HIZB UT TAHRIR

Hizb ut Tahrir and the successor organizations to al-Mujahiroun are described by non-Muslims as hate groups






12th August 2005


By: Ali Ismail

E-mail: aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)

TONY BLAIR PONDERS OUTLAWING EXTREME ISLAMIC GROUPS



Hizb ut Tahrir and al-Mujahiroun’s successors may be over the edge



About eighteen months ago, a colleague at work told me about Green Street in Newham, London and I went there to see what it was like. It was, indeed, like spending an afternoon in Mumbai.

However, standing on the pavement were two young men in traditional Islamic dress handing out A4 sheets of paper which were closely printed. I accepted one and then went to a café to read it over an Indian dessert and a cup of black tea. It turned out to be from al-Mujahiroun. That was my first contact with militant Islam in the flesh.

My argument and the reason for writing this article is that militant Islam in all its forms and ingenious presentations is the bullet which will destroy all of us and everything we stand for, possibly permanently; it will probably destroy more than only the militant Muslims themselves and what they happen to stand for.

To get back to my story, that piece of computer printed A4 paper was full of urgings against the West and the non-Muslim way of life. High prominence was given to the need to use force against anybody who might possibly earn the appellation of ‘kufr’ and to the shielding of Muslim women and female children from allegedly pernicious influences from beyond the Ummah. One passage asked rhetorically what possible honour a Muslim man could have when the womenfolk of his family shouted, danced and sang in public streets with foreign men. Strong stuff indeed.

Of particular interest to me was a couple of contact telephone numbers. When I got home I made calls to them and thereby came into contact with Ahmed (not his real name). When I explained that I worked for the organ you are now reading the psychological barrier went down and I was given and I accepted an invitation to an al-Mujahiroun meeting in East London that very weekend.

Bangladeshis largely attended the gathering but there were a few people apparently from elsewhere too. The back of the hall was sparsely monopolised by women but otherwise it was a male dominated event.

Speaker after speaker came to the stage of the hall and castigated the government of the USA and the United Kingdom’s Labour administration. They all urged war against the Great Infidel. One man said that people now have shorter life spans than certain personalities (such as Noah) in the early Old Testament of the Bible because they were ignoring God’s laws. Another made a species of a compare and contrast examination of ‘Sheikh’ Osama bin Laden and Khaleda Zia. The former had, he said, earned his place in paradise by means of his iron adherence to the teachings of unadulterated Islam while the latter had been, apparently according to him, a stooge of the Wicked Witch of the West and, forsooth, had failed to stamp upon the vice industry of Bangladesh hard enough.

The culmination of the afternoon was a film show in which the projector cast its imperfect images upon a sheet of white cloth, possibly a bed sheet, which was wrapped around the flat side of a pillar. In fairly rapid succession there were horrible images of dead and severely injured but still living men, women and children who had been injured by Israel’s military forces. After that were more distressing videos and photographs of suffering and dead Muslims outside the Holy Land while a loud and plaintive male voice keened plaintively in the background.

Just before we were packed off home the final speaker mounted the stage and told us that in the subcontinent, over a certain period of time, approximately 70,000 Muslim females had been raped. He asked us what we were going to do about that.

I kept in touch with Ahmed and he then gave me an invitation to attend a motivational evening at the Woolwich & Plumsted Mosque on a Saturday evening. I accepted. We both went in his car.

The mosque was well night full and it was a job to find a spot on which to sit for the duration. This time the attendees were nearly all young men. There were a few over the age of 40 and no females there at all bar a five year old girl of apparently European stock who kept walking in and out of the prayer hall with a younger boy who, I assume, was her brother.

The Syrian sheikh who was the star of the evening sat throughout upon the floor leaning against the back wall and spoke in heavily accented English into a microphone which relayed his voice distortedly to loudspeakers at the back of the hall. He urged his flock to be vigilant defenders and promoters of God’s will and declared that the governments of the Western powers were acting in opposition to divine laws. Our duty, he said, was to not inform the United Kingdom’s governing authorities of anything bar anything that other Muslims were up to. We should be mum throughout whatever was going on, he said. The young men ranged in front of his agreed and nodded their heads to signal their approbation.

On the way back home in the car Ahmed told me that the sheikh was a highly regarded cleric and had brought many people to Islam and had reactivated many a lapsed Muslim.

Meanwhile it has recently been announced that foreigners who preach hatred or sponsor violence in the United Kingdom could be deported under strict new measures that Prime Minister Tony Blair announced on Friday, promising to come down on extremists a month after terror attacks killed 56 people in London.Mr Blair said that his government would oversee the drawing up a list of websites, bookshops and centres that allegedly incite hatred and violence.A combative Mr Blair, in Margaret Thatcher mode, responded furiously to an Al Qaeda statement purportedly justifying the attacks, the first of which killed 56 people, as a response to the ongoing troubles in Iraq and in Afghanistan and described those arguments as a collective “obscenity.” Speaking at his final Downing Street press conference just before his summer holiday, Mr Blair disclosed about a dozen proposals to constrain radical Muslim clerics who seem to advocate terrorism or foment hatred. “Let no one be in any doubt that the rules of the game are changing,” the prime minister said. “Coming to Britain is not a right and even when people have come here, staying here carries with it a duty. That duty is to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life,” he declared. Among potentially controversial actions is a possible review of the 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, to see if it might have to be circumvented to accelerate the deportation of foreign citizens who are linked to activities which could be categorised as ‘terror’. A section of the convention preventing deportation if the detained person fears torture after his return to his homeland might be challenged, Mr Blair said. Additionally, Britain’s obligations under international asylum rules would be altered, the prime minister said. “Anyone who has participated in terrorism or has anything to do with it, anywhere, will automatically be refused asylum in our country,” he said. After the 7 July underground and bus attacks in which 52 people and four suicide bombers died in explosions and a bungled attempted repeat attempt a fortnight later when the bombs failed to go off, attitudes in Britain had hardened, Mr Blair said. Mr Blair said that he had been asked many times during the past four weeks to “deal firmly” with those who incite terrorism, such as hard-line clerics. Some of the new rules require only an administrative change to existing laws thereby enabling them to be introduced immediately, Mr Blair said, while others need actual parliamentary approval in the autumn. Mr Blair said that his government would ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organization that says it is dedicated to creating an Islamic caliphate centred in the Middle East but also insists that it does not support the use of violence. Mr Blair said that his government would also ban the successor organizations to al-Mujahiroun, a group that celebrated the 11 September, 2001 attacks in and around New York but is supposed to have disbanded. “We will proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir and the successor organizations of al-Mujahiroun,” Mr Blair told a news conference. Additionally, he said, powers would be extended, allowing the government to strip their citizenships from individuals with British or dual nationalities who “act in a way that is contrary to the interest of this country.”The government was also considering, he said, a request security services to hold terror suspects for three months without charges. The current limit is a fortnight. Mr Blair’s popularity has risen after his response to the two attacks but he remains shackled by the Iraq war especially over whether or not his decision to back the Americans made London a primary terrorism target. In a message broadcast on Thursday on the pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, the Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri warned the British people of their alleged lack of foresight and blamed Mr Blair for the attacks on London. “Blair has brought to you destruction in Central London, and he will bring more of that, God willing,” Dr al-Zawahri (an Egyptian-born surgeon) said. He did not personally claim responsibility for those attacks. Mr Blair said it was impossible to negotiate with the Al Qaeda leaders. “You only have to read the demands coming from Al Qaeda to realize there is no compromise possible with these people,” he said.

Hizb ut Tahrir defines itself as follows: ‘Hizb ut-Tahrir is a political party whose ideology is Islam, so politics is its work and Islam is its ideology. It works within the Ummah and together with her, so that she adopts Islam as her cause and is led to restore the Khilafah and the ruling by what Allah (swt) revealed. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a political group and not a priestly one. Nor is it an academic, educational or a charity group. The Islamic thought is the soul of its body, its core and the secret of its life’ in their official website.
Clearly, however, British Muslim opinion is not all on that wavelength. Mohideen Omar of Islington said: “They are using the name of Islam. Islam does not mean that you can kill anybody whatever. We are guests in this country. These people are giving us everything we are not getting back home.”
Representing most probably a majority viewpoint among the native English population, Mrs Cyril Findlay of Highbury said: “I think it is time he (Mr Blair) stands up. What happened on the 7th July was terrible. I think it was right for him to do so. They should be put back to the country they came from.”
The policies advocated by militant Islamic groups like Hizb ut Tahrir and the descendants of al-Mujahiroun will, in all probability, take us straight to the graveyard. Furthermore, as Mr Omar said, all of us, even the ones who were born on these islands, are de facto ‘guests’ in this part of the world.

THE END