Islam's secret army?

Hizb-ut Tahrir, the transnational party whose declared goal is to establish an Islamic superstate, is causing growing concern in capital cities around the world, as Ed Blanche reports from Beirut.

FOR YEARS, WESTERN governments paid little heed to an Islamic organisation called Hizb-ut Tahrir (HT, or Party of Liberation) dedicated to setting up a worldwide caliphate, restoring the religious and political authority through which the Ottoman sultans ruled an empire that stretched from Europe to Asia for more than 500 years.

Even though this secretive, highly disciplined Sunni Muslim organisation espouses overthrowing the governments of Arab and Asian states, as does Osama bin Laden, who also calls for the return of a caliphate based on Islamic religious Shari'ah law, HT was not seen as a particular threat in the West. But these days, bolstered by the belief that following 9/11 the West has declared war on Islam, the transnational party is increasingly seen in many quarters as the ideological vanguard of radical Sunni Islam.

Hizb-ut Tahrir professes to be non-violent, but its doctrine is virulently anti-western. It openly calls for the elimination of Israel, its adherents "to kill Jews", the "peaceful" overthrow of pro-western "puppet regimes" in the Middle East and the expulsion of all western interests from the region. It envisions achieving these goals through mass action, but eschews involvement in regional politics.

Some former members and sympathisers have been arrested in several countries in recent months on terrorism-related charges. This has raised fears that the party's hardliners have become impatient with what many have perceived as its gradualist approach and long-term strategy. That is a concept that has little appeal for the growing number of young, dispossessed Muslims radicalised by events since 9/11. Some of HT's members have been linked to Al Qaeda, and western governments are becoming increasingly alarmed.

Zeyno Baran, director of the International Security and Energy Programmes at the Nixon Centre, a rightwing think-tank in Washington DC, has branded the party "a conveyor belt for terrorists. It indoctrinates individuals with radical ideology, priming them for recruitment by more extreme organisations where they can take part in actual operations."

Hardline US right-wing institutions such as the Nixon Centre and the Heritage Foundation are demanding a crackdown on HT, but authorities in Britain and other western states fear that banning the party will simply drive it underground, making it more difficult to monitor.

"HT is regarded with some confusion by western analysts because while its goals of recreating a caliphate and then converting the world to Islam by force if necessary are almost indistinguishable from bin Laden's, its methods are entirely different," according to James Brandon, an expert on Islam, in a recent assessment for the Jamestown Foundation, a US think-tank that specialises in monitoring Islamist terrorism.

"Although HT members sincerely believe that the caliphate will be recreated soon, HT's real significance is likely to be its increasingly important role in radicalising and Islamising the Middle East. For example, HT's ideologies also fuel the increasingly common view that the present conflict between western democracies and Islamists is not a resolvable dispute over land, territory and temporal politics, but is rather an inevitable clash of civilisations, cultures and religions."

Hizb-ut Tahrir was founded as a secret society in 1952 in what was then Jordanian-ruled East Jerusalem by Sheikh Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, a Palestinian judge of the Shari'ah Appeal Court.

He had studied at the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 and the forerunner of modern radical Islamic groups. But he broke with the Brotherhood when it moved towards cooperation with the secular authorities in Cairo. While the Brotherhood became a potent opposition force in Syria and Egypt, HT took a more subversive path.

Nabhani died in 1979 and Abad Al Qadim Zalum, a Jordanian religious scholar who had also studied at Al Azhar, took over as leader and remained so until his death in 2003. The current leader is Sheikh Ata Abu Rashta, a Palestinian-Jordanian scholar about whom little is known. He is believed to live in secret in Lebanon, one of the few Arab states that tolerate HT

Nabhani's writings remain HT's guiding principles--they pour scorn on "depraved democracies" imposed on Muslims by the West and advocate "a single state over the entire Muslim world". One of Nabhani's most important texts says it is obligatory to militarily overthrow "every single Muslim government, then forcibly unite them into one military state even if it means killing millions of people".

According to Pepe Escobar, a writer who has travelled extensively in the Muslim world, Nabhani "clearly equates Islam with a permanent global revolution. Leon Trotsky meets the Holy Koran." Escobar says that while the HT "is far from being the same thing as Al Qaeda it's fair to say that it is not so far apart from the worldview of Al Qaeda."

HT's followers are "willing to wait 1,000 years to annex the West to a caliphate," Escobar says. "But recent pamphlets confiscated in Tajikistan already detect a change in tone. Apart from declaring the US a global threat that can only be cured by the caliphate, they are more viscerally anti-American, calling for a jihad against the West."

Long considered by western governments to be a quirky and ineffective organisation with a Utopian objective, Hizb-ut Tahrir has metamorphosed into an increasingly popular movement, highly organised and disciplined, with media-savvy national leaderships that have considerable autonomy.

The party is outlawed in most Muslim states, including the former Soviet republics in Central Asia--one of HT's key target zones--and in Russia and Germany. But its membership has swelled in the post-9/11 turbulence amid growing anti-US sentiment in the Muslim world, with the spread of its ideology accelerated by the Internet, a communications tool used to great effect by Al Qaeda.

According to the Jamestown Foundation, "During the last five years, several branches became large enough and strong enough to transition from their covert gestational phase to a publicly active stage, including those in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Malaysia, Palestine, Pakistan, Turkey and Bangladesh."

HT claims to be active now in at least 45 countries from Asia to the US, where it appears to be gathering momentum since its first cells were established in the 1980s. Its radical ideology is becoming increasingly popular in Arab countries and has established itself as an influential Islamist opposition group in many regions, including Central Asia and Europe.

It is well established in the UK particularly since the July 2005 suicide bombings on London's transport system in which more than 50 people were killed. These concerns are now being echoed in mainland Europe, where there are growing fears that proliferating Al Qaeda cells among the continent's large Muslim communities are bound to strike at some point.

In Denmark, where Hizb-ut Tahrir remains legal, counter-terrorism officials say a growing number of Muslims are being drawn to the party. These officials say that the party has played a key role in radicalising disgruntled young Muslims, but because it functions primarily as an ideological organisation rather than a paramilitary one, it is allowed to operate. However, officials warn that it is pushing the limits of Denmark's liberal free-speech laws to an extent that could trigger government action.

Despite the party's expansion and emergence from its traditional secrecy, much about the party's inner workings remain obscure. Its global membership is not known, but some estimates put it as high as one million. The extent to which its various branches coordinate is also not clear, nor is how the organisation is financed.

Traditionally HT has been strong in Europe and Central Asia, but in the last two or three years the party has gained popularity across the Arab world, despite being illegal in most states. It has become noticeably stronger in Palestine, putting tens of thousands of supporters at rallies across the West Bank. This reflects the growing disaffection with the fundamentalist Hamas movement and the Muslim Brotherhood and their failure to reinvigorate the much-battered Palestinian society, as well as a more general drift towards HT's caliphate ambitions and a Muslim revival.

The party is also believed to be gathering converts among Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, where the army took four months to crush Sunni extremists in the Nahr Al Bared camp outside the northern port city of Tripoli in 2007. Hundreds of people were killed. More arrests have been reported in Syria, where the regime ruthlessly crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, as well as in Egypt, Tunisia and Sudan.

In Morocco, 14 HT members, mostly well-educated men, were arrested in October 2006 and most were convicted of forming unauthorised associations. Forty HT members are believed to be imprisoned in Jordan, where the party has claimed to have inroads into the Hashemite kingdom's military and civil service.

Brandon notes that HT has apparently "failed to gain significant traction in countries like Egypt or Oman whose people are reluctant to see their distinctive historical, ethnic and cultural identities submerged within a caliphate. HT has also floundered in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states where political discourse is often simplistic and clan-based. Gulf citizens recognise that a caliphate would force them to share their oil wealth with the rest of the Muslim world."

But if Hizb-ut Tahrir is failing to win mass support in the wealthy Gulf states, it has made inroads elsewhere. In August 2007, more than 80,000 members filled a stadium in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim state, to call for the return of the caliphate. It was the party's biggest ever public event. In Pakistan, where HT was established in 2000, the party has accumulated considerable strength and was banned after 9/11 for alleged links to extremist groups.

High-level defectors

SOME OF HT'S LEADING lights have begun to abandon the party because they have come to question its ideology and purpose. Maajid Nawaz, a British university student from a Pakistani family who have lived near London for three generations, and who himself was one of HT's leaders in the UK, denounced the party in a high-profile defection in September 2007.

Nawaz had been an HT member for 12 years and had been seen as a future leader of the highly active British branch. He claimed the organisation "spearheaded the radicalisation of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger" and said that its ideology inevitably leads to violence. He felt, he said, "duty-bound to redress the phenomenon of politically inspired theological interpretations".

Nawaz, a key recruiter, says he helped establish Hizb-ut Tahrir in Pakistan in 1999-2000. The party sent him to Egypt in September 2001; ostensibly his mission was to study Arabic but in fact it was to proselytise. He was arrested in Alexandria in April 2002 and spent four years in prison. It was there, he says, that jailed Islamic scholars taught him that HT's ideology ran counter to the true meaning of Islam.

In April 2008, Nawaz and another senior defector, Ed Husain, announced the formation of the Quilliam Foundation, a think-tank named after a 19th century English convert to Islam and dedicated to combating radical Islamist ideologies. Husain said it would promote "pluralistic values free from cultural baggage of the Indian sub-continent and the political burdens of the Arab world".