The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  Where Mawdudi had been vague, almost dismissive, about the means by which an Islamic society might come about in Pakistan, Nabhani was exact in his three-part methodology. Moreover, all this was linked, it seemed, to the life of the Prophet Mohammed.

  At college, the Wahhabis had been bashing us in the YMO for our lack of scriptural evidence for our Mawdudian da’wah. Hizb ut-Tahrir, through Nabhani’s literature, provided me with ample evidence to counter such arguments. In fact, I was able to go on the offensive against the Wahhabis, arguing that they were British agents who plotted against the last caliphate, the Ottomans. Wahhabis had declared most Muslims to be ‘infidels’ and gladly accepted British support in rising against the Turkish sultan. From 1932 onwards, the British government maintained Ibn Saud as king of ‘Saudi’ Arabia until oil was discovered in the 1950s.

  Worse, Wahhabis supported Saudi Arabia, a satellite state of the US, and most Wahhabi clerics were Saudi trained. Of their crimes, the Saudi clerics, under American pressure, had declared that making peace with and recognizing Israel was acceptable. I blasted the Wahhabis and, increasingly, Jamat-e-Islami for the lack of precision in their plans to establish the Islamic state. They agreed with me that it was wajib, a religious obligation, but had no ‘methodology’ to implement this ‘duty’. The Hizb, in stark contrast, even had a draft constitution ready for adoption.

  I quickly learnt that as long as Muslims accepted the Hizb’s premise that the Islamic state was a wajib, just like praying, fasting, almsgiving, we were in the ascendant. The acceptance of that principle, that radical politics was the same as prayer, meant that whereas traditional scholars provided guidance in prayer, we provided leadership in political matters. And we knew it.

  Moreover, we unashamedly aspired to be the ‘intellectual leaders’ of the Muslim nation. Mentally, I had already signed up to the idea, the religious duty, of establishing an Islamic state, a caliphate. My readings of Mawdudi and Qutb had already established that, but Nabhani’s writings provided the details of how to achieve it.

  Nabhani argued for a complete destruction of the existing political order, particularly in Muslim countries, for it to be replaced by the khilafah system. We were single-minded in our pursuit of establishing a distinct Islamic state, for in the obtaining of political power lay all the answers to the problems of the Muslim nation. Our arguments were powerful and, at first, undefeatable. ‘If we had the Islamic state, then the caliph would send the Islamic army to slaughter the Serbs,’ was our answer to the Balkan conflict. The international community said they refused to arm Bosnian Muslims to prevent the escalation of the conflict. But we knew that there was a conspiracy to reduce the numbers of Muslims in Europe.

  Bosnia acted as a catalyst for extremism among large numbers of young Muslims in Britain. It was a serious political wake-up call for hundreds of us, semi-radicalized by the emotional Islamism of Jamat-e-Islami but given a clear, radical outlook on life by Hizb ut-Tahrir.

  Looking back, I am still astonished by how I became so confident so quickly following my affiliation with the Hizb. Almost everybody I met there was young, articulate, self-assured, and an intellectual of sorts. YMO, once so attractive, now seemed little more than an insignificant local group of unsophisticated young Bangladeshi men trying to assert power by retaining control of East London mosque and funding their would-be martyrs and brothers in Jamat-e-Islami.

  Hizb ut-Tahrir helped me to escape this narrow, imprisoned mindset of being in Britain yet associating with Bangladesh simply because I happened to live in Tower Hamlets. Hizb ut-Tahrir was an international political party; my new priorities were global. I was now part of an ummah transcending colour, nationality, and language.

  I needed to know more about the economic, political, and social system of what we called the ‘Islamic state’. Yes, to establish the state was wajib, but there was more. The Prophet’s mission was wholly committed to establishing political superiority for Islam and Muslims. Right from the outset, the Prophet was a master politician and devised a strategy to ensure political dominance, first of Arabian tribes and then the entire region. This, Nabhani argued, was the purpose of each and every Muslim: to regain political ascendancy by establishing a powerful Islamic state. The Prophet had established a political party to realize his aim: his own companions. The Hizb was following in his footsteps.

  It was explained to me that once I had reached this ‘deep level of thought’, realizing the need for political Islam in the modern world, then it was also wajib for me to join the Hizb, to study further its ideas and concepts and to swear allegiance to it. We bent the principles of Muslim law to our own ends. For example, wajib, or religious duty, was traditionally applied to individual acts of worship such as prayer and fasting, not politics, yet inside the Hizb we believed that the pursuit of political power was also wajib. Before formally joining the Hizb I underwent a lengthy interview with Bernie from SOAS. He made sure that I understood clearly the three-part strategy of the Hizb aimed at taking political power.

  First was the ‘secret stage’ of building a political party with a core group of activists, then the ‘open stage’ in which the dominant paradigm of political and social constructs would be attacked in an attempt to substitute an alternative worldview. Once this was in place, the Hizb would seek what we called the nusrah, or assistance from powerful sources, to take political power. This would, in all likelihood, be a military coup, the third stage.

  All this, we were convinced, was based on the sira, or the life of the Prophet Mohammed. He had bequeathed a political system for us to implement, a total ideology for global domination: Islam. This ideology would be carried to other parts of the world by means of a jihad, which was the raison d’être of the army of the future Islamic state. More precisely, our foreign policy was to conquer and convert. If countries refused to convert, then they would pay the Islamic state a tax, known as jizyah, to ensure their safety and protection by the Islamic army.

  After confirming that I was intellectually convinced, Bernie introduced me to the cell structure of the Hizb. Every member, from novices still studying the literature of Nabhani to sworn members, attended a weekly gathering of around five people. The Hizb’s secretive structure meant that I would be phoned by a mysterious ‘Shabbir from Walthamstow’, who would direct me to my particular cell, or halaqah, of the party.

  That weekend, Shabbir phoned me and we met at a house in Shaftesbury Road, off Green Street in east London. Shabbir was a fast-speaking, slim IT consultant. He made me swear that I would never disclose the name of my instructor, or mushrif, or the location of my halaqah.

  Our halaqah was to take place every Thursday evening, for a minimum of two hours, at the Chicksand House flat. At first I thought perhaps Bernie would be my mushrif, but no. Again, I was underestimating my importance, or the significance of the East End to Hizb ut-Tahrir. The party sent its most intellectual, high-profile, charismatic, controversial, media-savvy personality, to Tower Hamlets to train a new generation of Hizb apparatchiks: it was Farid Kasim himself. With Farid as my mushrif I knew I was going to be a big favourite in the Hizb.

  Farid had been frequently interviewed by Channel 4 News and the BBC, cited regularly in British newspapers, and was the Hizb’s official spokesman. At my first halaqah he took great pride in saying that he was banned from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and a host of other countries. It was almost as though he was suggesting that this was what we should aspire to. Then he said that he was like a father to all of us, and we should refer any problems in life to him. That instruction made me cringe. My own father, though I disagreed with him, was enough for me.

  Farid spoke with a slight lisp, wore thick glasses, and had curly brown hair and, in his own words, ‘beady eyes’. He was staunch in his Islamism, uncompromising in his attitude, and openly confrontational whenever the opportunity presented itself. He read the newspapers avidly, carrying the dailies around with him in his leather briefcase. The town planner with Islington Council
always spoke about his latest projects when we met.

  At the same time there was something particularly unappreciative in his attitude to life. Farid had multiple sclerosis and occasionally suffered from stiffness and spasms. He was regularly given time off work to rest and recover, but there was no interruption to his political activities. As a student at Sheffield he had been a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party and he brought that radical zeal with him to the Hizb. Even during periods of convalescence he would attend our halaqah in a wheelchair.

  Farid’s unstinting dedication to the work of the Hizb was an inspiration to us all. Despite his illness and many other commitments, he was always on time for the halaqah. Some days he was extremely jubilant, on others very serious. Farid was convinced that he was participating in the making of a new world order.

  Gathered at Chicksand House with our copies of Nabhani’s System of Islam, we would never discuss anything trivial. We had to be serious - we were the leaders of the Muslim ummah. Like student accommodation everywhere, the flat was sparsely furnished. We sat on the floor in Bernie’s untidy bedroom, under the black and white flag of the Hizb, with Farid as our focal point. One of us would read aloud from the pamphlet and Farid would explain its deeper meanings.

  He often spoke in cryptic terms, giving us the impression that there was something in the offing, somewhere in the world. To us, the emergence of the Islamic state was simply a matter of time. The caliphate by next Ramadan was not a slogan: it was a statement of intent.

  ‘The Hizb is organic,’ Farid would tell us. ‘Our ideas do not require offices, mosques, schools, charities, institutions for dissemination. They spread like wildfire. It is our duty to carry these concepts and use them to strengthen the Muslims, and destroy the West and its puppets in the Muslim lands.’

  My involvement with the East London mosque became minimal. I occasionally went to pray, but targeting the Muslim masses was more important than helping manage a mosque.

  As Hizb activists, we had to make ‘hundreds of contacts’ from among the Muslims, fill the ummah with our ideas. Every member of the Hizb, Nabhani stated, was equivalent to ten thousand Muslims. Without doubt we considered ourselves several cuts above the masses.

  Farid abhorred with a passion the Muslim Brotherhood and all its offshoots. Islamic Forum Europe, the UK Islamic Mission, the Islamic Foundation were all different teeth of the same beast. He used to compare them to an octopus which always survived the amputation of a limb. ‘The so-called Jamat-e-Islami and Muslim Brotherhood’, Farid used to say, ‘have many arms and many names in many places, but in the end, it is all shallow. They do not have thoughts and ideas with which to challenge the West, capitalism, and Arab socialism. It is only the Hizb that can overthrow these bastard regimes and install the caliphate. Our duty is to get this message to the ummah, to move them to support us.’

  Encouraged by the examples set by Farid Kasim and Omar Bakri, we openly attacked the leaders of the Arab world: Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein of Jordan, President Asad of Syria, Yasser Arafat, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, all came under our verbal fire regularly. With large numbers of Hizb campaigners now appearing on the radar in Britain, we took aim at others.

  Omar Bakri, during the first Gulf war, called for the assassination of the British prime minister John Major. According to the Mail on Sunday, Bakri declared: ‘Major is a legitimate target. If anyone gets the opportunity to assassinate him, I don’t think they should [waste] it. It is our Islamic duty and we will celebrate his death.’

  In Hizb circles we took pride in that command. After all, the CIA was involved in assassinating heads of state across the world, not least its botched attempts on Fidel Castro. So why not encourage Muslims to take out political leaders?

  Farid’s halaqah sessions were extremely potent. He injected us with ideas, brought to life by his years of experience and underpinned by the books we studied.

  A second cell met in the bedroom next door, though we never saw them nor they us. Such strict secrecy and discipline, cemented by the ideas of the Hizb, made it an exceptionally powerful network.

  Our seriousness and commitment were judged by the level and content of our questions. Farid would often test us. Once he mentioned that he would be attending a wedding at the weekend. A member asked, ‘Who’s getting married?’ To which Farid replied, ‘Why does that concern you?’ He had mentioned the wedding only to indicate that he would be busy; it was not for us to enquire about the details.

  There was a group culture inside the Hizb that no question should be asked unless it was relevant to our global aims. Our focus had to be total, unwavering, and zealous. Irrelevant enquiries resulted in accusations of ‘shallowness’ and the repetition of the same material in the halaqah rather than moving on to study new ideas. When Farid reprimanded me for asking too many questions about the life and death of Nabhani, I realized that I had strayed. We should not be interested in Nabhani the man, but Nabhani the ideologue and his vision for a future world.

  The System was a core text, as were some of Nabhani’s other books, including Mafaheem. The Mafaheem, or Concepts, was in many ways a more important text than the System. In part it was a refutation of the dominant Arab political ideologies of Nabhani’s time, but more importantly it cast in stone the vision of the future state the Hizb wanted to create for the Muslim masses. Our constituency was the ummah, the global Muslim nation, and the Mafaheem taught us that in the pursuit of this constituency we should disregard both the views of other Muslim groups and the consequences of our actions. What mattered was our ideological supremacy, the strength of our strategy; in Nabhani’s words we were the ‘flaming heat under the kettle’. ‘The water would warm and then boil, becoming a stirring driving vapour.’ We were to be ‘a flame whose heat would transform the society to boiling point, and then to a dynamic force’. The Hizb was ‘fire and light, which will burn and enlighten, and definitely reach boiling point’.6

  Nabhani’s words certainly lit a fire under us. Our passion was underpinned by other ideas spelt out in the Mafaheem. Nabhani informed us that traditional Muslim scholars, the ulama, were ‘confined to shallow sermons’ on Fridays; we, as activists of the Hizb, were an altogether superior sort of Muslim. It was we who called for the resumption of Islamism as a way of life rather than a mere religion, and for that way of life to be enshrined in the power of a state.

  The Islamic state, Nabhani taught, was a ‘launching point’ for a jihad. The ulama had failed to understand jihad over the centuries and reduced it to a means of fighting tyranny alone. Nabhani, like Qutb, argued that jihad should be a tool used by the state to advance the propagation of Islamist ideology. He cited the historical conversion of countries such as Egypt and Persia as a model for the advancing army of the future Islamic state. This state was to be set up first in Arab countries, from where it would spread to other nations. ‘Jihad’, Nabhani declared, was ‘a war against anybody who opposes the Islamist call’.

  We understood fully why almost every Arab government had banned us from our inception, why Nabhani had led a life on the run, and why Farid could disclose little about him other than that he was a chain smoker who could think deeply only when he had a cigarette to hand.

  Immediately after the halaqah members would light cigarettes and walk together, discussing what we had just studied. I have never smoked, but in the Hizb I came very close to taking up the habit, which most observant Muslims avoid but most in the Hizb embrace with enthusiasm.

  Pious Muslims generally avoid profanity, but in the Hizb it was the norm while arguing with Islamists, condemning the kuffar (often referred to in the Hizb as koofs) or even disagreeing with fellow members. How did this square with our aim to lead Muslims to an Islamic state by adopting a shakhsiyyah, or Islamic personality? There was nothing particularly Islamic about our personalities.

  Upon nearing completion of the study of the System, lifetime membership of the party was offered. Delayed membership of
the Hizb served two purposes: one was to test our level of commitment to the party, how we responded to the new ideas that we were being exposed to. Secondly, while we studied in the halaqah, we could legitimately deny membership. In the Hizb’s idiosyncratic terminology, becoming part of the secret cell structure did not constitute ‘membership’.

  Omar Bakri often taught that if the Hizb was hated, loathed as an organization by other Muslims, it did not matter. What was important was to ‘carry the concepts’ of the Hizb, support the future caliphate, and work towards establishing the Islamic state. At YMO we had been driven by the organization, the name, the affiliation. Here, it was all conceptual, with a clear vision of where we were headed. Soon organizations as diverse as al-Qaeda and the Taliban would be advocating what was music to the ears of Hizb ut-Tahrir: removal of Arab leaders and creation of a caliphate.

  When we were accused at public meetings held by other organizations of being Hizb members, our emphatic denials easily convinced our inquisitors. Such training to deny the truth in public was a key component of Hizb halaqahs everywhere.

  On various eschatological matters, for example, Hizb ut-Tahrir differed fundamentally from mainstream Muslim thinking. The Hizb, based on Nabhani’s excessive rationalism, rejected the role of the Prophet in the afterlife and the time spent before the Day of Judgement in one’s grave. Other areas of disagreement, as we shall see, included pornography, insurance and almsgiving, along with other subjects. Other Islamists and Wahhabis attacked us based on what they had heard from their Arab sources. Wahhabi organizations were holding conferences on Hizb ut-Tahrir, and our ideas were being discussed behind closed doors by every single Muslim group in Britain. This was the mid-90s, and Islamism was in the ascendancy among Britain’s Muslims.