The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  However, we had anticipated those stinging attacks and were well prepared to defend ourselves or, better still, go on the offensive. There was an inbuilt culture of aggressive argumentation, dogged debate, and an inherent ability to cause offence that helped us thrive. We were taught ‘Never defend, always offend’. With our radical ideas of world domination we set ourselves apart from the other Islamist groups in Britain. We caused a storm wherever we went. We challenged the ideas of every British Muslim grouping, even bullied speakers to adopt our arguments or face confrontation with Hizb activists. We provided them with what we perceived to be scriptural evidence for the necessity of the Islamic state. In those early days there were very few Muslims who could stand up to the might of the Hizb, pioneered by its young, articulate, British-educated followers. Moderate Muslims such as Yusuf Islam (the former Cat Stevens) even started to talk about the importance of the Islamic state. And so previously moderate Islamist organizations began to adopt our radical stance of confrontation with the West, establishment of an Islamic state, and commitment to ideological warfare. Long before the War on Terror the Hizb openly declared ideological war.

  Once other Islamists began discussing the viability of the Islamist state, they had adopted our agenda. Now all discussions on campuses, in mosques, and at Muslim gatherings revolved around rejecting democracy, removing the rulers of the Muslim world, and the duty of Muslims in the West to help advance the cause of our brothers in Muslim countries (though not by making charitable donations, which we discouraged individuals from doing since this was, in our view, the responsibility of the Islamic state).

  In political discussions our Muslim opponents were never able to defeat us. We knew how to deny, lie, and deflect. We discussed much of what Farid taught us with other members in Hizb ut-Tahrir and it was abundantly clear that we were receiving a uniform training. We believed that the Muslim ummah was in a state of war with the West, particularly Britain, France, Russia, and the United States, so lying and deception were simply strategies of war. Besides, our enemies were kafir, not deserving of our honesty or integrity. We employed the scriptural justification for deceiving the enemy that was used in the seventh century. We failed, however, to understand the context.

  Hizb ut-Tahrir believed that all natural events were acts of God (though in some actions man could exercise free will), hence insurance policies were haram. Furthermore, the kuffar economic system should on no account be supported. Consequently, Hizb members could not insure their cars or mortgage their homes.

  However, many members of the Hizb had a penchant for fast cars and now, without having to insure the turbo-powered engines, these cars became increasingly affordable. Hizb members were frequently stopped by police for speeding and many were banned for driving uninsured. The brothers from west London began to provide Hizb leaders with false certificates of insurance to produce at police stations. To this day I do not know how we managed to get away with it so often, but we did. (More pragmatic members circumvented the Hizb stipulation by insuring their cars in the name of a non-Hizb family member, which even at the time felt hypocritical.)

  Such deception was not limited to the kuffar authorities in Britain. Even among Muslims we were disingenuous professionals. For example, other Islamists accused Hizb ut-Tahrir of sanctioning pornography. Hizb leaders initially advised us simply to ignore such claims, but the accusations persisted until Farid was forced to provide us with a defence.

  ‘The Hizb tests public opinion,’ he said. ‘Occasionally, in the early years, the Hizb issued leaflets with religious edicts to test if the ummah was ready for khilafah. For example, when the ummah, mostly under Arabist influences, proved emotional we knew it was not the right time. Pornography was one such issue. Shaikh Nabhani always taught that there was no such thing as morality in Islam: it was simply what God taught. If Allah allowed it, it was moral. If He forbade it, it was immoral. There was no such category as “feeling immoral”. There is a source where early Muslims looked into the reflection of a woman who was preparing to bathe. In another source, it was permissible to look at a woman before a man married her.’ Here Farid stopped and asked if we knew what he meant by ‘look’?

  ‘Well,’ one of us replied, ‘it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aha!’ gasped Farid, as he prepared to enlighten us. ‘The verb “look” in Arabic means more than just “look”. Nabhani argued it meant a man could demand that he see a potential wife nude and then decide whether he marries her or not. Here, the duty was to prevent divorce later on grounds of bodily blemish. In order to prevent the sinful act of divorce, better to completely view her form before. There are sources to indicate that this was an early practice.’

  We all gulped at this. How were we to respond? We were not the ummah, we were the elite. We had to remember that there was nothing particularly moral or immoral in life, only God’s commands. Our own feelings had nothing to do with it. Based on that premise, our responses would deem us either intellectual (good) or emotional (bad). As leaders of the ummah, we were inclined to be intellectual and only express amusement at our new knowledge.

  It never occurred to me then to ask Farid what sort of view of women this promoted. Were they mere cattle? Products to be examined, bought? And what if the women disliked what they saw when their partner undressed? Those were questions that came to me later. For now we had just been given proof that pornography could be acceptable, and we had an argument to combat accusations on the streets of east London.

  But Farid was far keener on the wider issues, advising us instead to ‘Be sharp! Change the subject! Our shabab [literally ‘youth’ but in this context ‘party activists’] must be sharp. You should easily defeat the arguments of these Wahhabis, and the Jamat-e-Islami people. What do they have to say about economics? Foreign policy? Where is their constitution for the Islamic state? Those are the real issues, not pornography. We’ll take our concubines later. I prefer blondes from the Balkans personally, but that is for later. For now, work towards the state. Go out and destroy the thoughts of the West. Expose democracy for the failure that it is . . .’

  For Farid, and soon for us, the Islamic state was not an illusion. It was not an abstract idea. It was real, on the horizon, soon to be declared. It was merely a question of time. Farid’s remark about Balkan blondes was not fantasy - it was the future he foresaw.

  On university campuses across the country our shabab were creating a storm. Between 1992 and 1993 Newsnight covered our rise. Local newspapers in Britain, including the Evening Standard, wrote about the Hizb’s activities. The Jewish Chronicle campaigned against the Hizb. We circulated newspaper cuttings among the shabab and celebrated our prominence. All other Islamist groups looked on bemused. How had the Hizb raised its profile so quickly and so successfully?

  Boosted by the intense media interest, we went from strength to strength. Nothing gave us greater motivation than to hear our ideas being amplified in the national media, reaching new audiences of millions. To us it did not matter whether the coverage was favourable or otherwise. We were resigned to biased reporting, but we knew that there was a crucial constituency of Muslims who would look upon us as their leaders, their spokesmen against the attacks of the infidels. It was this recognition we needed more than anything else. The British media provided us with it and more: Arab dictators were now increasingly worried about the rising profile of a group they had banned four decades previously. Britain breathed new life into the Hizb.

  When Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan visited London, our shabab were there in large numbers calling for the removal from office of these and other Arab leaders.

  Buoyed by media interest, we now had a powerful presence at several British universities up and down the country. I had progressed from being an isolated president of a college Islamic Society to become part of a network of high-flying undergraduates at some of Britain’s finest educational establishments.

  On campuses we used the platform of the Islamic Society to ca
ll for the destruction of Israel and the rejection of the West, and to promote an Islamist alternative. At Queen Mary and Westfield College, for example, we held debates with the Jewish Society during which Farid and others often referred to the ‘bastard state of Israel’. Our numbers were steadily increasing as we attacked the West, questioned any possible future for Muslims in Europe in view of what was happening in Bosnia, and denounced the incompetence of Muslim rulers.

  We scoured newspapers and magazines for useful data to deploy against our major enemy the USA, underwriter of the state of Israel and prop of several despotic Arab regimes. The Hizb produced tens of thousands of leaflets envisaging the imminent collapse of the USA and the West, and of allied Arab governments. The leaflets cited the worst aspects of Western social freedoms, its financial system, and political immorality as evidence of the coming decline.

  At the same time we met stiff opposition from other Islamist organizations, not only for theological reasons, but because we attacked Saudi Arabia and Saudi scholars with unreserved zeal. It was the Saudi government that had invited the kafir US soldiers to the Holy Land. Their clerics had justified making peace with Israel, sworn enemies of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Our politics often isolated mainstream Muslims on campuses, but without doubt we had the loudest voices and the clearest ideas to convey.

  We held debates with our teachers, journalists, and other intellectuals. Farid, for example, debated publicly with the likes of Paul Foot at London Guildhall University (precursor to the London Metropolitan University) and also with Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics. He also debated, among large crowds, with the president of the National Secular Society, Barbara Smoker.

  She was constantly jeered, mocked, and patronized by a travelling crowd of Hizb apparatchiks who found it rather amusing that the best opposition Britain could offer to the Hizb was a middle-aged woman who was not well versed on Islamism. Nevertheless, she tried to enlighten her fanatical crowd with the virtues of secularism, though without much success. Farid’s lack of grace in those debates was notorious. And we loved it.

  Our style of debate and discussion was confrontational, designed to provoke outrage, to ‘destroy concepts’, as we called it. Our strategy was to obliterate those ideas that controlled people’s behaviour or influenced their psyche and then supplant them with new ideas: our ideas.

  The very first line of the System of Islam is ‘Man progresses as a result of his thoughts’. Much time had been spent in our halaqah, as well as during my long discussions with David, Bernie, and Patrick, grasping the importance of bringing about an ‘intellectual change’ prior to any other shift in society. Implanting our thoughts into the Muslim masses was our most important aim. Long before Tony Blair spoke about a ‘battle of ideas’ we were seeding the very ideas that would shake the world.

  One of our most popular speakers, a medical student at St Bar tholomew’s, was Abdul Wajid, or Waj as we called him. I still remember Waj’s boasts: ‘Jordan is ours,’ he used to declare. ‘King Hussein knows this. Our shabab control the army and we can walk into the palace at any time. But Jordan on its own cannot survive as the Islamic state, so we’re working in other countries to join Jordan.’ Similarly, Omar Bakri used to tell us that every house in Beirut had a Hizb activist. Such statements as these gave me great confidence.

  Waj understood the minds of young Asian Muslim students in Britain, their difficulties and concerns. He littered his talks with anecdotes of curry, masala, and Urdu words, and used these to devastating effect to recruit many to the Hizb. Waj was later instrumental in setting up Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan.

  Conventionally, the Hizb responded speedily to international affairs by issuing leaflets, circulating press releases, and condemning global powers. Waj changed all of that. He, with help from other British-Asian Muslims such as Farhan at the University of Westminster, decided on a series of leaflets and talks that proved to be a phenomenal success across university campuses in the 1990s.

  Waj travelled Britain delivering these talks, drawing huge crowds, bringing into the open subjects that mosque authorities considered taboo and families usually swept under the carpet. The first generation of British-born Muslims were now at universities in large numbers, and suffered from common problems that the Hizb tapped into.

  ‘Sex, Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll’ was one popular topic. ‘Asian: Born to be Brown’ was another. Most successful, however, was, ‘Marriage: Love or Arranged?’ Hizb ut-Tahrir produced leaflets on these subjects, though unattributed to avoid any accusation of dumbing down and losing its image of radical seriousness. We produced recordings of the talks and sold the tapes for a pound.

  At first, college authorities paid little attention to the speakers who spoke at Islamic Society events or the content of their speeches. On the way to one such talk at Tower Hamlets I had asked Waj not to refer too often to the Islamic state since there was a large number of YMO students who believed in the Jamat-e-Islami and Mawdudi method of achieving social change.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Waj. ‘You know we must pass on the concepts. I’ll debate them if they want, though we’ll rip them to shreds, but we have to pass on the concepts.’

  It was that sort of steely determination to ‘pass on the concepts’ that led to the development of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s distinct identity. Omar Bakri frequently reminded us that even if we were discussing the life of a chicken in a country farm, we were to link the discussion at hand to the caliphate, the Islamic state. ‘Impregnate the ummah with the Islamic state,’ Omar would say. ‘And she will deliver the baby.’

  The talks went like this: for example, in ‘Asian: Born to be Brown’ we would begin by cracking a few good jokes, utilizing examples of Indian food, auntie’s chapattis, and so on. Such examples were well received by young people who were away from home for the first time in their lives. Then we would speak about racism in British life, that we will always be brown and never accepted. Then we linked this to Bosnia and promoted the Islamist state in which there would be no racism.

  Similarly, in ‘Sex, Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll’ we spoke about clubbing in Leicester Square, getting high and one-night stands, and then realizing that there is more to life than pleasure. How could it be that we lived for pleasure while Bosnia burned? Those were sensible questions that resonated not only with Muslim students but with students of all backgrounds. However, it was our all-purpose solution, the Islamic state, that proved controversial.

  Many Muslims students disagreed with our politicization of every subject. Even Ramadan, a month of spirituality, was full of political meaning to us. Increasingly, Islamic societies dominated by Wahhabis and other Islamists expelled our members. ‘Fear Allah, brother,’ our members cried as we appealed to their sense of awe for God and, when that failed, we appealed for Muslim unity, suggesting that we should allow Hizb ut-Tahrir speakers to address events and deliver sermons on Friday. Invariably, that appeal failed, too. Interestingly, all Muslim groupings on campus at that time used self-taught, unqualified individuals to address gatherings. Wahhabis, less extreme Islamists, most certainly Hizb ut-Tahrir, all abhorred traditional or moderate Muslim scholars. In fact, ‘tradition’ and ‘moderate’ were dirty words in all our circles; in that, at least, we were united.

  When our tactical appeals to fear God and embrace Muslim unity had, predictably, failed, we pioneered other da’wah activities that stopped our rivals in their tracks. We made full use of British pluralism and the encouragement to dissent by setting up alternatives to an Islamic Society. When we failed to win control of an Islamic Society we simply ignored it and started a host of other student societies instead, with names such as Thought Society, Debating Society, 1924 Society, One Nation Society, Pakistan Society, and so on.

  We used these bodies to secure generous funding from the student union and then held events to promote our ideas and win converts from rival Islamic societies.

  At my own college there was a civil war raging in the Islamic Society. I had been elected presi
dent because I was a YMO stalwart, and now that I had defected to Hizb ut-Tahrir knives were being sharpened. Forever naive, I believed that the young people whom I had helped ‘bring back to Islam’, as it were, would at least support me. I understood why they would oppose my concepts, but not me. But to them, not only was I no longer a member of YMO, I had joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, and so I should be ousted.

  All the same I worked on expanding the Islamic Society beyond the Poplar campus to the college’s Arbour Square site. After an event at Arbour Square several members of the Islamic Society surrounded me and asked for an impromptu meeting. In typical YMO style there was a chair and a minute-taker, and I was put in the dock. It was an attempt to express dissatisfaction and initiate a chain of events to remove me from office. Looking back, I can’t believe that as eighteen-year-olds we were such organized, committed individuals.

  I sat and listened to a room full of people accusing me of having introduced dissension to the campus; that as president I should be neutral and not supportive of the Hizb. I countered that being neutral meant being with Jamat-e-Islami. I seized the opportunity to be ‘sharp’, and pass on the concepts as Farid had taught us to do. I challenged them to produce a methodology for their work, to abandon emotional activism, and to develop a vision for the future Islamic state, the need for which we were all agreed upon. As taught in the halaqah, I went on the offensive. But the crowd was not in receptive mood. They had clearly planned this and a protagonist was emerging.

  Abjol, the man later to become a councillor for the Respect Party, raised his voice and in rude and personal terms attacked my presidency, completely lacking the respect I expected of him and others. As I listened I could see how those very individuals I considered to be brothers could turn nasty, violent even. There were just a few Hizb sympathizers in the crowd who rallied to my defence.