The tentacles of Hizbut Tahrir

By Khaled Ahmed

Muhammad, son of Al Hanaffia, said:”The Black Banners will come out for the children of Al Abbas. The other black banners will come from Khurasan. Their turbans will be black and their clothes white. At their front will be a man named Shuayb, the son of Salih, from Tamim. They will defeat the companions of The Sufyaani until he comes to the House of Jerusalem where he will establish his power for the Mahdi, and he will be supplied with three hundred (men) from Syria after his arrival and the matter will be settled for the Mahdi in seventy-two months (six years).”

- From a Hizbut Tahrir website

In June this year, one Brigadier Ali Khan was arrested for his alleged ties with Hizbut Tahrir (HT), a terrorist organisation. Before that, Colonel Shahid Bashir, the then (serving) Commanding Officer of the Shamsi Air Force Base, was apprehended by the military police on 4 May 2009 for keeping links with this banned pan-Islamic political outfit. Colonel Shahid Bashir was arrested along with a retired PAF fighter pilot Squadron Leader-turned lawyer Nadeem Ahmad Shah and a US-educated mechanical engineer and a Green Card holder Awais Ali Khan.

A July 2009 report published in the British press had reported 35 members of HT arrested in Islamabad. Banned literature, computers, mobile phones and banners were recovered. The house where the gang was plotting the overthrow of the government – to be replaced by the “caliphate” – had 15 cars backing up the ‘revolution’.

That year, HT plunged into its rare belligerent mode and began talking about spilling blood for the Islamic revolution. And the idea was to wreak havoc on the Muslims of Pakistan, a country rather kind to HT, in contrast to Uzbekistan where its workers are mostly found languishing in jails together with the Pakistani Tablighis for criticising whom federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik has been pilloried by most peace-loving non-terrorist government and opposition politicians.

In London, the style of HT leader Tayyib Muqeem was aggressive when he declared that many activists had been sent to Pakistan to bring about sharia ‘by force’, as if the Taliban weren’t doing enough of that sort of thing. What Muqeem revealed additionally was worrisome. He said the Hizb had converted four Pakistani army officers during their training at Sandhurst in England.

Who founded HT? Intriguingly there are two claimants but the one recently canonised by reporters in Pakistan comes from the HT website and a very comprehensive paper written by Dr Simon Ross Valentine – ‘Fighting Kufr and the American Raj: Hizbut Tahrir in Pakistan’ – in the University of Bradford’s research unit, the Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU), established in 2007. The other claimant for founding of HT is Umar Bakri, a Syrian who got himself naturalised as a British citizen and then spawned two outfits, Al Muhajirun and Hizbut Tahrir in London, attracting mostly Pakistani-British youth.
Reports in Pakistan say HT was founded 58 years ago in Jerusalem by a court judge called Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. It has over one million followers in over 40 countries, including Pakistan. The Bradford paper says: ‘In 1968, HT was involved in two failed coups in Syria and Jordan, and a further coup in Egypt in 1974. Following the death of al-Nabhani in Beirut in 1977, HT spread to numerous other countries, firstly under the leadership of Abdal-Qadim Zallum, leader of HT till 2003, and then under Ata Khalil Abu-Rashta, the present international leader.

Although HT is a legally recognised group in the UK – despite pledges by Prime Minister David Cameron, when in opposition, to ban it – and the USA and several Muslim states including the UAE, Lebanon, Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia, it is banned in Egypt, Libya and Pakistan. HT was proscribed in Pakistan in 2004, following an alleged plot to assassinate former president, Pervez Musharraf, by HT members. More recently, on 22 October 2009, HT was banned in Bangladesh for allegedly ‘trying to destabilise the country’. The Home Secretary of Bangladesh, Abdus Sobhan Sikdar, said the government ‘feared HT posed a serious threat to peaceful life’.

In Pakistan, HT’s thinking coalesced with a number of other legitimate Islamist actors, which accounts for the spread of its influence within civil society and the army. Writing in daily Pakistan (15 April 2005) Tanvir Qaiser Shahid stated that British Islamist Umar Bakri had been in jail for his verbal aggression. He was originally a Syrian who had run away from Hafez Al Assad and got the British nationality. He took out a journal in London named Khilafah in which he abused the Quaid-e-Azam while advancing the cause of the banned-in-Pakistan organisation Hizbut Tahrir which was ‘exported’ to Pakistan from the UK.

Umar Bakri’s fiery speeches were identical with Egyptian Umar Abdur Rehman, who had tried to blow up the Trade Centre in New York in 1993 and was in jail in the US. In Pakistan, Dr Israr was in favour of Hizbut Tahrir and wanted khilafat to replace democracy and was at times insulting to the Quaid-e-Azam. In Qaumi Digest (April 2005) he had said that Islam could not be enforced in Pakistan because of Jinnah.

Syrian-born Umar Bakri was deported from the UK after 9/11. (The organisation denies he is the leader). He is supposed to be in Lebanon now, regretting losing his free car in London, in which he carried his eight children, and the social security bonanza that ran his cockney-accented boys around the world under the name of Al Muhajirun and Hizbut Tahrir, both unsolicited gifts of the United Kingdom to Pakistan.

A third one, Al Fuqara, the Pakistani-dominated party of the infamous Shoe-Bomber, is Pakistan’s gift to the UK, hence the queer justice of the quid pro quo. Al Fuqara was founded with the help of the agencies by Mubarak Gilani, the converter of the Shoe-Bomber, who was in hiding in Karachi when American journalist Daniel Pearl succeeded in finding his whereabouts and died in the process of going to meet him, at the hands of Al Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Gilani is inheritor of the ‘gaddi’ of the mausoleum of saint Mian Mir in Lahore.

One evidence of Bakri’s involvement with HT became public in Akbar S Ahmed’s book ‘Islam under Siege: Living Dangerously in Post-Honour World’ (Polity Press 2003). Ahmed, who was also Pakistan’s High Commissioner in the UK for some time, wrote:

‘In Britain, Sheikh Umar Bakri’s Khilafah, the journal of Hizbut Tahrir, attacked Jinnah as a kafir and an insult for a Muslim. Moreover it accused Jinnah of being an enemy of God and the Holy Prophet PBUH because Jinnah supported women, Christians and Hindus, and advocated democracy. Why I asked myself did they pick on Jinnah? Because, I concluded, Bakri saw him as a major ideological opponent. Significantly after the American strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, Bakri emerged in the media to claim that he represented bin Laden in Europe’ (p113).

When Akbar S Ahmed was making his Jinnah film and trying to talk to the ‘other side’ in an interfaith dialogue that he led on TV in London, a whole lot of the Muslims were put off. Islam giving itself over to dialogue with any other faith was unfamiliar. After he began his project of talking to Christianity on behalf of Islam, the aggressive Islamists of the UK didn’t like it one bit. One was Sheikh Umar Bakri, who damned everything if it was not khilafat. In a book about the interfaith dialogue, Bakri was quoted as calling him ‘chocolate Muslim’ and ‘an Uncle Tom’ because of his admiration of Western civilisation more than Islamic civilisation. ‘He is a sincere Muslim but sincere is not enough’. In October 2001 Bakri sent his followers to Afghanistan for jihad.

Tayyib Muqeem, the HT leader in Pakistan claims that one of HT’s strategies is to influence military officers. Shahzad Sheikh, HT’s official spokesman in Karachi, openly admitted how members were actively persuading the army to instigate a bloodless coup against the present government. But HT is not willing to accept that Bakri had a hand in founding the Pakistani-dominated HT. It is possible that he was one of those present at its creation but later had a falling out with the HT rank and file.

Linkages have developed because of the positions taken by HT in Pakistan. It is virulently anti-American, condemns drone attacks and curses the ‘Zardari government’ for being a ‘slave of America’, which may account for its lure in the military circles. It also condemns the Pakistan Army for fighting the Taliban in the Tribal Areas, which must please Al Qaeda, the Taliban and officers who don’t want to ‘fight their own brethren’.

According to Maajid Nawaz – he called on the writer in June 2011 in Lahore – a former high-ranking HT member now a ‘reformed radical’ working with the Quilliam Foundation, a UK-government sponsored counter-terrorism think-tank, HT was set up in Pakistan in the early 1990s by Imtiaz Malik, a British Muslim, and that in 1999 a call was sent to British HT members to move to Pakistan which prompted the movement of some of the UK’s top quality activists to South Asia. At least ten British activists were planted in each of Pakistan’s main cities.

Pakistan’s extremism has been noted by all and sundry in Pakistan, including the religiously steeped middle class, but very few connect it with the rise of organisations such as HT and Al Qaeda that abominate democracy and advise violent action against it. Least of all is anti-Americanism equated with extremism, a universal phenomenon in Pakistan which unites everyone behind terrorism.

Source: The Friday Times