Hisb al Tahrir Again in the News: Should it be Banned as a Totalitarian Threat?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  The talk of the town in Londonistan is whether the new Conservative government in England will ban the Hizb al Tahrir, known as the “Party of Liberation.”  According to Wikipedia: “The Hizb al Tahrir (Arabic: حِزْبُ التَحْرِير) is an international pan-Islamist, Sunni, vanguard political party whose goal is to combine all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state or caliphate, ruled by Islamic law and with a caliph head of state elected by Muslims.  The organization was founded in 1953 in Jerusalem by Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, an Islamic scholar and appeals court judge from the Palestinian village of Ijzim.  Since then the Hizb al Tahrir has spread to more than 40 countries”. 

  Counsel for the defense, Yamin Zakaria, has penned an article, “Ruling by Islam in the UK”, published in .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and http://www.radical views.org, to give an intelligent defense of the Tahriris.  Unfortunately, he is defending an indefensible organization committed to a dangerous global mission of ideological totalitarianism.  The only difference between the caliphatic movements of the Hizb al Tahrir and of Osama bin Laden are that the Hizb al Tahrir does not openly call for the use of force as a means to destroy everyone who disagrees with them.

  The end game of the Hizb al Tahrir is to destroy the British culture and every other culture of freedom and democracy as its strategy to destroy capitalism.  This is the Hizb al Tahrir’s chosen strategy to counter the increasing concentration of wealth and therefore of political power in the world, which is the major cause of global terrorism. 

  Rather than reform the existing system, the Tahriris wants to totally destroy it.  Their vicious doctrine of the political Caliphate as the end goal of a clash of civilizations designed to bury everything Western would warrant a banning of the Hizb al Tahrir wherever it exists.  Its preference, however, for simply burying everything Western without violent warfare, like Khruschev’s threat to bury America a half century ago, might argue for its right freely to preach hatred as the essence of Islam, based on the doctrine, developed in confronting Communism a half century ago, whereby action not merely speech is required for law enforcement. 

  The best approach would be not to ban the organization but rather to address the injustices of concentrated economic ownership that lead the Hisb al Tahrir to prefer concentrated political ownership of all human beings by a global caliph as the only remedy.  A more enlightened response to the evils that prompt the Tahriris to a “Neo-Conservative” agenda of creative destruction, may be found in the American Revolutionary Party’s platform,
http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us/partyplatform.htm.  This, however, is only the first and most important response to the Tahriris. 

  The threat of totalitarian global government posed by Muslim extremists must be met also by enlightened Muslim support of the doctrines taught by the great classical scholars of Islam.  Led by Ibn Taymiya, whom the Hizb al Tahriris ironically claim as their mentor, these scholars condemned the political caliphate as un-Islamic, because it is a perversion of the concept that the Islamic caliphate was a consensus on common purpose expressed in support of the universal principles embodied in the Qur’an and in the teachings of the wise spiritual leaders wherever they may be found in the world.  Ibn Taymiya was imprisoned for ten years and finally died in prison for teaching the enlightened Islamic doctrines of both haqq al din and haqq al hurriya, namely, religious and political freedom.

  The title of Yamin Zakaria’s article is a classic example of language that would be misinterpreted by 99% of both Muslim and non-Muslim readers.  His phrase, “Ruling by Islam”, is meant to mean political rule by Muslims in England, but it would be read by almost everyone as referring to a fatwa calling for Muslim political control of England.  This is similar to Ahmadinejad’s very specific call for Rezhim change in Israel and America, which was translated originally by the official Iranian news service and subsequently by the Western media as eliminating the Jews in the Holy Land and as driving the Jews into the sea. 

  If the meaning of Zakaria’s title would refer only to an Islamic fatwa, it could easily be dismissed because it does not meet the qualifications of a fatwa.  The only major problem would be posed by the fact that Islam does not give rulings.  Only Muslims do, based one might hope on the eternal principles of Islam. 

  If Yamin Zakaria’s title refers to the Hisb al Tahrir’s goal of replacing the British government with its own world totalitarian rule, then it merits serious attention, because this poses a clear, if not a present, danger to every person and to every community and nation in the world.