A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate

253 Pages·1996·8.585 MB·English

by  Suha Taji-Farouki

A Fundamental Quest
Hizb al-Tahrir and the
Search for the Islamic Caliphate

Suha Taji-Farouki
A Fundamental Quest
Hizb al-Tahrir and the
Search for the Islamic Caliphate
Grey Seal London
Hi
flà é >
First published 1996 by Grey Seal (Publishing) Limited
28 Burgoyne Road, London N4 1 AD, England
© Suha Taji-Farouki 1996
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers or their
appointed agents.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Taji-Farouki, Suha
A fundamental quest: Hizb al-Tahrir
and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate
1 .Islamic sects - Great Britain 2.Islamic
fundamentalism - Great Britain
I.Title
297.8'0941
ISBN 1-85640-039-5
The Author. Suha Taji-Farouki is Lecturer in modem Islam at the
Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Durham.
She was educated at Durham and Exeter. Her interests include
contemporary Islamic thought, Islam in Europe and Muslim-Jewish
relations. Dr Taji-Farouki is currently Secretary of the European
Association for Middle Eastern Studies.
To the memory of my parents
rahmat Allahi \alayhima

Contents
Introduction ix
1 The Elusive Caliphate The Origins and Development of the
Movement 1
2 Traditional Beginnings, Modem Ends The Ideology of the
Movement 37
3 Islamic Party into Islamic State The Strategy of theM ovement 76
4 Controlling the Fraternity Organization, Membership and
Leadership 114
5 Islamic InternationalismE xpanding into New Territories 153
Conclusion 188
Appendix Proposed Constitution for an Islamic State, 1979 193
Sources 219
Index 235
vii

Introduction
Reporting a rally organized by the Hizb al-Tahrir branch in Britain in
Trafalgar Square on 13 August 1995, The Observer quoted the organ­
izers as promising ‘a taste of the elixir that will inevitably disintegrate
the malignant cancers of freedom and democracy currently afflicting
the world’. They also pledged to call on Britain to embrace Islam,
urging Prime Minister John Major to lead the way. It was just over a
year since the movement’s notorious International Muslim Khilafa
Conference in Wembley Arena. Just as then, certain of Britain’s minor­
ity religious leaders (this time Sikhs and Hindus joining their Jewish
counterparts) attempted unsuccessfully to get the event banned, accus­
ing the movement of preaching a doctrine of racist hatred and violence.
While the British government could turn a deaf ear to the movement’s
irresponsible rhetoric (its threat, for example, to launch ‘a massive
campaign on the British way of life’, and taunts that ‘one day Britain
will become an Islamic state’), there were nevertheless genuine causes
for concern. These included the movement’s apparent success in
attracting and radicalizing disaffected sectors of Britain's young
Muslims, exposing the weakness of the country’s policy towards its
religious and ethnic minorities. Added to this was the embarrassment
caused by its vehement denunciations of friendly regimes in various
Arab countries where it continues to be a nuisance and, of course, its
vitriolic attacks on Israel. Moderate leaders of British Muslim commun­
ities worried at the negative impact of the movement’s aggressive rhet­
oric and confrontational style on the image of Islam, and the fruit of
decades of bridge-building in British society. While some mainstream
organizations entered the fight for the allegiance of Britain’s Muslim
youth by themselves cultivating a more radical tone, others turned to
the task of creating a new British Islamic culture in the hope of halting
the drift towards extremist ideas.
Where had these troublemakers, with their talk of world Islamic
ix
A Fundamental Quest
dominance and their remarkable soundbites (a favourite being ‘demo-
cracy is hypocrisy’, for example), come from? The origin of the mo'^’S^'
ment, which has in recent years established an increasingly!
international distribution in spite of its relatively small numerical \
strength and practical political impact, can be found in Jerusalem at the
turn of the 1940s. More specifically, it lies in the response of an Islamic
scholar and talented intellectual to the break-up of the Ottoman empire,
the fragmentation of its territories into nation-states, the creation off
Israel and the impotence of Muslim societies in the face of neo-imper- \
ialism. Repudiating the career as ‘alim for which his education had
pared him, on 17 November 1952, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani submitted
an application to the Jordanian Interior Ministry for permission to
establish a new party, Hizb al-Tahrir (HT). He described it as ‘a politi­
cal party with Islam as its ideology and the goal of resuming an Islamic
way of life by establishing an Islamic state which will implement Islam
and propagate it worldwide’. This application was made in accordance
with the new constitution, which permitted party organization provided
that parties submit to official investigation; soon after its promulgation
several opposition parties sought permission to organize openly.
Al-Nabhani’s application was rejected on the basis that the party’s plat­
form was incompatible with the constitution, launching it on a collision
course with the Jordanian regime that is ongoing today. In its ideologi­
cal formulations, strategy and structure, the new party conformed to
patterns of similarity discernible among Jordan’s new ideologically-
based opposition parties (Cohen 1975, 36-9), reflecting characteristics
of the broader trend of mass parties that emerged in the Arab Middle
East from the 1930s. These parties generally articulated the new secular
ideologies of nationalism and socialism which radiated from Europe
and swept the region between the wars, appealing to a rising inter-war
generation disillusioned with the West and with the old order of liberal
democratic regimes. By participating in the new political fields that hdcP
developed under these regimes in relation to the newly established
nation-states, this new generation aimed to gain control of the state
through a revolutionary programme that had as its ultimate goal the
creation of a new political and social order. Unlike the traditional pol­
itical groupings of the older generation, the movements they established
took into account the new realities, thereby making themselves effective
actors in the context of the new political fields. Displaying the char­
acteristic features of modem mass political parties, their programmes
centred on the efforts of a revolutionary vanguard, echoing the early
Leninist notion of the party as educator of the masses, and an elite
X