 Since Tony Blair's announcement last month that the Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir would be banned, the threat of proscription has been hanging over not just the group but the whole question of how much free speech our embittered society can now tolerate. The publication of the draft terrorism bill last week spelled out that a group might face proscription not just if its members were involved in terrorism, but even if the organisation was "associated" with statements glorifying terrorism. It is with such sweeping powers that the government apparently intends to send Hizb ut-Tahrir underground.
| I think that, rather than driving them underground, I'd be trying real hard to cause them to go out of business. Hizb ut-Tahrir, especially, has a record of being banned in lotsa countries, including not only Central Asia, but also civilized places like Germany and Denmark. The reason for the ban is the organization's position in the Wonderful World of Terror: not only do they keep things stirred up as well as they can by decrying all things that aren't Islamic and calling for the creation of Islamic states in other people's countries, but they also steer the rubes into organizations that aren't ostensibly non-violent. Al-Muhajiroun, for example, a Hizb offshoot, enthusiastically steered young Brits into running off to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. The only reason it really made the papers is that Hassan Butt is a publicity hound. |
Undoubtedly Hizb ut-Tahrir has an ugly face. Anti-semitic views have been published on its website and distributed by members (though disowned by other members) - and this was the main reason why the Guardian felt unable to continue employing a member of the group earlier this year.
| And now comes the big, fat "but"... |
But the organisation has other faces too. I first met a couple of articulate women from Hizb ut-Tahrir over a year ago. Among their views on the political system the party would like to see instituted in Muslim states, they talked of its promise of a more equal society focused on distribution rather than production. "There is an alternative to capitalism," said Ruksana Rahman. Another spokeswoman, Dr Nazreen Nawaz, told me: "The Islamic economic system would provide an answer to poverty."
| The Islamic economic system has had since approximately 622 A.D. to provide the answer to poverty. In that time, it's managed to produce a swath of poverty, ignorance, and brutality instead. The effects have in fact been uniform everywhere Islam has taken root, the only offset being those regions where the Islamic talent for sitting on pools of oil has manifested itself. Rather than providing seed money to jump start stagnant societies, the money's in most cases gone to building mosques and educating little jihadis. At some indeterminate point in the future the oil will be gone, but the poverty, ignorance and brutality will remain. |
As I talked to these women I realised that what they were saying echoed in certain ways what young people in the 1930s would have said about why they had turned to communism.
| Oh, that's comforting. Another idea that worked ever so well. Except that Islamism actually has it over communism in the horrors it's capable of producing. |
These women were impatient about the powerlessness of their people; although those people were not the international working class but the international Muslim community. They believed that human society was perfectible, even if it was to be perfected not by following the precepts of Marx but those of Muhammad, and even if the endpoint - the Caliphate - was the dictatorship not of the proletariat but of the faithful.
| Actually, that'd be the dictatorship of the Caliph, the supreme holy man, with the big jewelled turban, supported by his highly trained staff of less supreme holy men, with their own big jewelled turbans, only not quite as big. The Faithful™ would remain what they've always been, cannon fodder, recruits for the holy man class, and producers of zakat. Women, of course, would remain veiled figures of mystery and allurement, suitable only for breeding and training up as dancing girls. |
Absurd as such idealism might seem to many people in Britain, it is surely not beyond the bounds of our imagination to see why it has become attractive even to some educated and articulate people.
| Apparently in some parts of Britain it doesn't seem ludicrous, but I think that's mostly around mosques and the offices of al-Guardian. |
Many young people in 1930s Britain and America found themselves observing the inertia of an unjust society and decided that the only way forward was through fidelity to a utopian dream.
| Except for the ones who were born into privilege, they're mostly not the ones who made great successes of their lives or contributed much to the rest of the world. The gauloise and turtleneck set will, like the poor, always be with us. |
By joining an international movement they found a sense of solidarity and purpose that many held on to even when the ideals were tarnished beyond repair.
| By joining an international movement they found a like-minded community of similar losers. The holy men can do the thinking and The Masses™ can do the following. It's the same idea that made the Commies a success for awhile, the same idea that had 'em tromping in unison in Germany to the Horst Wessel song. It's the same idea that had them lopping people's heads off in the French Revolution and it's the same idea that has 'em lopping people's heads off in Iraq today. It's the same idea that gave birth to the auto da fe. All I can say is, God save us all from Idealism™. Cynicism and hypocrisy are tame and socially productive by comparison. |
John Gray, in Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, argues that political Islamism is similar to the communist movement as it provides this idealistic belief that people can put aside their human imperfections and produce a final utopia - that they can stop history.
| I just said that, and he misses the part about the autos da fe... |
Of course, it would be silly to overstate the parallels between Islamism now and communism then.
| Maybe silly to overstate it, but not to point out the first cousin relationship between the two... |
There is a gulf between religious and secular utopianism; although communism looked forward to a new society and so communists felt free to support other progressive tendencies in society, Islamism looks backwards to idealised Muslim societies of the past. And one of the striking characteristics of Islamism today is that there is no single authoritative party in the Islamist movement.
| Like I always say, any idiot can issue a fatwah, and many do... |
But Hizb ut-Tahrir, a formal party with stated goals, is more comprehensible than other bits of the Islamist movement. Since its goals are clearly political and - alongside the nasty hysteria about Zionism - have included the espousal of decent things such as women's rights, it is also a lot more sympathetic than most manifestations of radical Islam.
| "Women's rights" in the Islamist context falls under the heading of being kind to one's pets... |
Hizb ut-Tahrir does not espouse violence even against dictatorial Arab governments, much less against western states.
| But if you're so inclined — and you will be, after a few sermons down at the mosque — they'll be happy to kick in for a bus ticket to Chechnya or Iraq or Mindanao, and maybe even arrange for someone to meet you when you get there... |
If Britain bans such an organisation even though it is not supporting terrorism, it will be an echo of what the US government did from the late 1940s amid McCarthyist paranoia.
| The writer's somehow managed to convince him/her/itself that the Hizbies aren't supporting terrorism just because they say so. |
Then Communist party members were named and blacklisted, foreign-born members deported, leaders put on trial for plotting the overthrow of the government - though the US government never banned the Communist party outright.
| Free Alger Hiss!... Oh. Wait. It turned out he was a commie... |
During the cold war the British government did not emulate this paranoia, allowing communists to come to their own conclusion that they had indulged, as Doris Lessing put it, in a "sort of mass psychosis". Let's hope that in these equally psychotic times our government realises that a witch-hunt can rebound on the hunters as well as on the hunted.
| I seem to remember that the British gummint during those enlightened times was working hard to keep the commies from fifth columning the country. Anybody remember Christine Keeler? Kim Philby? Rudolph Abel? |
|