Islamist activists and organizations in Western democracies have responded angrily to the British government’s recent decision to ban the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahir (HT).
HT, which has roots in Jordanian-ruled East Jerusalem in 1952, is one of the oldest international Islamist movements, with branches across the world. It advocates for a global caliphate under sharia law. Rohan Gunaratna of the Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore has warned that “adherents of HT are actively engaged in global terrorism, while Michael Whine, founder of Britain’s Community Security Trust, has stated that HT “represents a long-term threat of subversion” whose “ultimate aim” is “the violent overthrow of the established order.”
HT is already faces bans or limits on its activities in Bangladesh, China, Russia, Pakistan, Germany, Turkey, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and a number of Arab nations. However, the group still has active operations in over forty-five countries. It largely operates freely and openly in the West.
The British government implemented a ban on the group, effectuated under the U.K. Terrorism Act of 2000, on January 19, 2024, following two abandoned attempts in 2005 and 2011.
The interdiction was partly sparked by HT’s response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. During protests in the West over Israel’s subsequent Gaza operations, HT activists called for “jihad,” urging Muslim countries to “get your armies and go and remove the Zionist occupiers.” The Jewish Chronicle reports that HT has published “antisemitic propaganda glorifying the massacre, praying for a Hamas victory and calling for further atrocities in order to ‘crush the Jews.’”.
In implementing the ban, the U.K. Government described HT as an antisemitic group that praises and supports violence and terrorism. U.K. Security Minister Tom Tugendhat said, in support of the ban, that “Hizb ut-Tahrir has antisemitism at its very core. They reject democracy…. and they don’t just reject British values, they seek to undermine them.”
Islamists in the U.K. and U.S. responded angrily to the ban.
HT officials assert that the ban is “a desperate measure to censor debate about the genocide in Palestine and to stop Islam’s just political alternative,” and that “it also demonstrates that all the talk about diversity, anti-censorship and freedom of speech, are only acceptable as long as one agrees with the extremist Zionist agenda of 10 Downing Street.” It vows to fight the ban, with a message left on its website simply stating: “The British Government proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir on 19 January 2024. A legal challenge is proceeding.”
Moazzam Begg, a prominent former jihadist who once admitted to providing “small arms and mountain tactics” at al-Qaeda training camps, notes HT wasn’t proscribed at the height of the Islamic State’s activities, arguing that it has only been subject to a ban now because “Zionist #Israel has a grip on colonising nations that’s hard to fathom.”
5 Pillars, a British Islamist media outlet, published a number of discussions denouncing “the sad state of freedom speech in this country.” 5 Pillars editor Roshan Salih declared “HT were banned for praising the Palestinian resistance. … They weren’t banned because they believe in khilafah [caliphate], they weren’t banned because they believed in sharia law. … I don’t want Muslims to be sacred into silence.”
Another Islamist outlet, Islam21C, offered a similar conclusion, arguing the proscription indicates British “subservience to Israeli policy.”
Dr. Sadek Hamid, an official at the UK Islamic Mission, a branch of the South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami, warns that “proscribing HT UK sets an ominous precedent to silence peaceful opposition to the state and is a slippery slope that may lead to other British Muslim organizations similarly being banned on spurious grounds.”
Islamists in the United States also denounced the ban. Hizb ut-Tahrir America deemed the decision a “silencing” of “critics of the genocide.”
Omar Suleiman, one of the most prominent imams in America, urged Muslims to “unite and challenge this no matter what your opinion on Hizb ut Tahrir is. Once governments target non-violent movements, it gives them a broad brush to violently crackdown with ideological litmus tests and no accountability.”
Outside the Islamist world, counter-extremist analysts have also expressed concerns. Rashad Ali, a Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, stresses that “it is not accurate to describe Hizb ut-Tahrir – as some have – as a conveyer belt to terrorism” while also noting nonetheless that HT “incites anger, justifies terrorism, and has created many offshoots which have become terrorist groups. These have acted on Hizb ut-Tahrir’s most extreme religious and ideological positions.”
Notwithstanding, Ali argues, “To ban them would be both illiberal and a failure to win the intellectual argument against extreme Islamism.”
Richard McNeil-Willson, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University, the ban will “likely fail to achieve its aims… as it removes encouragement for moderation and engagement and pushes a non-violent organization underground, and further demonstrates to those critical of counterterrorism that security policy unfairly targets Muslims.”
Others within the counter-terrorism world, however, doubt HT’s ability to embrace moderation, and have welcomed the focus on HT’s activities.
Daniel Roth and Madeleine Joelson at the Counter Extremism Project warn that policymakers and analysts should not “not hesitate to expose the true nature of this deceptively malign organization.”
They explain:
In Lebanon, its headquarters, the group has called for the ‘mobilization of the armies to liberate [Al-Aqsa mosque] from the filth of the Jews;’ in Britain, for ‘armies to mobilize’ for ‘the removal of the Jewish entity;’ in Australia for the death of Muslim apostates; and in Denmark, HT has produced leaflets encouraging Muslims to kill Jews ‘wherever you find them.’” … HT also has an uncanny ability to recruit, radicalize and export foreign fighters to terror groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. According to The Times of London, HT is responsible for a recruitment ring in Birmingham that is ‘linked to more homegrown terrorists than anywhere else in the UK.’
Ted Rosner is a writer for the Middle East Forum. He has previously worked at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. and the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel.