Last week’s JC revealed how activists affiliated to Hizb ut-Tahrir, a notorious Islamist group that advocates the violent destruction of Israel and the establishment of a caliphate across the Muslim world and beyond, have been covertly returning to speak on UK campuses.

I was involved with the organisation from the age of 15. In the late 1990s, I became responsible for their activities on university campuses across London; I have monitored their activities as both a researcher and a campaigner ever since.

Hizb ut-Tahrir’s aim is to infiltrate influential parts of society and to push public opinion to rise up against governments in Muslim majority countries. It believes that if it takes power in one state ,it can then take over others by force. Until then, however, it focuses on supporting various “jihads”.

They style themselves as liberators from tyranny. Given how fascistic dictators are in the Arab world, this is an effective tactic. But somewhat ironically, they also claim to be anti-imperialists, not recognising their longed-for super-state as an empire to be.

But as a group established by former Ba’athists (Arab socialists) and Islamists (whose formative thinking was developed in the period when anti-imperialism was dominant as an ideology), they have a totalitarian outlook; the Islamist state will solve all problems and define everything, from ideal role of women in the house, to control of public resources such as oil and gas, and banning any democratic party or human rights groups as insufficiently “Islamic”. This ideology is used to appeal to people who are fed up with dictatorships which slaughter their own people, or states which have resources but no rational economy, and to appeal to grievance narratives, whether based around the Iraq War or persecution of Uighurs by China.

They push failure of existing governments and states to look after the true interests of Muslims, to manage their valuable resources properly, or to unify Muslims.
This is combined with criticism of both free market failures and communists’ irrationality, along with theological arguments for the necessity of a divine creator and the need for absolute morality in a relativist world. They sell Islamist ideology as the solution to all problems, an intellectual alternative to both socialism and capitalism, and a political motivation for change which is indeed badly needed. It is the lure of a utopia based around the ideology of Islam(ism), sprinkled with passionate arguments about enemies in the West and their “pawn”, Israel.

The attraction of this to immature idealist minds — on campus, in other words — is obvious, especially when combined with selective fundamentalist scriptural citations into a religious, political and “intellectual” argument.

Hizb ut-Tahrir never, of course, begins its pitch with, “We will establish an Islamic State and unify Muslim lands by force, even if millions of Muslims will have to die for the cause”. Rather, they start with cosmological arguments and political grievances and end with One Ummah (nation), One State, One Caliph — which is not far from Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.
Their views on suicide bombing and taking civilian life in Israel (which is against foundational Islamic teaching for a millenia on the rules of war and ethics) will not be what they normally speak of on campus, but rather notions of occupation by international law standards and the hypocrisy of UN resolutions.

When they are unable to take control of student Islamic societies, or where the NUS applies its ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir activities, they use names like “debating society”, “1924 committee” and suchlike. They are not terrorists; but the extremist ideology and views they extol are not far from that and act as justifications.

Exposing their ideology, challenging the extreme beliefs, empowering people with the knowledge and confidence to oppose them is a vital part of civil society activism that we have been falling short in. Like all extremes, they must not be allowed to fester.

Rashad Ali is Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue