In 1989, Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was condemned as blasphemous to Islam by the Supreme Leader of Iran’s Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who pronounced a death sentence—with an offered bounty—against the author and all involved in the book’s production. Over the last quarter-century, this fatwa has led to various lethal attacks against translators and publishers in numerous countries. In August 2022, a would-be assassin, Hadi Matar, caught up with Rushdie himself, stabbing him on stage in New York as he was about to deliver a lecture, costing Rushdie one of his eyes and the use of one of his hands.
The aftermath of the 2022 attack on Rushdie revived the argument that has taken place at varying levels of intensity within Muslim communities ever since the fatwa was issued. Two responses were particularly notable. Dr. Abdul Wahid, Chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) Britain, said he understood why Muslims reacted so strongly to Rushdie’s novel, which was like a “knife into the hearts of hundreds of millions of Muslims”—an attempt to Westernize and secularize them by a Muslim-born man who had sold out to liberals. Nonetheless, Wahid stopped short of endorsing the fatwa, an encapsulation of HuT’s formal stance against violence and its ambivalences about that stance in practice. The remnants of Al-Muhajiroun, a splinter from HuT that has since joined the Islamic State (ISIS), by contrast, made little secret of their support for Matar’s actions, likewise reflecting Al-Muhajiroun’s broader approach to achieving its ends.
This report examines where these two groups came from, their ideological divergences, their approaches to the use of violence in pursuit of a goal they agree upon (the restoration of the caliphate), and how this theoretical perspective has played out in historical and contemporary contexts.
The report begins with a forward by Rashad Ali, a Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), examining the tensions inherent to the outlook of HuT, inherited by Al-Muhajiroun, which bases itself on the idea that it will restore the Abbasid caliphate and the medieval Islamic law tradition that underpinned that Empire, eliminating the Western influences on Islam, while its practical politics are those of a thoroughly Western and modernist totalitarian political party, of the kind that ruled the Soviet Union or Ba’thist Iraq.
Olivia Mangan, a postgraduate student pursuing a Master’s degree in International Security and Terrorism at the University of Birmingham, then explains how HuT conceptualizes its mission in the world and the role that violence plays in this, as well as the very special case of Syria that has tested the ideological boundaries of HuT, bringing them to support the violent insurgent activities of some other groups, without themselves ever changing their stance on violence and loudly repudiating the conduct of ISIS.
This contrasts sharply, as Mangan lays out in detail, with Al-Muhajiroun, which voiced its support for ISIS and helped facilitate foreign fighters, then pledged allegiance to ISIS and recognised its “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria as legitimate. HuT’s stance has allowed it to remain in legal operation, while Al-Muhajiroun has been banned and its most visible spokesman in Britain, Anjem Choudary, imprisoned. Mangan documents the current status of Al-Muhajiroun’s surviving network, including the activities of Choudary, who is now out of prison and released from his license conditions.
Terrorism is only the most public manifestation of Islamist militancy, and groups like Al-Muhajiroun that promote and engage in terrorism are in many ways the easiest to deal with. In Britain of late, the debate has belatedly been growing about what to do with the other elements of the Islamist movement that remain within the letter of the law, even as they seek to overthrow the whole legal structure of capitalist democracy and individual liberties, to replace it with an Islamic state governed by the shari’a. This report helps analysts and policymakers to understand the nature of one of the most important such organizations, HuT.
European Eye on Radicalization aims to publish a diversity of perspectives and as such does not endorse the opinions expressed by contributors. The views expressed in this article represent the author alone.
