Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Ummatic Ghost Dance
Why Khilafah revivalism is a doomed project
﷽
Like many of you reading, I developed a keen interest in both politics and Islam at a young age. However, as a young Muslim dipping my toes into the field of Islamic political thought, I was at a loss for who to take after. On one side, there were the so called "Islamic modernists" or "moderates", spending their time railing against the evils of "Islamism" and calling on Muslims to embrace both liberalism and secularism. On the other extreme end of the spectrum lay those who gave tacit support to groups like Daesh and Al-Qaeda, slamming every Muslim country as being run by the Taghut (tyrants who go against God's will) and call on all Muslims to fight them and the West as a whole, lest they be labelled as disbelievers too. Like many other conscientious Muslims, I was repulsed by both sides; one side demanded that I give up my religion, and the other demanded I give up my conscience and common sense. In this period where I was attempting to reconcile Islam (not in its bastardised form as modernists affirm but in its totality) which sensible politics, I stumbled upon a YouTube video. While this video has long since become lost to time, the few clips that still exist persist on in videos meant to refute it, I still remember the key points clearly. The video was presented by a man in a thawb and kufi,and in his American accent, he presented his group's view on what should be the course of action for Muslims to create the Caliphate, and thereby return to their former glory. Unlike the Modernists, he presented a program based upon the life and method of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself. And unlike the proponents of Daesh, this program didn't include wanton violence or acts of civilian terror. It was exactly the program and ideology I was looking for. This organisation, known in Arabic as Hizb ut Tahrir (The Party of Liberation) entranced me, but despite my rose-tinted glasses, there were some issues that immediately stood out to me.
The first issue that presented itself was that the Hizb ut Tahrir member was oddly insistent that Muslims must act out the exact strategy of the Prophet, step by step, in an attempt to establish the Caliphate. While there is of course no problem with looking back to the Seerah for inspiration and guidance, the man went much further. Muslims to him were to follow exactly in the method of Muhammad ﷺ, even if it means failure, because it is a religious obligation. I found this requirement to be bizarre, but at the time I saw it as only a minor issue. The second problem however was much more damning. Looking into Hizb ut Tahrir (who we’ll be referring to as “HT” for the rest of this essay), I found out that despite their large global membership network and influence, they have yet to anchor their program in a workable model, leading to few significant successes.hey been around for 70 years, yet they have achieved nothing significant. In 70 whole years, they were not able to successfully mobilise a mass movement, instigate a circulation of elites, or takeover significant institutions. How has an organisation that has been functioning for so long have so little successes. Is HT itself proof that the goal of Islamic sovereignty is unattainable? To answer these questions we first must gain a deeper understanding of the history, ideology and methodology of this organisation.
Hizb ut-Tahrir: History, methodology, ideology
The founder of HT, Taqi ud din an-Nabhani, lived in a revolutionary age for the Muslim world. Born in 1909, the same year that Abdulhamid II was forced to resign by the Young Turks, an-Nabhani was old enough to remember the abolishment of the Ottoman Caliphate. As a young boy, he was raised in a deeply religious environment, his father and grandfather being scholars of Islam- he would continue on in the family tradition by going to study in the prestigious Al Azhar University. An-Nabhani came of age at a time where almost the entirety of Dar-al Islam was occupied by foreign non-Muslim powers. This period of ignominy culminated in the establishment of the Zionist entity in Palestine, followed by the humiliation of the Arab world on the battlefield, and the mass slaughter and expulsion of the Palestinian peoples. A Palestinian refugee of the Nakba himself, An-Nabhani was effected greatly by these events, which contributed to his founding of HT only 5 years later
.
HT distinguished itself early on by its adherence to what it saw as the method of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Other groups that aimed to revive Islamic sovereignty, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, were seen as too moderate by An-Nabhani, and criticised for not adhering to the system of politics that governed Madinah. HT gained minor successes in the Life of its first leader, spreading its political message across the Arab world, and forming cliques, cells and groups that participated in clandestine activity against the ruling regimes. This culminated in two failed coups, in Jordan and Iraq respectively. in 1977, an-Nabhani died in Beirut, being succeeded as leader by Abdul Qaleem Zalloum. It was in this period that HT truly became international, setting up bases of operation in many Muslim countries outside the Arab world, and even non-muslim countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The increase in the breadth of the organisation was not due to any conscious strategy however, as it was the outlawing of the party and the persecution of its members that spurred the mass exodus into new lands. Today HT is present either officially or illegally in over forty countries in the Muslim world, increasing its influence and spreading its message using social media.
HT is unique for its strict rejection of modern systems of governance while also remaining non-violent. It's also unique in having a clear plan of action and manifesto. To the party, all modern ideologies, from monarchy, to Arab Nationalism to Communism, as man-made, are all seen as incompatible with the political framework of Islam. The mode of rulership most viable Islamically is Khilafah, the rule of all Muslims under a Caliph. The importance of the Caliphate is one of the key talking points of HT; in their media, it is stressed as the key solution to the all of the problems of the Ummah, from economic downturn and inequality, to persecution of Muslims in non-Muslim lands, to the Liberation of Palestine. If you were to go onto a channel run by the members of the party, you would see dozens of videos going on in detail about how the future Caliphate would deal with all manner of problems, including how the Caliphate would deal with the US, if the would allow men to shave their beards and whether or not the internet would be banned.
The praxis that HT employs to achieve their dream of Islamic revival is even more stringent than their ideology itself. In order to achieve Islamic revival, they see it as crucial for Muslims to follow exactly the method of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in establishing rule of Madinah and conquering Makkah. This strategy is broken down into four key steps:
nurturing a small clique of dedicated revolutionaries
spreading its message to the Ummah in general
establishing an Islamicate state through a bloodless coup
eventual unity of the entire world under Khilafah
While the last step was seen as far off goal, only achievable after most of the world's population embraces Islam, the other three were seen as achievable goals in the short term. It was seen as so achievable, that originally an-Nabhani had given HT thirteen years for the organisation to establish and Islamic state; this deadline was later extended to thirty years, until eventually being scrapped by the party. The party considers itself to be on the second step
As earlier stated, HT has been in function since 1953 (over 70 years by the time this is written), but it has failed to achieve anything significant in decades. The strategies being used, are demonstrably outdated, and their ideology dangerously naive. yet despite this, HT remains stubborn in its ways, refusing to overhaul its strategy to gain a greater chance of success. Why is this the case? the answer may lie, strangely enough, in the religious practices of Native Americans half a world away.
The Ghost Dance and Hizb ut-Tahrir
In the 19th century, Native American tribes were faced with an existential threat to their culture. From the East, European settlers began to push into their ancestral lands, killing or subjugating those who resisted. In response to the threat of westward expansion, the natives began a new movement in order to protect themselves. Was this some sort of coordinated political movement aiming at uniting the tribes against the settlers? Did this movement plan to treat with the settlers, to either integrate themselves for their own protection, or to buy time to mount a fierce resistance? The answer was that this movement had neither ideas in mind, nor some other practical or pragmatic ideas for a solution to their woes. Instead they danced. In dancing, as they believed, they would be able to summon the spirits of their ancestors back into the material plane to fight with them, to drive the settlers out of their land and to finally bring peace and prosperity to the natives. but this never happened. No matter how fierce or how long the natives danced, their ancestors would not come, and the settlers would not stop. And thus they lost their sovereignty.
While your typical HT member may initially scoff at even the suggestion of their being a similarity between their highly thought out political praxis and the superstitions of "primitive" and dying society, there are many more similarities between the two than meets the eye. There are three properties of the attitude that created ghost dance that can be applied to most reactionary movements, including HT. They are as follows:
wishing to resurrect structures or strategies from the past that wouldn't work in the present.
being fundamentally intellectually comfortable.
wishing to relive an idealised era of glory.
The first point, as I have made clear when discussing the History and Methodology of HT, is a depressingly accurate description of the strategy of the party. The party takes pride in its strict, literalist adherence to the strategy used by the Prophet , yet they fail to realise that its political hermenuetics of the Seerah is outdated. As Muslims, we should all take the example of Muhammad ﷺ in our personal and social lives, and the society he built in Madinah is the ideal which all Muslims should aspire towards. However the strategy used in this time was one crafted to deal with the enemy of the time, the 7th century Quraysh. This strategy was not made to work against the 20th and 21st century American hegemonic order, nor against the modern dictatorships which litter the Muslim world today. This is a problem specifically with the mode of thinking that dominates HT- they seek to follow on the path that led to the establishment of the Rashidun, yet they fails to realise that the cultural and technological factors that contributed to the greatness of that era cease to exist, meaning that the course of action he proposes is outdated by centuries. This should be all the more apparent to the HT of the 21st century, which has the blessing of hindsight. Yet they continue to stick to the same old strategy, even if it leads to continued failure and stagnation.
Whether or not HT is aware of the inevitable failure that their project would lead to is up in the air, the reason why they stick to it regardless is explained with the second property listed. HT has a problem that is shared with much more violent groups wishing to reestablish the Caliphate; They lack a willingness to put intellectual effort into their projects. When I levy this criticism at HT, I do not mean to call them lazy or unwilling to actually follow through with what they plan. The party has demonstrated many times their willingness to establish Islamic states through attempted military uprisings or mass mobilisation, their zealotry for the cause of Khilafah is marked in the number of members sent to prisons, and the number of countries that have banned their operations. HT have proven they will put in the physical effort to achieve their goals; the problem is that this isn't matched at all with intellectual effort. We live in a radically novel era for humanity, with little that would be recognisable to someone even 150 years ago. These problems require novel solutions that require us to go back to the drawing board. However, to do such a thing is too intellectually uncomfortable for the heads of HT
The party has many books and pamphlets, each detailing a comprehensive vision for a caliphate, describing all areas from the caliph himself to the provinces and local regions. As stated earlier, this is presented by them as an alternative to western modernity and based purely on Islam. The irony of this it is that their political vision is that it is an imitation of modern western systems of governance. While HT does fervently condemn the nation state as anti-islamic, they paradoxically embrace the paradigm of the modern state, painting it with a thin coat of sharia to ease suspicion. The "Caliphal state" (which I put in quotation because a "Caliphal state" is an oxymoron) which they propose as an alternative to the Westphalian model, acts as a powerful, centralised and absolute entity, enforcing the laws it "derives" from the Quran and Sunnah onto the entire population in a uniform manner. The "Caliphal state", just like modern nation states, has a judiciary and executive branch, both under the power of the state, with it adopting a "separation of powers" not unlike those seen in the West. Education in the as well as healthcare, would be under the full control of the "Caliphal state" with it even controlling and administering public property and goods. The "Caliphal state" runs against the Islamic paradigm of governance that had existed in pre-modernity, so much so that it can hardly be called Islamic. The party attempts to replicate the political structures of the Caliphates of the past, but due to their poor understanding of its true nature, they have managed to mimic the modern nation state in its content, with only its form vaguely resembling the Rashidun. HT does not understand that merely appointing Caliph and enforcing the criminal code is not enough, especially when the entire system is profane and anti-Islamic. But for the party, producing an alternative Islamic vision that is paradigmatically is too hard; it is far more comfortable for them to thoughtlessly appropriate the modern state system, labelling it Islamic and ignore how blatantly paradoxical it all is.
Another aspect of the Ghost Dance that is reflected in Hizb ut Tahrir is their longing for an idealised caliphate that never truly existed. In the propaganda produced by the party, the Caliphate features prominently as the fix all for all of the problems of the Ummah. Before 1924 the Caliphate had always existed, the Caliph acting as the representative of all Muslims worldwide, and that with his deposition, we live in an unprecedented age. This is of course greatly exaggerated. After the Abbasid revolution, the Muslim world was never truly united; Spain was controlled by a rival Caliph, and regional governors increasingly chipped away at the power of the Caliph. by the end of the first Millennium, the Caliph had became a puppet ruler in all but name, only briefly gaining independence in the 12th and 13th centuries before they were destroyed by the Mongol horde. For 258 years, the Muslim world went without a widely recognised caliph (although an Abbasid pretender was propped up by the Mamlukes in Egypt). The Muslim world did surprisingly fine during this period, stopping the Mongol advance across the Middle East and eventually bringing them under the fold of Islam, removing the last remnants of Crusader rule in the Levant, and even conquering the city of Constantinople. Eventually, the Ottomans claimed the title of caliph following their conquest of Egypt in 1517, being the first power in centuries to wield the title of Caliph while having the power and authority to back it up. But even in this period of Pax Ottomana, the Muslim world wasn't collective in its recognition of a single caliph. The Safavid shahs rejected the Caliph outright, positing themselves as the leaders of the Shia world and in opposition to the Sunni Ottomans. Not even the Mughal emperors, who were Sunni, recognised the suzerainty that was claimed by the Ottomans. With this in mind, it is clear that the image of the caliphate that Hizb ut Tahrir likes to create, being universal, powerful and revered by all Muslims, has very little basis in reality.
To conclude, Hizb ut Tahrir as an organisation has not had any significant successes because of both its outlook and strategy. The party claims to strictly follow the strategy used by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in order to attain power, a claim they use to assert that only their approach is truly Islamic, and that it is an obligation for the Muslim community to follow their plan of action. However, their approach fails in dealing with the circumstances of the modern age- Moreover they have shown that the party lacks the dynamism to adapt their strategy in lieu of their own past failures. HT, like many reactionary movements across history, have remained stuck in their ways, unable to put in significant intellectual effort to craft either an effective strategy or a potent analysis. This led the party in particular to make major blunders in their description of the "caliphal state", which in reality is merely a modern nation state dressed in the garments of Sharia.
From its founding under An-Nabhani, through its persecution and the exile of its leaders to the West, and up to today, HT has been dutifully carrying out its strategy for the establishment of a Caliphate. A Muslim has to admire how diligent the party has been in its goal to achieve its aim, despite how much time has passed and how much it has cost them. But in order to be successful in achieving sovereignty for Islamdom, much more than grit and zealotry is needed. We must first humble ourselves, and admit that the strategies we have been using have failed for a reason, and that a new praxis is needed that accounts for our modern circumstances. Intellectual effort should be exercised in soberly analysing our own past, learning to carry on the spirit of the past Islamic ages without attempting to resurrect long-obsolete political structures. lastly, we should not be afraid to learn from our enemies and subjugators, not just to learn how they were able to gain victory over us, but to also understand what makes the Islamicate truly unique. It is only by doing this that the Ummatic ghost dance can finally be ended.