What’s really behind UK’s decision to outlaw Hizb ut Tahrir?

Luck ran out for Hizb ut Tahrir (HT) on January 19 when the UK parliament rubber-stamped the government’s recommendation to include the group’s name in the list of proscribed organisations.

In the past two decades, the UK government had tried at least twice to ban the group, but the decision didn’t go through as HT wasn’t perceived to pose any serious threat.

But the political winds appear to have shifted against HT after Israel launched its war on Gaza in which tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, have been killed.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government has accused HT of anti-Semitism, saying its members referred to Hamas fighters as “heroes”.

Richard McNeil-Willson, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, who has closely followed the group over the years, says the UK government is obliging the Israelis with its decision on HT.

“There has been a widespread pushback, social movements and demonstrations in the UK against Israeli violence in Gaza and against Palestinians, which is seen as hugely excessive, destructive and kind of vicious.”

HT has been at the forefront of those protests and has organised large rallies in London in recent weeks with placards and banners condemning Israel. That put the spotlight on the group’s activities in the United Kingdom.

"The UK government is trying to make sure that it prevents open attack on its pro-Israel narrative,” says Willson.

Sunak’s Conservative government has steadfastly stood with Tel Aviv, giving it military and diplomatic support.

A political gambit

HT, which once boasted tens of thousands of followers worldwide, has shrunk dramatically over the years as an organisation, says Willson.

“It’s a group that’s in decline. It has lost its dynamism. There are a lot fewer members, and a lot of them are old. So, this is not a group of any particular relevance.”

HT, which experts and officials have long argued was never directly involved in any armed resistance, has now been placed alongside extremely violent organisations such as Al Shabaab terror group by the UK government.

Under UK laws, anyone who is found to be connected with HT can face up to 14 years in prison.

For years, HT members have taken out rallies and distributed pamphlets at colleges in the hope of convincing people to back its idea of creating a Caliphate that unites Muslim countries from Morocco to Bangladesh.

The group, which was formed in 1953 in Jordan, is already banned in several Muslim-majority states, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.

In the UK, the group enjoyed relative freedom in carrying out its activities, which mostly centred around raising its voice for the persecuted Muslims in Bosnia, Palestine, and elsewhere.

An outright ban will push its members to go underground and maybe join more extremist organisations, says Willson.

“Various studies, and even kind of government-led studies into HT, have just sort of confirmed that really, they're just a talking shop. They're not connected to violence, they're not interested in violence.”

Pushing HT members out of the mainstream will be counterproductive for the UK authorities as it will make it difficult for them to monitor their activities, he says.

The decision also raises the question of the UK government’s real intentions.

Sunak’s Conservative Party has faced multiple setbacks in recent years. From its handling of the migrant crisis to the disastrous economic decisions of former PM Liz Truss, the party has alienated voters, as indicated by recent polls.

“The right-wing government is pushing itself further right as a way of trying to stay relevant,” says Willson.

And it’s doing that by focusing more on security, migration and terrorism, he adds.

“It has to be understood within a context of quite a desperate government trying to get an easy win against a kind of fringe group that's more connected to minorities and migration.”

A victim of Daesh

In the UK and other Western countries, HT has mostly stuck to distributing its political literature. But in Muslim-majority countries, governments have accused the group of trying to instigate rebellion and mutiny in their militaries.

The group doesn’t believe in democratic governments and has vowed to replace secular or quasi-Islamic governments in Muslim countries, which, they believe, are run by "Western puppets".

HT's ideas have been shaped by the doctrines of the late Sheikh Taqiuddin al Nabhani, its founder born in 1909 in the Haifa district of Palestine, where the Israeli occupation deeply affected him in later years.

After remaining on the fringes, HT started to make its presence felt in the mid-1990s across Muslim-majority Central Asian states. At the same time, it emerged in Indonesia and Pakistan.

The Uzbekistan government launched a crackdown against the group, accusing it of the 2004 bombings at the US and Israeli embassies in Tashkent.

But experts who study Muslim movements, such as Dr Emmanuel Karagiannis, don’t believe HT could have carried out the attacks.

“It appears that there is no evidence connecting the group with terrorist attacks in Central Asia, and this is why it was not placed by the US government on the list of terrorist organisations in the wake of the September 11 attacks,” wrote Dr Karagiannis in a 2006 paper.

While Hizb avoided a ban in the UK for many years, it wasn’t lucky in other European countries. Germany outlawed the group in 2003 after accusing it of spreading anti-Semitic propaganda.

That same year, the Russian Supreme Court banned Hizb, declaring it a terrorist organisation. Around a dozen countries, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have also proscribed it.

In the UK, the group gained a wide following among the children of Muslim immigrants in the early 2000s on the back of its anti-colonial and anti-capitalism messaging.

But HT’s appeal faded because of internal splits and the emergence of other Muslim-led organisations that gave the children of immigrants a vocal platform, says Willson.

With the rise of Daesh, which proclaimed to impose its own version of Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, HT faced problems in clearing its name.

For a non-Muslim, it can be difficult to differentiate between the black flags of HT and Daesh that look alike.

“A lot of HT members told me that ‘you know, 10-15 years ago, we’d go with this idea to people, and they’d go, that’s great, what an interesting idea,” says Willson.

“Now we present it, and it gets associated with Daesh. So instead of spending an hour talking about the Caliphate as we want to, we spend 50 minutes explaining why we don’t want that (Daesh’) kind of caliphate, and we don’t believe in violence and what Islamic State is doing’.”

For most parts, it has proven to be a hard stain to wash off.