Introduction:

The Hizb ut-tahrir on the Clash of Civilizations

The Hizb ut-tahrir (Party of Liberation) is a one of the more articulate exponents of militant anti-Western ideology. The party's manifestos, including its essay "The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilizations" offer a particularly conflict-orient interpretation of the Qur'an. The essay takes passages involving war and makes them the foundation passages for the Qur'an--in a way similar to the way Christian and Jewish militant groups cite Biblical passages on conflict and use them to frame the contemporary world into clashing forces. By quoting these few verses from the Qur'an outside of their textual and historical context and then applying them directly to the present day situation, the essay builts an argument in in favour of aggressive jihad. The term "jihadist" can be applied to this particular interpretation kind of interpretation. The jihadist interpretation focuses upon the military meaning of the word "jihad" (literally "struggle") rather than the other meanings of jihad in the Qur'an (struggle for personal reform, struggle to create a religiously just society). Jihadism views such military struggle as inevitable and ending only with the complete victory of one party in the conflict over its enemies. It views participation in this struggle an an obligation on all believers.

It is just as hard to estimate the number of Muslims who are jihadists in this sense as it is impossible to estimate the percentage of American Christians and Jews who believe that Armageddon or global war war is inevitable, that it may happen in our lifetime, that it will involve Jews and Christians fighting Islam, and that it is the U.S. obligation to lead the fight on behalf of what they call “Judeo-Christian” civilization, and that any peace agreement that does not give all of the Biblical Israel to the contemporary nation state of Israel is a violation of God’s command. (By some accounts, there are more than 40 million American Christians who believe in a version of the above scenario and for whom such an apocalyptic war will be a good thing, because until it occurs Jesus cannot return).

Four key points about such ideologies:

1) the numbers of people who believe in them can expand or contract dramatically depending upon historical circumstances;

2) it is possible for a person to have a split mind, believing in militancy with one part of the self and not believing it with another part of the self (people really are complex);

3) the more people believe in the inevitability of conflict, the more likely that that belief will help make conflict inevitable, and

4) The more conflict is sustained, the more people become convinced it is inevitable (or even divinely commanded).

Points 3 and 4 make the dangerous circle: the more believe in the inevitability of conflict the more conflict is generated, the more conflict is generated, the more belief their is that the conflict was inevitable. Thus the theory of "class of civilizations" or "age old hatreds" (the version of clash-theory that was used to justify "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans) is not only an idea that can be right or wrong, it is also an actor in the world, an influence, a force.

It is also important to point out the Christian believers in civilizational clash (such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson), secularist Western believers in civilizational clash (such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington), and Jihadist believers in civilizational clash (such as the Hizb u tahrir, the Taliban, and the recently deceased Saudi leader Shaykh Ahmed Bin Baz) influence one another continually, adopt one another's language, and help affirm one another in a variety of ways. Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Corporation television programs reach tens of millions, stated that the truest form of Islam was that practiced by the Taliban, a statement that the Taliban would have heartily endorsed.

The Hizb ut-tahrir's view of aggressive jihad is shared by other militant Islamist groups. The Taliban left little written justification for their acts, but had they composed such a justification, it might well have resembled the Hizb ut-tahrir's literature. Both groups come out of the tradition of modern anti-Western Salafism. That tradition is based upon a selective reading of the polemics of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a figure whose writings had relatively little acceptance before the colonial period, but were retrieved and made central to anti-colonial writers.

The Ibn Taymiyya-based ideology shared by the Taliban and the Hizb u tahrir is known as Salafism, after the Arabic word salaf, which refers to the "select" generation of the time of Muhammad, the generation of Muslims who are said to have had the pure Islam. Radical Salafi writers claim to see directly into the origins of Islam at the time of Muhammad and, having in their view a infallible view of what the generation of Muhammad thought and did, are able and indeed required to implement that model in today's world. This act of implementation is in their view the essential duty of all Muslims and anyone who calls himself a Muslim who does not participate in this implementation is in their view a false Muslim, if not an apostate.

Salafi groups sprang up throughout the areas colonialist by European powers, particularly after the British sack of Delhi in 1857 and the abolition of the Mughal dynasty in India. The Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt (founded by Hassan al-Banna in the early twentieth century) was particularly influential in popularization of Salafi ideas.

Saudi Salafism, also known as Wahhabism (after its founder Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab) propagated a strongly anti-Western version of Salafism and with its control over the Islamic institution of the Hajj, the holy cites in Mecca and Medina, and much of the world's oil supply, and the vast wealth that oil supply brought, Saudi Arabia was able to finance a world wide propagation of militant Salafism throughout much of the world.

The U.S. supported radical Salafi movements in Afghanistan and throughout the world as a weapon against the Soviet Union and the long, Afghan jihad radicalist these movements and created an international cadre of veteran fighters who had been tested in war and encouraged by what they saw as their defeat of one of the two superpowers; if they could defeat one superpower, they could, they believed, defeat the other.

The Hizb u tahrir documents not only offer an example of how militant Salafi groups select the conflict passages of the Qur'an, puts them foremost, and draw forth from them a creed,. But it also shows how they combine this Jihadist creed with a contemporary critique of post Cold-War globalized capitalism. Pages 41-50 of the "Inevitability of the Clash of Civilizations" offer a particularly clear example of this combination of the Jihadist trend in Salafi ideology and it economic and civilizational critique.

A similar combination can be found in the Hizb u tahrir's document "Dangerous Concepts to Attack Islam and Consolidate Western Culture."

The Hizb ut-tahrir, unlike al-Qaeda, does not openly advocate attacking Western populations or targets, but at the very least it advocates a version of Cold War between Islam and the West. In this sense, it might be interesting to compare this article to Samuel P. Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations," where Huntington argues that the U.S. should built up its defense against Islam (which Huntington sees as inherently hostile), try to use Muslims powers against one another, and build up its ideological and propaganda apparatus for use against Islam.

Clash of Civilizations advocates view civilizations as unchanging and as monolithic. Thus there is an unchanging "Islam" and an unchanging "West" that are self-contained units that have always been in conflict with one another. Such theory has to deny the common sources and contacts of what is now called The West or Islam, as well as way the continuing history of interaction, cooperation, and conflict shapes and changes attitudes over time. It needs to deny or ignore the way “the West” emerged from a Jewish, Christian, and Islamic world (indeed, two of Christianity's greatest theological influences were the Muslim writers Avicenna and Averroes, just as Arab poetry was integral to the development of the love poetry traditions of Europe and Arab science (created by Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Islamically ruled regions) to the scientific revolutions that occurred in Christian-ruled Europe. This denial can occur by simply ignoring this legacy of interpermeation and mixture, by denying that it was significant (as when the Arab role in Europe is reduced to a kind of mindless transmission of Greek text, without any other contribution, to Latin Christianity), or by actively attempting to purge the traditions of what are viewed as impure accretions from outside (as was done by "ethnic cleansers" in Bosnia attempted to purge Europe of all traces of what they viewed as defiling and alien Islamic elements or by militants Islamic groups seeking to purge Islam of alleged corruptions from Judaism, Christianity, and other traditions).

The latter, purge form of denial, is particularly violent: since the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic roots of cultures in Europe and the middle East is so deep, the amount of purging necessary to purify a region is virtually unlimited: as anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, anti-Muslim genocide in Bosnia, and anti-Christian genocide in the Sudan has shown, the groups conducting the purge can never be satisfied; there is always another population to purge (thus the Inquisition process for seeking out hidden Jews or Muslims who claimed to be Christians, obtaining confessions by torture, and then executing the confessed crypto-Jew or crypto-Muslim). Ultimately, the ethnic or religious cleanser can never stop the cleanser process because on some level, he bears the traces of these allegedly alien groups within himself; his hatred for the other can never stop because it also a part of himself. ms

The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilizations (for the centerpiece of the civilizational argument see pp. 41-50)

Dangerous Concepts to Attack Islam and Consolidate Western Culture

Homepage of the Party of Liberation.