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| The Road From Tashkent to the Taliban |
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Response to the Road From Tashkent to the Taliban
The following letter was delivered to Ms Baran, Dimitri Simes (Centre President) and Geoffrey Kemp (Director of Regional Strategic Programs) at the Nixon Centre. It is a response to an article written by Ms Baran titled "The Road from Tashkent to the Taliban" which accuses Hizb ut-Tahrir of being a 'conveyor belt for terrorists'.
Dear Ms Baran,
I read your recent article, "The road from Tashkent to the Taliban," with interest because it presented conclusions from a conference about Hizb ut Tahrir, the Islamic political party of which I am a member, and was published by the Nixon Center from which perceptive analysis might be expected. Furthermore, your visit to London a few months ago, where we met and discussed at some length, was an opportunity to assist you in arriving at informed opinions regarding Hizb ut Tahrir and the plight of thousands of our members in Uzbek torture camps.
I was soon disappointed, however, by the article's conflations, and its opening conjectures, which effortlessly transformed, as the paragraphs slipped by, into accepted facts. Along the way surprising charges were made against us; hatred, racism and anti-Semitism. I suggest that future conferences about us would be better served by having someone from Hizb ut-Tahrir present. I for one would be happy to oblige. Meanwhile, as Tom Paine once wrote, "It is often better, to pass some things over" and so, in deference to his wisdom, I will limit my response to the central argument of your article - that Hizb ut-Tahrir is a conveyor belt for terrorists.
First though, I must tell you that in one important respect I envy you your rare privilege. You are the director for international-security and energy programs within a centre that offers in depth thought and analysis, to a nation not only with the power to act, but more importantly with the moral conviction that its form of government, freely chosen, was built upon a set of declared thoughts; framed by Thomas Jefferson and approved by congress on the 4th July 1776. One year later John Jay expressed his sense of the blessing of a government based upon the choice of intellect; "The Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing, the forms of government under which they shall live." Despite being labeled a terrorist, your first President fought, Jefferson's eloquent preamble etched into his heart, to liberate Americans from the arbitrariness of despotic British colonial rule. For the Declaration of Independence Americans can thank Tom Paine, one of Benjamin Franklin's 'value-added' recruits from Britain, who in January 1776 wrote a seditious pamphlet called Common Sense. The British viewed him as a traitor for the crime of calling for a declaration of independence, based, not upon the privileges of land or birth, but upon thoughts; "Can we but leave posterity with a settled form of government, an independent constitution of its own, the purchase at any price will be cheap." Had the conveyor belt been invented in that time it is conceivable that British international experts and law-enforcement agencies would have called his work a conveyor belt for producing terrorists. By calling Hizb ut-Tahrir a conveyor belt for producing terrorists, the Nixon Center showed its inability to appreciate a double irony.
Were the production of terrorists our goal, we would find it hard to compete with American foreign policy, which Muslims perceive in the same way that Americans perceive the brutal tactics of the English during the War of Independence. A picture, it is said, tells a thousand words; and Muslims have many pictures of US foreign policy in action, from many theatres, over many years. I tend to agree with a recent headline from Robert Fisk, "What better recruiting sergeant could Bin Laden have than the President of the United States."
While it is true that Hizb ut-Tahrir is opposed to American colonial interests and dares to espouse an alternative ideology, it would be trivial to content ourselves with stirring up anti-American feeling because there is no shortage of such feeling already in the world today. The effort that we put into changing peoples thinking is to convey them towards a stated objective. We hope that it will lead there inevitably as if by standing upon a conveyor belt, and certainly we are not relying upon chance. We desire to see the fruit of our hard work, and that is why Hizb ut-Tahrir's ideology and its method of work has been meticulously thought out and published in many detailed books; including one on the subject of thinking itself. We have published a draft constitution for the coming Khilafah State, and this along with many of our books is available in the English language. We too are working, in one sense, as your forefathers did, upon establishing governance based upon the ideas that we hold dear. We share the confidence of your own forbears and we share their words when we say; "we have it in our power to begin the world over again. We are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder. Beneath the shade of our own vines are we attacked; in our own houses, and on our own lands, is the violence committed against us." Tom Paine was referring to the suffering of Americans, but Muslims in Falluja, Baghdad, Najaf, Ramallah or Gaza city could be forgiven for thinking that he was writing about them. Muslims are victims of what they perceive to be State terror, and for resisting occupation, are themselves called terrorists. Even those who have chosen to address the root cause of Muslim weakness by working politically and intellectually to reestablish the Khilafah are assaulted with the charge of terrorism - and for doing less than Tom Paine's followers. They fought on the battlefield with muskets and flintlocks - Hizb ut-Tahrir on the other hand has sought only to fight thought with thought.
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