Islamic group banned by Britain wins over middle-class Pakistan(Hizb ut-Tahrir)

Islamic group banned by Britain wins over middle-class Pakistan

Wed Aug 24,12:42 AM ET

KARACHI (AFP) - As the Islamic radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir fumes over the British government's intention to ban it following July 7 bombings in London, it can take some comfort from its offshoot in Pakistan.

Islamabad also outlawed the group in 2003, but here it is attracting a new breed of students and professionals, who are more likely to wear sharp Western suits than the baggy Islamic clothes preferred by other fundamenalists.

"I do my normal job and than take out some time for Tahrir, as I believe they are doing a good job to change the system," says Habibullah Saleem, the manager of a free eyecare centre in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.

Like the group's followers in Britain and elsewhere, members in Pakistan have conservative views, but they say they abhor violence and only want an "intellectual revolution" in the Muslim world.

Other followers here include a civil engineer working in a multinational company, an assistant professor in a medical and dental college, and "thousands" of students, the group says.

Founded in the Middle East in the 1950s and then consolidated in central Asia, Hizb ut-Tahrir -- the Party of Islamic Liberation -- is a Sunni movement that says it wants to create a pan-Islamic state through non-violent means.

Countries around the world have since seemed unsure how to handle it.

It remains legal in most western nations, although Russia classified it as a "terrorist" organisation in February 2003 and Germany imposed a ban due to the group's alleged anti-semitism.

Uzbekistan says a military crackdown in May that claimed hundreds of lives was in response to a Hizb ut-Tahrir plot to seize power. However, many analysts and rights groups say they saw no direct link between it and the violence.

And when British premier Tony Blair said this month that he was banning the group, it was greeted with anger even by some mainstream Muslims because it was paired with Al Muhajiroun -- a hardline British-based group that cheered the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. The attacks, for which Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, killed about 3,000 people.

In Pakistan, the group has a powerful opponent in military ruler President Pervez Musharraf, who banned it in November 2003 as part of a general crackdown against Islamic extremism.

He singled it out in a speech following the London bombings, accusing it of "passing an edict against my life" and saying that London was allowing it to operate with impunity.

The London bombings killed 56 people including the four men who attacked three subway trains and a bus.

But the year and a half since Pakistan's ban have seen an increase in the group's membership in colleges and universities, it says, inspired partly by increased anti-Americanism over the war in Iraq.

"It's an international intellectual and political movement, something more dangerous for the West than any militant group," Hizb ut-Tahrir's spokesman in Pakistan, Naveed Butt, told AFP.

Hizb does not depend on Pakistan's Islamic seminaries, known as madrassas, for its recruits.

During Pakistan's post-July 7 crackdown -- which Britain's High Commissioner to Islamabad last week insisted was already planned before the bombings -- Musharraf ordered about 1,400 foreign madrassa students to leave Pakistan.

Pakistan has also arrested more than 800 Islamic extremists and banned their publications since the London attacks.

"You don't find our workers in madrassas. Not because we are against it but because we worked in a different manner and believe in non-violence," Butt said.

Political analyst Tauseef Ahmed said it was a positive sign that Hizb ut-Tehrir was not apparently producing violent militants or suicide bombers, and said they could influence other Islamist organisations.

"They are certainly different from other extremist groups, as they don't draw their strength from madrassas," Ahmed, professor of mass communication at Karachi's Urdu University, told AFP.

"And the significant part is that educated youth are attracted by their approach."

In the last couple of months dozens of Hizb ut-Tahrir members have been arrested from different parts of the country, mainly for distributing their pamphlets or literature, but most of them have been released by the courts.

The group's adherents say they are immune to whatever action the authorities take.

"Our weapon is our thoughts," member Saleem said.