Johann Hari: Free speech must apply even to the odious

On Wednesday, David Cameron rose to his feet in the Commons - with the smoke from the failed car-bombs still stinging Britain's eyes - to demand the banning of a poisonous little Islamist group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. As the issue descended into partisan barracking, I immediately began to remember my own tussles with the comically-misnamed "Party of Liberation" over the past few years.

The middle-class professionals who make up Hizb ut-Tahrir's British branch pine for the creation of an Islamist empire imposing shariah law over the whole planet, where I would be killed - and so would most of the readers of this article. Are you a woman who shows her hair in public? Are you gay? Have you ever had an affair? Are you a Jew? Are you a Muslim who has had doubts about your faith? Then I'm afraid a strict interpretation of their draft constitution for the New Caliphate - which they want to build after taking power through the ballot box - would entail your execution.

I first encountered Hizb ut-Tahrir on the streets of East London, where I live. At the Brick Lane Festival - a glorious burst of Hindu and Sufi Muslim music and laughter - they handed out leaflets telling Muslims they should not be present because the event contained "alcohol, dancing and free-mixing of sexes". One Muslim girl snapped, "But those are all of my favourite things!"

Late last year, I was invited on to a discussion on the Islam Channel with a man called Sajad Khan, who is a prominent member of Hizb ut-Tahrir. He had a nasal East London accent and a bluff populist style, talking about the "persecution" of Muslims here in Britain and offering pensive warnings of "cameras in people's bedrooms and bathrooms".

He started by attacking "secular liberal fundamentalism" which he said wanted to "impose" on Muslims "an alien way of life". I replied that secular liberalism is precisely the opposite of fundamentalism and imposition. We want you to be free to choose your own way of life, as long as it doesn't harm anybody else. If you want to spend all day in a mosque worshipping a God we don't believe in, we'll fight to the death to defend your right to do it. If you want to spend all day at an orgy, we'll fight to the death to defend your right to do that too.

But while secular liberals will defend your right to live your way, Hizb ut-Tahrir will defend your right to live one way - their way. I started citing articles of their constitution to prove this point. Article Seven says any Muslim who changes their mind about their religion should be killed. Sajad slithered around the subject.

This is "a stereotype", he said. Really? It's a stereotype to read your own constitution? Then he spluttered: "There are another 106 articles of the constitution, why don't you read them?" Because this one involves murdering vast numbers of innocent people, for starters. In the end he had to resort to ludicrous straw men: "You say we live in a liberal utopia here ..."

Hizb ut-Tahrir are careful to present their arguments in polite, restrained language publicly. "This is how it should be - debate and discussion," Sajad said towards the end of the show. I had to reply that while I believe in debating and discussing with anyone, I'm afraid he doesn't: it would be quite hard for me to have a debate after I'd been beheaded in his ideal world. As for "imposing" things on Muslims, what could be more of an imposition than executing great numbers of them for making minor personal choices you disagree with?

I think this row, in its own tiny way, offers some signposts for the Cameron-sparked debate about whether Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned. Any organisation that plans imminent violence within Britain should of course be outlawed: al-Muhajaroun plainly fell into that category. The only legitimate restriction on free speech is where it involves a direct incitement to kill.

But if al-Muhajaroun are like the neo-Nazi bombers of Combat 18, Hizb ut-Tahrir are more like the British National Party - a group with deeply evil ambitions, but pursuing them through existing political structures. The best way to defeat them is not to abandon liberal values by banning them, thereby feeding their martyr complex, but by acting on liberal values by discrediting and destroying them in argument.

It's really not hard. How many Muslims living in a free society are likely to be tempted by a Taliban-style global state in which they will be hellishly oppressed at every turn? It is preposterous to believe that Hizb ut-Tahrir would ever win at the ballot box in Britain - so we can argue back and whittle down this deranged ideology over time.

In his fascinating book The Islamist, the young East-Ender Ed Hussain explains how he was drawn into Hizb ut-Tahrir - and why he left. The group offered him a transcendent cause where he could imagine he was the victim of "a great gay-Jewish conspiracy" and fighting for the rights of people in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He deliberately didn't find out about what Islamists were actually doing in those places.) He soon had no white friends, and no female friends.

He did not lose faith in Hizb because people showed "respect" for their ideas, or deferred to his "culture." He left because people challenged their agenda. When Hussain went to university, he heard people vehemently deconstructing the Hizb agenda for the first time. And he began to remember his life at a mixed primary school in Tower Hamlets, where white non-Muslim teachers had showed great kindness to him. "When I doubted my affinity with Britain, those memories came rushing back," he writes. The next generation of British Muslims will have fewer such memories, because they will have been increasingly ghettoised into "faith schools".

At the moment, Hizb ut-Tahrir is not being challenged with the verbal aggression it deserves. The reasons are complex: great wodges of Saudi money for British mosques makes these arguments for shariah seem more mainstream; decent liberal people are frightened of being called Islamophobic or receiving death threats; and the great liberal majority of Muslim women are too often intimidated into silence. If we want to undermine Hizb ut-Tahrir, we need to end each of these by lavishing cash on Muslim women's groups.

A true victory over Hizb ut-Tahrir will not come through banning them. It will come from ensuring that every one of their meetings is greeted by a picket of Muslim liberals and Muslim women - people like Ed Hussain - declaring loud and proud that when "they denounce Britain as a brothel and call for a Caliphate, they do it Not In My Name."

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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