On Jan. 19, the British government banned Hizb ut-Tahrir by labeling it as a terrorist organization, making it a crime to belong to or support the activist group in the United Kingdom. The Liberation Party, as it is known in English, was founded in East Jerusalem in 1952 by Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, an Islamic scholar dedicated to opposing the newly formed state of Israel and uniting the postcolonial Muslim world under the banner of a global khilafah, or Islamic state.
In the following decades, Hizb ut-Tahrir grew into a global movement with a presence in at least 45 countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, the United States, and the United Kingdom. With this ban, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) becomes the 80th proscribed organization in Britain, joining the likes of al Qaeda, Hamas, and HT’s notorious British spinoff, al-Muhajiroun (ALM).
The United Kingdom is not the only Western democracy grappling with subversive ideologies. Democracies have long struggled with how to protect their institutions from anti-democratic forces without weakening the very institutions that they seek to protect by eroding core political rights, including the freedoms of speech, assembly, and association. Today, the United States, Canada, Australia, and numerous European democracies confront a range of ideological threats, from radical Islamist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir that reject democracy to anti-government patriot groups such as the U.S.-based Oath Keepers that engage in sedition.
The ban of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has practiced radical but peaceful activism in Britain since the 1980s, is as shortsighted as it is counterproductive. Not only is proscription unlikely to stop its members from pursuing their activism, it will also make the group harder for British authorities to monitor—and for British Muslims to challenge. The ban also weakens British democracy.
Rather than outlawing these Islamist and far-right groups, Great Britain and other democratic states should monitor them to ensure that they do not engage in political violence while empowering citizens to challenge their radical ideologies.
I first met HT activists in 2007 with the help of a counterterrorism officer from the London Metropolitan Police. I was conducting research on Islamic extremism in the United Kingdom, and the Special Branch officer brought me as his guest to an all-day conference in North London hosted by HT Britain. I spent the day interviewing conference attendees and listening to speakers and, in the weeks after, interviewing HT activists. As a student of violent extremism, I eventually decided that it was not the best use of my time to hang out with intellectuals like these. I needed to speak with people who had closer ties to political violence.
Then I met Anjem Choudary, the local leader of al-Muhajiroun. Like other ALM activists Choudary went beyond talk to engage in direct action on London streets via da’wah stalls—calling people to their interpretation of Islam—and political protests. Choudary was the longtime confidant of Omar Bakri Mohammed, the former leader of HT Britain. When Bakri later left Britain in the wake of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, Choudary assumed day-to-day leadership of ALM at a time when British politicians were threatening to ban both groups.
The years that I spent interviewing and hanging out with activists and former activists from HT and ALM gave me insights into the similarities and differences between them. These factors help explain why the British government’s banning of Hizb ut-Tahrir is wrong. They also provide lessons for other Western democracies struggling to contain extremist ideologies.
Bakri and Choudary created al-Muhajiroun when HT’s global leaders grew tired of Bakri’s increasingly provocative activism, which included calling for violence against British Prime Minister John Major during the Gulf War. Given this institutional history, it’s no surprise that the two groups shared ideological and operational similarities.
Both groups rejected so-called man-made systems of law and governance, such as liberal democracy, in favor of God’s “sovereignty” and their politicized interpretation of Islamic law. Both groups aspired to return Islam to its golden era by (re)creating the caliphate through “offensive jihad,” where the caliph leads his army to reconquer recalcitrant lands. Both groups denounced Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere as unbelievers, or kuffar, and called for a military coup in the nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority country of Pakistan to kick-start the caliphate.
There were also important differences between the two groups. These help explain why the British government’s ban of ALM in 2010 is justified, while its ban of HT Britain is not. Despite threats from former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2005 and 2010, the government never did because lawyers from the Home Office were not convinced that the group glorified terrorism, let alone engaged in it. This speaks to the importance of distinguishing groups that have meaningful connections to political violence, such as ALM, from those such as HT, which do not.
In the four decades that HT has been active in Britain, the group has had zero connections to political violence. No HT activist in the country has been convicted of crossing the line from legally protected speech to glorifying terrorism, nor have any members been implicated in terrorist attacks within or outside the United Kingdom.
In contrast, a number of former ALM activists and supporters have participated in terrorist attacks. These include a suicide bombing on behalf of Hamas in Tel Aviv that killed four and injured dozens in 2003, the gruesome murder and near-beheading of an off-duty British soldier in Woolwich in 2013, and a motor vehicle and stabbing attack at London Bridge and Borough Market that killed eight and wounded fifty in 2017. Given the group’s extraordinary connections to political violence within and outside the United Kingdom, few observers claimed that its proscription was wrong or unjust—and the ban was met with virtual silence and even support from British Muslims.
The government’s decision to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir has been met with stiffer resistance, both from HT’s British activists, who have vowed to fight the ban in court, and from independent activists and imams, who denounced the move as an attack on free speech and association and a significant weakening of the threshold for proscription. The ban, they contend, is meant to silence critics of Britain’s support for the Israeli government in its war against Hamas in Gaza.
The Home Office counters that Hizb ut-Tahrir championed Hamas, itself categorized as a banned terrorist organization in Britain, following Hamas’s attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilian noncombatants. In announcing the ban, Home Secretary James Cleverly insisted that “[l]egitimate free speech includes neither the promotion of terrorism nor celebrating terrorist acts.”
The ban has had its limits. These same activists continue their pro-Palestinian activism, and they still support the caliphate as the solution to Britain’s problems. Back in 2007, when I asked a member of HT Britain’s executive committee what would happen if they were banned by the British government, he doubted whether it would have much of an impact.
“We are a party that deals in thoughts and ideas,” he said. “You can’t stop the flow of ideas by banning the party.” When Germany banned Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2003, local activists responded by decentralizing their operations, forming new spinoffs, and adapting their rhetoric to focus more on current events than the caliphate. HT Britain is likely to do the same.
The British government is about to find out what their German colleagues learned 20 years ago: Banning the group doesn’t stop its activism. HT’s activism in Britain has been as noxious and nonviolent as HT Germany’s. Former activists and supporters from HT Britain have not left the country to fight on behalf of the Islamic State, nor have they engaged in terrorist attacks within or outside the United Kingdom. HT Britain’s activism has been provocative, sometimes deliberately so, but it has always fallen under the banner of legally protected speech—until now.
The change in Hizb ut Tahrir’s legal status in Britain has less to do with any changes that local activists have made to their work or their support for violence, and more to do with the tense political climate that British politicians find themselves in over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
As a liberal democratic state, Britain can deal with the subversive threat from Hizb ut-Tahrir without sacrificing the country’s political values and institutions. Instead of following the example of authoritarian states—such as China, Russia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—that have banned Hizb ut-Tahrir, the British government should look to other liberal democracies that have not, including Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Britain also has its own grand tradition of protecting political dissent that it can draw on in dealing with Hizb ut-Tahrir. At the height of a global ideological struggle between two superpowers during the Cold War, the British government never found it necessary to ban the Socialist Workers Party or the Communist Party of Great Britain. Instead, it allowed these and other nonviolent dissident groups the political space to express their views peacefully and lawfully, however extreme or anti-democratic their views were.
When such groups are allowed to participate in the marketplace of ideas, they can be challenged by the many who disagree with them. Over the years, sundry Muslim and non-Muslim groups in Great Britain have disagreed with Hizb ut-Tahrir. Even before the Islamic State’s disastrous experiment in governance, HT was declining in Britain and had been for years, much like al-Muhajiroun. Outlawing HT runs the risk of increasing its popularity among the young people who are most vulnerable to its message. In their view, proscription confirms that the group must be on the “right path,” because the hypocrites and non-Muslims hate it. ALM has been playing this card for years.
As one former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist who was actively working to counter HT explained to me years ago, banning HT Britain “would make my job a lot more difficult.” It would also make Scotland Yard’s job a lot more difficult. Extremist groups that operate in the open are easier for law enforcers to observe and influence.
This lesson is worth repeating as other liberal democratic countries, including the United States, continue their own ideological struggles against an array of extremists, Islamist and otherwise. For the U.K. government, the red line of proscription should be drawn at violence. Extremists who engage in or actively support political violence should be banned, even at the risk of driving them underground, potentially making them harder to monitor and more glamorous to young people.
But extremists such as HT who advocate peacefully against British or larger Western values should not be banned. In seeking to protect liberal democracies from anti-democratic forces, political leaders must avoid weakening the democratic institutions that they claim to protect. In banning Hizb ut-Tahrir, British parliamentarians have done just that.