Weekly Worker 573 Thursday April 21 2005

Islamic extremists attack Galloway

There is no undifferentiated ‘muslim community’, writes Ian Mahoney

George Galloway was forced to take refuge while campaigning on the Osier estate in Bethnal Green on April 19 when a group of 30-plus islamic militants - supporters of Hizb-ut-Tahrir - trapped him and his canvassing team. Police were called after a fight broke out and - ideological considerations apart, of course - comrade Galloway admits he was grateful for their intervention: “The police saved my life,” he told the Evening Standard (April 20).

He went on: “I was meeting people who live in the flats. Hizb-ut-Tahrir suddenly filled the room and blocked the door. I tried speaking calmly. They then said I was parading as a false prophet and served a sentence of death on me. They were claiming I was representing myself as a false deity and for this apostasy I would be sentence to the gallows.”

Anti-war muslims: homogeneous bloc?

The east London incident followed on from a provocation by a small group of men at a general election meeting of the Muslim Council of Britain. Although the individuals involved in this earlier clash were not Hizb members, they share a common grievance - opposition to involvement by muslims in the electoral process itself.

Hizb membership is probably quite small, but it can attract relatively large numbers to events. On its website the organisation asserts that its central aim is to re-establish “islamic guidance for mankind and lead the ummah (the muslim community) into a struggle with the kufr (the non-believing world), its systems and its thoughts, so that islam encapsulates the world” (www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org). The method of achieving this is “firstly changing the society’s existing thoughts to islamic thoughts, so that such thoughts become the public opinion among the people, who are then driven to implement and act upon them”.

Central to this project is about the creationion of a theocratic state, headed by a “khaleefah [who will be obeyed] on condition that he rules according to the book of allah (swt) and the sunnah of the messenger of allah (saw) and on condition that he conveys islam as a message to the world through da’wah and jihad”.

For this group, therefore, casting votes - as an expression of a form of democracy - is by definition “unislamic”. Thus Galloway is right to believe that he is being targeted because he is “offering a democratic solution to muslims”, as the Standard said, paraphrasing his words.
Naturally the attack on, and threats made to, Galloway should be unconditionally condemned by the workers’ movement. Hizb is a deeply reactionary sect. Of course, it has about as much chance of achieving its cherished aim of a universal caliphate as George Galloway has of being elected to the national committee of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. But this should not blind us to the harm it can do.

Some of the men who cornered comrade Galloway were tooled up with chains and knives. This attack was part of wider campaign of intimidation that Hizb has been conducting in the constituency. Muslim voters who have shown support for Respect, or even taken leaflets from stalls, have been targeted. Posters have been pulled down and canvassers abused.

Asad Rehman - political advisor to George Galloway - told the Weekly Worker that this campaign “is having some effect”. Clearly, even the minuscule influence Hizb has should be fought and rooted out.
But is there the political will to do this? Leaders of the SWP have drummed it into their members that the “muslim community” must be approached as some sort of homogeneous bloc. Communist Party members have been told that we are chauvinists, or even “racists”, for insisting that the class and political differences in this community should be openly debated. Leading activists in the campaign suggest that Respect is deliberately playing down the violent incident, as publicity would act to further divide the muslim community in the constituency. There are suspicions that the Evening Standard has actually given such publicity to it precisely in order to sow these sort of divisions, helping to undermine George’s campaign.

Clearly, pressures are building within this section of the population, the overwhelming majority of whom are working class. The mass involvement of muslims in the huge anti-war demos of 2003 - and the subsequent development of Respect - has brought many of these people into contact with the revolutionary left for the first time. The protests of Hizb and others against the involvement of muslims is a reaction to the possibility of a progressive assimilationist process occurring in Britain. This is precisely what the CPGB has advocated and precisely what the SWP - and the organisations it influences - has buckled before. As we go to press, there has been no mention of the attack on comrade Galloway on either the Respect website or that of the SWP itself.

The fact Hizb-ut-Tahrir fears our assimilationist project like sin was confirmed when it issued in 2003 a leaflet titled ‘Marching on February 15 is haram [ie, incompatible with islamic law - MF] and the height of political naivety’ (February 11 2003). This attempted to draw a line between muslims and the broader anti-war movement. It argued in favour of a sectarian, separatist (and thus useless) ‘pure’ islamist anti-war movement.

Quoting contemporary issues of the Weekly Worker, it cited discussion on the significance of mass muslim involvement in the anti-war movement between comrades Martyn Hudson, Marcus Ström and Ian Donovan (all CPGB members at the time). From the point of view of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, communists have only “sinister motives” in seeking to draw muslims into the wider anti-war movement.

Comrade Donovan was quoted thus: “It may well be that a progressive movement will emerge from the contact and dialogue of the muslim brothers and sisters that are coming into contact with socialist and revolutionary literature and ideas. There is no guarantee of this, of course, but I believe it is a realistic possibility and something positive to hope and struggle for” (Weekly Worker November 28 2002).
Hizb-ut-Tahrir was clearly alarmed at the idea that muslims would be contaminated by contact with communists. It recoiled in horror at comrade Ström’s “sinister” suggestion that on the September 28 2002 demonstration “thousands of muslims ... were exposed to the ideas of mass democracy, secularism and socialism” (Weekly Worker October 2 2002).

Hizb comments: “The inability to reach a consensus on muslim involvement in the February 15 march is not surprising, given that it is difficult to reconcile the view of the communists that islam is the ‘opium of the masses’ with the view of muslims that islam represents the only ideological alternative to the decadent ideology of capitalism and the defunct ideology of communism.”

The political accommodation of the SWP to reactionary islamic trends has partially undermined the opportunities that Weekly Worker writers were pointing to in 2002-03. But the violent rearguard action of the Hizb reactionaries underlines that the progressive potential of the mass anti-war movement still exists - if the left only had the politics to take full advantage of it.
Ian Mahoney