Karasuu, Kyrgyzstan
One Friday this fall, I went to a mosque in Karasuu, Kyrgyzstan, to hear a fiery Uzbek imam preach. The imam regularly draws a crowd of several thousand worshippers, and many of them, I was told, belong to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist Islamic group bent on reestablishing the caliphate in Central Asia, and eventually around the world. The group exists in more than 160 countries. It is particularly active around Karasuu. So for several hours, I crouched beside a busy dirt road, drinking chuli, a syrupy juice made from apricots, and chatting with parishioners about Hizb ut-Tahrir as they filed in and out of the mosque.
It's likely that, for most Americans, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation) is an unfamiliar name. It hasn't bombed any schools or sawed off anyone's head. That's not its style. In more than 50 years of existence, the party has never committed an act of terrorism. In fact, unlike al Qaeda or Hamas or various other jihadist groups, the Hizb uses only nonviolent tactics to pursue its goal of eventually overthrowing the non-Islamic governments around the world and uniting Muslims under one ruler, the caliph. And though it shares many ideas with al Qaeda, the Hizb is keen on keeping its distance. It's tough business, after all, raising the call for jihad without raising the sword.
But is Hizb ut-Tahrir any less dangerous than those groups that have become household names in the United States? Two of the party's founding members went on to become leaders
of the militant Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If violent jihad has a gateway drug, Hizb ut-Tahrir might be it.
Among the people I stopped that day in Karasuu were two thin, middle-aged men, one wearing a denim jacket. Neither openly admitted belonging to Hizb ut-Tahrir, but there were telltale signs in their speech. The tone of their voice vibrated with zealotry as they drilled me on my own religious beliefs, proselytized, and then berated America for its policies in the Muslim world. At one point, the man in the denim added with frankness and disgust, "[Uzbek president Islam] Karimov is a Jew. The butcher will fall." The biggest giveaway, however, was a unique phrase--"the universe, man, and life"--that they kept saying. When I asked an Uzbek friend later that day about the phrase, he grinned: "The universe, man, and life," he said, are repeated over and over in Hizb ut-Tahrir's resaleh--a collection of religious decrees.
MOST PARTS OF CENTRAL ASIA feel more like a forgotten part of the Soviet Union than a part of the Islamic world. Signs are all written in Cyrillic and statues of Lenin still tower over public squares. During Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast by day, I nearly had to fight for a seat in a café at lunchtime. Hizb ut-Tahrir represents only a small minority of an otherwise tolerant Muslim populace. Radical Islam in Central Asia just doesn't pose the same kind of threat it does in, say, Pakistan or the Middle East.
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