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.
Even Hizb ut-Tahrir's rise can be attributed in some measure to non-Islamic factors. The Ferghana Valley, where the Hizb is most present and which Karasuu is part of, is a vast, fertile area covering parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The Ferghana Valley has always been the most restive part of Central Asia. Today, it is poor, unemployment is high, and the people, most of whom are Uzbek, hate President Karimov, who is the target of much of the Hizb's literature.
A leaflet distributed in May, one week after the massacre in Andijon, Uzbekistan, that left hundreds of demonstrators dead, was titled: "This is how the butcher of Andijon committed his crime." People are also fed up with the difficulties of crossing borders in the Ferghana Valley, a region that was borderless until 15 years ago, when the Soviet Union crumbled. Folks who are otherwise not attracted to the Hizb's ideas sympathize with its plan to form a borderless state. The man in denim offered this explanation of why he joined the Hizb: "Socialism was godless and capitalism is a lie." By default, Hizb ut-Tahrir is the last ideology standing.
While official pronouncements in Central Asia paint the Hizb as the root of all evil, many people in the street disagree. When I asked a 22-year-old university student in Bishkek about the threat Hizb ut-Tahrir poses, she stared back at me incredulously and wanted to know if I was kidding. She, like several other democracy and civil society activists I met, even supports the idea of inviting the Hizb to participate in elections. Mahmudjon Dodoboev, who belongs to a monthly forum of Tajik policymakers that is part of an internationally sponsored Dialogue Project, said, "We must not be afraid. They are not armed. They are not trying to fight. They are only extremists in ideology."
But that ideology is spreading "like the roots of a tree--or like cancer," said the chief coordinator of the Dialogue Project one afternoon in Dushanbe. A consequence is that Hizb ut-Tahrir has become the most organized opposition movement, albeit one totally uninterested in running for office, to the despotic regimes in Central Asia. And their platform? In September, Imran Waheed, the London-based spokesman for the party, laid out the party's vision of an Islamic state. He dismissed Iran and Saudi Arabia as viable models. "Only lip service is paid to Islamic law" there, he said.
Hizb ut-Tahrir will continue to befuddle policymakers. Its secretive and diffuse nature makes it difficult to observe--and even more difficult to understand. That being said, Kumar Bekbolotov, a journalist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, cautioned against taking the Hizb too lightly. Is Hizb ut-Tahrir a real threat? "They should be," he said. "Just listen to their message."
Nicholas Schmidle is a freelance journalist and associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.