Speakers present included Sajjad Khan on "Realising Political Unity", Dr. Mahmad Salim on "The Shariah and Unity", Sister Sultana Parvin on "Scientific and Educational Potential under the Khilafah State", Jamal Harwood on "Economic Development through Unity and Khilafah policy" and Imran Waheed on "Pakistan- an application of Unity and Khilafah policy". The relatively unknown, loss-making satellite television station, Islam Channel, was present to record proceedings.

As at all other Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami events, there was much talk about bringing back the Islamic Caliphate which finished in 1924. Much discussion about how neither democracy nor dictatorship worked and how Khilafah was the only workable solution compatible with Islam. No one version of Islam was mentioned and no mention of which caliphate to revive was ever referred to. The great successes of democracy and certain dictatorships swept aside as if human progress depended purely on algebra. Always the first law in misleading advertising is to avoid the concrete and plant the vague - the speakers as deceptive as Sweeny Todd in their spinning of illusions.

At face value and promulgated in the right tone, these myths - suggesting the West would be economically inferior to (even bankrupted by) a revived Caliphate if it lessened its grip on Muslim lands - seem as plausible to a Muslim as a non-Muslim. These are useful myths when delivered at opportune moments in drawn-out addresses by men and women who have had no training in public speaking, have never run a business let alone an economy, have never studied the productivity rates of secular and theocratic lands, and who always load their speeches with a preponderance of historical and theological reference in order to camouflage their lack of qualifications and complete lack of governmental experience. They conjure a mirage and those who feel insecure about their identities - likely called a "dirty Paki" at school by numbskulls or thoroughly embarrassed by the lack of any similarly ethnic representatives in Premiership football clubs - want desperately to believe that they are a stakeholder.

So what are the myths and the truths they disregard?

There are seven main myths which were mentioned at this Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami meeting and they are:

1. Around 70% of the World's Oil Reserves are owned by the Muslim World.

2. 55% of the World's Gas Reserves are owned by the Muslim World.

3.  57 or so nations of the entire world are Muslim.

4.  Islam is reported to be the world's fastest growing religion. Conversion rates are claimed to have increased significantly post 9/11. At present the number of Muslims around the globe is reportedly around 1.3 Billion. 1 out of 4 people in the world's population is Muslim.

5. The Western Economy is doomed and Capitalism has failed. The Financial World is looking to the Middle East for investments and developments as the new economic and financial headquarters, i.e., Dubai.

6. The Khilafa was an egalitarian success.

7. There is a Muslim Ummah. It is desperate for a return to the unity of the pre-1924 Caliphate.  

Debunking these myths is undemanding and it makes one speculate why even the thickest attendees at the meeting seemed to be taking the speakers' myths as read. Surely they can read (or know someone who can read) and have access to Google? Or is it that these people want to believe what is being said because, like Truthers and the brighter irhabi like Atta, the last thing they want to face up to is the veracity of their littleness and insignificance? The self-manufactured failure as free men of their own personal existence?

First let's deal with the statistical, "mine's bigger than your's" realities compared to Islamist myths:

Let's take oil reserves. All reserve estimates involve uncertainty, depending on the amount of reliable geologic and engineering data available and the interpretation of those data. The relative degree of uncertainty can be expressed by dividing reserves into two principle classifications - proved and unproved. Unproved reserves can further be divided into two subcategories - probable and possible to indicate the relative degree of uncertainty about their existence. The most commonly accepted definitions of these are based on those approved by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and the World Petroleum Council (WPC) in 1997. It is worth noting that such proved reserves are the only type the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allows oil companies to report to investors. To make matters more complicated, estimates in developed countries are generally much more accurate than those for undeveloped countries. For instance, reserves estimates in the United States are considered highly conservative, while those Russia are more speculative, and those in Iraq are highly uncertain due to the lack of exploration data. The Middle East - including all Muslim lands mentioned at the Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami meeting - has only between half and a third of the recoverable oil reserves in the world. 70% is a gross misinterpretation of the facts - a myth. Moreover, saying that the Muslim world "owns" its oil reserves is misleading - the companies that exploit oil resources and bring oil to the market are more often than not multi-nationals owned by shareholders who come from all over the planet and without their efforts the oil would likely stay where it was for lack of human capital, vital equipment and technologies and, most important of all, the social get-up-and-go required to extract oil (rarely if ever found in theocratic / Islamic can't-do states who traditionally import skilled labour).

Likewise, gas reserves are a subject of much speculation. Again, there are different gauges of how much gas exists on planet earth, as well as countries that are less exact in measurement and prediction than others. It is generally agreed that the Arctic houses about one third of all gas reserves but if you take them out of the equation as "undiscovered", then Russia has by far the largest gas reserves on the planet at 1,680 (trillion cu ft) out of a world total of 6,112 (trillion cu ft). Gas-producing "Muslim Countries" (Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Algeria, Iraq, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Kuwait) have among themselves a total of less than fifty percent of the world's gas and (including the Arctic reserves to which they hold no claim) they have a sum of under forty percent of the world total.

As for 57 "Muslim" countries - again the Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami statisticians are propounding myths. For there are only 52 countries on the planet with a Muslim majority population (that is out of 192 UN member states not including the Vatican or Kosovo). Out of those 52 Muslim-majority countries, only 23 have any form of Islamic government (few are theocratic states). The remainder are secularly governed and would never refer to themselves, or be referred to, as Muslim countries (e.g. Albania, Senegal, Sierra Leone). When Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami considers great swathes of catholic Spain as Muslim lands, you get the general picture - they are of the same deluded geographical mindset as the tragic fantasists Abu Izzadeen and Anjem Choudary. They also probably think that parts of London, Birmingham and Glasgow are "Muslim lands", though such areas are host to stag weekends, football clubs, lap dance establishments and run by local councils - all are technically owned, when they really think about it, by the chief kuffar, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.

The world Muslim population numbers about 1.3-1.5 billion people, roughly one-fifth of the world population. There is a big difference between 1 in four and 1 in five - ask any striker or salesman.  

Also the world's fastest growing religion is not Islam. If you are going by rate of change for belief in the supernatural, then Wicca seems to have the highest percentage game, self-relative - some 1600% growth between 1990 (8,000) and 2001 (134,000) in the US alone. Islam is growing slower than Christianity when you look at where Islam has to start from (with only 20.12% of the world's population classified as being Muslim while 33.03% of the world's population is classified as Christian), while Seventh Day Adventist Christians and Mormons are proselytizing at a far higher rate than Muslims. In 1997 the total number of world Christians was growing at about 2.3% annually, a figure roughly equal to the growth rate of the world's population. Islam was growing at 2.9%. This means Islam is increasing its share but, in terms of pure numbers of adherents, the Christian population is increasing faster than any other, simply because more Christians are being born. It isn't conversion but immigration and "high birthrates in Asia, the Middle East and Europe," that is cited as the reason for the growth of Islam and 9/11 does not seem to have had any effect on conversion rates globally - though, it's worth noting that such eminent people as Satanist David Myatt have rushed to extreme Islamism and can't get enough of it.

The collapse of the Western economy has been foretold many times before and yet it never seems to happen. Why? Because the Western economy doesn't exist as a demarcated entity as uninformed Islamists like Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami would like to think of it. When you consider that the equivalent monetary value of the GNP of a large European country passes daily over several foreign exchange desks of several multi-national banks in London off on journeys to most corners of the planet, then you begin to understand the scale and reach of the "Western" economy, which is owned by many stakeholders and is perhaps the most truly global phenomenon (even more than the English language, which the meeting was held in).

As for the fall of capitalism? There are always going to be the anti-capitalists who make a fuss and cause a noise but, like Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami, they consistently fail to come up with a viable alternative. Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami is disgusted at the world's present-day capitalist system because "we are all getting taken advantage of in one form or another and making the rich guys richer off our backs" yet the main beneficiaries of past caliphates were by far the caliphs and their few favourites - hardly egalitarian.

Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami says that we are taken advantage of every time we make a capitalist transaction yet always seek funding. Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami is obviously not a big advocate of freedom and fails to realize that every time people make a decision to purchase something, they are making a choice. The only way to have a choice is to have freedom. If we were to implement Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami's way of economic distribution, we would have no choice and we would have no freedom. Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami has failed to realize that the reason it has the opportunities to express itself is due to capitalism and fails to observe in its discourse that capitalism and money have been an ever progressing part of civilisation since it began.

Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami talks about the 2 Trillion Dollars in Assets alone owned by the Muslim Gulf States - how this is more than enough to wipe out the outstanding combined debt in the Muslim world. Yet Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami fails to recognize that the value of such assets depends on inter-dependency with a successful global economy, which happens to be run by the economic powerhouses of the US, EU, China and Japan (note the oriental powerhouses alongside "the West"). There's only one thing for sure - if Hizb ut Tahrir got its hands on the Gulf States then the assets of those states would lose value overnight, just as Afghanistan's assets tumbled in value when along came the Taliban. Muslim Gulf State assets under a Caliphate would be about as valuable as a Picasso covered with black gloss. As for outstanding combined debt in the Muslim world - an aggressive Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami Caliphate (admittedly as likely as The Chuckle Brothers being asked to play The Kray Twins in a drama) would be interested in settling debts to kuffar nations?  

Finally, Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami fails to recognise that the end of the Islamic Ottoman caliphate did not mark the beginning of division, it merely formalised the already existing divisions between the caliphate partakers, who happened to be Muslim. The Ottoman Empire at that time was exhausted, it was moribund, it was propped up by western powers that chose to use it as a counterweight in the great diplomatic games of the imperial age. Divisions had already existed - witness the differing caliphates, the wars to establish hegemony among the warring tribes, the policies of arabization, the tribalisms and the shia-sunni split.

The caliphate had many different departments, governing many differing tribes; in other words even during the caliphate it was divided. There were areas that were prosperous, others that were impoverished. Some areas were badly managed, some were milked of their natural wealth.

There has never been a global Ummah and there likely never will be. The world's Muslims are split into many sections, sects, interpretations and traditions and what is a holy place to one is often not to another - these splits are evident within boards of trustees in mosques, so-called Muslim countries and most evidently within extremist groups like Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami themselves. There is no hierarchy and no structure in Islam (required for government) - as demonstrated in Algeria where one interpretation deemed superior to another empowered its holders to kill non-believers even though they described themselves and their victims as Muslims.

One need not look in places as distant as Iraq - at Shias killing Sunnis and vice versa. One need look no further than the speech by Sultana Parvin at the Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami meeting where she spoke up against one union of Muslims - the Organisation of the Islamic Conference - calling that unrepresentative of "the Ummah" in spite of the election of some of its leaders by its Muslim peoples.

In what way would the election of Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami officials be more representative of the Ummah than the OIC? There is no Ummah while many of the world's Muslims would prefer to hug an infidel to a so-called fellow Muslim. There is more unity and uniformity (and certainly less violence) in your average London-based inter-faith meeting than there would be in a meeting between MPAC, Al Muhajiroun and Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami. A Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami Caliphate would start and finish with totalitarianism for two reasons - unmanageable sharia and want of consensus amongst interpreter power-holders.

C.S. Forester describes in The Barbary Pirates the shortcomings of all sharia-based systems: "The homelands of these people - the four North African countries of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli - were known as the Barbary States. They were parts of the vast Mohammedan Empire which at one time had threatened to conquer the whole world. Later, this empire fell to pieces of its own weight, largely because it had never been able to build any system of government except a simple tyranny".

The Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami meeting was yet another congregation of self-delusion and paranoia. Yet another illustration of how paranoia and totalitarian thinking go hand in hand. Now, while all paranoids are not totalitarians, virtually all totalitarians are paranoids. The Islamic faith as interpreted by extremists like Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami - the ultimate example of spiritual totalitarianism - in no way disproves this hypothesis. Its myths are for debunking and its continued existence in First World Britain is a worrying reflection on the intelligence of its Muslim youth, who are luckily still free boys and girls and at liberty to think and investigate for themselves.

Dominic Whiteman is Editor of the Westminster Journal and Director of the investigation team V7.

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