This is a guest post by the Mu’awin Tafweed
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The Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA) is planning to hold a fundraiser at the Paddington Hilton.
One of the advertised speakers is Hamza Tzortis who claims his political views are not radical while also downplaying his association with Hizb ut Tahrir.
Last year he even made this angry statement on the philosopher Stephen Law’s blog:
I am not a member of Hizb ut Tahrir or any other political party, and I am not a ‘front’ for their work. However I have been associated with the Hizb ut Tahrir in the past. I formally left the party early this year for many reasons, some of which include theological, political and spiritual concerns. These have been shared with some senior figures within the party.
[…]
As a concluding note, I would like to highlight that I will not hesitate to take any entity that publicly defames me and the work that I do via a legal process, as a means to formally clarify my position.
So, how far did his association go?
Take a look for yourself in this picture of a Hizb ut Tahrir demonstration against the Iraqi elections outside the Wembley Conference Hall on January 30, 2005.
Of course, Hamza has also previously gone on record to say:
We as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech, and even the idea of freedom. We see under the Khilafa (caliphate), when people used to engage in a positive way, this idea of freedom was redundant, it was unnecessary, because the society understood under the education system of the Khilafa state, and under the political framework of Islam, that people must engage with each other in a positive and productive way to produce results, as the Qur’an says, to get to know one another. Whereas in this society, what they call debate and positive discourse is printing cartoons. What they call debate and positive discourse is creating a rhetorically-driven, and gender-motivated, politically-motivated film. Is this facilitating debate and discourse in a positive way in a postmodern society? Of course not.
So nothing too extreme then.
