[towelie]

I was taking classes for a course, and one of the instructors was a UK born Pakistani, who was now settled in Lahore. So he invited us all to KFC one day, and during the meal started discussing politics. A couple of days later those of us who were more involved in the discussion were invited to his place for lunch.

There, the discussion again took a turn towards the plight of Muslims around the world and then they came out about their affiliation with HT. There was the usual discussion about the reasons for decline of the "Ummah".

Couple of weeks later : another lunch invitation. This time the hardcore stuff started. We were shown a whole album of pictures of dead men, women and children from Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya etc. Infact these images were always on display during all their future sessions.

We were introduced to their ideology, which goes something like this :

1) Preaching to the "awam" never works. An elite vanguard is needed to capture power.
2) Educated people are to be trained and placed in critical positions in society so that when things go bad, they can take over.
3) The primary objective of the movement was establishment of Khilafa and unification of the Ummah.

All of their people are educated and most settled in the UK.

These guys were paranoid about security and from the start of the hardcore sessions demanded cellphones be switched off and the batteries taken out. It seems the intelligence agencies were on their ass as they were always complaining of their members being picked up.

My main problem with them was that the establishment of "Khilafah" was an end to them and not the means to establish a better society. It was almost as if as soon as the Emir of HT took control there would be rainbows and unicorns in sky. They had a utopian view of the Ottoman empire and refused to acknowledge any flaws. They believed in the existence of one single monolithic Ummah across the world, which is an extremely flawed idea. And finally, the idea that their way was the one true path and everyone else was misguided. Their absurd demands for establishing Shariah in the UK, and blind adherence to the chant that Islam was the only way, etc etc .....

I attended a couple more sessions on and off, I was just curious, plus who doesn't like free KFC :P