There is a new wave of sophisticated, articulate Islamic fundamentalists trying to spread the word among moderate Muslims in Sydney. Young men, wearing regular clothes, with neatly trimmed beards, broad Australian accents and fluent in Arabic, they appear to be fully assimilated, second-generation Australians. But they belong to a political group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) that calls for the creation of a global Islamic state, or caliphate, under strict sharia law. The message from these young men is one of division, non-assimilation and rejection of the values of the "kafir" - non-Muslims.At a public lecture at Bankstown Town Hall earlier this month, Hizb ut-Tahrir organiser Soadad Doureihi, his brother Wassim, and Usman Badar, president of Sydney University's Muslim Student Association in 2005, outlined their utopian goal of the ultimate overthrow of Western democracies. "Islam can never coexist one under the other or one within the other," Soadad told the crowd. "When the state is established, when people see the mercy of Islam they embrace Islam in droves." The April 8 lecture, to about 200 men and 50 women, was titled "Should Muslims Subscribe to Australian Values?"
Banned in Britain, Germany, Holland, Russia, and much of the Muslim world, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) has been invited to speak at Sydney Boys High at least twice, and often addresses students at Sydney University. Borrowing its methodology and ideology from Marxist-Leninist groups, HT calls itself a political party which works to "change the situation of the corrupt society so that it is transformed into an Islamic society", its website says. It opposes integration and assimilation of Muslims into Australian society.
Wassim told the Bankstown crowd: "The pushing to integration and assimilation is to get us to think and believe and feel in a certain way that Islam will not condone. On the collective level everyone accepts you have to have one set of laws and no Muslim in this country is demanding today the implementation of sharia law. In this country, yes, we believe this is the best way forward but . . . our current struggle is the implementation of Islamic law in the Muslim world and that will serve as a model for the rest of humanity. [But] if governments want to interfere in the individual, personal affairs of any citizen, they are going to create the conditions of civil unrest and chaos like in France."