Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed

Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed

Overview

* Radical Muslim cleric
* Founder of two radical organizations: Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun
*  “We don’t perceive [al Qaeda] as the U.S. perceives them; we see them as a sincere devoted people who stood firm against the invasion of a Muslim country.”


Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born Muslim cleric, established two major Islamist organizations in the United Kingdom in 1986**.

**One of these groups is the radical political party Hizb ut-Tahrir (“the Party of Liberation”) also known as Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami (“the Islamic Party of Liberation”), which reportedly has secret cells of members in 40 countries. Although outlawed in Russia, Germany and many other nations, it remains a legal political party in the United Kingdom. The Sheikh has said he resigned from this party on January 16, 1996 over a theological issue.

The other is Al Muhajiroun (Arabic for “The Emigrants,” a name its founder says “refers to the early followers of the Prophet Muhammad.”) is a radical Muslim organization based in England that claims to have branches in many other nations.

According to Islam scholar Daniel Pipes, it may be “the most extreme Islamist group operating in the West.”

Al Muhajiroun on its web site describes itself as “not a group or a political party. We are a Jama’ah (collective body) within Ahl us-Sunnah wal Jama’ah (The minority saviour sect) working towards the world-wide domination of Islaam.”

Both groups have been widely accused of encouraging or having links to terrorists, and of having links to each other. And both groups’ openly-avowed long-term aim is to replace all existing governments with a theocratic Muslim global government under a single ruler called the Caliph.

The movement al-Hay’at al-Tahrir al-Islami (“the Islamic Society of Liberation”) was founded in Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem in 1951 by Sheikh Taqi-ud-deen Al-Nabahani. He was a judge on Jerusalem’s Islamic appellate court and reportedly “an associate and contemporary” of the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Haji Amin Al-Housseini, who spent much of World War II in Berlin.

The political party Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami emerged from this society in 1952-1953 and was led by Al-Nabahani until his death in 1977. His place was taken by Palestinian cleric Sheikh Abd-el Qadim Zalloum, a former professor at Al-Azhar in Cairo, who led until his death on April 29, 2003, publicly naming no successor as head of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Al-Nabahani had married into a wealthy family in Lebanon and used that wealth to propagate the party into other Muslim countries. One of the founders of Fatah was prior to that a founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir, as was the future “spiritual leader” of Islamic Jihad.

Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, born in Syria in 1958, joined Hizb ut-Tahrir as a teenager in Lebanon during the early 1970s. He also created another organization that aims to create a global Islamic Caliphate, Al Muhajiroun, established in Mecca but launched publicly in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with 40 founding members on March 3, 1983, a date chosen because it was “the 59th anniversary of the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate.”

Expelled from Saudi Arabia for radical political activity, the Sheikh arrived in Great Britain on January 14, 1986. He soon began to establish both Al Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir on fertile British soil.

“Islam is the fastest growing religion in the UK, with up to two million followers and more than 1,000 mosques across Britain,” wrote Ori Golan. “In many cities across Britain, Muslims live in segregated communities, with separate education, social and cultural networks. It is within these closed communities that the extremists find recruits for al-Qaida and other terror groups.”

Most British Muslims are not Anglo-Saxon converts but Islamic immigrants from lands like India, Pakistan, the Middle East and other parts of the world once ruled by the British Empire. Many perceive themselves as an underclass in Britain’s class-oriented society.

The Muslim world became weak and fell under the hegemony of Western unbelievers such as the British, Hizb ut-Tahrir teaches, because the last vestige of the Caliphate was extinguished in 1924. Restoring the Caliphate and expanding its rule to the entire planet, Hizb ut-Tahrir teaches, will usher in a new global Muslim Golden Age of peace and divine harmony.

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his right-hand man Abu Bakr took the title Kalifa, Arabic for “Deputy,” as successor to the Prophet. He became the first of the four “rightly-guided” Caliphs (three of whom would be murdered), who ruled with even more religious than political authority, like a Muslim half-Pope and half-emperor.

The essential concept of the Caliphate was that one Caliph rules every Muslim on earth. Every Muslim is therefore part of a single nation under divinely-given Islamic Sharia law. And it is divinely destined that someday the entire world will become Muslim and be ruled by one Caliph after another.

The avowed aim of Al Muhajiroun is to restore and expand the Caliphate, the last vestige of which collapsed when war hero Mustafa Kemal (“Ataturk”) and his “Young Turks” overthrew the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. (Al Muhajiroun curses Ataturk, who reoriented Turkey towards the West and laid the basis for it today being the only predominantly Muslim member of NATO and a friend to Israel.)

The new Caliph, called Al-Khalifah or “leader” on Al Muhajiroun’s web site, “whose foreign policy is to conquer the whole world by Jihad,” will thereby bring the dawn of a world of peace, love, economic fairness and divine harmony.

By striving “to establish Al-Khilafah in order that Islam dominates the World (Izhaar ud-Deen) and becomes the World order,” reads the web site, Al Muhajiroun teaches that its followers are doing the will of Allah.

Under this coming worldwide “Domination of Islam (Izhaar ul Deen)” people will not necessarily be forced to become Muslims, implies the Al Muhajiroun web site, but they will be taught “to accept it as a political way of life and a solution for their [and society’s] problems.”

Until that day arrives, the web site frankly says, one of Al Muhajiroun’s tactics will be “To formulate a fifth column as a community pressure group which is well equipped with the Islamic culture e.g. ruling, social, economic, judicial, penal [sic] and ritual systems in order to become capable of implementing Islam fully and comprehensively in society.”

The weapons to be used to establish global Islamic political power range from debate, media appearances and the law to the funding of Jihadists and recruiting of suicide bombers.

In October 2000 the Sheikh co-signed and issued a “Warning to All Jews…in the UK” that “if you support Israel financially, verbally or physically you will become part of the [Middle East] conflict.” He, in other words, explicitly warned Jews in democratic Great Britain, the mother of parliaments, that if they opened their mouths in support of Israel, they risked being attacked in England by Islamist terrorists.

The Sheikh in 1999 became chief sponsor in Great Britain for the International Islamic Front (IIF), a group persuading and assisting young British Muslims to undergo “guns and live ammunition” combat training and then go overseas to fight Jihad (“Holy War”) in Chechnya and the Balkans.

Osama bin Laden in 1998 issued a fatwa that declared it a Muslim’s “individual duty” to kill Americans and he created a new organization called the International (or World) Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. Sheikh Bakri Mohammad described himself as the head of the “political wing” of IIF with no “structural link” to bin Laden, according to the India newspaper Indian Express, but the Sheikh acknowledged that “the military wing of the International Islamic Front is run by Osama bin Laden.”

The very word Islam means “surrender” or “submission” (to Allah). Muslims refer to the combined nations where Islam is the dominant religion as Dar al-Islam, which literally means “the Zone of Submission.”

Al Muhajiroun aims to restore the Caliphate, a monolithic form of religious-political rule of all the world’s Muslims that existed during the succession of four “rightly guided” Caliphs who ruled after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Every Muslim on Earth would look to this single ruler, and with Islam’s global conquest all human beings will become citizens of a single Nation of Islam.

Osama bin Laden has said that the goal of Al Qaeda is to “unite all Muslims and to establish a government which follows the rule of the Caliphs.”

On the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attack on America, Islamist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri marked the day by scheduling a conference to launch a new organization (reportedly funded by Al Muhajiroun with a six-figure cash donation) to be called the Islamic Council of Britain (ICB). ICB’s stated goal is to “implement sharia law in Britain.”

The poster advertising this conference at Sheikh al-Masri’s Finsbury Park mosque in North London featured a large photograph of the World Trade Center towers, one already afire, the other about to be hit by another skyjacked airliner. In large letters the poster read: “September the 11th 2001: A TOWERING DAY IN HISTORY.”

One of the most prominent guests invited by Sheikh al-Masri to attend his conference was the British representative of the Islamic Liberation Party, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Dr. Imran Waheed, an advocate of restoring the Caliphate.

The second was Anjem Choudary, spokesman for Al Muhajiroun.

The third was Choudary’s employer, the British founder of both this political party and Al Muhajiroun, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, who said: “The people at this conference look at September 11 like a battle, as a great achievement by the mujahideen against the evil superpower. I never praised September 11 after it happened but now I can see why they did it.”

Of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorists, Sheikh Bakri Mohammad said: “We don’t perceive them as the U.S. perceives them; we see them as a sincere devoted people who stood firm against the invasion of a Muslim country.”

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