UZBEKISTAN: Interview with Human Rights Watch representative
We sort of group all those people [together] and call them independent Muslims,but they don't promote violence. If you go to a Hizb ut-Tahrir trial, you will find that the allegations against them are that they distributed some leaflets or materials, that they perhaps collected money to give to families of jailed Hizb ut-Tahrir activists, or they were members of the Hizb ut-Tahrir and took oaths as its members.That's the basic allegations against some 95 percent of the people in prison. For Wahhabis, there is a similar set of allegations. They are imprisoned for meeting others, learning and reciting the Koran in Arabic. It will be pointed out that they were particularly pious in terms of women and that they wore headscarfs in a way which was not traditionally Uzbek, but fundamentalist Islamist or Arabic.
Assem was drawn to Hizb ut-Tahrir 16 years ago, as a 22-year-old lost soul in Vienna. "I'd grown up in Egypt, where my father was from, and then moved to Austria, where my mother is from," he says. "I didn't really fit in with a lot of the Austrians I met, but I couldn't feel comfortable with those guys you see at European mosques either — the ones with the long beards and robes but nothing going on upstairs."After a brief flirtation with Scientology, he re-embraced Islam just as someone told him about Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Hizb ut-Tahrir members "were educated and self-sufficient and open to the world around them," Assem recalls. "It wasn't all about beards and robes and prayer, but about logic."