Leader of Islamic group says US riots are an opportunity for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia law

A controversial Muslim preacher is predicting Islam will replace the United States as the world’s dominant geopolitical force.

Ismail al-Wahwah, the Australian spiritual leader of hardline Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has suggested riots across the US would bring down the global superpower.

‘Who will take over if America fall?,’ he said a video on Wednesday night.

‘Someone can say Europe, someone can say China, speak about Russia some, but for me the message is, the one who have more values, true values, and that’s us Muslims.

Mr al-Wahwah described the violent mass demonstrations across the US as an opportunity for Muslims to exploit – following the alleged murder of black man George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer.

‘It’s time to use this opportunity to stand up, and to come back and to take the leadership again,’ Mr al-Wahwah said.

‘We as a Muslim, we should take this opportunity to take the leadership again, I know it’s not easy job.

‘I know it will cost us much, but I know 100 per cent that we are able, we can do it.’

Hizb ut-Tahrir is global Islamist political party, active in 50 countries, that wants Islam imposed as a political system.

It has a goal of replacing world governments with a caliphate based on the rule of Sharia law.

The Islamist group’s ‘Draft Constitution of the Khilafa State’, a blueprint for how its caliphate would govern, advocates the killing of ex-Muslims, known as ‘apostates’.

Despite its fundamentalist Islamic ideology that endorses slavery and only allows Muslim men to rule, Hizb ut-Tahrir is claiming to be the party of civil rights and is convinced riots against police brutality would hasten the downfall of the US.

‘Do you think what’s happening in America will be the end of the Americans’ time? Yes,’ Mr al-Wahwah said.

‘Absolutely, I believe what happened in America today, what will happen in the coming days and months and years, maybe, that will be a change in the position of America as a leader in this world.

‘That’s how superpowers fail. That’s how superpower fall.

‘That is one of the vital points that will be in the American history.

‘It was a natural development in the decline of the American leadership.’

He predicted the US would resort to war in a bid to maintain its global hegemony but would fail to stop its decline.

‘You can delay it, maybe. You can maybe run to an international war, total war world,’ Mr al-Wahwah said.

Like other fundamentalist Islamists, Hizb ut-Tahrir wants to avenge the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1924.

‘We have all elements of success if we do the right thing with help from Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala,’ Mr al-Wahwah said in his Facebook video.

Nonetheless, Hizb ut-Tahrir is so extreme it is banned in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.

The group is also illegal in other Islamic nations, including Pakistan, Turkey and Jordan, along with Germany and Russia, but it remains legal in Australia.

In July 2018, Mr al-Wahwah was detained at Amman Airport while travelling in Jordan with his wife, and was kept in custody for several months.

Ismail al-Wahwah, also known as Abu Anas, was born in the West Bank city of Hebron which is now jointly controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Israel. He came to Australia as a refugee in 1997.

The former taxi driver, based in south-west Sydney, is a controversial figure who had previously been deported from Indonesia and travelled to Syria in 2013 in support of an Islamic caliphate.

A video from March 2016, translated and shared by the Middle East Research Institute, showed him urging Muslims to restore the Islamic caliphate at a conference held in Turkey.

He called on the attendees in Ankara to pledge ‘before Allah to restore the caliphate, to raise the banner, to restore the Sharia, to unite the Islamic nation and to lead the armies of jihad that will conquer Europe and America so that the word of Allah will reign supreme’.

In 2014 Mr al-Wahwah delivered an anti-Semitic rant to a rally in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba that vilified Jewish people, calling them ‘the most evil creatures of Allah’.

‘Moral corruption is linked to the Jews,’ Mr al-Wahwah said.

In 2017, Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Uthman Badar told a forum at Bankstown, in Sydney’s south-west, that ex-Muslims, called ‘apostates’, should be killed.

‘The ruling for apostates as such in Islam is clear, that apostates attract capital punishment and we don’t shy away from that,’ he said.

The extraordinary admission was caught on camera by Daily Mail Australia and the matter was referred to the Australian Federal Police by Justice Minister Michael Keenan.

In 2014, another Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman, Wassim Doureihi, repeatedly refused to condemn Islamic State when interviewed by ABC journalist Emma Alberici on the Lateline program.

Last year, he told Hizb ut-Tahrir’s ‘Unapologetically Muslim’ conference at Campsie in Sydney he refused to condemn ISIS and considered the Australian national anthem to be oppressive.

‘Imagine someone comes into the room and looks at us both. Looks at us both and says these two are a bunch of paedophiles,’ he said.

‘And they come up on stage and they say, “Do you condemn paedophilia?”

‘Would I actually respect that question and give a yes or a no? Why would I do that?’

Source: Daily Mail