From caliphate to the classroom: How hardline group courts the young

Inside a suburban community centre, more than two dozen teenagers and young men sit on red plastic chairs, their eyes glued to a neatly dressed man addressing the audience from a makeshift stage.

“We should be proud that Islam restricts our interaction with women,” the man tells the crowd in Sydney’s west. “Islam holds men on a certain pedestal. It holds women on a certain pedestal. It gives us this pride. This should be a badge of honour for us.”

Mohammad Alwahwah, a relative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia founder Ismail Alwahwah. He is the administrator of the Stand4Palestine WhatsApp group.

The speaker is Mohammad Alwahwah and the event, headlined Sliding into DMs, is the first talk by a new Islamic youth group operating in Sydney’s suburbs, Muslim Youth Revival, which claims to build brotherhood and faith among young men.

The boys and young men have come to the Busby centre to hear Alwahwah talk about where to draw the line in their interactions with women. On offer are also a group prayer, games, prizes, and free pizza.

In videos of the event posted online, Alwahwah warns the young men against socialising with women and engaging in sex out of wedlock, a practice he claims is disgusting and evil, “something that ruins society, that ruins individuals, and we shouldn’t go anywhere near it”.

Much of Alwahwah’s lecture wouldn’t be out of place in events organised by many fundamentalist religious groups, Muslim or otherwise, but he is not an ordinary teacher.

On Sunday, this masthead revealed he is one of the activists involved with radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, a controversial fringe international political organisation that has spent years lobbying for an Islamic caliphate. The group’s most extreme Australian supporters have been exposed praising the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as a step towards its caliphate goal.

A social media post promoting an event hosted by Mohammad Alwahwah.Credit: Instagram

The role of Alwahwah and his relatives, and fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir activists, Amer and Anas, in the Sydney University camp has prompted renewed calls from the Jewish community for the university to urgently end the protest encampment. Stand for Palestine said there would be a rally at the university on Monday evening after protesters began dismantling the camp following a directive from the university.

The university said it was also concerned about the reported links and would seek further advice from authorities.

Mohammad Alwahwah’s work as a youth group leader, along with other evidence uncovered by this masthead, suggests Hizb ut-Tahrir’s work influencing younger Muslims isn’t confined to university campuses, where the group has long maintained a fringe presence. It is not suggested that Mohammad Alwahwah has publicly supported the Hamas attack.

An investigation by this masthead and 60 Minutes has uncovered links between prominent Hizb ut-Tahrir figures and two separate youth groups for young Muslims and mainstream Muslim student organisations.

Hizb ut-Tahrir believes Muslim youth are at the centre of a campaign by the Australian government to erode their faith and subordinate them to “the prevalent secular democratic system”.

During a Hizb ut-Tahrir lecture in Sydney in late November, a member of the group told the audience that children needed to know “what’s happening” and “get them involved in the Ummah’s affairs early on”.

“You don’t really have to show them the disgusting images that we are seeing [in Gaza], but you need to explain to them that … all the prophets went through this,” he said.

“We think that our kids are not smart. They’re young. Just give them the iPad and let them watch their cartoons. This is the wrong thinking. We need to treat them like young adults and give them a big vision for Islam from a very young age.”

This sentiment was echoed by a Hizb ut-Tahrir supporter, who on November 30 reposted an image of a toddler looking at a world map displaying a caliphate stretching from Indonesia to Spain captioned “start teaching them early” on his social media page.

In an article published in 2016, Hizb ut-Tahrir claimed young Muslims in Australia were being diverted from key Islamic concepts such as working for the interests of a global Islamic community, the caliphate, jihad and “presenting the Islamic way of life as a radical alternative to the current order” by institutions including schools, universities, and mentoring programs.

“The aim is to integrate the youth by involving them in mainstream politics, sports and culture, diverting them away from key Islamic creedal concepts and actions,” the article read.

Prominent figures linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir, including Alwahwah and radical Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun, have become regular speakers at events organised by Muslim Youth Revival, lecturing young men on how to interact with women, marriage, and the war in Gaza, and being unapologetically Muslim. Alwahwah and Dadoun refused to comment when contacted on Monday.

It is not suggested that Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters engage in terrorism, only that the organisation and several of its prominent figures have made statements supporting the October 7 attacks.

Supporters of the group have also rebranded a podcast launched by Hizb ut-Tahrir figures in 2020 called The Convo Sydney into a youth initiative targeting young Muslims in the city’s west.

The podcast was, in turn, a rebranding of a Hizb ut-Tahrir initiative called Unapologetically Muslim in 2019, which included a conference with speeches from key group figures.

Events organised by The Convo Sydney have also featured a list of Hizb ut-Tahrir-affiliated speakers, including Mohammad and Anas Alwahwah. Anas Alwahwah did not respond to requests for comment.

Deakin University extremism expert Dr Josh Roose said students were an obvious recruitment ground for extremist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir seeking to capitalise on anger and discontent to spread their rhetoric.

“They’re intelligent, they’re highly active, they’re motivated,” Roose said.

British counter-extremism expert Hadiya Masieh was radicalised by the group while she was studying at university in London in her late teens and remained a Hizb ut-Tahrir member for a decade.

Masieh said the group exploited her feelings of injustice and fervent desire to change the world to hook her in and pitched the idea of a global caliphate as the solution to all problems.

Counter terrorism expert Hadiya Masieh.Credit: 60 Minutes

“It was this utopia situation that I feel for. This is what I wanted to achieve – a society that wasn’t going to be persecuted, harassed by governments, bullied,” she said.

“When you are a teenager you have these idealistic goals and views, and you see things very much black and white, so it was something that I did believe in for a long time.”

Masieh broke ties with the group in the aftermath of the 2005 terror attacks in London after she realised how similar the rhetoric she was peddling was to that utilised by the bombers.

She retrained as a counter-extremism expert and has since built a career educating people, including the youth, about the dangers of extremism and how to identify it.

“Hizb ut-Tahrir, like other extreme groups, will use any mechanism they can to push their agenda. They divide, they prey on people, and they brand and market themselves very well,” she said.

There are now growing calls from the Coalition and Jewish groups for the Albanese government to urgently investigate the possibility of proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation in Australia as was done by the UK government in January.

Masieh is a sceptic of the British ban, believing counter-extremism education is a more useful tool than proscription.

“Our philosophy is that you cannot ever take the wolf away from the sheep, but at least the sheep will know what the wolf looks like.”