Hizb ut-Tahrir (“The Party of Liberation”) has since its 1952 founding continued to exploit conflicts across the world to achieve its objective of restoring the caliphate and imposing Islamic law.
In recent months, the group has increased its activities globally. While the previous Bangladeshi government of Sheikh Hasina had banned the group in 2009, her August 2024 ouster opened the door to the group’s revival. On March 7, 2025, it held a march in Dhaka to demand Islamic law. Thousands of Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters clashed with law enforcement. Over subsequent weeks, it has sought to leverage the war in Hamas to incite radicalism and anti-Americanism.
After Morgan Ortagus, the deputy U.S. envoy for the Middle East, visited Lebanon, Hizb ut-Tahrir slammed the new Lebanese leadership for its supposed powerlessness to stand up to America. It has likewise not only criticized stalwart U.S. allies like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, but has also condemned adversaries like Iran, Syria, and Turkey for being insufficiently committed to the defeat of the United States and Israel.
Several countries ban the group for its terror support. In 2024, for example, the United Kingdom banned Hizb ut-Tahrir. Even Canada, which is often permissive toward terror groups, recently blocked one of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s major public events. Yet, the United States has not designated the group. On April 5, 2025, for example, Hizb ut-Tahrir held a Khilafah Conference in Chicago where speakers condemned the United States and Israel and called on Muslims to reject “failed manmade ideologies” such as liberal democracy.
Hizb ut-Tahrir’s legal status in the United States raises questions about how democracies should balance free speech with clear-eyed recognition about how terror groups incite violence and use liberal societies to further violent aims without fearing consequences.
Hizb ut-Tahrir’s legal status in the United States raises questions about how democracies should balance free speech with clear-eyed recognition about how terror groups incite violence and use liberal societies to further violent aims without fearing consequences.
While Hizb ut-Tahrir has renounced violence, Western policymakers should recognize its insincerity, especially as it offers a theological justification for the rejection of democratic systems.
Countering Hizb ut-Tahrir in the United States and globally requires more than traditional counterterrorism frameworks, as the movement operates within legal grey zones, leveraging democratic protections to disseminate its anti-liberal, anti-Western ideology. Repressing or banning it might drive the group underground, thereby exacerbating its conspiratorial worldview and increasing its mystique among the disillusioned. What is required is a multi-dimensional counterstrategy that combines legal oversight with counter-narratives, including the amplification of pluralist Islamic scholarship and support for civil society actors resisting ideological monopolization.
The U.S. administration should place Hizb ut-Tahrir high on federal counter-extremism monitoring lists, directing Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security’s attention to key areas of ideological propagation such as college campuses and digital media platforms. There should be close and continuous monitoring of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s recruitment pipelines and financial flows, both within the United States and abroad. To identify and chart links between Hizb ut-Tahrir’s global infrastructure and spheres of influence and its activities in the United States will require close collaboration with Five Eyes partners. This is all within the realm of possibility given how the United Kingdom and even Canada so far appear more forward leaning in efforts to confront the threat than Washington.
U.S. foreign policy must also address the contradictions that Hizb ut-Tahrir exploits. U.S. and Western diplomats should call Hizb ut-Tahrir out for criticizing supposed U.S. support for authoritarian regimes while Hizb ut-Tahrir aspires to be the most authoritarian regime of all.
A quarter century ago, much of the U.S. counter-terror bureaucracy ignored the Al Qaeda threat. Usama Bin Laden’s training camps and minions were too distant for most in Washington to worry about, nor did many believe that Bin Laden’s ideology could gain such traction. In 2006, Newsweek published an attack on George W. Bush belittling his mention of the caliphate as outdated, irrelevant, and ignorant. Less than a decade later, the Islamic State erupted.
The United States should not make the same mistake three times. It is necessary to tackle Hizb ut-Tahrir before it can spread its ideology and cause irreparable damage. Like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, Hizb ut-Tahrir is a ticking bomb primed to explode.
