It’s a hot summer Sunday and I am stuck in a strip-lit hotel room five minutes from Heathrow Terminal One. All I want is for someone to pass me the freezer-cold bottle of water from the end of the table. I stare at the shaven-headed solicitor on my right, hoping, just hoping, that he will notice me, but he is speaking. “Where,” asks Basharat Ali, “is the initiative for the individual to enter into his own economic undertakings in a communist system? In the Islamic and capitalist systems the initiative is upon the individual.” Sajjad Khan, an accountant, pushes his glasses back up his nose: “Now that’s not totally fair. There is no incentive on the individual, but there is incentive in doing something for the collective good.”
These and two other middle-aged, middle-class people are members of the worldwide Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir (Hizb for short), and I am sitting in on one of their normally private study circles. Marxist economic thought is just the sort of thing they do on a Sunday, and any university professor would die for this kind of enthused, informed debate.
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