Memorandum from Hizb ut-Tahrir to Colonel Gaddafi (1978)

مقدمة / Introduction

Colonel Gaddafi, Peace, mercy, and blessings of God be upon you. Hizb ut-Tahrir, a political party whose ideology is Islam, works to resume the Islamic way of life and carry the Islamic call to the world through jihad, by establishing the Caliphate. It adopts political action as its path. Since holding rulers accountable is among the political actions undertaken by Hizb ut-Tahrir, the party intended to issue a bulletin in response to your speech delivered on the evening of the third of July in the Moulay Muhammad Mosque in Tripoli, on the occasion of the hundredth recitation of the Murattal Quran, in which you declared that the hadiths narrated on the authority of the Messenger are of doubtful authenticity because they were recorded two hundred years after the death of the Messenger. And that conflicts occurred among Muslims, and that during these conflicts, fake and forged hadiths attributed to the Messenger appeared, with no beginning or end, so that each of these conflicting Islamic parties could prove that its position is correct according to Islam. Thus, sixty types of contradictory and conflicting hadiths appeared, and you gave an example of the contradiction of the hadith, that Ali bin Abi Talib is one of those promised paradise, and Ali bin Abi Talib falls under the hadith "If two Muslims meet with their swords, both the killer and the killed are in hell." This is a contradiction, because Ali raised his sword against a Muslim, so how can Ali be in paradise according to one hadith and in hell according to another?