It’s Islam Awareness Week in Britain.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Islam Awareness Week. Celebrations to mark the success of the venture will be launched on 22nd November at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

The week hopes to further unite Britain’s diverse communities, with the aim of developing respect and understanding between race and faith groups.

The theme for this year’s festival is ‘Your Muslim Neighbour’. The focus will be to enhance understanding of the role of Islam globally, and specifically within local society.

To enable non-Muslim members of the community to gain a real insight into Islamic culture, Muslims will open up their homes and community centres.

Islam Awareness Week will see the launch of the “Tent of Peace” which will be created by school children throughout the country. The tent will be made up of ‘handkerchiefs of peace’ which will display Islamic designs and messages of peace.

No word on whether Hizb ut Tahrir, banned throughout the Middle East but tolerated in Britain, will be participating in the “Your Muslim Neighbour” festival: ‘The West needs to understand it is inevitable: Islam is coming back’.

The east London hall echoes to the sound of the speaker’s voice: “They want us to redefine Islam to fit the agenda of the west,” he intones, and the audience murmurs. “Islam is going to be political, no matter how hard they try. Islam itself is political. Allah has not remained silent when it comes to political matters.”

The speaker is a member of Hizb ut Tahrir, the most controversial Islamic group in Britain today. Critics have called for the group to be banned, as it is in Germany, while supporters hail it as the saviour of the Muslim community. Hizb - the name means Party of Liberation in Arabic - is banned throughout the Middle East, and three British men are in jail in Egypt accused of propagating its views. In Uzbekistan, thousands of Hizb members are in jail, and a Russian thinktank has compared the group to al-Qaida.

Eighteen months ago, the group briefly appeared in the public eye when the wife of Omar Sharif, the Briton who launched a failed suicide-bomb attack in Tel Aviv, was found to have leaflets from the group in her home. Hizb ut Tahrir also has a presence on university campuses, where it has been accused of anti-semitism.

Until recently, the leadership of Hizb was secretive and cautious, reluctant to release details of the scale of its membership, its leadership structure or its funding. One ex-member who spent years with the group says there are probably only 500 members across the country, but the group may have 10 times that number as committed supporters. Hizb’s annual conference in Birmingham last year attracted about 8,000, by the far the most for a Muslim organisation.

In a sign that the group is changing direction, it has given the Guardian unprecedented access to its leadership. The newspaper has spoken to current and former Hizb members and supporters in London, Derby, Leicester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester in an attempt to piece together the group’s motivation and ideology.

The leader of the group, a 28-year-old IT consultant called Jalaluddin Patel, is the first leader in its 18-year history in the UK to speak to the national press. He says Hizb has nothing to hide but will not release membership figures: “It’s a genuine security issue. We’re unsure about the manner in which western society would treat a group like ours.”

Patel insists that Hizb is no threat to the west, but part of it. But he adds that the west “needs to understand what is really an inevitable matter, and that is that Islam is coming back, the Islamic caliphate is going to be implemented in the world very soon … The Muslim people need to realise that the way in which they will restore a form of dignity and bring civilisation back to the Islamic world is to establish a modern caliphate.”