ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to describe milestones in Hamas’s historical chronology and intellectual development and the political challenges it faces in a region beset by turmoil. The analysis pays particular attention to the tension between utopian and ideological ideals driven by religious aspirations within the movement, on the one hand, and the political realities which have compelled Hamas to adopt pragmatic positions with a visible relaxing of its ideology, on the other.
Hamas’s official inception is normally dated to late 1987, but its origins go back as far as the mid-1940s, when the formation of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in Jerusalem was announced. The ‘Palestinian Brothers’ was in fact a branch of the original Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood organization, which was established in Egypt in 1928. That organization’s initial aim was to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate, which had been effectively ended by Ataturk and his Young Turk comrades in 1923. The collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate was viewed as the ultimate manifestation of Muslim weakness and defeat in the face of Western powers resulting from the Muslims’ abandonment of true Islam. Thus, to bring back power, unity and advancement of the Muslim Ummah (an all-encompassing pan-Islamic nation), efforts needed to focus on the re-Islamization of Muslim societies. This Islamization, as actively advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood, would encompass a bottom-up process, starting with the smallest unit, the individual and family, then moving into various aspects of society and ending up guiding government and politics.
