Hamas’ Ideological Ties to the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood

Last update: 2025-01-14 10:49:54

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and several other Palestinian militant groups committed an attack in which they killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers. The subsequent Israeli invasion that this led to killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – both civilians and members of militant groups. All of this has put the spotlight firmly on Hamas, an organisation that some believe will never accept Israel’s existence because of its supposedly ideologically motivated hatred of Jews. As many scholars have pointed out,[1] however, and as I also show in my forthcoming book about the organisation,[2] Hamas’ ideological development is more complicated and its policies more pragmatic than this belief suggests.

A good way to illustrate Hamas’ ideological development is to delve into its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organisation from which it stems. In what follows, I will therefore first provide a brief overview of the history and ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, followed by a focus on the Palestinian (and particularly the Gazan) branch of that organisation. I will then go into the founding of Hamas and how it is rooted in but also different from the Gazan Muslim Brotherhood, how Hamas has developed since its founding in 1987 and, finally, how the latter has increasingly distanced itself from the broader Islamist organisation it was once part of.

 

History and Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt by the teacher Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) in 1928. From its humble beginnings, with al-Banna preaching his message of Islamic piety and religious commitment in cafés, the organisation quickly spread to the rest of Egypt, becoming a mass movement by the 1940s. The organisation espoused a strongly activist and anticolonial message, which was often critical of the Egyptian rulers, their policies and their relations with the British colonial occupiers. As such, it was perhaps not surprising that the organisation was outlawed by the Egyptian state for its critical and controversial message and al-Banna was even assassinated in 1949.[3]

The Brotherhood’s ideological framework was quite broad, rather general and even vague and ambiguous, which it continued in later years.[4] The message emanating from this was equally general and mostly aimed at lay people, whom the organisation tried to influence with its strongly anti-British and anti-colonial views.[5] The group was simultaneously concerned with the role of Islam in politics and society, particularly in Egypt, which it expressed by protesting the presence of supposedly Western influence in music, cinema, radio and other forms of entertainment. This, together with the mingling of the sexes, would supposedly lead to the corruption of Muslims, particularly Muslim women.[6]

 

The Religious Approach of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood

The Egyptian Brotherhood’s message of social conservatism was also found among the Palestinian branch of the organisation, which was founded in the mid-1940s. The Palestinian Brotherhood subsequently spread throughout the country and, after the war of 1948, came under Transjordanian control in the West Bank, where it enjoyed relative freedom under the kingdom’s Hashemite rule. In the same period, the Brotherhood also resided under Egyptian occupation in the Gaza Strip, where it was initially popular because of its participation in the fighting with the newly independent Israeli state. Yet because of repression of the organisation in Egypt – particularly after 1954, when the Egyptian regime of President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir (Nasser; r. 1954-1970) banned the Brotherhood entirely – the Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip grew increasingly isolated and politically quietist. This situation was reinforced by the popularity of secular Arab nationalism as promoted by Nasser, which was at odds with the Brotherhood’s religious message.[7]

The isolated position in which the Gazan Brotherhood found itself and its opposition to the revolutionary message of Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism were very important in shaping the organisation’s policies, including after 1967, when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip (and the West Bank). Pursuing a policy labelled “sensory isolation” (al-in‘izal al-shu‘uri), which allowed them to live as pious Muslims in supposedly sinful environments, the Gazan Brotherhood eschewed violence against Israel and, instead, focussed solely on religious, social and charitable activities to increase Islamic observance.[8] This put it at odds with the much more politicised branches of the Brotherhood elsewhere (including in the West Bank), which were sometimes involved in fighting Israel in the 1960s.[9] Viewing it through the prism of religion, the Gazan Brotherhood believed Israel could only be beaten at some undetermined stage in the future, after a thorough Islamisation of society. It also rejected the secular, nationalist solutions offered by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) or Palestinian factions like Fatah, which had split off from the Brotherhood in 1959 because of the latter’s lack of anti-Israel militancy, and sometimes even used violence against them. All of this caused Israel to turn a blind eye to the Gazan Brotherhood as a counterforce to more militant groups, who – in turn – accused the Brotherhood of passivity.[10]

 

Hamas: The Nationalisation of the Gazan Muslim Brotherhood

From 1973 on, the Palestinian Brotherhood’s policies and activities in the Gaza Strip were increasingly coordinated through the so-called Al-Mujamma‘ al-Islami (the Islamic Centre), which was founded in Gaza in that year and led by some who would later lead Hamas. Although it initially continued the Gazan Brotherhood’s quietist policies, in the early 1980s a younger generation of members entered its ranks that had grown up in refugee camps, where they had often been instilled with a strong sense of Palestinian nationalism and militancy. As a result, although many Muslim Brothers wanted to continue focussing on religious and social activities, the desire among some to combine Islamisation with nationalist anti-Israeli militancy grew, which the Islamic Centre decided to adopt as its new policy in 1983. This not only changed the Gazan Brotherhood into a more explicitly Palestinian organisation, but it also caused its leaders to start collecting weapons. When the intifada broke out on 9 December 1987, the Gazan Brotherhood decided the time was right to join the fight against Israel under a new name: Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Resistance Movement), better known as Hamas.[11]

The founding of Hamas thus clearly represented a nationalist change of course for the Palestinian Brotherhood in Gaza. This change was not absolute, however, and the Gazan Brotherhood’s continued influence is reflected in Hamas’ charter, published in 1988.[12] On the one hand, the charter approaches Israel as Jewish, citing Qur’anic verses and hadiths about Jews and adopting anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews’ allegedly nefarious influence throughout the world; on the other hand, it clearly also deals with Palestine, its national identity and Palestinian nationalism and speaks respectfully about the PLO. This is not to suggest that anti-Semitism is limited to the Gazan Brotherhood and never occurs among Hamas members. It does suggest, however, that the Gazan Brotherhood’s greater emphasis on religion facilitates its reasoning that the conflict with Israel is a Jewish-Islamic one, going all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad, which perhaps – in turn – facilitates the use of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories more than a nationalist discourse would.

 

Hamas’ Ideological Development

Since the publication of Hamas’ charter, that organisation’s ideological development can be described as a gradual move away from the Jewish-Islamic rhetoric of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip and towards an increasingly nationalist approach, although this has not happened consistently or absolutely. In its charter, Hamas refers to Palestine as an Islamic waqf (religious endowment) that is to be handed over from generation to generation, never to be given up by Muslims (article 11). Moreover, the charter states that Hamas will strive to raise the banner of Islam over every bit of the land (article 6) and suggests that the end of times will not begin until Muslims fight “the Jews” (article 7). Although the charter was not as uniformly uncompromising as this suggests and, as mentioned above, also struck a more nationalist tone at times, this type of discourse made it easy to depict Hamas as entirely unwilling to ever come to terms with Israel.

Yet Hamas quickly began to differentiate between a “historic solution”, meaning attaining “all of Palestine”, and an “interim solution”, which can more or less be equated with the two-state solution internationally accepted as the end-goal of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy.[13] While Hamas has remained adamant that it will not recognise Israel and has insisted that Palestinians have a right to the entire land, it has long seemed willing to compromise on actually obtaining that supposed right by accepting a removal of the Israeli occupation from and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Crucial in this development has been the concept of hudna (ceasefire). Given the Islamic roots of this concept – the Prophet Muhammad is said to have applied this in his truce with the Meccan Quraysh tribe at Hudaybiyya in the year 628 – this concept enables Hamas to come to an agreement with Israel in an Islamically legitimate way, while still enabling the organisation to claim that it has not given up its right to all of Palestine.[14] In Hamas’ de facto new charter, published in 2017, the organisation repeats its unwillingness to concede its supposed right over any part of Palestine, but simultaneously officially affirms its support for what is, in effect, a two-state solution as a “national consensus formula” (article 20).[15]

The ideological development away from a virtually unsolvable Jewish-Islamic conflict as espoused by the Gazan Brotherhood can also be seen in Hamas’ decreasing emphasis on Islam. This can be seen in the organisation’s ideological documents, for example. While the charter from 1988 frequently refers to Islamic sources, a memo that Hamas produced for Western diplomats in the late 1990s is entirely devoid of that.[16] Later documents, such as a memo published in 2000,[17] Hamas’ elections manifesto from 2006[18] or the aforementioned document from 2017, do mention Islam, but not as a justifying factor in the fight against Israel, thereby pulling the conflict out of the explicitly religious sphere.

Hamas’ decreased emphasis on Islam is connected with another point of change in its discourse, namely the shift away from portraying the enemies as Jews. While the organisation’s charter from 1988 frequently refers to Jews (rather than Israel), as we saw above, and also refers to classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hamas has since made an increasing effort – albeit inconsistently – to emphasise that it is not fighting the Jewish religion or the Jewish people, but an occupying state. As such, later official documents, like those mentioned above, completely refrain from repeating anti-Semitic tropes or conspiracy theories and, instead, insist that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not religious in nature.[19]

Finally, Hamas’ move away from Islamic arguments can also be seen in its rule of the Gaza Strip since 2007. To be sure: Hamas’ governance of the Gaza Strip was Islamic in the sense that many incidents of explicit signs of Islamic piety being forced upon people could be discerned. Yet these could not always be traced to Hamas’ actual policies and may often have been the work of individuals, rather than Hamas’ government. Perhaps more importantly, Hamas’ Islamic policies (insofar as they existed) were limited to the societal sphere and the organisation did not implement the sharia in the Gaza Strip and did not try to establish an Islamic state there.[20]

 

Hamas’ Loosening Ties to the Gazan Muslim Brotherhood

Hamas’ shift away from the Jewish-Islamic prism as employed by the Gazan Muslim Brotherhood is echoed in the organisation’s actual ties to the overarching Islamist group. Firstly, while Hamas was originally founded as an activist wing of the Gazan Brotherhood, the former increasingly took over the social activities of the latter and eventually co-opted it to such an extent that Hamas came to constitute the Palestinian Brotherhood.[21] Secondly, Hamas has set up an armed wing and a political party that have, respectively, engaged in terrorist attacks against Israel and parliamentary politics, both of which are quite at odds with the activities and the policies of the Gazan Brotherhood. As such, Hamas has become a much more nationalist and politicised version of the Gazan Brotherhood.

Given Hamas’ move away from and take-over of the Gazan Brotherhood, it would seem obvious that this is also reflected in how it speaks of the latter, which is indeed the case. While Hamas’ 1988 charter called the organisation “a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine” (article 2), its aforementioned memo from 2000 describes the older group only in historical terms and labels itself “the intellectual and dynamic successor of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine” (article 2). In its 2017 document, finally, Hamas does not mention its relationship with the Brotherhood at all,[22] although this seems partly rooted in a desire to placate Egypt, which had once again outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood after the coup in that country in 2013.[23]

 

Conclusion

Hamas is thus strongly rooted in the Palestinian – and particularly the Gazan – branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, Hamas was founded to exemplify an Islamist version of militancy and Palestinian nationalism, which differed strongly from the Gazan branch’s quietism and its tendency to view the conflict with Israel in religious terms. Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has therefore slowly but surely moved away from the Gazan Brotherhood’s religious approach to the conflict, its explicitly Islamic discourse and even the Brotherhood itself. While this distancing has not been absolute, Hamas’ changing relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood is nevertheless an apt illustration of its ideological evolution throughout the years.

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• MuslimBrotherhood
• Hamas