Opinion | The Theology of Hamas

Hamas isn’t only a terrorist group, and it isn’t a Palestinian nationalist movement. It is a religious organization, incubated by the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, departed from Islamic tradition and created Islamism, a totalitarian ideology to resist the pluralist West.

Its worldview, as French political scientist Gilles Kepel has documented, arose in the same intellectual firmament as German Nazism and Italian fascism. The Brotherhood developed a new declaration of faith for its members: “God is our objective. The Prophet is our political leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our method. Martyrdom is our aspiration.” No Muslim before the 20th century would have belittled his faith’s sacred text by regarding it as a political manifesto.