ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a detailed understanding of Hamas both as an Islamist movement and as a national liberation movement. The exploration of various facets of Hamas’s development and maturation is necessary to account for the shifts in Hamas’s political behaviour. As such, the chapter is divided into several sections. The first section provides a brief history of the MB’s presence in Palestine/OPT to provide some context to the eventual inception of Hamas. The second section outlines Hamas’s internal structure and worldview, providing an appreciation of its relative strengths and weaknesses as a movement and as a government. The third section examines its ideological construction and development. Here the importance of the combination of national liberationism and Islamism in Hamas’s ideological narrative becomes clearer. The final section consists of a brief analysis of three influential persons that have played a part in the development of Hamas’s ideological narrative: Sheiykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Sayyid Qutb, and Sheiykh Ahmed Yassin.
