ABSTRACT
How has a relatively new organization like Hamas been able to ‘blur the boundaries between a narrow territorial state (dawla qutriyya) and a broad Islamic nation (Umma)’? (Mishal and Sela, 2000, p. 32). Gellner argues that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness, it is rather the invention of nations where they do not exist’ (cited in Marty and Appleby, 1993, p. 622). According to this rationale, Hamas has been able to win over the minds and hearts of Palestinians by re-imagining the identity and the features of this yet-to-be Palestinian state. It has done so by situating and historizing the Palestinian struggle in the universal search for a renewed Islamic caliphate, and by providing for and empowering vulnerable social groups like the refugees in the Gaza Strip, who had been previously marginalized by the secular power system.
