Recently the Hamas politician Fathi Hammad went on TV to proclaim that the organization’s next step would be to declare a caliphate—a concept that the Islamic State had all but trademarked for its use in jihadist circles. The caliphate would be based in Jerusalem. Hammad also took aim at Muslim rivals (another ISIS obsession) and called for the ouster of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a secular figure. By invoking caliphates and gunning for Abbas, Hammad turned toward a different kind of warfare, religious not only in rhetoric but also in its specific goals. The shift was so noteworthy that it was featured by MEMRI, the monitoring service that specializes in publicizing the most cringey and embarrassing rhetoric from Arab media.
Not much has been said since October 7 about the religious nature of the current war. Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist at Israel’s Haaretz, broached this touchy subject in a recent article. “None of the international coverage and commentary on Hamas’s massacre in Gaza border communities, and the war it triggered, has addressed its religious aspects,” he wrote. Hamas’s fighters incessantly invoke God and use religious language, and at some point one must “take them at face value” and “listen to what they actually say.” Like Zionism, he wrote, Hamas is “rooted in religion,” and that makes the present conflict “fundamentally religious.”
Religion is a sticky and intractable kind of dogma, and if the war is religious, the prospects for negotiated resolution are poor. Luckily, Pfeffer’s contention—that Hamas is religious and therefore the conflict should be understood religiously—is incomplete. I have seen the same videos as Pfeffer and have listened to all the “allahu akbar”s from the Hamas raiders, and their gleeful references to killing “Jews” (not “Israelis”). But listening to what someone says and taking them at face value are often contradictory pursuits. And a close listen to Hamas suggests that although the organization is religious, its religiosity is flexible.
Hardly a minute passes without Hamas supporters draping themselves literally or figuratively in Islamic idioms. Arabic conversation is filled with little stock phrases that mention God, and that through constant use can lose their religious sense. (English does the same: Few Americans have God on the mind when we say goodbye, literally “God be with ye.”) Even by this standard, though, the group’s religious references are frequent, and far from perfunctory. The GoPro videos from the massacre include footage Hamas could not have planned to leak, and it shows killers using religious language with one another, while alone, and with their dying breath. In one case the bearer of a GoPro is shot in the chest, and as his lungs fill with blood, he issues a last, wet, gurgled prayer.
I don’t doubt the sincerity or fanaticism of the death-rattle prayer, or of Hamas’s official statements. I don’t suggest that its leaders are or were insincere; Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, was not sneaking BLTs and Coors Lights after Friday prayers. But for an organization, or a movement, to have “religious roots” means something more than sincere rhetoric. And relative to some other jihadist groups, Hamas has shallow religious roots.
A religious group can bend its political goals to accommodate the demands of religion, or it can bend its religion to accommodate the demands of messy, modern politics. An example of the first is ISIS, which Israeli and American officials have understandably but inaptly compared to Hamas. I wrote previously that ISIS hates Hamas and has marked the group’s leaders for death. One source of ISIS’s enmity was Hamas’s willingness to adopt policies that ISIS considered without support in Islamic scripture or history. ISIS really did try to break free of the bonds of modernity and replace the law and politics of today with forms recognizable to Muslims 1,000 years ago: a caliphate, a criminal code straight from the Quran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, even modes of dress and grooming. Adherence to these policies cost ISIS dearly. When the group seized new towns, the locals often found its ways weird and unpleasant. When ISIS took sex slaves, in what it described as emulation of the practices of the Prophet and his companions, even many of its supporters objected, and pretty much the entire world, including most Muslims, united against ISIS.
By contrast, Hamas’s political program tends toward modernization. The organization mentioned a caliphate as an afterthought. In its infamous charter, Hamas brings up Islam constantly, but only in broad terms. It lists as its first objective “discarding evil, crushing it and defeating it,” and goes on to say that Islam should reign and its land revert to its rightful owners. (It invokes, somewhat tendentiously, the Islamic legal concept of the waqf, an irrevocable religious endowment. Palestine as a whole was a waqf, it says, and thus it can never be ceded to non-Muslims, “until the Day of Resurrection.”) Islam, the charter says, is a “way of life”—a widely shared view among Muslims, but one that says little about whether Ismail Haniyeh or Mahmoud Abbas should be in charge, and what the punishment should be for drinking wine. The charter states that Hamas “draws its guidelines from Islam”—a contrast with ISIS’s deriving its actual laws from Islam.
Hamas tries to take old concepts and mold them to fit new ones, including democracy, a form of government alien to Islam—and every other ancient religion—in its original form. Early Muslims counted as a key political concept bay’a, or loyalty oaths, and ISIS adopted these, whereas one Hamas ideologue likened multiparty democracy to a “modern bay’a,” as a way to legitimate the newfangled political concept. The group’s politics are replete with these concessions to life in a modern state. Even the supposed irrevocability of the waqf turns out to be flexible: The group has suggested that it would accept the existence of some version of Israel, and well before the Day of Resurrection.
What distinguishes a movement with deep, as opposed to shallow, religious roots is whether its actions make any sense, except in light of religious motivation—or whether, when you subtract the religious element, the movement stays pretty much the same. On the one hand, political violence by Palestinians is not an exclusively Muslim activity (Christians and atheists have partaken), and Hamas’s terrorism fits within that ecumenical tradition. Even Hammad, in his teaser about a caliphate, tried to keep his tent extra-large. He appealed to Islamic concepts, but he also appealed to a universal sense of self-respect, saying that he was “not even talking in terms of being Muslim, but in terms of being noble.” On the other hand, if Hamas were drained of its Muslim character, one would have a hard time imagining those youngsters running around the Gaza envelope, hoping to end the day with a bloody prayer on their lips. Non-Muslims have courted glorious and (in their minds, at least) heroic deaths just as Muslims have. But the particular headlong rush toward martyrdom does seem characteristic of jihadism.
The religious rhetoric is there; it is sincere; it is foundational. And yet the action on the basis of that rhetoric remains not completely religious in character. I see ample room for motivation by chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and, yes, legitimate political grievance. Fathi Hammad’s comments suggest that the religious roots are sinking deeper. But they haven’t hit bedrock yet.