A Different Concept of Death

An interview with author and intellectual Paul Berman about Hamas’s ideology and Western blindness.

PB: Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood emerged in the 1930s as an Islamic fundamentalist renewal movement, but it became a mass movement by absorbing a number of European ideas. Mussolini and Hitler wanted to “cleanse” society by resurrecting the Roman Empire in some kind of modern version. Hassan al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and he entertained a similar cleansing fantasy, only, in his case, he wanted to revive the Islamic empire of the Prophet Mohammed.

AS: Did he draw upon the ideas of the fascists?

PB: He invoked Mussolini, and he invoked Hitler, whom he admired especially. And he promoted a cult of death, as the European fascists did. But he did it in his own style. “Martyrdom on the path of God is our greatest hope,” was Banna’s slogan. The greatest theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb, who happened to be a scholar of English Romanticism, as well. Qutb deepened the cultural and psychological ideas of the Brotherhood, again in a style that is bound to seem recognizable to anyone who knows the European literature. And he brought all of this together in his thinking about the Jews.

AS: What did this thinking look like?

PB: A central document of European antisemitism is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious fabrication, which postulates a Jewish conspiracy to impose a wicked domination of the world. TheProtocols were Hitler’s favorite text, and the German government in his era distributed it in Arabic translation to the Arab countries. Qutb drew on the Protocols in formulating his own supernatural conspiracy theory of Jewish evil, according to which the Jews began to conspire against Islam in the seventh century in Medina, and continued to do so until modern times, with the intention of annihilating Islam.

AS: So, Nazi thinking infiltrated Islamist movements?

PB: Yes, Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their fellow thinkers among the Palestinians arrived at an idea of Jewish evil that is not so deeply rooted in Islam. In traditional Islam, the Jews play a different role, not that of an all-powerful and frightening cosmic enemy. The idea that the Jews are all-powerful and cosmically frightening is pretty much a European idea.

AS: Why is this important in relation to Hamas?

PB: Hamas has fully embraced these ideas. You can see that in their founding charter from 1988. The charter, or “covenant,” begins with a quotation from the Quran, followed by a quotation from Banna about the obliteration of Israel. The cultural and psychological analysis that follows seems to come from Qutb, or from thinkers with similar views. And the charter goes on to invoke this strictly European document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

AS: Hatred of Jews is openly declared.

PB: Article Seven of the charter calls for the extermination of Jews. Today, it is said that Hamas is a response to the terrible things that Israel has done to the Palestinians since 1948. But these ideas about the Jews do not come from 1948. The ideas are an infernal mix of Islamic fundamentalism and Nazi ideology of the 1930s and 1940s, elaborated in later years by various people, and then adopted by Hamas in the late 1980s.