Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 16: Hamas and the broken promise of 150 years of Islamic reform

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Hamas's rule in Gaza is a theocratic dictatorship. But its roots lie in the 19th-century movement for Islamic reform that believes modernization, science and even political liberalization. How did the great liberalizing theologians of the late 19th century, from Al-Afghani to Abduh to Rida, become Hamas?Join us for a story that raises the startling possibility that the deradicalization of Gaza could come from within.This episode is sponsored by “the Frozen Chosen, Haviv's supportive community from Minnesota."And as has become a podcast tradition, this episode is dedicated to Netta Epstein, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists in his home in Kibbutz K'far Aza on the morning of Oct. 7th. In his last selfless act, he heroically jumped on a grenade, saving the life of his fiancé Irene. Netta was well known in many communities, but we focus on him today because Netta spent four summers at Herzl Camp in Wisconsin.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hi, everybody. Today's episode is going to be a complicated thing, a deep dive into the theological origins and the political and spiritual origins of Hamas. We're not going to ask what Hamas believes. We're not going to look at Hamas leaders and thinkers and try to explain Hamas's strategy and this bitter, horrible war and all of that. What we're going to be looking at is actually the genial. of ideas from the reformers of the 19th century in Sunni Arab Islam down through the Muslim Brotherhood and over to Hamas that created the movement, that created its sense of self, its way of thinking, that created its strategy and its willingness to engage in horrible, bloody warfare and terrorism, not just to fight an enemy it believes is evil, but actually also to undermine any peace with that enemy, to target peace processes, and to lead to the destruction and death among Palestinians. Hamas believes, the people who run Hamas and belong to Hamas, believe that they are engaged in a vast redemptive struggle that is far, far larger

than the Palestinian cause, far larger than independence for Palestinians, from Israeli military rule. In fact, they oppose independence for Palestinians from Israeli military rule as long as it leaves Israel in existence. And so why? Where do they come from? One of the really extraordinary things to know about Hamas. And by extension, other jihadi violent anti-Western anti-kind of anti-liberal anti-modernizing movements in the Sunni Arab world is that they began with the best of intentions. They began in a deep reformist impulse that was pro-emulating the West's strengths, finding within Islam rationalist interpretations, doubling down on science, rebuilding a very weakened cultural space, weakened by 400 years of Ottoman rule, weakened by, as the reformist thinkers of the 19th century, argued by centuries of blind adherence to medieval

jurisprudence to medieval religious ideas. And they discussed a return to an older version of Islam, to the original Islam, to the Islam of the forefathers, of the first generations of Muslims, as a path forward towards science and commerce and prosperity and strength and redemption of Islam from these centuries of weakness. These reformist ideas that Westerners today would be inspired to hear from Muslim leaders and were advocated by the most senior of Muslim leaders, the most important, the most mainstream of Muslim leaders. These ideas transformed over the course of the generations, over the course of the last 140 years, into the most violent jihadi, destructive, burn our own society to the

ground in the Great War for Redeeming Islam, versions and strains within Islam. How did that happen? First of all, I'm going to try and lay out that story. But ultimately, the fact that Hamas comes from the great reformers of the 19th century, I think, teaches us that there is a path even within this kind of radical conservatism in Islam, which is a oxymoron, except that, as you'll see, within this kind of Muslim discourse in this particular strain of Islam, makes perfect sense, the idea of radical conservatism. But even within that radical conservatism, there are paths forward to much, much better things, to real reform, to real prosperity and development and peace and equality. It's also an argument that Gaza knows

how to deradicalize itself, if it has a religious leadership willing to access, frankly, just the Islam of their grandparents. But before we get into that story, I want to tell you about our sponsor. Our podcast today is sponsored by the Frozen Chosen, Chauvin, Kaviv supportive community from Minnesota. Folks, I went to Minnesota, gave a talk at the Jewish Community Relations Council, Minnesota, to a packed room. The governor of Minnesota was there.

It was really an extraordinary event with really wonderful people. I think I might have spoken a little too long. Minnesotans are so polite. They'll never tell you that. And they have asked to sponsor this episode and called themselves the Frozen Chosen. I absolutely love that. Today we remember Netta Epstein, 22 years old when he died, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists in his home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on the morning of October 7.

In his last selfless act, he jumped on a grenade thrown into the home by Hamas terrorists outside the house. His fiancé, Irene, was saved by that act. Netta was well known in many different circles and communities. We focus on him today because Netta spent four summers at Herzl camp in Wisconsin. He was a part of a group from the Gaza envelope communities that came to experience summer camp in the United States and create friendships with American Jewish peers, Netta was the first Israeli camper to attend Herzl for multiple summers. He was the first Israeli Ozo, that's a counselor in training at the camp, and he inspired a new precedent for Israelis to come to Herzl camp and return

year after year. Netta was beloved by campers, by staff. He's remembered for a silly spirit, his love of soccer, an inclusive personality, a contagious curiosity, and and his big heart. Netta has survived by his parents, Ori and Ayelet, his sister's Rona and Alma, and his fiancée, Irene. Thank you to the Minnesota Jewish community, to the Frozen Chosen, for letting us remember him. I want to talk today about Hamas. I want to talk today about the new president of Syria, who was once affiliated with al-Qaeda. I want to talk today about the Qataris and their sponsorship of jihad. I want to talk today about the Qataris and their sponsorship of jihad. I want to talk today about our new friends in the Emirates. I want to talk today about the Palestinians' possible

alternate futures, like a future of deradicalization and independence and prosperity. I want to talk about all of these things without specifically talking about all of these things, because our subject today specifically addresses these things. And it's a complicated and fascinating story. And here's the secret. I already mentioned in the introduction. Here it is. The absolute worst elements of the present-day Muslim world. I'm talking about the violent theocracy of Hamas, have their earliest roots in a deeply reformist and modernizing, and even in some important ways, liberalizing impulse. We're going to talk about the people. We're going to look at those ideas. We're not talking, you know, a very important caveat. I really want to put this out there,

not to be politically correct, but because it is intellectually accurate and important. I am not going to talk about ordinary Muslims, what they think, what they believe. You know, to talk about the development of Christian thought is not the same as talking about what billions of Christian people are actually thinking. There's a connection. There's an overlap. It's an important one, but it's not a simple one. So I'm going to criticize. I am going to discuss and I'm going to lay out some very negative things. It's in the idea space. Real people live in a much more complicated world than the idea systems in which, that circle them and to which they adhere. This episode is not about telling you what Islam thinks, where Islam went wrong.

This is going to be very, very focused in order to actually say something real and useful that with any luck, and hopefully, Muslim listeners and viewers will be able to identify with, debate with, but understand that I am trying to take it very seriously. we're going to be looking at a specific line, a lineage of thinkers, of theologians, of masters who taught students, who in turn became masters to a new generation of students, in a specific intellectual lineage that begins in the great calls for deep reform and modernization in the 19th century, mostly in Egypt, but not only. And we're going to focus on, you know, this is parts of the Arab Sunni world, right?

So it's not happening, you know, necessarily everywhere. and a lineage that ends in Hamas, ends in Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassines called to murder all Jews everywhere and the, you know, incorporation of Nazi themes and the protocols of the elders of Zion into the Hamas charter.

And ultimately, Yichia Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, his cruel strategy, not only of massacring Israelis, but of dragging Gaza into a catastrophic war designed, that's what the great tunnel system is for, designed to be as destructive as possible for Gaza while Hamas hides in the tunnels in order to make Gaza's destruction a precursor to Israel's destruction. In other words, a leadership willing to sacrifice their own polity. How do we get

from 19th century liberalizing reformers to that Hamas? In the early 1800s, there began a Nakhd awakening in the Arab world. It was driven, some scholars think, by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, that sudden jarring, unavoidable experience of European power set against the weakness of the Arab Muslim world or the Ottoman world.

But other scholars think that it had to do with internal reforms in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire knew it was weak and began to drive major reforms, and try to build railways and political reforms, the Tanzimath reforms, and try to build out a better political system and political order that would encourage prosperity and better imperial control and allow the empire to continue to survive and even reverse

some of the weakening tendencies within the Ottoman Empire. So was it external pressure or was it internal reforms that themselves are just one degree distant from a similar? kind of external pressure. Let's just say it was both. It makes a lot of sense that it was both, and the actual Muslim thinkers in this group, they thought of it as both. The lineage that I want to describe today begins with a gentleman born in 1839 named Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Jamal-Din al-Afgani was a preacher, an imam, a jurist as well, and he preached. a kind of modernist Islam that he framed in a very interesting way, and this is going to be a recurring theme,

as a kind of return to an original Islam. Al-Afghani was the thinker who began to talk about the problem, obviously not beginning, but for our purposes in this lineage, began to talk about the problem of taklid, of tradition, of adhering to what was basically medieval jurisprudence, medieval theological interpretation, that had he believed frozen and ossified Islamic thought. And so he absorbed this sense that European power was no longer ignorable. The gap between the Muslim world and the Europeans was no longer ignorable. The theological crisis of Islamic weakness, of desperate Islamic weakness,

was therefore the subject of Islamic thought. You can't avoid it, and it matters, because Islam-like Christianity is a missionizing religion, a religion that believes that its spread is the same thing as the great redemption of the world, that it has this redemptive mission in the world, it has this duty to spread and ultimately be the religion of humanity. There's a redemptive arc to history

that the spread of Islam brings about and is a precondition for. And therefore Islamic weakness is a profound theological crisis. Something in the Christian world, in the West, in the Western European world, was going right and it was going wrong in Islam. Al-Afghani basically argued that the authoritarian monarchies and the medieval ossification of tradition had left Islam unable to pivot, unable to interpret itself, reinterpret itself, unable to absorb the strengths of the West, the rationalism, the science,

and unable therefore to be a strong force, the force it needs to be, the rightful place it needs to take, unable to take that place in history. Al-Afghani's main and most important student was Muhammad Abdoukh. 1849 to 1905, he didn't live very long, but he had a profound influence on how the Arab Sunni world would think about these things in the future. His teacher, Al-Afghani, began the discourse on absorbing from the West, you know, liberalizing, democratizing, rationalist ideas. Abdouche took those ideas of Al-Afghani and really became a pioneer in spreading them and

expanding on them and creating a proper internal Muslim movement. He opposed adherence to takli to tradition, but the blind imitation. of tradition. He wanted to revive rationalism within Islam. He wanted Muslims to begin to use their critical thinking rather than total obedience that he saw as the inheritance of these medieval traditions. He wanted the word in Arabic is itchihad. Ishtiad is independent reasoning. You look at a piece of the Quran, you understand something about science. They can be merge they can be internally coherent with each other they are not necessarily opposed to each other we don't have to choose between our great moral truth and our great scientific truth if we use independent reasoning and are willing to open the gates of interpretation to allow for all these modern things that the Europeans have proven to us are the path to success.

So he wanted to challenge stagnation, which he basically saw as moral decay. In other words, it was Islam failing not just to build a political order that would be more successful. It was Islam failing to be the religious world it needed to be, failing to be the expansionist, redemptive, world-improving tradition that it needed to be. This conversation about moving away from T'Klid, moving away from an ossified tradition, and leading an Islamic revival through independent rational reinterpretation of Islam, which Abdouh placed emphatically in the ancient caliphs. This was the original idea of Islam, he said, the ability to take the Quran, the ability to

take the sayings of the prophet and to link them and merge them, say that they are coherent and compatible with new ideas, new experiences, new discoveries, new science, is the original stance of Islam, according to Abdouche. That has been lost. The traditionalists, the people who close the gates of interpretation are the people who left Islam weakened in the face of a new and surging European strengths because the Europeans did not have these limitations placed by Islam taking that wrong turn in the Middle Ages. And so he wanted to lead a weak, a dependent, a fragmented Arab world out of this weakness and into the light. And it was an urgent impulse in Abdur's day. The urgency, of course, was European conquest. The British were in control of Egypt, the French. were colonizing Algeria. The entire edifice of what had been Ottoman lands and the Ottoman Empire

was retreating on many, many fronts, and Muslim control was retreating. And more and more Muslim areas, Muslim communities, Muslim peoples were falling under the influence of the far more powerful Europeans. And so for the Muslims to get it together, to adopt reason and reform and science was an urgent political task because only political renewal, political restructuring and strengthening, would actually create the conditions necessary for political liberation.

Abdouch believed that one of the great strengths driving this economic engine and political engine that allowed European empires to grow so powerfully and to be so much more powerful than, for example, Islam, was democracy, was liberalism, and he thought that a tremendous amount of it could be adopted within Islamic frameworks and that it was absolutely necessary to achieve what Islam needed to achieve.

He talked about the Shura idea, the consultation idea, consultative bodies around the ruler that would be a kind of constitutional check like, you know, French theoreticians were talking about checks and balances. There would be public consultation. It would be a state of the rule of law. Now, he wasn't, he didn't have to work hard to take these. democratic ideas, the Republican ideas from the West, and apply them to Islam. Islam is very much a religion of law, very much a religion of order, and very much a religion

that also sees the ruler as fundamentally reigned in by ethical and moral requirements and also ethical and moral institutions. Rulers were the both political leader but also religious leader. And yet at the same time, rulers were not free to do whatever they wanted. against the determinations and beliefs of A, believers, and B, imams and ultimately the religious leadership. And so he went looking for the most modernized, westernized, and liberalized interpretation that is still deep, deep Islamic, internal Islamic theory.

Abduh believed that weakness, the weakness that Muslims were going through came from an abandonment of Islam. of true islam of the true path which would deliver for moslems honor and strength and borrowing wisdom from the europeans finding it in islam realizing what it is about islam effectively what that would be would be realizing what about islam muslims had forgotten and lost Muhammad Abdoukh, while he talked this way and wrote these things, was the grand Mufti of Egypt. We are not talking about marginal figures that I'm drawing on because I like them. We're not talking about that one liberal guy that, you know, coming from the West that nobody actually sees as an authority in the Muslim world. And then comes Abdouk's great student, Rashid Rida. Muhammad Rashid Rida comes from a village in Syria, what is today northern Lebanon, but at the time was Ottoman Syria.

Born in 1865, died in 1935, 30 years after the death of Abdoukh. And he was very much Abdux's top disciple, his most important student. And he was drawn to Abduh, precisely because Rida saw himself as part of the Nakhda, part of the awakening, part of the modernization idea, part of the argument that we can learn from the West, but the specific strengths we need to draw from the West's strength, from the discovery of the gap and strength that we have allowed to develop between Islam and the West, we can find deep within Islam. Islam has the answers.

An originalist sense of Islam will deliver for us an end to this crisis of modernity, to this crisis of weakness that the Europeans and their strength has forced on us. In 1905, Rida is 40 years old. Abdoukh dies. Rita moves to Cairo from present-day Lebanon in 1898. And in 1898, he establishes a journal. I just wanted to clarify how important Rita is called Al-Mannar. Al-Manar is the lighthouse.

This journal would go on to become the most influential journal in the Muslim world. And I mean Morocco, you saw printings of Almanar, and in Malaysia you saw printings of Almanar. You saw thinkers in the Muslim community in the Muslim community in Russia try to create their own versions of Almanar after reading Almanar and being deeply influenced both by its ideas and both by the platform of a pan-Islamic journal of that sort. Al-Mannar becomes an astonishingly important platform. And over the next 35 years, 37 years until Rita's death, Rita would develop ideas about pan-Islamism, talking about the Uma, the great nation of all believers, about the need for reform,

about a very modernist view of a call for nationalist awakening as a first step toward a larger Muslim awakening. He would be exactly like al-Afghani and Abdouche's teacher and his teacher's teacher in terms of being a theologian of Islamic weakness who needs to bring Islam into this modern age, understand the challenge posed by Western power, and turn that challenge into a rallying of Islam and Muslims

until they can produce a powerful society of their own. He also lived through, the great disappointment with these modernist ideas, with these liberalizing calls of his teachers. He believed that an Arab awakening, an Arab independence movement, a liberalization of the Arab Muslim world would produce strength and power to throw off the yoke of the imperialists. When he died in 1935, all of that looked like it had failed. There was a short-lived attempt by Syrian Arabs that Rita was actually part of

to establish a Syrian independent state and the French crushed it with military force. A lot of the Arab leaders that took on the mantle of Arab awakening in Arab nationalism and building out Arab states over the course of the 20s did it as stuges of the British. The British drew the lines in the sand that would form the nation states

and these leaders were jockeying for position to be appointed by the British overlords. Rita watched as these hopes of awakening never came true, as the weakness of the Arabs and the weakness of the Muslims only deepened, and British control only grew stronger. French control only grew stronger and in some ways more violent. There's a tragedy here. If Rita had lived 13 more years and seen 1948 and the British redeployment out of,

many of the countries, not just Israel, Palestine, but many of the countries in the region, Egypt, he would have understood that actually imperialism and colonialism were on their way out of the region, but he didn't live that long, and he, over the course of those 30 years, let's say from 1898, when he establishes al-Munar till 1935, becomes deeply, deeply disenchanted and resentful, and radicalizes. and he radicalizes for reasons that we're already there in the original ideas of al-Afghani and abduh. So, for example, he talks about the need for Islamic unity, for an UMA, for an understanding and a consciousness of having an Uma. Uma is actually an interesting Arabic word. It means nation.

It's a cognate of the Hebrew word Uma or Le'om, which are modern words for a literal nation, like we might say the Poles or a nation or the Germans or. a nation or the Yemenis are a nation. And so it is consciously applied to Muslims as a way of saying Muslims because they are united by this great redemptionist, you know, revelationist idea, are themselves a nation. In other words, it's not a different word that you have to understand in its own context. It is the word nation applied to Islam to say Islam is more than religion. When you join the religion, you have joined something deeper, something more visceral. That sense Islamic unity was there among all the reformers and through that Islamic unity we will

reach that level of reform. Rida witnessed in 1924 the cancellation and shuddering of the caliphate of the caliph of the Ottoman rulers who claimed to be caliphs. Caliphs are the religious rulers of Islam and the caliphate was dismantled and in modern Turkey in the new modern Turkey established in the wake of the Ottoman Empire. and rita wrote a book and i have the book caliphate now is how you translate the hebrew translation of this book pick up the english translation there are many translation it's a remarkable book because if you read a book to-day from a muslim thinker that says caliphate now you assume it's pretty radical pretty jihadi pretty violent it's not rita would come to advocate quite a bit of violence to over overthrow the imperialist powers. But it is something so much more interesting than that.

It's an argument that this thing that just fell, a Muslim political order rooted in Muslim law and thought needs to be rebuilt. And it still needs to be rooted in Muslim law and thought. And it has to have consultative bodies, Shura, councils. And we have to build it out with some of the strengths, checks and balances that we learn from the West, but through interpretation, by finding these things in the Quran and in the Sharia. In other words, we also need a rational reinterpretation of the Quran. It needs to ultimately deliver for us liberty, freedom of thought that would allow for scientific progress. It needs to give us modern governance with Islamic legitimacy. It is a call for a caliphate that is liberalizing.

and modernizing. It's this astonishing mix that Al-Afghani and Abdduch had been thinking about. And Rita really draws it out. The book is actually written in serialized articles, essays in Al-Mannar over a certain period of time.

Rita sees Islam as in some ways far behind the Europeans on questions of governance or scientific progress or checks and balances or all of these important reforms. But in some ways he also sees them as having a leg up. as it being more natural to Islam than to the West, and therefore Islam's path to these things, to these achievements, to these reforms,

isn't a long one, isn't a difficult one. For example, in the 1890s, and I think it's 1898 in Almanar, Rida deeply and profoundly criticizes the French for the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus Affair, there's an episode of this podcast that dealt with it, I think episode one,

where we talked about Herzl's journey to Zun, Zionism. The Dreyfus affair was not just an unjust trial for treason against a Jewish officer in France who was totally innocent. And even when the entire French High Command knew he was innocent, they still threw him into a prison. And anti-Semitism became the discourse. And this was, you know, the number one topic dividing the French elites. And it actually produced mass riots throughout France against Jewish communities. It was this enormous failure. of French republicanism and decency and fairness and equality and all these ideas that France takes pride in.

And Rita watched it and followed it and remarked, first of all, criticized the racial intolerance of French republicanism. But he also remarked that nothing like it had ever happened in Islam. And so Islam was already ethically, morally ahead on some of these progressive questions. in the early years of Zionism in the early 1890s, saw a lot of good in Zionism. He thought Zionism was the Jews doing what he believed Arabs should be doing. So, for example, returning to their old language, returning to their old

texts, harking back to a kind of originalist Judaism in order to rebuild, in order to reunify, in order to change a world, a situation of terrible weakness. and a world that truly threatened them in the mass waves of pogroms happening in Eastern Europe. He looked at Zionism and he said, hey, the Arabs need that. He actually talked about learning.

He wrote in Al-Mannar about learning from the Zionists, developing the way the Zionists were developing. And then everything soured for Rida. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. European imperialism and colonialism became the de facto rulers and controlled everything happening in the Arab Muslim world. And some of the other options for modernizing the Arab world that had arisen, secularism and nationalism, mostly driven by Christian thinkers who naturally couldn't appeal to old Islamic ideas in their call for reform,

had failed him, had failed the Arab world, had failed to drive serious and profound reform, throw off the yoke of imperialism and colonialism. and so reidah slowly and always rooted in arafghanis and abduh's ideas turned away from the reformist liberalizing impulse there was the idea that all the problems all the questions can be found in islam islam itself contained the reforms that islam needed to grow strong again well this idea transformed into a doctrine of political theology right rulers should enforce sharia sharia was the source of legitimacy for rule a literalist reading of the koran became a puritanical reading of the koran this is a very similar process to what happened in protestantism in fifteen seventeen martin lutherd mails to the wall of the vertenberg cathedral in Germany, his 95 theses. And one of those theses is

the idea that you can appeal, the believer can bypass the priest, the church, and appeal directly to the scripture. And access the scripture. And Luther and the Protestants would lead a massive

effort, driven, helped by the Gutenberg Press and this new bursting forth of the capacity to distribute books on a mass scale. a translation of the scripture and the idea was it doesn't all get filtered in obscure languages through a priesthood that tells you what god believes and you have to go to the priest to know what god wants of you you yourself can learn what god wants of you by going to the scripture now the original impulse of that idea is to bypass the corruption of the church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but what ended up happening was a lot of people were suddenly reading the their Bible and coming to religious conclusions. And because they had had direct access to the canonical text itself, to the divine text itself, they believed that they were reflecting God's

word in a way that a believer who had to ask the priest's permission for everything really couldn't believe about themselves. And so they turned puritanical and oppressive. Protestantism doesn't begin with modern American free-for-all of ideas. Protestantism begins with calvinist geneva it begins with these small very very oppressive totalitarian kinds of communities and so the original over the long arc it would lead to a massive opening of religious thought and religious freedom but in the immediate aftermath of opening of a discourse that favors an appeal to a canonical text directly you build out puritans you might like the puritans of plymouth rock and and Salem, Massachusetts and that founding ethos, but I don't know if you'd want to live there. You would not have been allowed to put a single toe out of line.

A similar dynamic, it's hard to compare these processes across centuries and across cultures and religions, happens to Rita and happens to Rita's followers. We go straight to the Quran, and we find in the Quran a blueprint for an Islamic state, and we find in the Quran a blueprint that argues, this is Rita's great argument as he lays out a blueprint for this, caliphate this Islamic state, that scholars and early Islamic ideas and norms, whatever we could find in the holy generations, the first generations of Islam, the incredibly successful generations of

Islam, who extremely quickly built an empire that spanned continents. We go back to them and what we find there, that is true Islam, that is the solution to the great problem of Islamic weakness in the modern age. This begins as a modern process. This begins as an attempt to reform something that had become decayed and corrupted. And by the 20s and 30s, it becomes an Islamist political theory that was much more about creating a public space that does not actually have a diversity of opinion, that a politics that adheres very closely to a very originalist interpretation of the religion. it was an appeal to Islamic truth

to build out a political body that would rule Islam and reform Islam and rebuild Islam but once it was installed and once there was a caliph religion in God and Islam itself demanded the adherence to that belief and so it was creating a political authority

that denied the legitimacy of any other political authority because it was rooted in actual original Islam. And it sought to unify Muslims, that's the Ummah, and to protect Muslims and fight for Muslims against Western domination, cultural domination, but also military and political domination. Folks, I'm describing a slow trend from deeply reformist impulses to Rita launching a campaign after 1924, after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate,

to establish a new caliphate and redeturning from finding the solutions to modernity in rational rethinking of our interpretation of the Quran to

Sharia law being the only legitimate source of legislation not only would he reject Western-style democracy he would come to support jihad jihad as he understood it as war a war to overthrow

these Western powers. The early generations of Islam expanded Islam and built out the Islamic empires and brought the great revelation of Muhammad to the world through war. Ultimately, it wasn't enough to reform through internal processes and introduce some checks and balances you found in the consultative traditions of Islam or reform Sharia of interpretation. Ultimately, war would lift the yoke of the European oppressor, war would unite Muslims, war would redeem Islam. He even wrote himself that when I say jihad, I don't mean what many, many thinkers talk about, which is jihad being this internal spiritual struggle within myself. I mean the jihad of external war in the geopolitical.

of this world. That's an obligation. If Muslim lands are occupied, if Muslim lands are attacked, he writes, colonial powers have to be resisted militarily, and Muslim rulers who fail to protect Islam, and fail to protect Islam through violence and war, or collaborate with the British, collaborate with the French, collaborate with the Zionists. They have to be deposed. They have to be overthrown, they have to be opposed, they can be attacked. This vision of modernity, a modernization, this movement of modernization, through piety, through a return to the old time religion, produced many nonviolent movements, including within, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.

And it produced, after Rida, extremely violent movements. Rita begins with an admiration of Zionism, reawakening, awakening within Jews these energies that allowed the Jews to go from the refugees of 1898 to the Israel of 2025. He wanted the Arabs to emulate that path, those energies. He goes from that to advocating, to sitting in 1931 on stage at the great emergency gathering for the rescue, of Jerusalem from the Zionists put on by Hajamina al-Huseni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,

who advocated massacres of Jews and advocated the destruction of Zionism and war against the European empires. That's the pivot, the failure. That's how ideas of finding these reforms within Islam became a kind of internal Islamic fundamentalism. It became an appeal to the original conquering ethos of the first generations of Islam. The Ummah that Rita talked about was born in conquest. And Salafism, as it was understood then, the forefatherism, so to speak, idea is necessarily going to generate those who call for war. Abdouh, Rita's teacher, never supported violence.

He didn't like extremism. Rita didn't at first either. And by the way, when the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, after the establishment of the Saudi kingdom, after the conquest of the hijazz in the 1920s, the holy area of Arabia with Mecca and Medina, the Saudis actually sent to Rita for students to come build out their new Wahhabi education system. And he was uncomfortable with Wahhabism. He thinks it was too conservative. It took all these ideas too far. But he sent those students. And he contributed to that building.

And he supported what he saw as a future caliphate, pan-Arab, pan-Islamic caliphate born in Saudi Arabia. That would be based there because that is the holy center of Islam. He didn't support violence until he did. And by the end of his career, he was actually lecturing Muslims to go to jihad to war, including for the unification of Islam and for the ousting of the imperialist and colonel. and for the destruction of the Zionists. And now we come to the last of this lineage, a student of Rida's, a man who would come for meals in Rida's home,

and who took Rita's transformative ideas or Rida's own arc from the very modernizing and liberalizing ideas of Abdouh to a much more fundamentalist, originalist, puritan. ideas and also violent ideas of Rida's later years and consolidated them into a grand theory and built out the modern Islamist movement, the most important of them, that would come to produce Hamas in the 1980s. His name was Hassan al-Banna. He was born in 1906 the year after Abduh's death. He was, so, he was, so. an important figure because he took Rita's later ideas. He actually, when Rita passed away in

1935, took over Al-Manar and tried to continue publishing it. But it, without Rida, Al-Manar wasn't really Al-Manar. But just as a signal of how much Hassan al-Bana himself saw himself as a disciple as a continuation of Rashid Rida. Hassan al-Bana's ideas, consolidated Rita's ideas. Under him, he came up with a theory that all politics must be Islamic politics. All policy must be Islamic policy. Islam contained all the answers to monetary policy, fiscal policy. Everything was Islam.

Everything could be incorporated as Islam. He advocated ending the influence of Western culture, Western custom. Western Moors. So for example, women should stop walking around in Western clothing, as was extremely common in Egypt of the 1960s. It was a totalitarian Islam, what people sometimes call Islamism. Islam as an ideology, Islam as a political theory, not Islam the religion, but Islam the political ideology. The movement was extraordinarily influential. In 1949, the Egyptian secret police assassinated Hassan al-Bana. and his son took over the running of the Muslim Brotherhood. And so we have it, folks. In 1987, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and others

establishing Gaza, an organization called Hamas as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the Muslim Brotherhood under Hassan al-Bana, it develops an entire charity network, a system of charity that is, again, Islamic, part of Zakat, which is the acognate of the Hebrew, Zadqa.

a charity network that is seen as fundamental to an Islamic society, to the proper functioning of an Islamic society. All things are contained within Islam. Hamas today in Gaza is a massive network of charities. A anti-colonialist modeled on the F.L.N. of Algeria fighting force that believes that all Islam should unite in the pan-Islamic umma to resist the occupier the imperialist the westerner all the things that come and stand on top of muslim lands and must be pushed out through great purifying war as the example of the first generations of islam teach us nothing of israel can remain standing the war is permanent the war is for the redemption of islam if gaza must be destroyed to bring about the redemption of islam from centuries of weakness so be it

Hamas leaders sacrificed their own families in this war. Ismail Haniyah didn't just shrug off the deaths of Ghazan civilians while Hamas hid in tunnels that no civilian was allowed to step foot into for 19 months now. Ismail Haniyah shrugged off the deaths of his sons and their families in this war. Three of his sons were killed in this war. All that death, all that destruction, is a lot of them. okay is justifiable. And the strategy that puts that destruction at the forefront, because that is the greatest cost they can inflict on Israel, is the death of Gazans, is a legitimate strategy, if you

understand the vastness of the stakes, and the century and a half of discourse on Islamic weakness, Islamic reform, how we redeem Islam from all of its troubles and problems and the weakness in the face of the modern West. Hamas also manages to unify Palestinian nationalism, which it's not really nationalist. It doesn't like flying the Palestinian flag, which is a flag designed by the British.

It is Palestinian nationalism only in as much as it sees Arab nationalism as a stepping stone to an Islamic awakening, to a pan-Islamic awakening. If Palestinian nationalism does the job of kicking out the Jews, it will have been a

step on that larger, grander mission. If you're hearing Hassan al-Bana and Rida and Abduh and Al-Afghani, you're correct. One of the students of this illustrious line of thinkers was Saeed

Al-Kutab, who spent time in the West, came back, took on these ideas of this sort of Islamic originalism, Salafism, forefatherism, and included, incorporated into it a deep deep disdain and and almost moral horror at what he believed was the west's moral decay he talked about going to a party in nineteen fifty's america and seeing them throw their elbows around and dance and gyrate he thought that american society was fundamentally morally decayed

he was talking about the period that americans today see primarily as a society as america at its stuffiest and most moralizing but for but for cutib it was it was decay and he incorporated that deep, visceral anti-Westernism into the thought of Rida. And he even then talked about how this Islamic return to the original generations was fundamentally revolutionary and permanently revolutionary. Well, he's the inspiration for groups like Al-Qaeda. from liberalizing, modernizing reform that sought within Islam parallels to Western democracy in checks and balances and consultation

and in openness to re-interpreting Islam by going straight to the original sources from this deep liberalizing place, this love of science, this desire to find within Islam the answers to modernization and the challenge of European modernization flowed through the generations

and primarily through disappointment and different layers and levels of resentment and opposition to colonialism and imperialism turned these strains of Islam at the highest levels from the most mainstream of thinkers into Hamas, into al-Qaeda, into ISIS.

The roots of this evil, thing of these brutalizing things, these movements whose very strategy, whose very theory of the world, lionizes and seeks mass death and destruction. Everything these kinds of movements have ever touched, they have destroyed. But they flow from the best, the most open, the most modern, the most validating of modernity and science. impulses within 19th century Islam. That choice still remains.

There is a political party among Israeli Arabs, Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, called Ra'am. I want to tell you the story of Abdullah Nimer Darwish, an imam, born in Kfar Kassim in northern Israel. Darwish was very much in the later Rida camp, jihad or maybe the hassan al-Banacamp jihad understood as the overthrow of foreign and also secular and nationalist ideas is everything and all things can be found in it and restoration of islamic power and honor and dignity and success will come from that islam in nineteen seventy one he founded the islamic movement of israel kind of mostly modeled on basically the muslim brotherhood of egypt and in nineteen seventy nine he actually built out a kind of um

militant wing of that movement that actually tried to commit terror attacks. He was arrested. He was tried. He went to prison. In 1985, he gets out of prison because of an Israeli prisoner exchange with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And when he comes out, he basically switches from the violent branch of this Salafism, of the Rida kind of reformist Salafism, radical conservatism, he switches to the peaceful branch, to those who say piety will restore our dignity and honor and success. And we don't actually need to burn everything to the ground. We don't have to engage in jihad. And when the Oslo Accords come in in the 90s, his Islamic movement splits into the northern branch very much goes back to what we think of

today is Hamas. Hamas's vision was very much the vision of the northern branch, and the northern branch of the Islamic movement would spend years supporting, defending, suicide bombings and other elements of violence produced by Hamas. And the southern branch went with Darwish and advocated interfaith and advocated integration of Israeli Arabs into Israeli society. One of Darwisha's students is Amanid Mansour Abbas, the current head of the Ra'am political party in Israel.

Mansour Abbas has been saying for years in interviews that Israel is a Jewish state. And by the way, we're a minority too often neglected or mistreated by that state, and it claims to be a democracy. And so it is our task. We are now free, because we're not at war with it, with its very existence, to come to it with demands.

And he came to the last Israeli government, the Benetlipid government, with demands of billions of shekels every year for 10 years. And he's free to do that because he doesn't actually think you need to, you know, burn down the state of Israel. My point in saying this is that there are two political movements in Palestinian Islam, two political Muslim movements, political religious movements, both with the same roots, the same roots in Rida,

the same roots in Abdouh. ever since monsurabh started talking the way he now talks he became the biggest political party among israeli arabs these two offshoots of the moslem brotherhood offshoots of rida are the two most important and most powerful political movements in palestinian society in the palestinian world And they come to opposite conclusions about Israel. The part of Palestinian religion and politics that says we burn everything to the ground to murder everybody's children because the redemption of Islam is at stake. And the part that says, yeah, they're a Jewish state. And now they have to, they have a moral debt to us all. Those two parts both come from this lineage that begins in Abdoukh's reformism and liberalism

and ends in Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. I didn't bring you this lineage to tell you that it all failed. I brought you this lineage to argue as an outsider, as an Israeli Jew, as someone with a lot at stake in how Islam understands, how Muslims understand their tradition and decide to move forward, but nevertheless not one of those Muslims, but just to tell you that it is absolutely a choice. to choose the religious ideology of Hamas.

And it is a choice that has alternatives, deep within Palestinian Islam, deep within the very branches of this radical conservative Islam that both Ra'am and Hamas belong to. There's a great conversation underway today, an important one, a vital one. Unfortunately, the Israeli government isn't enough in it. I have been a major critic of that. I'm not going to get into that today.

but a conversation about the day after in Gaza, a conversation about deradicalization in Gaza. I'm coming to say that Palestinians don't really need outsiders to come deradicalize. They need outsiders to create a political counterpressure to Hamas, because Hamas will murder and burn and jail and oppress to prevent it from losing ground and its version of this Islam from losing ground.

But if you can actually defeat Hamas and remove Hamas within Palestinian Islam authentic and generations old is the de-radicalization answer to Hamas in Gaza. They don't need it to come from outside, certainly not from Israel, but maybe not even from Saudi Arabia. The solution to our problems, to Islam's problem, to our problem of this particular strain of Islam, being undeterable and devoted to the death of us all,

is contained within Palestinian Islam itself. And so I'm an optimist, because in the long arc of the development of this evil version, is all the good we need to fix everything that's broken. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you in the next episode.