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 ask what Hamas believes. We're not going to

look at Hamas leaders and thinkers and try to explain Hamas's strategy in this bitter, horrible

war and all of that. What we're going to be looking at is actually the genealogy 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 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

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