Abstract
On May 1, 2017, Ḥamās published “A Document of General Principles and Policies” (the new Charter). This article compares this document with “The Charter of Ḥamās” (the old Charter), issued in August 1988, to reveal the shift in logic from the old Charter to the new one and to elucidate their “flexibility.” While an earlier study found the old Charter to be ideologically “flexible,” it was in fact indirect and a kind of a “loophole.”
This article addresses six issues in its analysis of the new Charter: (i) the reliance on logic other than the traditional Islamic legal system, such as “international law” and “human rights”; (ii) the decline of Islamic elements, as exemplified by the dramatic decline in the number of times the word “Allāh” appears, the complete absence of quotations from the Qur’ān, and the absence of mention of the Muslim Brotherhood; (iii) the place of Islam in logic (in particular, no longer employing causality to assign blame to the absence of Islam); (iv) the change of the meaning of jihād and the emphasis on its legitimacy; (v) the distinction between “Jews” and “Zionists”; and (vi) the disappearance of the “waqf” and the possibility of recognizing the State of Israel. To conclude the analysis of this article, there has been a shift in logic from the old Charter to the new one and the new one brings out Ḥamās’s “direct flexibility.”
