Hamas and its Vision of Development

This article accounts for the conceptualisation of development by the Palestinian Islamist party, Hamas. It concludes that Hamas's position on development can be seen in either two ways: 1) as broadly similar to mainstream neoliberal development; or 2) as significantly different and an alternative type of development. Which view taken depends on whether an Orientalist or non-Orientalist approach to understanding development is employed (with Orientalism linking development, modernity and progress with the West and denying it to the non-West). While an Orientalist view assumes that development only occurs within narrow parameters, obliging the non-West to ‘catch up’, a non-Orientalist approach would study Islam on its own terms—and therefore see Hamas's approach to development as an alternative to mainstream thinking. To account for this, the article studies the basis of knowledge in Orientalism and Islamic thought alongside Hamas's rise from its foundation in 1987 to its control of Gaza in mid-2007.