New York Review of Books roundup of books on Hamas

This week’s issue of the New York Review of Books features an essay on Hamas titled “Which Way for Hamas? written by Nicolas Pelham and Max Rodenbeck.

One of the books featured in the essay is Jeroen Gunning’s Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence.

Here’s what the article says about Gunning’s work:

Not surprisingly, much of the future generation of Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat, entered politics as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fiercely anti-imperialist, pan-Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928. Even before 1948, according to Jeroen Gunning, a British academic whose /Hamas in Politics/ is an exemplary political primer on the Islamist party’s evolution, structure, and thought, the Brotherhood was said to have thirty-eight branches in Palestine, with ten thousand members. Ironically, Arafat’s founding of Fatah, the secular party that dominated Palestinian politics until the 1990s, was prompted not by a rejection of Islamist ideas but by the Brotherhood’s move, under intense and frequently brutal pressure from Arab regimes, to abandon “armed struggle” in the 1950s.

You can also browse the book via Google Preview.