This paper aims to explore a set of historical lessons and religious ideological trends that have influenced Hamas. The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement is most often portrayed as a monolithic whole. Hamas is however the product of a complex set intellectuals tendencies. These derive from its mother organization, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the different schools of thought therein, as well as from the debates and developments among Islamic movements more broadly in different countries across the Middle East. I aim to guide this discussion including references to specific Hamas ideologues by taking a close look at their writing. In the process I would like to identify various ideological forces that coexist within the movement, ranging from those that take social justice as their baseline to the ones that lean more towards Salafi and Jihadist movements.