In current US discourse, Mosab Hassan Yousef is regarded as one of the notable experts on Hamas and the Middle East. The article examines Yousef’s autobiography “Son of Hamas” (2010) for the first time from a religious studies perspective. As a young Palestinian from Ramallah, Yousef underwent a double conversion: religiously, he converted from Islam to evangelical Christianity; politically, he distanced himself from Hamas and collaborated with Israeli intelligence. His conversion account follows a narrative structure aimed at generating authenticity in the role of a contrite and reflected Christian. This role, ostentatiously displayed throughout the book, is seen as the key to understanding other religious themes there as well: the extremely pejorative portrayal of Islam, Yousef’s thoughts on religiously motivated violence, the depiction of his father as a symbol of a ‘good’ Islam, and his religionization of the Middle East conflict. Further, the authenticity generated in the conversion narrative is used to profile himself as an intimate yet reformed expert on the ‘other’ side. However, his account is characterized by orientalist, exoticist, and Christian Zionist interpretive patterns.
