"On august 14, 2009, a bloody confrontation took place in Rafah, a city at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, between Hamas security forces and supporters of Abd al-Latif Musa (aka Abu al-Nur al-Maqdisi), Imam of the Ibn Taymiyya mosque and leader of Gaza’s salafiya movement. This violent clash seemed to usher in a new, more violent phase in the long-standing intra-Islamist quarrel between Hamas and the al-Qaeda-inspired constellation of salafist-inclined jihadist groups operating in the region. To many observers, the clash was yet more evidence that Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s most politically successful offshoot, was ideologically irreconcilable with the tenets of salafist-jihadism, and that the Hamas government could be trusted to serve as a firewall against al-Qaeda’s penetration in Gaza. Indeed, in the aftermath of the August violence, the outpouring of salafist-jihadist denunciations, tracts and analyses labeling Hamas as a traitor to the cause of Islam, and even as an apostate organization, only underscored the breadth of the antagonism between these two Islamist rivals. Yet beneath the surface of this ongoing conflict lie a number of developments within Gaza that have considerably narrowed, rather than widened, the gap between the contending and purportedly irreconcilable ideological currents represented by Hamas and its salafi-jihadist detractors. This process, which is best described as one of ideological convergence and homogenization, is ongoing and, to be sure, its outcomes are not necessarily linear. But the process itself is not limited to the rivalry between Hamas and salafi-jihadists in Gaza; in fact, it affects both field and cyberspace Islamist movements, effectively testing the limits of ideological Islamist expression across the world. Understanding this process of convergence is thus crucial for any assessment of Islamism’s plausible futures as a whole."