When the half-blind, almost wholly paralysed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin arrived in Gaza in October 1997 after his release from an Israeli jail in exchange for Mossad agents caught trying to assassinate a colleague in Jordan, one Arab commentator likened him to Nelson Mandela. That was a comparison that must have made Yasser Arafat inwardly seethe, even as he heaped outward homage on the returning hero, who has been killed in an Israeli air strike aged around 67. For if there were any Palestinian Mandela, any unique, historic leader of the Palestinian people, Arafat believed he was it.

In truth, neither Arafat nor Yassin had Mandela's special greatness. But of the two it was Yassin, the founder-leader of the militant Islamist organisation Hamas who came closer. This was not to be found in his beliefs - which, in their narrow, religious frame, were far removed from the South African's lofty humanism and compassion - but in the facts of his career, and the part which certain very personal qualities, of selflessness, simplicity, conviction, and a true sense of service, played in bringing it to fruition.

Yassin had personal glory largely thrust upon him. He was in his late 50s, and a very sick man, before he became a really potent force on the Middle East political stage. As a prisoner in enemy jails, he had little to do in a practical sense with the devastating suicide bombings, from which, more than anything else, he derived that force. Indeed, for most of his career, as a local leader of the international Muslim Brotherhood, he had shared its deep-rooted, strategically motivated opposition to direct, violent action against the Zionist foe, let alone of such an extreme and atrocious kind.

He was more devoted to the revival of Islam than to the salvation of Palestine, deeming that the second goal could only be pursued after the completion of the first. Indeed, there had actually been a time when, on account both of his quietism, the ideological challenge he posed to militant secular nationalism, and his opposition to the armed struggle espoused by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, that the Israelis looked benevolently on him and his works. The PLO nationalists had even branded him a collaborator.