Known better by the title of his book than his own name, Mosab Hassan Yousef, author of Son of Hamas, returned to the Middle East last week. In Jerusalem one week ago today, the son of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, announced that he will be making a movie about Islam with the intention of showing Muslims the “real nature” of Prophet Muhammad. Many details about the movie are still forthcoming. Yousef’s memoir, a New York Times best seller published by Tyndale Momentum, an imprint of Tyndale House Publishers, has more than 150,000 combined copies in print in hardcover and softcover and has been a consistent best seller in Israel. Yousef received political asylum in the United States in 2010.

"I think this is the time to expose the real nature of Islam," said Yousef to reporters gathered. "Islam is a religion of war and most Muslims don’t understand the true nature of Islam. This is the time and I would like to announce it today here from Jerusalem, next to the Temple Mount."

In a statement to Palestinian media the elder Yousef, in Israeli custody again, reaffirmed that he had shunned his son. Yousef’s mother, Subha, was similarly unforgiving.

"I’m not to be addressed as his mother because he’s not my son. He gave his loyalties to a religion other than Islam. We’re Muslims and he attacked our religion," she told Reuters. "He didn’t save anyone. These are myths in his own head."

Mosab Hassan Yousef was born in Ramallah, in the West Bank in 1978. His father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, is a founding leader of Hamas, internationally recognized as a terrorist organization and responsible for countless suicide bombings and other deadly attacks against Israel. Yousef was an integral part of the movement, for which he was imprisoned several times by the Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service. He withstood torture in prison only to discover Hamas was torturing its own people in a relentless search for collaborators. He began to question who his enemies really were— Israel? Hamas? America? After a chance encounter with a British tourist, Yousef started a six-year quest that jeopardized Hamas, endangered his family and threatened his life. He has since embraced the Christian faith and has received political asylum in America.

Additional information about Mosab Hassan Yousef and his book, Son of Hamas, is available at http://www.sonofhamas.com/.

Tyndale House Publishers, founded in 1962, is one of the largest privately-held Christian publishers of books, Bibles and digital media in the world. Tyndale is the publisher of many New York Times bestsellers and contributes its dividends and a portion of its profits to the non-profit Tyndale Foundation, which makes grants to help meet the physical and spiritual needs of people around the world. Originally founded to publish the Living Bible, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible that became a global publishing phenomenon, Tyndale now publishes the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT), the translation of choice for millions of people.