Has outgoing Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal brought about a new, more peaceful, face to the organization?

Khaled Meshaal is a man without a home, a country and — after a lifetime spent promoting political Islam — soon to be without a job.

As he prepares to step down as political leader of Hamas, a designated terrorist group, he is leaving behind a rapidly changing organization. The Islamist movement is forging links with its former enemy Fatah as well as learning lessons from the Arab Spring, not the least being that a policy of peaceful resistance may achieve more than all the rockets fired from Gaza.

Mr. Meshaal, who has been — depending on the times and the prevailing political winds — vitriol-spewing extremist, cunning strategist and pragmatic moderate, appears to have brought about a new era in Palestinian leadership.

Not everyone in Hamas may be on board with his message, but some experts suggest talk of a split may be premature.

“From what we see from the outside, there is a suggestion that there may be a rift,” said Aurel Braun, professor of international relations and political science at the University of Toronto. “But I would urge a lot of caution, especially on the impact of peace with Israel. No one in Hamas has any intention whatsoever of ever reaching a peace agreement with Israel.”

Mr. Meshaal was born in the West Bank village of Silwad in 1956, but the family later moved to Kuwait, a hotbed for the Islamic movement and a catalyst for Arab nationalism. At age 15, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and while studying physics at university helped found the List of the Islamic Right, an organization dedicated to mobilizing students to represent a more conservative Islam.

He was prominent in the development of the Palestinian Islamic movement and in 1996, when the Hamas Political Bureau was founded, was appointed its leader. A year later, after Hamas organized a series of horrific suicide bombings against Israel, Mossad tried to assassinate him.

Mr. Meshaal has been based in Damascus for many years, but with Syria at boiling point, both he and Hamas have been forced to make tough decisions.

With President Bashar al-Assad’s campaign of violent oppression targeting Syrian Sunnis, many of whom are of Palestinian origin, residents of the West Bank and Gaza are looking on in horror.

The Hamas leader is now considering a move to Doha or Cairo, distancing both the man and the movement from the Assad regime. While it’s likely to win support from more moderate countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, it could also generate animosity with Iran, a chief financier of Hamas activities and a strong Assad supporter.

In an attempt at damage control, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza, visited Iran this week. With no love lost between Mr. Haniyeh and Mr. Meshaal — the former supports a more conservative agenda for Hamas, the latter a more moderate approach — the trip signalled Mr. Haniyeh is doing all he can to sell his version to key allies.

“It’s interesting that it was Haniyeh, not Meshaal, who went to Iran just last week,” said Aziz Abu Sarah, director of Middle East projects at George Mason University, near Washington.

“Normally, these meetings were carried out by Meshaal, but because of the situation, they decided to send the Gazan leader to fix that relationship.

“The result of the Arab Spring has been positive for Hamas in many ways. They realized that if they stood with Assad, they would lose the support of the Palestinian people who generally do not have an interest in Syria. That put them in a very bad spot. Hamas leaving Syria is [significant] in that it gives a lot of the more moderate countries reason to support them.”

Another area of tension between Hamas in Gaza and Mr. Meshaal is armed resistance to Israel.

“What’s going on is that the Gazans are not moving with what appears to be the new paradigm in terms of the Arab world,” said James Gelvin, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California in Los Angeles, referring to the political change achieved through mass peaceful resistance.

“Meshaal is more in tune to the implications of the Arab uprising than Haniyeh is. He is seeing that the [concept] Hamas was formed under is out of date right now. The problem is that the West Bank Hamas are more liberal than the traditionalist Gazans, who are not moving with the times and are bound to a stark and archaic ideology.”

Of peaceful resistance, Mr. Sarah said, “It’s something they hardly talked about before. The fact that both Hamas and Fatah are actually talking about this kind of unarmed, popular resistance is a big shift from their earlier politics. It gives a lot of the more moderate countries reason to support them.”

Mr. Meshaal has also sparked the ire of the conservative Hamas faithful in Gaza by aligning the organization with Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas and Fatah spent the last five years locked in a bloody civil war and tensions still run high.

Some see the alliance as his way of promoting the formation of a unified Palestine. But many wonder how any such alliance can achieve peace with Israel if Hamas continues to advocate for its destruction.

Mr. Meshaal and Mr. Abbas will meet in Cairo next week to hammer out the details of the reconciliation. It will most likely be Mr. Meshaal’s last official order of business as Hamas leader, and will once again reaffirm his belief a unified government is on the horizon.

Although Mr. Meshaal has made his intention to step down known, the organization itself says it is not his decision to make.

An official Hamas statement reads: “The movement urges [Mr. Meshaal] to reconsider, and to leave this issue to the Shura Council, with full respect to his wishes [not to run again], considering this is a public matter that the Hamas institutions should decide, and not an individual person.”

For now, Mr. Meshaal is increasingly an isolated figure. His chief allies have fled to Egypt and his ties with the Palestinian cause seem all but severed. He has disillusioned the few supporters he has left by promoting a pragmatic, moderate approach to Israeli resistance.

Ironically, it seems that very sentiment has found its way into the current Fatah/Hamas rhetoric.

“We set the agreement’s pillars, and Hamas agreed with us that resistance will be popular,” Mr. Abbas said.

“[We will] adopt peaceful ways, rather than military resistance.”