Humiliation and the Political Mobilization of Masculinity

Introduction

In 1993, the bodies of several American soldiers were stripped, mutilated, and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Photographs of the corpses instantly appeared in newspapers across the United States, with captions consistently referring to the horror depicted as a “humiliation,” not of the specific men, but of the American nation. ¹ Like a mirror image, Osama bin Laden represented the same event in similar language in his 1996 “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places”:

[A]fter some minor skirmishes, in which dozens of your soldiers were killed and an American pilot was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, you left defeated, repelled back, taking your dead, dragging the tails of failure, disappointment, defeat and humiliation (hawan). Clinton appeared in front of the world threatening to take revenge, but this threat was only a preliminary for retreat. Allah has humiliated you (akhzakum) and you withdrew. The extent of your impotence and weakness has become clear. The spectacle of you being defeated in these three Islamic cities [Beirut, Aden, and Mogadishu] has “healed the breasts of a believing people.” ²

Bin Laden is now gone and the shock of these photos has since been eclipsed by too many other grisly images to inventory, circulated by new technologies unprecedented in reach and speed. What’s particularly striking, however, is the consistency with which so many violent and symbolic clashes between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the cultures they are often made to represent, are depicted in terms of humiliation. It is thus unsurprising to find Thomas Friedman observing that the “humiliation factor [is] the single most underappreciated force in international relations,” and he is not alone in this assessment. ³ Journalists, policy makers, scholars of international relations, psychology, and terrorism have increasingly concentrated on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general.

But perhaps nowhere else has humiliation figured so prominently in recent years than in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims. Since 2001, there’s been an explosion of publications by scholars and journalists on the tactics of humiliation used in U.S. interrogations of Muslims, as well as on experiences of humiliation that motivate Islamist actors to heed the call of armed jihad. At the same time, Islamist rhetoric and writing from Libya to Pakistan, Somalia to Indonesia, are replete with invocations of “the humiliation of Islam,” accompanied by repeated exhortations to make the enemies of Islam “taste the humiliation” that has been inflicted on Muslims. Such rhetoric has pervaded and energized a number of recent geo-political flashpoints, from protests against the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the controversy over Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to the burning of pages from the Qur’an by U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan.

So understood, the association between humiliation and Muslims is very much a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars working in a range of disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. This phenomenon raises a number of questions that have not yet been posed, let alone answered. What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Does the rhetoric invoked by, for example, Bin Laden and the American press in response to the events in Mogadishu articulate the same understanding of humiliation, as an act and an experience? What might close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it? ⁴ And finally, what does such analysis suggest about the reach and limits of dominant scholarly and popular accounts of humiliation?

In much of the literature concerned with Muslims and Arabs, humiliation remains substantively thin or devoid of content, treated as a self-explanatory motivation, embedded in tautological explanations that beg the very questions that need to be answered, or invoked as a “reduplicative intensifier” of more primary impulses such as shame, fury, or frustration. ⁵ Consider Dominique Moïsi’s claim in Foreign Affairs that the entire “Arab and Muslim worlds are trapped in a culture of humiliation” that has devolved into a “culture of hatred,” for example, or a New York Times column on the escalation of hostilities in Southern Lebanon stating that Hizbollah is fighting “to humiliate the enemy, not for any particular objective.” ⁶ In the former, humiliation is evacuated of any lived experience and recast as an ontologically grounded culture of hatred. In the latter, the act of humiliation figures as the very antithesis of an objective, by implication both self-evident and without relevant political content.

Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God is another, particularly illustrative, case in point. Although the book has an entire chapter titled “Humiliation” that focuses on interviews with Palestinians about the “real or perceived national humiliation of the Palestinian people by Israeli policies,” Stern does not define the term, apparently taking its meaning as self-evident. ⁷ In lieu of a definition, humiliation is clustered throughout the book with various other terms such as alienation, deprivation, rage, desperation, fear, hopelessness, embarrassment, and envy. How these are related to one another, in what they consist, and whether they’re intended as synonyms, elaborations, triggers, or consequences of humiliation remains unclear. Stern concludes that what really explains Islamic terrorism “are perceived humiliation, relative deprivation and fear—whether personal, cultural, or both . . . holy wars take off only when there is a large supply of young men who feel humiliated and deprived.” ⁸ This seems right as far as it goes, but begs rather than answers the central question of what counts as the experience of humiliation and why.

The few scholars who inject more substantive content into such humiliation tend to characterize it as a violation of human dignity—sometimes recast in the language of self-respect—that corresponds to the definition of “humiliating” as a “lowering of one’s dignity or self-respect” offered by The Oxford English Dictionary. ⁹ Yet it is precisely because this understanding is so commonplace that the human dignity upon which humiliation is made to depend for definition is frequently taken as self-evident, asserted rather than substantiated, becoming a placeholder for what author or reader takes as distinctively and universally human. ¹⁰ As a result, scholarship predicating either tactics or experiences of “Muslim humiliation” upon a prior, ill-defined, and continually contested conception of human dignity often ends in the tautological claim that humiliation entails a violation of human dignity, and respect for dignity means (among other things) not humiliating people. ¹¹

Many of these accounts are implicitly drawing on more fully developed concepts and arguments that comprise what can be classified as a liberal discourse on humiliation (despite the fact that it is historically and philosophically indebted to thinkers such as Augustine and Hegel, as well as to Kant). There are several expositors of this discourse, but the most extensive contemporary liberal account of humiliation, Avishai Margalit’s The Decent Society, is illustrative. In contrast to the kinds of arguments made by Moïsi and Stern, Margalit recognizes humiliation as a substantive category in need of elaboration, and aims to render it rational. Toward this end, he defines humiliation as “any sort of behavior or condition that constitutes a sound reason for a person to consider his or her self-respect injured,” arguing at the same time that “humiliation is injury to human dignity,” and that “if there is no concept of human dignity, then there is no concept of humiliation either.” ¹²

As his focus is on “the setup of the society as a whole,” Margalit’s definition is meant to apply more to institutional practices than to the relationship among individuals for the express purpose of determining what, in his view, constitutes a “decent society.” Yet the basic features of Margalit’s definition are echoed in an extraordinarily wide range of scholarship in different fields with slightly different emphases, from work by analytic philosophers to social psychologists to scholars of human rights and law. ¹³ In such work, humiliation is understood as a violation of human dignity or respect, both of which tend to be grounded in the inherent and equal worth of every human being, which, in turn, requires respect for the moral autonomy of a generic individual. ¹⁴ Here, then, is the dominant substantive answer to the questions I’ve posed, so widely invoked and readily available it has achieved the status of common sense.

On the one hand, there are at least etymological grounds for reaching toward such a general, substantive account of humiliation, particularly in the case at hand, as there is significant overlap in the literal meaning written into the Arabic and English words for humiliation. ¹⁵ The Arabic terms reasonably translated as humiliation, depending upon context, include those derived from the root dhal-lam-lam, to be lowly, contemptible, humiliated; kha-zayn-ya, to humiliate, degrade, and shame; sad-ghayn-ra, to debase, make lowly or inferior; and ha-waw-nun, to despise, humble, humiliate, degrade, insult, scorn or disdain. Like the Latin root of the English word “humiliation,” humous, which means “earth” or “ground,” the etymology of these Arabic terms signifies a push or orientation downwards, a debasement or degradation. ¹⁶

On the other hand, to borrow from Stephen Lukes, the dominant account articulated by Margalit begs rather than answers questions about what counts as a sound reason; whether or not there is a single definition of self-respect (or dignity) that applies to all cultures; what constitutes a reasonable standard of injury; which individuals, communities, and audiences are relevant to determining such reasons, standards and definitions; and whether the categories of “dignity” and “self-respect” are even appropriate to capture the content and significance of humiliation across and within specific cultural formations. ¹⁷ The upshot is that this “common-sense” definition doesn’t shed much light on how the experience and act of humiliation come to be configured in specific ways in particular contexts, nor does it provide much traction on the affective, political, and even ethical work humiliation rhetoric does.

To begin to answer the questions I’ve posed, in the following pages, I analyze the specific content and significance of humiliation in Islamist discourse. This reading is intended as a corrective to philosophical accounts that beg the questions that must be answered, as well as to arguments that evacuate the content of humiliation by proceeding immediately from cause to consequence. ¹⁸ It also aims to address a notable lacuna in current scholarship. Despite the intense focus on Muslims as perhaps the pre-eminent site of humiliation in the twenty-first century, there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; ¹⁹ correspondingly minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and virtually no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation, the experience and the act.

In the analysis that follows, I make four arguments. The first is that Islamist discourse defines the “humiliation of Islam” as the imposition of impotence on Islam/Muslims by those with greater and undeserved power, a condition understood to violate natural gender and sexual norms as well as the divinely given socio-moral hierarchy upon which justice depends. Second, I show that this definition also depicts retaliatory humiliation as an enactment of a particular version of masculinity, the performance of which at once recuperates a lost sense of agency and restores the proper hierarchical ordering of men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, the dominant and submissive. My third argument is that, inasmuch as humiliation discourse encodes already gendered constructions of agency and powerlessness, it operates on an affective register particularly central to certain experiences of masculinity. Such constructions and experiences are precisely what are obscured by invocations of a violated dignity or injured self-respect organized around a generic individual. The discussion tacks back and forth between the specific and the theoretical because I view Islamist discourse on humiliation both as a crucial area of inquiry in its own right and a case suggestive of broader insights into the affective and political work humiliation does in this historical moment.

Any inquiry that juxtaposes Islam, humiliation, and masculinity is politically suspect at best, and for good reason. The link between Islam and humiliation is perhaps most closely associated with Bernard Lewis, who has been especially assiduous in tracing contemporary “Muslim rage” to resentment at the humiliation of Islamic civilization by the accumulation of Western military, political, cultural, and economic “victories.” ²⁰ Moreover, depictions of Arab Muslim hypermasculinity, along with images of the victimized Arab Muslim female they produce and justify, have a long and pernicious history, part of an iconography of the Orient implicated in a wide range of imperialist ventures. ²¹ And these depictions are hardly confined to the past: Paul Amar has shown that a great deal of current scholarly and popular discourse on “Middle Eastern masculinity” has been particularly adept at constituting Middle Eastern maleness as an “atavistic, misogynist and hypersexual” problem. ²² It is precisely this “problem” that Raphael Patai explicitly links to humiliation in his 1973 portrait of a timeless and unchanging Arab masculinity obsessed with sex and animated by avoidance of humiliation and shame. ²³ As Seymour Hersh revealed in his exposé on abuse of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. Army, Patai’s chapter on Arabs and sex would become, according to one source, “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior,” and consequently a guide for interrogation tactics designed to sexually humiliate male Iraqi prisoners. ²⁴

Under these circumstances, merely connecting invocations of the “humiliation of Islam” to masculinity may be read as reauthorizing such images, equations, and assumptions. Yet it’s precisely because such accounts are so pervasive and pernicious that avoiding the subject becomes a form of abdication, one that permits the smooth conversion of complex phenomena into further “evidence” of an unchanging and pathological Arab or Muslim masculinity nurtured by developmentally arrested “honor cultures.” In this context, there is a political as well as intellectual imperative to attend to the gendered register of Islamist discourse on humiliation, along with the affective resonances it mobilizes, and to recognize them as complex effects of power and history rather than as identities and propensities constituted prior to power and history.

This leads to my fourth and final argument, that the gendered register of humiliation evident in Islamist discourse is also operative in several invocations of the “humiliation of America.” This is so despite the fact that each discourse is constructed out of a repertoire of self-images sedimented through an accumulation of politically, historically, and culturally specific experiences of power and powerlessness. I argue that, under certain conditions, humiliation in the twenty-first century has become an affective Esperanto that registers in multiple contexts as an exhortation to action specifically designed to perform and recuperate a “dominant” masculine agency. This means, of course, that there is nothing inherently Islamic or Muslim about how Islamists yoke humiliation to emasculation, empowerment to an enactment of manhood. It also means that identifying overlaps in the meaning and work of different rhetorics of humiliation is facilitated less by recourse to abstract principles of human dignity than by attending to the cultural scripts that at once reflect, refigure, and mobilize a historically contingent tension between a particular understanding of masculinity and the forces that jeopardize the possibility of performing it.

Islamist Discourse on Humiliation

The single term Islamism masks real differences among Islamist thinkers and activists past and present, as well as significant diversity in the politics they embrace, the strategies they deploy, the contexts in which they operate, and the audiences they address. ²⁵ Yet such variation makes it all the more striking that so much Islamist rhetoric is suffused with references to humiliation and retaliatory humiliation. This doesn’t mean that every single Islamist traffics in the language or imagery of humiliation, nor does it mean that Islamists have a monopoly on the rhetoric of humiliation analyzed here. ²⁶ What it does mean is that attention to the diverse and rapidly changing views and practices that today constitute Islamism must be balanced by recognition of patterns that at once reveal something significant about it and about the broader perceptions among the audiences it mobilizes. ²⁷

Islamist discourse on humiliation is just such a pattern, albeit one among many. It’s evident in the work of several influential Islamist thinkers, but is even more obvious in the various missives, interviews, pamphlets, videos, and documents issued by radical Islamists, circulated via print, tape cassette and the Internet, which articulate a conception of humiliation less by way of direct argument than by the use of symbols, archetypes, anecdotes, and invective. Drawing an account of humiliation from these disparate, fragmentary, and often ad hoc sources requires attending to implicit connections as well as explicit juxtapositions, analyzing occasionally blurry logics as well as clearly specified grievances. Needless to say, focusing on the features, presuppositions, and operations of this particular discourse comes at the expense of conveying, for example, the extent of disagreement among Islamists about gender roles and legitimate action, as well as the ways many Islamist women are actively negotiating the gendered script outlined here. ²⁸ In this instance, however, such an approach is warranted by the array of disparate and diffuse sources constitutive of a fluid discourse fully elaborated by no single thinker or text.

In particular, this focus brings into sharp relief a conception of humiliation that clusters around three interrelated features. First, humiliation explicitly denotes an assault on the capacity of Muslim men to defend the umma (Islamic community) militarily as well as culturally, provide for their progeny, and protect their women. This is exemplified in al-Difa “an aradi al-Muslimin ahamm furud al-a’yan ” [The Defense of Muslim Lands: The Most Important of Individual Obligations] by ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam’, an architect of Arab participation in the “Afghan jihad” and a one-time mentor to Bin Laden. ‘Azzam here writes of the agonizing humiliation of young men unable to act when the Afghan woman is “crying out for help, her children are being slaughtered, her women are being raped, the innocent are killed and their corpses scattered.” ²⁹ In recent interviews, members of the Somali al-Shabab have talked about the respect and power they receive as men dedicated to defending Islam, and some have even explained their membership in terms of a desire to exact revenge on soldiers they describe as “animals” who “touch our women inappropriately at the checkpoints. Imagine when you see this being done to your mother or your sister . . . it is humiliating and infuriating.” ³⁰

Second, humiliation functions rhetorically to incite men to restore a jeopardized Muslim virility through great deeds that humiliate the male enemy. This is evident, for example, in an interview with the online magazine Sawt al-Jihad [Voice of Jihad], where Saleh al-Oufi, a leader of the Mujahidin of Saudi Arabia, insists that only the violent humiliation of those who humiliate Muslims can recover men’s honor, prestige, and courage—a sentiment echoed in “Hadha wa’d Allah” [This is the Promise of Allah], the declaration of a restored caliphate issued by ISIS (or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham). ³¹ The examples abound: a trainer of Palestinian martyrs insists that the motivation for martyrdom operations is the recuperation of men’s “honor and dignity . . . when we are humiliated, we respond with wrath.” ³² And in an audiotape titled “Aina ahl al-muru’at?!” [Where are the Possessors of Manhood?!] and attributed to Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the speaker claims that the mujahidin (those who struggle) have “made the international coalition taste cups of humiliation (dhull) . . . lessons from which they are still burning.” ³³

While the title of Zarqawi’s audiotape makes men the explicit subject, the default subject in these texts is male, even or especially when it remains unspecified. This is less because the plural pronouns and third-person verb forms are masculine—as these can be taken to refer to both men and women—but rather because Islamists always specify when they are speaking of women/females as opposed to the male default. Of course, “men” sometimes refers to the Muslim community of which women are a part, and humiliation to a suffering inflicted indiscriminately on all of its members. But in many instances, it functions quite literally, and this is especially clear when women appear in these texts. Herein is the third feature of this account: women repeatedly figure as a symbolic crux of humiliation, both the experience and the act. More specifically, their bodies are the primary battleground for the humiliation of Islam, their degradation is the archetypal trigger for retaliatory humiliation, their voices are a chorus of praise for such acts, and their virginity is the eschatological reward for those who die humiliating the enemies of Islam.

Take, for example, the preceding quotes from ‘Azzam and al-Shabab members, in which the violation of Muslim women’s bodies doubles as both the paradigmatic instance of humiliation and powerful trigger for retaliation. Here as elsewhere, the bodily integrity of women implicitly serves as a measure or mirror of Muslim masculinity: as female purity reflects the ability of men to guard and protect, a woman’s violation demonstrates male impotence in need of immediate redress. This is evinced by a number of Islamist “letters home,” including one in which an aspiring martyr instructs his mother to “[r]emember me with every resounding scream uttered by a pure Muslim woman in the land of Jerusalem, or Chechnya.” ³⁴ Or consider “The Story of a Mujahid” published in al-Hussam, about a young man who had come to the United States to study:

In America, his eyes were opened to the wounds of the umma. . . . Sleep was driven out of his eyes by the reports of Muslim women’s chastity being violated at the hands of the Crusader criminals . . . the screams of the Muslim women were louder to his ears than the words of all seeking to hold him back. ³⁵

Yet another illustration is in the opening lines of the al-Qa‘ida training manual, which pledges to retaliate for every “sister believer . . . whose clothes the criminals have stripped off . . . whose hair the oppressors have shaved . . . whose body has been abused by the human dogs.” ³⁶

Such Islamist exhortations to protect Muslim women from the rapaciousness of “Western men” parallel rhetoric about the need to save Muslim women from Muslim male violence that has accompanied recent U.S. military ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, as scholars have shown, in the course of the American-led “war on terror,” a pathologized Muslim masculinity helped sustain depictions of Muslim-women-as-victims in need of rescue from a beneficent Western masculinity. ³⁷ As each side busily depicts itself as rescuing innocents from the barbarism of the enemy, women and their bodies are transformed into a site of masculine contest. Here is yet another illustration of how, in Seyla Benhabib’s words, “women and their bodies are the symbolic-cultural site upon which human societies inscript their moral order.” ³⁸

Indeed, while women’s bodies are made to speak volumes in these texts, from their mouths largely issue wordless screams that conjure the unspeakable. In the moments when women utter actual words, their voices tend to serve as a chorus ratifying masculine acts that either purge the umma of humiliation or perform retaliatory humiliation. Ahlam al-Nasr, known as “the Poetess of the Islamic State,” for example, memorializes ISIS’ victory in Mosul, Iraq, with the following words: “Ask Mosul, city of Islam, about the lions/how their fierce struggle brought liberation/The land of glory has shed its humiliation and defeat/and put on the raiment of splendor.” ³⁹ Sawt al-Jihad has often featured women’s voices in the form of symbolic role models named, for example, “Umm al-Shahid” (Mother of the Martyr), although it is far from clear that women actually write them. ⁴⁰ Such voices invariably express pride and pleasure in the death of husbands and sons in martyrdom operations, as in the message supposedly from the spouse of “one of the martyrs in the Arab peninsula,” addressed to the widow of Paul Johnson, an employee of Lockheed Martin who had been beheaded by Saudi Islamists. The spouse writes:

You must know that Muslims will by no means let the shedding of my husband’s blood be in vain. We will make sure your husband’s corpse will be followed by mountains of his fellow countrymen until they leave the land of the prophet—God’s blessings and peace be upon him—utterly humiliated [adhilla]. ⁴¹

Perhaps the most famous illustration of obvious ventriloquism is Bin Laden’s “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” where female voices exhort men to jihad in the following way:

The matter is bigger than insulting words; prepare yourself like a fighter

The wolves of kufr [unbelief] are eating our wings; will you abandon us to them?

The wolves of kufr are drawing together evil persons scattered everywhere

Where are the noble men defending noble women by force of arms?

Some shames can never otherwise be blotted out; death is better than life in humiliation (dhull). ⁴²

Finally and most famously, women appear as virginal rewards for those martyred in such acts in the afterlife, as in the final instructions for the 9/11 hijackers, where Muslim “brothers” are urged to purify their carnal impulses, sharpen their knives for the slaughter (dhabiha), and heed the call of the hur al-‘ayn (black-eyed ones) awaiting them in paradise. ⁴³ ‘Azzam even entitled his collection of reports and letters from slain Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan ‘Ushshaq al-Hur [Lovers of the Paradise Maidens], a reflection of how frequently men who expect martyrdom write excitedly of their expectations of meeting the beautiful dark-eyed maidens upon their death. ⁴⁴

As is perhaps already clear, underlying Islamist discourse on humiliation is a specific gender scheme, one explicitly elaborated by several influential Sunni and Shi’i Islamist thinkers. In this familiar scheme, female nature is defined in and through reproduction, and women are understood as vessels or moral and cultural purity. This view is built upon the premise that men and women are equal in religious belief but perform fundamentally different and complementary functions in society. Whereas men are naturally made to rule in both the public and private domains, women belong to the domestic realm, where their primary role is to be wives and mothers. It is thus women who are responsible for the integrity of the family—the first school of moral education—and therefore women’s burden and honor to produce the next generation of Muslim men destined to restore Islam to its former glory.

Depending upon context, such gender norms can have a complex but mutually reinforcing relation to longstanding codes of honor which, scholars contend, tend to define femininity in terms of sexual purity, and masculinity in terms of virility, paternity, and the power to keep outsiders away from their female kin. These codes of honor are far from static, of course, and they are hardly unique to so-called “Mediterranean cultures.” ⁴⁵ Moreover, such gender norms have been—and still are—endorsed by a wide range of thinkers and communities at various points in history. For these Islamists, however, such norms and functions are rooted in an inescapable human nature fashioned by God. Thus, the very question of whether they are culturally and historically contingent is itself a symptom of a metastasizing moral bankruptcy that has cast doubt on the most basic of truths of creation.

Among other things, this means that a woman’s inability or unwillingness to perform her duties constitutes a disobedience to a transcendent divine will that requires chastening and immediate correction. Men’s disobedience also constitutes a transgression in need of redress, but women’s disobedience is especially dangerous: in jeopardizing the integrity of the family, women imperil the future of Islamic civilization itself. As one of the earliest female Islamist leaders, Zaynab al-Ghazali (1917–2005), writes in an article for al-Da’wa titled “To You: My Lady!”

Yes, my lady, you are responsible for our subjection to non-Muslims who are instigators of unbelief, licentiousness and savagery . . . you have taken to showy adornment and rebellion against our religion and all of our inheritances. Yes, my lady, you are responsible for the decline of Islamic civilization, its supremacy and what it gives to life. ⁴⁶

From this vantage point, the “Western” insistence on full equality between the sexes is doubly pernicious: it liberates women from basic moral constraints and enslaves them to mutually reinforcing sexual and capitalist exploitation. As Murtaza Mutahhari (1920–1979) argues, capitalism makes use of women to market its goods “by trading in honour and respect, through [their] power to entice,” thereby “transform[ing] man into an involuntary agent of consumption.” ⁴⁷ The impotence and moral bankruptcy of contemporary Muslim societies thus serves as damning evidence of how “Western” conceptions of ersatz gender equality have lured women into betraying their domestic vocation. Here women become conduits, or are themselves the embodiment, of foreign corruption, the flip side of representations of them as vessels of cultural and moral purity. This is the Janus-faced woman whose sexual and reproductive functions at once establish her proximity to the chaos of nature and figure her as a constant threat to the social order. This doubled image recurs in a remarkably wide array of cultures and eras, ⁴⁸ but is given particularly stark contemporary expression by Abdessalam Yassine (1928–2012), founder of Morocco’s Jama’at al-’Adl wa’l-Ihsan (Justice and Spirituality Association), who depicts women as either “blonde tourist whores” imported along with AIDS, or virtuous Muslim women characterized by “delicate sensitivities and mother love.” ⁴⁹

It’s not difficult to see why such gender norms, no matter where they appear, are so frequently attributed to a male desire to control women, as well as to a need to shore up heterosexuality over other sexualities and desires that perpetually lurk as destabilizing, if largely disavowed, possibilities. Yet for my purposes, what’s crucial is the way in which such gender norms at once underpin the Islamist understanding of humiliation and link it to a particular socio-moral order whose very structure is the embodiment of justice. Here justice is understood to entail a hierarchical ordering of different parts of both the visible world—men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim—and that of the divine, and according each their due. ⁵⁰ Much Islamist rhetoric simply assumes such a conception of justice, but it is made explicit in several Islamist texts, including Sayyid Qutb’s (1906-1966) influential Qur’anic commentary (tafsir), Fi Zilal al-Qur’an [In the Shade of the Qur’an].

For Qutb as for many other Islamist thinkers, justice begins in the recognition that God is the sole legitimate authority, and therefore only He is owed perfect obedience. Far from indicating a state of impotence, however, submission to Allah constitutes freedom from enslavement to arbitrary human authority that is the precondition of Muslim strength, agency, and nobility. This is “humility” rather than “humiliation,” as such voluntary submission—the very meaning of the word muslim—is no degradation. Indeed, drawing upon a well-known hadith, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) argues that humility is the very antithesis of humiliation: while God will degrade those with inflated self-regard, He will elevate those who exhibit humility and modesty in both this world and the next. ⁵¹

As those who oppose Islam and His messenger are both intrinsically lowly and destined to be brought low by God in this life and the next, the humiliation inflicted on unbelievers is an expression of justice and fate. By contrast, the humiliation endured by Muslims both in the past and in the present is a temporary injustice destined to be overcome: it is, Qutb avers, no more than a test devised by God so that true believers can demonstrate the firmness of their conviction in the face of what appear to be insurmountable odds. ⁵² The momentary supremacy of the current enemies of Islam thus attests to Muslims’ failure to choose the correct path, a failure evinced as much by women’s unwillingness to perform their natural duties as wives and mothers as by men who have forsaken the obligation to jihad fi sabil Allah [struggle in the path of God].

In these terms, rebellion against gender roles stipulated by the Creator constitutes an imbalance in the just order of things; restoration of equilibrium actually requires the humiliation of those who transgress such social norms, as well as those unbelievers who facilitate such transgression. By the same token, the enforced submission of true Muslims to unbelievers and hypocrites whose worldly power masks the lowly condition that is the destiny of all enemies of Islam exemplifies injustice, and requires immediate redress. ⁵³ Finally, inasmuch as dominant sexual norms yield a critical distinction between penetrator and penetrated (see below), the invasion and occupation of Muslim lands by unbelievers is a symbolic, psychic, and physical humiliation requiring not only the expulsion of invaders but a literal reinscription of humiliation upon them.

Taken together, these premises, arguments, and equations posit a collective “humiliation of Islam” and define it as the imposition of impotence on Islam/Muslims by those with greater and undeserved power, a condition that violates a particular conception of masculinity and the structure of justice in which it is embedded. In contrast to the voluntary self-humiliation—more properly understood as humility—embraced as an enactment of piety by some Sufi mystics, ⁵⁴ here it is the imposition of powerlessness by others that adds to the etymological meaning the inflection of having been made, in common parlance, to “eat dirt.” Qutb makes this quite explicit, arguing that humiliation throws human beings into the lowest depths: “it pulls them to the earth, binds them to the dirt; they are entirely unable to release or elevate themselves.” ⁵⁵

So understood, I want to argue that Islamist invocations of the “humiliation of Islam” deploy the symbols and rhetoric of emasculation to conjure historical, cultural, and political experiences of powerlessness, and vice-versa. Such rehearsal has the effect of revivifying the experience of impotence itself, but for the express purpose of depicting retaliatory humiliation as an enactment of masculinity. This performance of masculinity at once recuperates a lost sense of agency and restores balance to a divinely ordained social hierarchy jeopardized by dramatic shifts in gender relations and geo-political power that have marked the current epoch. In this way, Islamist invocations of humiliation function rhetorically to, first, link historically specific experiences of emasculation with the denigration of Islam tout court and, second, catalyze such experiences to incite Muslim men to courageous action against male enemies external to the umma and reclaim patriarchal authority within it.

Mobilizing Masculinity

The preceding analysis suggests that under particular conditions, humiliation discourse operates on an affective register particularly central to certain experiences of masculinity. This is not the same as saying that women cannot, by definition, be humiliated; too many women know better. What I do mean is that humiliation discourse can, among other things, be usefully understood as a crucial affective instrument of the “political mobilization of masculinities”. ⁵⁶

The plural “masculinities” here cautions against the tendency to posit a single, ahistorical, and dysfunctional conception of masculinity—“Arab,” “Muslim” or “American,” for that matter—just there to be mobilized into action. ⁵⁷ It is frequently noted that gender is relational, and this is most obviously the case in the ways in which “patterns of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity.” ⁵⁸ Perhaps less obvious is the variability within the category of masculinity: as many scholars have argued and demonstrated, there exist multiple masculinities that are highly changeable, vary across and within cultures as well as institutional contexts, and interact with other elastic aspects of identity in ways that are neither simple nor predictable. ⁵⁹ Yet “all masculinities are not created equal,” and the extent to which one prevails over others is, like the precedence of masculinity over femininity, a matter of power rather than a reflection of nature: it is secured through vigilant policing of unacceptable desires, unmanly templates and threatening disruptions. ⁶⁰ So understood, there is not only a plurality of contingent conceptions of manhood but also a hierarchy of masculinities. ⁶¹ “Normative masculinity” is the name scholars have given to the conception of manhood that dominates in a particular time and place: it “sets the standards for male demeanour, thinking and action . . . [it] is more than an ‘ideal,’ it is assumptive, widely held, and has the quality of appearing to be ‘natural.’” ⁶²

What’s mobilized by humiliation discourse is not some universal standard of manhood but rather a normative masculinity still widely constituted in terms of the power to provide, protect, and control, an understanding that clusters females with children as the objects of such power rather than as themselves agents. This argument must be distinguished from the claim that the dominant norm of masculinity is exactly the same in all cultures and times—although the variability and changeability of all masculinities in different contexts ought not to inhibit recognition of commonalities and overlaps among some or even many of them. It must also be distinguished from the presumption that women, however identified or defined, are powerless, that their subjectivity is coextensive with passivity or victimization, that the male/female binary exhausts the possibilities of gender, or that dominant gender norms map neatly onto the varieties of lived experience.

Instead, the argument I am laboring to make is that a humiliation defined as the unjust and unnatural imposition of powerlessness registers not just as a generic loss of agency produced by indiscriminate oppression, but also and specifically as emasculation under conditions where dominant norms of masculinity and femininity already contain within them an asymmetrical understanding of agency. In other words, while the experience of powerlessness can be just as painful to women as to men, prevailing norms of masculinity and femininity tend to construct it differently for each. Feminist scholarship in a variety of disciplines has amply documented the extent to which patriarchal gender norms encode an equation of powerlessness and femininity. ⁶³ Among other things, this means that imposed powerlessness does not threaten—and to some extent, even affirms—dominant norms of femininity in which highly circumscribed agency is already constitutive of what it means to be female. By contrast, such an experience threatens an understanding of masculinity defined by the power to act as well as by power over others. In these terms, to be humiliated is not just to be powerless but to be “unmanned.”

But there’s even more to it than this, as the gender norms at the heart of Islamist discourse on humiliation also install a hierarchy of sexual norms. Islamist gender norms take heterosexuality as a given, of course, yet the hierarchy of sexual norms central to humiliation is organized less around the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual desire than between active and passive, penetrated and penetrator. Scholars of sexuality in Muslim-majority societies have pointed to different understandings of those who are the “active” partner in a male–male sex act and those who are the “passive” partner, arguing that masculinity is often considered compromised not by desire for other men or by the act of penetrating another man, but rather by taking and enjoying the “passive” role in sexual relations. ⁶⁴ In this context—as in so many others—the active role becomes a vehicle not only for sexual gratification but also for the deliberate humiliation of the male who is constituted through the act as passive, emasculated, effeminate. ⁶⁵ The conception of masculine agency mobilized by humiliation discourse may thus be rendered sexually (and indelicately, following Drucilla Cornell) as the power of the fucked to transform his male humiliator into the fuckee. ⁶⁶

Scholars have noted that it is precisely at those moments when normative masculinity is most unstable that the reaffirmation of manhood becomes most urgent. ⁶⁷ Scholarship in a range of disciplines also suggests that times of instability often elicit particularly vigorous efforts to police women’s fidelity to patriarchal gender norms, as well as sometimes brutal attempts to shore up heteronormative caste systems composed of descending gradations of “deviant” sexualities. ⁶⁸ There is, in fact, an intimate relation among these phenomena, as the reaffirmation of normative masculinity encodes hierarchical gender and sexual norms even in those instances when the status of women and sexuality appears to be entirely irrelevant. As gender is a “negotiated response to the consistency with which others demand that we act in a recognizable masculine or feminine way,” reaffirmation of masculinity requires a “sequence of postures” performed primarily (but not exclusively) for other men, proximate or spectral, who confer or withhold the status of manhood. ⁶⁹ What counts as such a performance in particular contexts, however, is determined not only by the normative masculinity that prevails and the audiences for whom it is enacted but also by the nature of the disruptions thought to imperil it, along with how they are interpreted.

To be clear, the argument here is not that there’s a single variable called masculinity that somehow explains humiliation. Rather, the claim is that the historically contingent tension between a dominant understanding of masculinity and a set of transformations that jeopardize the possibility of performing it translates the experience of imposed powerlessness at the heart of humiliation into emasculation. So, for example, there’s a good deal of work documenting experiences of impotence produced by hereditary monarchies and the consolidation of postcolonial authoritarian regimes, a process that has frequently entailed brutal suppression of domestic dissent or opposition in many Muslim-majority societies. Also critical in this connection are high unemployment and widespread poverty, which jeopardize men’s ability to marry, engage in sanctioned sexual relations, and provide for their families. ⁷⁰ Exacerbating this situation is the challenge to conventional gender roles posed by the entry of women into the workforce, along with women’s visible political activism and increased access to higher education. ⁷¹ Finally, the legacies of colonialism, longstanding Euro-American support for oppressive regimes, drone strikes, Israeli occupation, the stationing of foreign troops in Muslim lands, capital penetration and cultural hybridization combine to intensify perceptions of Muslim impotence relative to the so-called West. This perception is continually revivified by the flow of images of bloodied Muslim bodies delivered by a burgeoning array of video, satellite and electronic media such that “humiliation is frequently absorbed through images,” experienced “viscerally, rather than directly.” ⁷²

Such conditions persist throughout the Middle East, North Africa and beyond, despite uprisings from Morocco to Yemen that have sought to radically transform them. Of course, not all of these conditions obtain equally everywhere, and this points to the ways in which Islamist discourse not only reflects certain experiences of powerlessness but also conjures the very collective humiliation it aims to mobilize. Christian Neuhäuser delineates three different logics by which a group can be collectively humiliated. The first and most obvious is direct group humiliation, where all members of a particular group are humiliated precisely because they are members of that group, such as security practices that profile Muslims in both Europe and the United States. Symbolic group humiliation entails the degradation of a particular symbol of a group, which is experienced as shared humiliation, such as the burning of the pages of the Qur’an or the defilement of Jewish graveyards. Representative group humiliation is when a “whole group is humiliated through the humiliation of one or more of its members,” a logic exemplified by the degradation of particular Muslim women as well as of the inmates in the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. ⁷³

Islamist discourse at once reflects and weaves together direct, symbolic, and representative group humiliation, assembling such different logics and experiences into a narrative about the collective “humiliation of Islam.” In other words, the mechanisms, symbols, and rhetorical devices of humiliation discourse actively bind the “I” to the “we” of the umma and to the fate of Islam; ⁷⁴ they make it possible to persuasively refigure an individual experience of religious profiling by European airport security, for example, as an instance of the general humiliation of Islam. This further suggests how and why a discourse that draws on the Islamic tradition to recast humiliation as an emasculating loss of agency can resonate widely among populations either directly or vicariously familiar with both macro-historical patterns of powerlessness and quotidian experiences of impotence—and who might otherwise harbor little sympathy for Islamist objectives.

The existence and extent of such resonance is not susceptible to precise measurement, however, and this is not only because quantitative data on discursive resonances are notoriously difficult to gather in many of these contexts and situations. It’s also because such resonances often circulate below the surface of observable behavior, at other times erupting into visibility with varying intensity at different moments, but always flowing in continuous and continuously changing feedback loops between an internally multivocal Islamist discourse and the various constituencies it aims to mobilize in response to changing circumstances. This makes the correlations between rhetoric and response at once significant and “incomplete and uncertain.” ⁷⁵ But as Saurette aptly points out, the “fact that humiliation is difficult to measure doesn’t mean that these dynamics are any less influential.” ⁷⁶

So understood, the salience of such conditions and their broad resonance also goes some way to explaining how and why the rhetoric of humiliation often (though not inevitably or solely) mobilizes a particular kind of performance of manhood among Islamists from Saudi Arabia to Somalia: acts that aim to banish a posture of submission by reinscribing humiliation on (male) enemies and restoring domestic masculine primacy, both of which encode hierarchical gender and sexual norms even when women and sexuality seem irrelevant. While these dynamics are routinely assimilated into a remarkably resilient account of Islam as inherently patriarchal and violent, such resonances and the actions they mobilize attest to a quite different phenomenon: the increasing instability of patriarchal arrangements and gender norms, a historically specific condition inscribed as precarity in a rhetoric of humiliation deployed to vanquish it. ⁷⁷ Far from evincing identities and propensities prior to power and history, then, Islamist discourse on humiliation may be understood as producing a particular conception of Muslim manhood, one whose specific features reflect the extent to which the assumption of a certain kind of male agency written into dominant norms of masculinity can no longer be taken as a given. ⁷⁸

Conclusion

From London to Benghazi, Cairo to Nairobi, the eleven-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States was marked by the escalation of protests against a fourteen-minute “trailer” for a low-budget American-made video, the “Innocence of Muslims,” depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a pedophilic, philandering fraud. ⁷⁹ In a televised speech, Hassan Nasrallah of Hizbollah called for a full week of organized outrage, declaring that the “whole world must know that this great Prophet has followers who will not be silent in the fact of insult [ihana] or humiliation [madhalla], no matter how steep [the price] of sacrifice.” ⁸⁰ Nasrallah’s characterization of the video as a humiliation that cries out for retaliation was both presaged and widely echoed in the protests, which only seemed to gather steam with each passing day.

Within hours, it seems, most of the English-language commentary at the time translated the meaning of the protests into a clash of rights. ⁸¹ Reporters immediately sought the expertise of constitutional lawyers and law professors to interpret events, thus ensuring that the stakes would be framed much as they were during the Danish cartoon controversy: as a conflict between freedom of speech and protection of religion against offence or, more often, as a clash between constitutionally protected hate speech and religious hypersensitivity. ⁸² Once converted into the language of rights, the protests became a matter of law rather than of politics, to be evaluated by the commitments written into American constitutionalism and addressed within the framework of the United Nations Human Rights Council. ⁸³ Invocations of humiliation such as Nasrallah’s were either recast as part of a larger demand for equal respect and rights, or as indicative of an essential Muslim intransigence and inability to join the liberal world of rights-bearing individuals. ⁸⁴

Not coincidentally, this framing evinces the spectrum of claims about humiliation with which I began. At one end are accounts that implicitly or explicitly depict Muslim experiences and acts of humiliation as reflexes grounded in ressentiment or religious fanaticism that require little to no substantive analysis. At the other end is the liberal account of humiliation as a violation of dignity/respect which presents as established fact a definition derived not from analyses of meaning-in-use, but from a set of ontological claims that prevail among certain circles of moral philosophers. ⁸⁵ The arguments here suggest that both of these accounts are inadequate. The work accomplished by characterizations of the video as a humiliation in need of redress requires analysis not only of what such a discourse says but also what it does, that is, the ways in which it gives meaning to experience, invests certain acts with political and ethical significance, and—borrowing Connolly’s language—energizes certain affinities of identity and sensibility not only among Islamists, but also among Muslims in general who may dissent, even strenuously, from Islamists’ account of what Islam “really is.” ⁸⁶

At this point, one might well object that my own analysis of Islamist discourse remains inadequate in the absence of a judgment about whether such perceptions of humiliation are legitimate, accurate, or empirically proven. As philosophers of law frequently tell us, there is a critical difference between a subjective experience of humiliation and the social fact of humiliation. ⁸⁷ Moral philosophers further warn that, without these judgments, such analysis risks becoming an apologia for violent retaliatory action.

It’s certainly possible, and in many instances necessary, to distinguish between more and less persuasive claims about humiliation. There is, after all, a significant difference between characterizations of the inmates in the Abu Ghraib photographs as humiliated and a husband’s claim that his wife’s job humiliates him. Yet this is not a normative enterprise that aims to identify what’s common to diverse phenomena, attach to that commonality “humiliation,” and lay out the reasons why we should condemn it. In fact, plotting such claims on a spectrum of either accuracy or moral legitimacy misses two crucial points. First, it misses the mutual imbrication between patterns of experience and social facts. Second, to borrow from Bernard Williams, the content and resonance of Islamist discourse on humiliation is not simply a product of nonmoral preferences or excessive concern for what one’s neighbors happen to think, but reflects an ethical psychology shared by all those bound together by a shared sense of the right order of things. ⁸⁸ This is so regardless of whether those not so bound are unpersuaded that such humiliation is either morally significant or empirically proven. It is unclear how one would go about proving—or disproving, for that matter—such experiences and emotions, but in any case, “what people’s ethical emotions are depends significantly on what they take them to be.” ⁸⁹

The effort to understand this system of meaning and one way in which it works does not require others to see it as justified or respond with sympathy. What it does require is a willingness to recognize its features and interior logic without relinquishing the perspective necessary to critically analyze it. There’s little doubt that Islamist discourse on humiliation does indeed “draw something dismal into the world” that can and must be challenged. ⁹⁰ Doing so entails, among other things, identifying counter-resources from within the Islamic tradition and practices of Muslim-majority societies, rather than simply superimposing the evaluative frameworks with which Euro-American scholars are most familiar. While this is not my purpose, it’s nevertheless important to recognize the range of sources, arguments, and evidence available to both challenge Islamist discourse on humiliation and contribute to the many ongoing efforts to advance an egalitarian Islam conducive to emancipatory purposes rather than retaliation and repatriarchalization. ⁹¹

Of course, many (though certainly not all) Islamists claim to speak for the authentic and true Islam, a representation reinforced by the frequent conflation of Islamist arguments with Islam per se. Nonetheless, the conception of humiliation articulated by Islamist discourse is historically and politically contingent rather than inevitable, unique to Muslims, or the expression of an Islamic essence. The extent to which this discourse continually evokes the Islamic tradition from which it claims authority is a crucial dimension of its affective power both within and beyond Islamist cadres. But as the preceding arguments make clear, its resonance also depends upon familiarity with a widely recognized version of masculinity, as well as with quotidian and collective experiences of powerlessness among the audiences it seeks to mobilize.

Neither this understanding nor these conditions are unique to Muslim-majority societies. This provides a point of entry for thinking about potential overlap among contemporary invocations of humiliation across cultural formations and languages. The most obvious comparison is with other religious discourses, particularly given the frequent and explicit links among humiliation, masculinity and retaliation evident in some Jewish and Hindu “fundamentalist” rhetoric. ⁹² Yet it’s far too easy to project these features of humiliation discourse onto others, to contain it within the precincts of religious extremism or so-called “honor cultures.” ⁹³ It’s much less obvious—and far more revealing—to investigate overlaps closer to home.

Here, then, it makes sense to return to the example with which this discussion began: the rhetorics of humiliation evoked by the photographs from Mogadishu. American characterizations of the photographs as a national humiliation most obviously express outrage at the brutal treatment of Americans by “ungrateful Somalis.” By the same token, Bin Laden’s invocation of humiliation most clearly expresses exultation that injustices suffered by Muslims at the hands of Americans have been avenged. What’s perhaps less obvious is the way that both rhetorics of humiliation collaborate to convert the images of dead, stripped, mutilated American male soldiers dragged through the streets of the capital—and what was done to make them—into a public enactment of American impotence, literal and symbolic. As opposed to the “cognition of inadequacy” characteristic of shame, humiliation here lives in the rupture between such imposed impotence and Americans’ sense of rightful primacy in the geopolitical order. ⁹⁴ This means that the repeated rehearsal of the event by Islamists after the fact, as well as the continual reproduction of the photographs in American newspapers, did more than simply circulate a record of what happened. It also constituted a reenactment of the rupture, one capable of revivifying the experience of humiliation itself. This is worth thinking about, particularly in light of digital technologies that now circulate such images and rhetorics instantly, repetitively, and everywhere.

A gendered discourse of national humiliation has been energized at many other moments in which “America” has squared off against an “Islamic enemy.” One obvious case in point emerges most clearly from Saurette’s analysis of how George W. Bush’s electoral persona and character, confirmed by the hyper-masculinist dynamics of his inner circle, helped frame the events of 9/11 as a “profound humiliation” of the United States. ⁹⁵ Much as Islamist discourse requires certain forms of retaliatory humiliation as expiation for the “humiliation of Islam,” Saurette points to Bush’s first speech at the World Trade Center wreckage as evidence that both the president and his audience framed the attack as a humiliation requiring public retribution. According to Saurette, the dynamics of the speech convey “not merely that punishment will be meted out, but that the humiliated nation, the humiliating terrorists, and the viewing world public will all be witness to a counter-humiliation that not only visits just retribution on the terrorists, but that also allows the pride and self-respect of the American nation to be publicly reasserted and regained.” ⁹⁶

Consider also the explosion of Internet chatter in the United States about how President Barack Obama’s apology for the burning of Qur’an pages by American military personnel in Afghanistan “humiliated America,” a theme that returned repeatedly during the 2012 presidential election in the form of accusations that Obama had embarked on an “apology tour of the Middle East.” ⁹⁷ Such characterizations recast Obama’s apology for a specific event as the humiliation of America tout court, tantamount to rolling over, bending over, and ultimately, handing over a measure of American power—and to Muslims of all people. Depicted as submission, Obama’s apology evokes the specter of an America unmanned, a perversion of the proper hierarchy of cultures and nations whose antidote, by definition, requires an enactment of American potency sufficiently muscular to recuperate a posture of primacy. As with many Islamist invocations of humiliation, the status of women and sexuality seems beside the point, yet is implicated at every turn by the hierarchy of gender and sexual norms such rhetoric and exhortations to action encode. Also implicated in such depictions of Obama in particular is the unspoken matter of race deeply and toxically intertwined with humiliation, gender and sexuality in American life, past and present. ⁹⁸

I adduce these examples not to advance a general law that explains all invocations of humiliation, but rather to show that the gendered register of humiliation evident in Islamist discourse—the ways it reflects and energizes a historically specific experience of impotence and a correlative need for particularly muscular expiation—is operative in multiple contexts, including “our” own. Such overlap is not tantamount to equivalence or suggestive of a universal principle reflective of a common human nature beneath surface differences. Recent U.S. experiences of humiliation are at least partly predicated upon a superpower myth of primacy and invulnerability difficult to fully recuperate in the wake of 9/11—and, crucially, Vietnam. ⁹⁹ In this context, continual and visible enactments of American potency are necessary to at once banish the specter of vulnerability and shore up a myth revealed as such.

By contrast, a provocation such as the “Innocence of Muslims” video was experienced by many Muslims as just the most recent in a long series of humiliations, from Abu Ghraib to the invasion of Iraq, drone strikes in Pakistan to the continual degradation of Palestinians, Danish cartoons to the destruction of Qur’anic pages by American military personnel. At one level, these incidents are radically different from one another. On another level, however, they register as continuous symptoms and symbols of asymmetrical power: the power and desire of non-Muslims to humiliate Islam and Muslims, and the felt powerlessness of believers—particularly those men who understand themselves as guardians of the umma, of Islam, and of women and children—to either to stop it or remake its conditions of possibility.

These examples show that the collective humiliation encoded as imperiled masculinity is constructed out of a repertoire of self-images sedimented through an accumulation of politically, historically and culturally specific experiences of power and powerlessness. It is precisely this gendered register that is obscured by invocations of a violated dignity or injured self-respect organized around a generic individual. At the same time, these examples render unsustainable accounts that trace the dynamic of “humiliate or be humiliated” to a timeless and pathological Arab or Muslim masculinity characteristic of developmentally arrested honor cultures. ¹⁰⁰ In contrast to both such accounts, these examples suggest that under certain conditions, humiliation in the twenty-first century has become a kind of affective Esperanto that registers in multiple contexts as an exhortation to what Machiavelli called virtú: action that performs and recuperates a “dominant” masculinity. ¹⁰¹