Humiliation and the Political Mobilization of Masculinity

Abstract

Islamist rhetoric about the humiliation of Islam and American rhetoric about national humiliation have been energized by disparate events in recent years, from the photographs of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia to the invasion of Iraq, the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the attacks on 9/11. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of scholarship on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general, and in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims in particular. The link between humiliation and Muslims is thus a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars from various disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation. This article takes up the following questions: What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Do these different rhetorics of humiliation articulate the same understanding of it, as an act and an experience? What does close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it in this particular moment in history? Finally, what do the answers to these questions say about the reach and limits of the dominant account of humiliation as the violated dignity or injured self-respect of a generic individual?

Is Tolerance Liberal? Javed Ahmad Ghamidi and the Non-Muslim Minority

“…66 Other modern thinkers such as Syed Qutb have taken humility in pious devotion to Allah to "constitute freedom from enslavement to arbitrary human authority." 67 Relying on the wide and deep endorsement of humility in Islamic thought, Ghamidi takes for granted the familiarity of his audience with the notion of khushū'.…”

Osama Bin Laden and His Jihadist Global Hegemonic Masculinity

“…Some researchers point to similarities between jihadist concepts of masculinity and those of the extreme right in Europe and the United States. In both cases such masculinities are conceptualized as “protest masculinities” and rooted in a profound sense of alienation and male humiliation that result in strictly dichotomous world views and longings to reinstate what is perceived as a sense of honor and the self-respect of the respective community (Euben 2015; Kimmel 2003). However, and as Inhorn (2012) has pointed out, protest masculinities in the Middle East today are likewise constructed by “ordinary men,” such as those who in January 2011 entered the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond to challenge the dictatorial regimes, police brutality, corruption, poverty, and unemployment in their home countries.…”