The chastity society: disciplining Muslim men

At a time when Western humanitarian rescue discourses seek to save Muslim women from irrational and violent Islamic masculinities, the Jordanian Islamist charity “the Chastity Society” seeks to train young men to restrain their excessive masculine passions to ensure that Muslim women are spared the fate of the benighted and oppressed Western woman. This article traces parallel emphases on gender essentialism, rationality, cultural pathology, and abjection to argue that a shared language of contention unites both Islamists and those who advocate for Western humanitarian interventions. I explore how several kinds of social control are legitimized through these symmetrical polemics about gender, order, and civilization.