From classical texts to TikTok, Muslim masculinity has taken many forms. These papers analyze the way that Muslim men have imagined ideal masculinity physically, spiritually, and relationally, as well as the ways men have embodied and/or resisted these ideals.
This paper examines Crusader imagery on social media to show how creators are deploying the Crusader knight in new ways. By drawing on a shared image of traditional masculinity, the Crusader knight draws affinities between users from a variety of religious and national backgrounds. After a brief look at the history of the internet cultures that inform it, the second half of this paper analyzes widely viewed knight edits on TikTok, taking into account the captions, tags, and comments to get a better sense of how the Crusades have been memeified, communicating affect and vibe more than alignment with a particular religious historical narrative. Ultimately, I show that Crusader content is shaped just as much by internet culture as by the religio-political groups that deploy it.
What is an ideal man? I explore this question through early Muslim depictions of the beard. Discourses on the appearance, treatment, quality or absence of beards reveal much about the underlying concerns surrounding the masculine roles and identities that were required to enact proper belief, righteous behavior, social status and communal care. Part 1 examines the beard as metonymy for male genitalia, and bearded men as essential begetters of life, patres familias, conductors of ritual, sources of wisdom, or warriors. Part 2 examines cases where facial hair or its absence troubled established associations between beards and men, which clouded patriarchal roles, gendered binaries, and ritual fulfillment. The conclusion suggests how fracturing traditional masculinities enabled men to express fragility, pain or grief, and proffered the revelatory message of care and inclusion to bodies on the margins, including the impotent, castrated or effeminate.
Can a man be a mystic and a good father? The orthodox obligation to marry and have children meant Muslim men often had to navigate the equally weighty demands of fatherhood and mystical life. Hagiographies of medieval Sufi men have a curious tension: they often praise men who abandoned and ignored their children in pursuit of mystical insight, but also show vast Sufi family networks and discuss in-home Sufi education. While it seems that wayward fathers were idealized, the lived reality indicates that many “ordinary” Sufi men were likely quite active in attending to their children’s spiritual, emotional, and financial needs. Drawing on Sufi manuals, hagiographies, ethical, and legal texts, I begin to trace the major questions of the relationship between mystical fatherhood, saintly narrative, and how an “ordinary” father’s mystical achievement can be recovered and elevated for scholarly consideration.