Orientalism divided the world along gendered terms into a masculine, active, rational, and progressive West and a feminine, passive, irrational, and backward Orient. Given this gendered understanding of modernity, how did the Orient as a "living tableau of queerness," in Said’s pointed expression, accommodate formations of the masculine heroic? This paper explores the location of the Arab Muslim hero within the asymmetric relationship between East and West through an examination of obituaries for Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri (1807-1883). It suggests that the assigning of masculine heroism to occasional “Orientals” should be conceived as an intrinsic part of European expansion into the Orient as it permitted imagining a commitment to submission and loyal acquiescence to colonial projects of modernity. Abd al-Qadir, who was at times explicitly compared to his contemporary Garibaldi, was doubtlessly one of the most illustrious figures of modern Middle Eastern history. Two moments of his life gained him global notoriety: first, his tenacious military resistance as leader of jihad against the French invasion of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, which was followed by imprisonment in France 1847-1852 and his widely popularized liberation by France’s president and later emperor Louis Napoléon; second, his protection of the Christian population in his Damascene exile during the riots of 1860, for which Abd al-Qadir was decorated and honored by various European governments. His lifetime coincided with a peak in hero worship in Western Europe, exemplified in the works of Thomas Carlyle, as well as a shift towards bourgeois versions of hegemonic masculinity. Against this background, many European intellectuals recognized in Abd al-Qadir a decidedly Arab form of masculine virtue and heroic character, took pride in being acquainted with him, and made sure to visit him on their journeys through the Levant. When he died in 1883 after a protracted illness, Abd al-Qadir had largely retreated from politics or anti-colonialist activity, lived a quietist life as a local notable and respected Islamic thinker, and benefited from French financial and diplomatic support. Abd al-Qadir’s death received substantial attention in the international media. In this paper, I present a critical analysis of obituaries that appeared in French, British, and Ottoman journals. In doing so, I discern and compare how journals in different imperial contexts emphasized the masculine heroic in Abd al-Qadir’s life to counter or validate Orientalist images of the Orient and projects of colonial expansion.