This paper explores uses of psychological and Islamic discourses in efforts to reform public secondary education in independent Hashimite Iraq (1932-58). These efforts targeted adolescence as a critical and precarious stage of psychological development and were often attempts to discipline politically transgressive youth with leftist sympathies. I focus on the writings of three leading educational theorists, Sati` al-Husri, Sami Shawkat, and `Ali al-Wardi. While there were important differences in their pedagogical philosophies, all were critical of “will” or “reason” as a determinant of human action, arguing that the science of psychology had demonstrated that effective education worked on the senses, the body, feeling, and the unconscious rather than on the intellect. And all criticized what they saw as the backwardness of Islam in their time, which was manifested in 1) the scholastic preoccupation of Islamic authorities with ideas, texts, and speech that worked only on the planes of reason and the conscious mind rather than on those of the body and the unconscious, and were therefore ineffective; and 2) Islamic pedagogies such as memorization, chanting, and rocking back and forth, which did work on the body and the unconscious and were effective, namely in producing mindless fanatics dependent on the guidance of external authorities rather than modern, self-disciplined subjects with developed interiorities. The problem for these secular reformers was thus not that Islam in their time concerned itself strictly with the soul, or perversely with the body, or that it saw itself as a set of ethical pedagogies rather than private beliefs (as suggested by three recent scholarly narratives). It was that it failed to provide “education for real life,” which meant 1) life that would ultimately contribute to the nation’s economic development; and 2) life that moved in its own stable linear time through specific psychological stages of development and according to the differences between the two sexes. Once the practices responsible for this failure had been carefully disavowed, Islam reappeared in the writings of these thinkers, not on either side of a soul/body divide but as a means of cultivating morality understood as sexual difference and heteronormativity. “Islamic” education (seen as best taught by those trained at Baghdad Teachers College, not in Islamic institutions) thus became especially important in the reform of secondary schools, where, it was hoped, it could help adolescents successfully traverse the perilous stage of life after puberty by disciplining their newly awakened sexual instincts.