Focusing on the prominent emphasis on gender and sexuality in contemporary Islamic discourse, the paper explores changing configurations of sexual difference as schemes for articulating modernist visions of Islamic normativity and related forms of subjecthood that accompany them. It asks how sexual difference emerged as an allegedly undisputed transcendental fact and thus a locus for the production of authoritative Islamic speech. The nature of women and men as well as relations between the sexes in the realms of marriage, family, society and polity at large have been major concerns of public debates in the MENA on religion, modernity and scientific progress since the colonial period. In these debates, Islam figured as a key reference beyond the circles of religious specialists. It developed into a core resource for projects of both, personhood as well as social and political order. At the same time, Islamic references themselves were continuously rearticulated and reorganized on the structural as well as the conceptual level cutting across the secular-religious divide. Against this background, notions of properly sexed and sexualized human “nature” became crucial apologetic devices in modern foundationalist conceptions of Islamic normativity as well as in arguments about specific forms of subjecthood. Based on critical textual analysis of selected writings by Islamic intellectuals from different countries of the Arab speaking region covering the period from the 1950s to the 2000s (such as ?Allal al-Fasi, ?A?isha ?Abd al-Rahman, Fatima Ahmad, Rashid al-Ghannushi and Hiba Raouf ?Izzat), the paper scrutinizes the shifting political grammar as well as the different epistemic grounds of Islamic definitions of sexual difference.