Islamist rhetoric and writing are replete with invocations of “the humiliation of Islam," accompanied by exhortations to make the enemies of Islam “taste the humiliation” that has been inflicted on Muslims. At the same time, an array of high-profile flashpoints between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the "civilizations" they are often made to represent, are widely depicted in terms of “humiliation.” So understood, the association between humiliation and Muslims is very much a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke humiliation, and the cottage industry of publications seeking to explain and contain the violence with which it’s continually linked. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse, correspondingly minimal effort to analyze how the experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action, and virtually no attempt to identify both patterns and discontinuities in the way different rhetorics construct humiliation, the experience and the act. Analysis of the specific content and significance of humiliation in Islamist discourse in this paper yields four arguments. First, Islamist discourse defines the “humiliation of Islam” as the imposition of impotence on Islam/Muslims by those with greater and undeserved power, a condition understood to violate ‘natural’ gender and sexual norms as well as the divinely given socio-moral hierarchy upon which justice depends. Second, this definition depicts retaliatory humiliation as an enactment of a particular version of masculinity, the performance of which at once recuperates a lost sense of agency and restores the proper hierarchical ordering of men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, the dominant and submissive. Third, humiliation discourse so understood operates on an affective register particularly central to certain experiences of masculinity, a register reflective of a gendered experience not captured by the dominant philosophical definition of humiliation in terms of the injured self-respect of a generic individual. In contrast to those who have posited and pathologized an essential Muslim or Arab masculinity, I argue that the gendered register of humiliation evident in Islamist discourse is also operative in several invocations of the “humiliation of America.” This is so despite the fact that each discourse is constructed out of a repertoire of self-images sedimented through an accumulation of specific experiences of power and powerlessness. In this sense, under certain conditions, humiliation in the 21st-century has become a kind of affective Esperanto that registers in multiple cultures and languages as an exhortation to courageous acts designed to recuperate masculine agency.