Scouting for God: Metaphysics and Masculinity in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Jawwala Program, 1933–1948

Abstract

This article examines the Muslim Brotherhood’s scouting ( jawwāla ) program in colonial Egypt as a key site for the articulation of masculinity. Building on scholarship on effendi masculinity and modernity, it argues that the Brotherhood advanced a distinct model of masculine self-cultivation that cannot be fully understood through frameworks of nationalist subject formation alone. Drawing on Brotherhood periodicals from the 1930s and 1940s, the article shows how scouting practices were reinterpreted through an Islamic moral and metaphysical framework centered on God, the soul, and the afterlife. It further demonstrates how Brotherhood activists depicted the homosocial bonding fostered by scouting practices as a privileged source of piety and masculine virtue. Taken together, these elements foreground the role of God in shaping modern Islamic activism while also revealing the hybrid character of the Brotherhood’s model of masculinity, rooted in both Islamic ethical traditions and modern transnational movements such as “muscular Christianity.”