How to realize your self? This question, reflective of neoliberal understandings of individual subjectivity and the sacred, is the basis of the Egyptian self-help guide whose artwork graces this issue's cover. The book is one among hundreds like it that can be bought in Egypt's bookstalls and bookstores, from where they circulate through the homes and workplaces of readers. This growing and popular corpus is the focus of Jeffrey T. Kenney's “Selling Success, Nurturing the Self: Self-Help Literature, Capitalist Values, and the Sacralization of Subjective Life in Egypt,” the first of two articles that make up the section “Therapeutic Discourses.” Kenney argues that as capitalism has expanded in Egypt, it has given rise to a pervasive consumer culture and, relatedly, a self-help literature that competes with Islamic etiquette manuals. Mixing modern ideas and ethical practices to form varied and unpredictable combinations, self-help has become a flat universal idiom, but what has given it its legitimacy in Egypt is its association with local tradition. “The inherent message of self-help,” Kenney writes, “is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.”

The growing strength of self-help literature in Egypt represents a new cultural expression of accommodation with capitalism, and markedly expands the mix of modern ideas and ethical practices rendered legitimate through association with tradition. The ideas and practices found in self-help, however, are anything but traditional. In its style and content, self-help expresses the values of individualism and neoliberal understandings of subjectivity. Informed by modern insights into the self and its formation, the genre blurs the boundary between psychology and religion, valorizing the process of self-exploration and self-fulfillment. The inherent message of self-help is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.

This article examines the growing interest in questions of memory, trauma, and justice in Turkey, with a special focus on the notion of “coming to terms with the past.” Through an analysis of key academic and popular texts published between 2002 and 2013, it argues that “coming to terms with the past” is a therapeutic public discourse that rewrites national history through the temporality of trauma. In other words, this discourse reconfigures the sequence of past, present, and future as the beginning, development, and end of a case of collective trauma, applying the psychotherapeutic terminology of victimhood, healing, and forgiveness to social realities. The article offers new perspective on existing debates over “coming to terms with the past” by analyzing the limits of this therapeutic discourse and by exploring the potential and open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.

While the idea that Saudi Arabia has functioned as a beacon of ultraconservative religious influence since the 1970s oil boom is commonplace, the modalities of this influence have rarely been seriously interrogated. As a window onto this issue, this article considers the history of the Islamic University of Medina, an influential Wahhabi missionary project with global ambitions. It pays particular attention to the role played by non-Saudi staff, who for long periods made up a majority of the university's faculty. Previous accounts of migrants working in Saudi religious educational institutions have tended to focus on the contested question of their contribution to the rise of politically activist modes of Islamism within the kingdom. In contrast, the account offered here draws on the concept of spiritual capital to argue that they also played an important part in legitimizing the expansion of the Wahhabi mission to diverse Muslim communities around the world.

Soon after its founding in the early 1980s, the Lebanese political organization Hizbullah developed a specific practice of remembering its dead. In this article, I argue that through this practice Hizbullah constructed an elaborate conception of time and history that gave ideological coherence to the movement's main political project, al-muqāwama al-islāmiyya (Islamic Resistance). Examining early writings in the Hizbullah weekly al-ʿAhd published during the organization's formative period, I show how such writings were instrumental in producing ideological templates that have continued to be replicated until today. Through a set of ritualistic practices, Hizbullah-affiliated intellectuals have archived everything related to martyrs and other kinds of human legacies, a process that has fed into the notion of an ever-present, and at times anticipated, era (ʿahd) of resistance. Moreover, the project of Islamic Resistance has gained salience each time the past is relived in the present, producing political action. Hizbullah's efforts at history writing have involved a transmission of ethics through martyrs' act of witnessing and their testimony to a way of life. Analyzing this phenomenon sheds light on the way political Islamic groups such as Hizbullah articulate national imaginaries through specific kinds of ideological production.

Exploring how railway technology was incorporated into the everyday lives of Iranians during the second quarter of the 20th century, this article focuses on spatial discourses and practices around the Iranian railway. The first part investigates Iranian journalists' construction of the railway traveler prototype as the propagator of modernity prior to the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway in 1938. The second part shows how in the 1940s the railway space became a microcosm of the heterogeneous Iranian nation, and explores how middle-class travelers experienced the railway space. I argue that the railway space, rather than creating a homogeneous experience of railway journeys, was conducive to fragmented experiences among its diverse occupants, who were divided by religion, socioeconomic status, cultural orientation, and ethnicity. The visibility of heterogeneity in the railway space compelled modern middle-class travelers to consolidate their class identity and distinguish themselves from the rest of Iranian society. Wanting to achieve a homogeneously Europeanized Iran, they also felt compelled to travel the country more extensively to create a national community connected through direct interaction.

This article focuses on petitions by Ottoman women from Greater Syria during the late Ottoman era. After offering a general overview of women's petitions in the Ottoman Empire, it explores changes in women's petitions between 1865 and 1919 through several case studies. The article then discusses women's “double-voiced” petitions following the empire's defeat in World War I, particularly those submitted to the King-Crane Commission. The concept of “double-voiced” petitions, or speaking in a voice that reflects both a dominant and a muted discourse, is extended here from the genre of literary fiction to Ottoman women's petitions. We argue that in Greater Syria double-voiced petitions only began to appear with the empire's collapse, when women both participated in national struggles and strove to protect their rights as women in their own societies.

The summer of 2015 will perhaps be remembered as a watershed moment in the annals of racism in the United States. What had been normalized for decades by the southern states and giant retailers in “postracist” America was institutionally delegitimized almost overnight. Upping the ante, the department store giant Macy's announced it will discontinue Donald Trump merchandise because of Trump's racist remarks. A mere half century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in a perfect act of Foucauldian governmentality and market regulation from above, American business interests aggressively interfered in redefining the discursive and symbolic boundaries of the new mainstream normativity and truth in the United States. One can safely say that symbolic and actual denial of slavery and racist essentialism as normalized discourses in mainstream US culture and scholarship took another institutional blow, even though some reactionary book review here and there can still make its way into the mainstream, and even though defeating “dog whistle politics” is much more difficult than defeating outright racist symbols or speech.

Still prefaced in many commentaries as a taboo, the topic of the genocide in Turkey has ironically become a talking point de rigueur for anyone who is visible in the public sphere and who lays claims to an identity as an intellectual. “Anyone,” then, will momentarily serve as the working definition of the intellectual, for all intents and purposes, in this inquiry into the grammar among Turkish and Armenian intellectuals both within and outside Turkey. The litany of self-proclaimed firsts in addressing the topic of genocide in any given genre in Turkey is better understood in the light of Barthes' notion of the “inflexion” in myth. Such vocabulary of self-advertisement, of being a historic “first,” creates a curious hierarchy when it comes to the all-important topic of a foundational and denied genocide: it is not that the intellectual brings herself to the service of the topic, but that the topic serves up to the rejuvenation of the intellectual's prominence and controversial value in the public sphere. The emphasis is not on the quality, characteristics, or commitments of the works in question, but on the fact of the intellectual being a “first,” and thus, implicitly, a mythical figure above critical inquiry.

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse as sözde Ermeni sorunu (the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as 1915 olayları (the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.

The existing literature on the denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 tends to concentrate on either the Turkish state's political practices or civil society's increasing openness to alternative readings of the event. I argue that both approaches reduce denialism to the political practices and defense mechanisms of Turkey by prioritizing the state as the sole agent of genocide denial. Although the state is indeed a dominant actor of denialism, to juxtapose state and society is to overlook the power that rests in the discourse itself and its pervasiveness across different—at times even competing—social and political settings.

A century after the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial by the Turkish state, there has emerged a notable and unprecedented interest in the Armenian past and present both in civil society discourse and scholarship in Turkey, accompanied by various reconciliation iniatives at the state and society levels. Observers have suggested that this increased engagement with Turkey's suppressed past is an outcome of its EU candidacy, the democratization reforms of the early 2000s, and the shockwave among liberal segments of Turkish society caused by the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. I argue that this shortsighted analysis, which completely ignores the Kurdish movement's transformative challenge to Turkish denialism since the 1980s, echoes the key fallacy of present discussions of Turkey's engagement with its past: compartmentalization and disjunction of interlinked state crimes.