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 second article in this category is Duygu Gül Kaya's “Coming to Terms with the Past: Rewriting History through a Therapeutic Public Discourse in Turkey.” Over the last few decades, memory, trauma, and justice—themes that reemerge in this issue's roundtable—have converged to form a powerful discursive field through which political claims can be made and historical processes constructed and described. Drawing on popular and academic texts, Gül Kaya traces the recent emergence in Turkey of a particular therapeutic public discourse that she terms “coming to terms with the past,” which has been deployed by victimized groups—such as the Kurds, the Alevis, and the Armenians—as well as by the Turkish state. While often celebrated for its redeeming qualities or dismissed as empty jargon, “coming to terms with the past” is rarely analyzed as a discourse, no less one with temporal effects. As Gül Kaya argues, 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.” Her article assesses the limits of this discourse while raising questions about the politics of memory in general.
Michael Farquhar's article, “Saudi Petrodollars, Spiritual Capital, and the Islamic University of Medina: A Wahhabi Missionary Project in Transnational Perspective,” opens the second section of the issue, titled “Islamic Ideological Projects.” Since the oil boom of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has wielded strong influence outside its borders through the ultraconservative Wahhabi Islam for which it is known. However, the workings of that influence have not been interrogated beyond the analysis of “petrodollars.” Farquhar addresses this gap through a focus on the history of the influential Wahhabi missionary project, the Islamic University of Medina, and particularly its majority non-Saudi faculty. Whereas scholars have shown how non-Saudis contributed to the rise of Islamist forms of politics in the kingdom, Farquhar draws on the notion of spiritual capital to show how they were also critical to the expansion of Wahhabi Islam elsewhere. He argues that “migrant staff did not arrive at the IUM [Islamic University of Medina] only as units of skilled labor or as Islamist ideologues. They also came as bearers of diversified reserves of spiritual capital, symbolic resources that stood to bolster the university's religious standing with Muslim communities around the world.” In other words, Saudi missionary projects and influence abroad depended on the flow not only of oil and petrodollars, but also of people, and not only from the kingdom to elsewhere, but also from around the globe into the kingdom.
In “Martyrology and Conceptions of Time in Hizbullah's Writing Practices,” Bashir Saade calls for a rethinking of Islamist ideology, and ideology in toto. Much of the scholarship on Hizbullah has sought to identify the ideology that frames and informs the group's political practices. But Saade suggests that “social and textual rituals of commemoration are so crucial to Hizbullah's modus operandi that one could argue that the party's effectiveness at making sense of its environment and producing political action derives less from a complex, theoretically informed ideology than from its meticulous use of the past.” Analyzing a set of writings on martyrs published in early issues of the Hizbullah periodical al-ʿAhd (The Promise), Saade argues that they are part of an ever-expanding archive of “traces” that have provided ideological coherence to the movement and served as templates for future ideological formulations. For Saade, Martyrs' acts of “witnessing” are testimonies to a way of life that are meant to transmit a particular ethics for others to follow. Moreover, as martyrs accumulated in Hizbullah's battle with Israel and its Lebanese proxies, the commemoration of these testimonies gradually filled the calendar space, breaking up calendric time by fusing past and present in a way that, according to Saade, challenges the often-made distinction between modern secular and premodern religious time. Analyzing this phenomenon, Saade shows how Islamist groups such as Hizbullah rearticulate both communal and national imaginaries through particular kinds of ideological production and normative discourse.
The third category in the issue, “Vernacular Journeys,” opens with Mikiya Koyagi's article, “The Vernacular Journey: Railway Travelers in Early Pahlavi Iran, 1925–50.” Koyagi explores how during the second quarter of the 20th century railway technology and spaces became part of the everyday lives of Iranians. Critical to this process was the Iranian state's and middle class' construction of the railway traveler prototype, a “vernacular code” with which Iranian elites differentiated themselves from the foreign travelers whom they encountered on the trains. Developed in the 1920s and 1930s in anticipation of the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway, this prototype was also intended to propagate modernity by cultivating certain kinds of Iranian travelers suitable to a certain vision of the railway space—what Koyagi refers to as a de Certeau “strategy” for control. But once the railway opened, the prototype elicited the de Certeauian “tactic,” or the attempt by those with no control over space to gain temporary advantage. Thus, “rather than creating a homogeneous experience of railway journeys, [the railway space] was conducive to fragmented experiences among its diverse occupants, who were divided by religion, socioeconomic status, cultural orientation, and ethnicity.” Encountering this heterogeneity, middle-class travelers were compelled to consolidate their class identity and distinguish themselves from the rest of Iranian society. Yet they also felt the urge to travel more extensively, whether to propagate modernity or to gain knowledge of Iranians different from themselves, ultimately contributing to the spread of national consciousness and the formation of an interconnected national community.
In “Women's Visibility in Petitions from Greater Syria during the Late Ottoman Period,” Fruma Zachs and Yuval Ben-Bassat draw attention to an understudied and important source for Ottoman history: women's petitions. Judging by the paucity of such petitions in the Ottoman State Archives, the authors suggest that Ottoman women only rarely petitioned the sultan in Istanbul. Those who did petition the state were typically urbanites who used the petition as a last resort when all other avenues for recompense—particularly through the courts—had failed. In the early period, women submitted petitions individually and deployed a submissive and humble tone. With the emergence of constitutionalism and the spread of women's literacy and activism in the early 20th century, the “woman question” came to the forefront of public discourse, but the number of women's petitions did not rise. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of nationalist movements in which women took part, women's petitions were often collective, strident in tone, and, most importantly, reflective of a “double voice.” As Zachs and Ben-Bassat argue, “double-voiced petitions … allowed women to submit petitions as part of the dominant national discourse while expressing their muted voice—the voice of women fighting for their own place in the national project.”
Organized with the help of Ayda Erbal, this issue's roundtable, titled “One Hundred Years of Denial: The Armenian Genocide,” recognizes the passing of a century since the Armenian Genocide through a focus on genocide denial. Our five contributors cover three central themes related to this subject: civil society initiatives and the popular and scholarly discourse of Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals over the past twenty years; the ethical and moral responsibilities of scholars; and the political grammar structuring encounters between Turkish and Turkish-Armenian intellectuals, as well as between Turkish intellectuals and Armenian diaspora intellectuals.
