The other Copts: Between sectarianism, nationalism and catholic Coptic activism in Minya (2024)

The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, 2019

Under the leadership of Coptic Pope Tawadros II, the official message of the Coptic Orthodox Church has been that Copts under Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi are living under their best conditions in modern Egyptian history. Tawadros has championed Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi as a “savior” of the Copts, following the ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi. Despite the church’s official statements praising the government for its protection, acts of terrorism and incidents of sectarianism have continued.

Introduction The term Copt originally came from the Greek word Aiguptos meaning “Egyptian.” It became synonymous in Egypt with native Christians since the Arab conquest.1 The Copts are the largest Christian community in the Middle East, geographically concentrated mainly in Egypt, where they constitute some 10–16% of the population.2 Although most of the writers used to refer to the Copts in Egypt as minority, the Copts themselves used to deny that.3 The first half of the 20th century can be arguably considered the turning point in the Copt’s modern history. The year 1911 witnessed the first Copts’ claim of discrimination and the 1923 constitution was the first official step, according to some Copts, against their sense of belonging to Egypt by declaring Islam as State religion. There is a prevalent narrative of entrenched and pervasive discrimination against Egypt’s Coptic community in that period. It behooves us then to look closely at this dominant narrative to determine its legi...

After the conquest of Islam, scholars argue for a ‘crisis of the Coptic identity’. With a major focus on the Mamluks’ period, they propagate that the Mamluks imposed strict restrictions upon Copts which turned them into a marginalized minority. The historical sources of that period are loaded with intercommunal tensions among the ‘ordinary people’ which increases suspicion and tension between both communities in our modern times.In order to get a deeper insight into the reasons behind the turbulent intercommunal relations, and highlight the social change in medieval Egyptian society, I will analyze the religious speech of both Muslim and Christian communities, using Bourdieu’s habitus theory.This study argues that the fading boundaries, resulting from the period of the Shi‘i Fatimids’ rule, led to a struggle of religious identities among both the Sunni Muslims and the Christians. Upon the succession of the Sunnis to power, Sunnis emphasized their religious identity, in relation to the other, based on what is not, rather than what it is. A strategy which was followed by the Christians as well. This led to reciprocal hatred and interreligious violence which brought the Coptic Christians to a low point in their history under the rule of the Mamluks. Consequently, a ‘Coptic’ Christian identity emerged in order to face the developing Sunni Muslim identity.

Deep within the sands of the Nile Valley in the Land of the Pharaohs, weathering the relentless passage of time, has been preserved one of the oldest surviving traditions of Christianity. Coptic Orthodox Christianity, tracing its inception to the apostolic ministry of Saint Mark in the first century, is a vibrant form of Christianity that is unique to Egypt. After 18 centuries of laborious existence, having withheld multiples waves of persecution and invasions, the last in a chain of imperialist, religious, and cultural intruders was an uninvited transfusion of Western Christianity in the modern period. The American Presbyterian mission of the 19th and 20th centuries served to challenge, animate, reshape, strengthen yet surely also vex this ancient church. This mission would eventually exert a powerful impact not only on this indigenous Christian Church but also on the wider emerging modern Egyptian nation, precipitating significant religious, sociological, and political changes whose echoes still reverberate in Egypt today. In this paper, relying on primary mission sources as well as Egyptian and Western secondary sources, I attempt to provide a brief survey of this mission, its context and circ*mstances, ideas and ideologies, strategy and methodology, and its reception and entertainment in the local context, while seeking to understand the complexities of the encounter - or rather this “clash of civilizations” - between the Occident and the Orient in this context and its ramifications for a church and for a nation.

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief , 2020

Middle East Critique, 2016

This article explores conflicts within the Coptic community related to problems of definition and representation. Coptic groups that emerged from Egypt’s 2011 revolution brought these tensions to the fore. Groups such as the prominent Maspero Youth Union (MYU) [Itihad Shabab Maspero] were formed to contest the hegemony of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egyptian nationalpolitics. The MYU and others have attempted to reconstruct social boundaries drawn by the Church and the state, promoting political secularism, or the separation of religion from politics, as a solution to inter-communal strife and remedy to intra-communal conflict over the position of the Coptic Orthodox Church as the sole representative of the community. At the same time, the group has emphasized their Coptic identity through religious symbols and imagery at protest events, as depicted at the Masperomemorial march in 2012. While the MYU officially endorsed secular governance as a means to overcome sectarianism, its actions also made visible internal conflicts over the representation of Coptic identity in contemporary Egyptian society. Although the promise of secularism and equal citizenship is not specific to the Coptic or Egyptian context, this article focuses on its paradoxical effects within the Coptic community and its relationship to the state.

The paper focuses on the Staus of the largest minority group in Egypt, the Copts before the Arab Spring Revolution and, immediately after the revolution. It includes also an historical perspective as to the status of the Copts in Egypt from the 19th century till the end of Mubarak's era.

The Alexandria School Journal, 2020

The late twentieth century saw both a revival and change of the Coptic Orthodox theological framework. Copts from Egypt began to emigrate into the West which led to a paradigmatic shift in theology among Copts in the diaspora. In this paper, I intend to provide a systematic analysis of the rise of modern Coptic theology, and its effect on the Christian concept of community. I will argue that the political rhetoric of exclusion is incongruent with the Christian ethos of inclusivity and call to live with the “other”. I will also argue that Copts need to shift their thinking from exclusion to belonging, and to reframe our practices to prioritize the centrality of catholicity to the church (i.e. inclusion of all others). This paper will seek to do three things. Firstly, it will highlight the terms of community and belonging, which are vague and complex, and need to be accurately understood. Secondly, the paper will demonstrate that merely including people labeled as “outsiders” is not enough in overcoming the alienation, stigmatization, and exclusion of those who we have been reduced as the “outsiders” in the Coptic community; Copts need to move from ideas of exclusion to practices of belonging. Finally, the theology of Father Alexander Schmemann will be used to demonstrate that the key to such transformation is not in politics, but in a eucharistic understanding of the body of Christ, which brings together all nations and cultures. It is only when we learn how to accept and love one another, as others, through an inclusive community that embodies the whole, that we understand the theology of radical Christ-like love.

European Yearbook of Minority Issues, Issue 11, 2014

This article unpacks the relationship between Egypt’s Coptic OrthodoxChurch and the Egyptian state. It argues that although cooperation between PopeShenouda and former president Mubarak was based partly on the aim of preventingIslamists coming to power and threatening the status of non-Muslims, the Churchquickly adapted to a post-Mubarak political environment. This was reflected in theendurance of old paradigms of relations despite changes in leaders since the revolutionof 25 January 2011. However, the rise in attacks on Copts and Coptic churches indicatesan underlying problem of sectarianism remains, exacerbated by the uprising that theseold paradigms cannot address. This article contends this endemic religious tension andthe failure to find influential spaces outside the Church for Coptic political participationwas exacerbated after the uprising by the decline of a discourse of al-mowatana (activecitizenship), accompanied by the appearance of a counter-discourse of matalib fi’awiya(factional demands).

Studies in World Christianity, 2009

Millennium

“Historical Definitions and Synonyms for “Copt” and “Coptic”: the Construction of Communal Identity in Pre-Modern Egypt at the Nexus of Language, History, and Ethnogenesis,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 13 (2021), 11-45., 2021

This study scrutinizes the meaning and use of “Copt” and “Coptic” in the Middle Ages, when three interrelated—yet distinct and, at times, contradictory—“sets” of definitions circulated among Christians and Muslims. The first set comes from linguistic etymologies and mythical histories. In that context, this study contests the historicity of “Copt” in the earliest versions of the written Talmud. A second set of definitions emerged from Arabic historical and ethnogenetic narratives, while a third set reflects religious communal identity. Here, the evidence suggests that “Copt” and “Jacobite” were not only used interchangeably, but that “Jacobite” was often preferred and, at times, exclusive to the Copts. Significantly, the communal boundaries of the third set of definitions blatantly transgress those of the second, and even the first. In addition, this study demonstrates that pre-modern texts switched from one definition to the other without pause, which places a greater burden on scholars to clearly discern the contexts of any attestation for “Copt[-ic].” The three sets of definitions parsed here challenge contemporary usage among the Coptic community, church, and academics, which largely depend on the paradigm of the nation state.

In a multi-lingual and multi-religious society such as the Egyptian one, the development of the collective memory is obvious and can be traced in order to identify the events in Christian Egypt that were most influential in shaping Coptic consciousness. Coptic identity can be recognised in every element of the Coptic heritage, such as literature, archaeology and art. The present paper tries to highlight the self-identification of the Copts as it is reflected in their own literary texts produced until the end of the Mamluk period (1517 CE). Since Coptic identity is variegated, this brief study will be limited to only three features: language, conversion and martyrdom, and apologetics and religious dialogue.

Coptic Canadian History Project, 2020

I examine biographies that are simultaneously ignored by historical, anthropological and sociological writings on the one hand, and that are institutionally suppressed by the Egyptian State, society and the Coptic Orthodox Church on the other. My scholarly research takes place in bars, coffeehouses, night clubs, weed gatherings, prisons, and casinos. I tell stories of Coptic sex workers, queers, alcoholics, drug addicts, non-believers, and traumatized people. My aim is to elevate the voices and agencies of people who reflect heterogeneous definitions of what it means to be, and to live, as a Copt.

As Egypt faces rising tensions following the ousting of Mohamed Morsi, the Coptic community once more finds itself in the crossfire. The Coptic Patriarch’s stance in support of the June 30, 2013 protests has been linked to the killing of a Coptic priest in Sinai days after Morsi’s fall.1 This incident is the latest in a series of developments in Egyptian history in which the country’s Coptic community has played the role of a litmus test for the national ideal.