No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2022
Every June, Coptic Solidarity, a lobbying organization, holds an annual conference in Washington, DC, with the aim of raising awareness of the persecution of Coptic and other Middle Eastern Christians. The Copt-run organization reaches out to American politicians, religious leaders, and advocates of human rights and religious freedom. During their 2016 conference, a panel entitled “What is the Future of Egypt's Minorities?” sparked a heated debate. Panelist Fatima Naoot, a secular, liberal Muslim activist from Egypt, was firm in her commentary that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are an integral part of its character. “It's impossible to say that there is a Coptic minority in Egypt because Coptic is not simply a religion, but also an ethnic category that forms the basis of Egyptian identity. Therefore, if Copts are citizens [of Egypt], they cannot be part of a minority.” An organizer for Coptic Solidarity emphatically disagreed with Naoot, speaking from the audience during the Q&A period: “We are the indigenous people of Egypt, of course! But we are also a minority in Egypt and we are persecuted, whether we are citizens or not. Because of persecution, we are here [in the US] because our people are a persecuted minority there!” Naoot responded, admitting that there was discrimination but insisting that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are integral, as one of the ethno-religious peoples of Egypt, to the abstract idea of the Egyptian nation and therefore to Egyptian citizenship. She concluded with the following clarification: “In Egypt, you are not [a minority], but here in America you are!”
1 For more on the history of this debate in Egypt, see Sedra, Paul, “Class Cleavage and Ethnic Conflict: Coptic Christian Communities in Modern Egyptian Politics,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 10, no. 2 (1999): 219–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mahmood, Saba, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 By the end of the Cold War, the coalescence of the Christian Right and the emergence of the United States as the world's sole superpower formed the context of a new kind of transnational politicization by way of the persecuted Christians movement, which impacted upon how non-Western Christian minority migrant communities like the Copts shaped their communal narratives, activism, and advocacy, in line with more conservative political alignments. For more on the persecuted Christians movement, see Elizabeth Castelli, “Praying for the Persecuted Church: US Christian Activism in the Global Arena,” Journal of Human Rights 4 (2005): 321–51; and Melani McAlister, “Evangelical Populist Internationalism and the Politics of Persecution,” Review of Faith & International Affairs 17, no. 3 (2019): 105–17.
3 Exceptions include: Nadia Marzouki, “The U.S. Coptic Diaspora and the Limit of Polarization,” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 14, no. 3 (2016): 261–76; and Candace Lukasik, “Economy of Blood: The Persecuted Church and the Racialization of American Copts,” American Anthropologist 123, no. 3 (2021): 565–77.
4 Ghassan Hage, The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 5.
5 “Founder's Vision,” Cordoba House, accessed 28 August 2022, http://cordobahouse.com/about-us/founders-vision.
6 “Joseph Nasrallah Speaks at the FDI/SIOA Rally of Remembrance, 9/11/2010,” YouTube video, 4:23, EyeOnTheWorld4, 12 September 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJMRDqsMCE&t=28s.
7 Marlow Stern, “Media for Christ, Company Allegedly behind ‘Innocence of Muslims,’” Daily Beast, 14 July 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/media-for-christ-company-allegedly-behind-innocence-of-muslims. Although not in attendance at Nasrallah's 2010 speech, I was in attendance for his 2011 appearance at the same rally. Members of the audience around us distinctly asked one another whether Nasrallah was Muslim or not, even after he was introduced as Coptic Christian.
8 See Volpp, Leti, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49 (2002)Google Scholar; Rana, Junaid, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
9 Candace Lukasik, “Land, Migration, and Memory in an Upper Egyptian Village,” Egypt Migrations, 25 June 2017, https://egyptmigrations.com/2017/06/25/land-migration-and-memory.
10 Mahmood, Religious Difference, 213.