! ! Casual Crossings: The Muslim Attendance of Coptic Spaces in Provincial Egypt ! ! ! by ! ! ! ! Isaac Friesen ! ! ! ! A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor! of Philosophy Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University !of Toronto ! ! ! © Copyright by Isaac! Friesen 2021 ! ! ! ! !

Casual Crossings: The Muslim Attendance of Coptic Spaces in Provincial Egypt ! ! Isaac Friesen! Doctor of Philosophy! Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University !of Toronto 2021! ! !Abstract This dissertation examines overlapping ethics, traditions and histories at four Coptic sites frequented by Muslims in the provincial Egyptian city of Beni Suef. Despite operating beneath the weight of a narrative of worsening sectarian relations, these sites, like many others in Egypt, reveal patterns of casual and confident interfaith crossing. Based on years of participant observation, interviews and institutional archives, this dissertation argues that these crossing practices relied on the ubiquity of practical ethical judgement in people’s everyday lives. At the same time, this dissertation illustrates how powerful traditions and institutions can also be marked by fluidity, flexibility and pragmatism. Critiquing the great explanatory power some anthropologists have granted to formal concepts (such as secularism), this dissertation employs historicism to better elucidate the social and political contexts of a particular place in time. When people at these sites of crossing did express feelings of doubt, failure or anxiety, it was almost always related to historically-situated socioeconomic and political pressures. Hence, while interactions at these interfaith sites usually did not hinge on religious difference, they provide a compelling lens into how provincial Egyptians have experienced neoliberalism, colonialism, the religious revivals, globalization, secularism, and the state in their everyday lives. In turn, this project reveals how these complex historical processes have shaped “Muslim-Christian relations” in Egypt.

ii Acknowledgements

I want to first thank my committee members, Amira Mittermaier, Michael Lambek and James Reilly, for their guidance and support over my years of study at the University of Toronto. Jim Reilly taught me a great deal about how to read, research and teach the history of the modern Middle East. I am very grateful to Michael Lambek for his kind, generous and helpful advice and support. Finally, I want to thank Amira Mittermaier for taking a chance on me as a PhD student back in 2014. Whether it was a twist of fate or a bit of good fortune, I am grateful to have ended up with such a wonderful person and scholar as an advisor. ! I am also grateful to Khaled Fahmy for joining my committee as an external examiner. Having long admired and learned from his scholarship and commentary on Egypt, it meant so much to receive his guidance in my study of Egyptian politics and society. I also want to thank Nada Moumtaz for her very helpful contributions as internal-external committee member. Other people in the academic world who have helped me along the way include Andreas Bandak, Bessma Momani, Gavin Brockett, Pamela Klassen, Anna Sousa, Jasmin Habib, Abdel-Khalig Ali, Jens Hanssen, David Monod, the late George Urbaniak, Vlad Naumescu, Nermeen Moufah, Ahsen Akdal, Joud Alkorani, Usman Hamid, and Ahsan Moghul. This project was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Toronto, the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ! To Wanda, my fellow traveller, you have my love. We are not two, we are one. ! Finally, I want to thank my many Egyptian friends and interlocutors who made this project possible. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Teresa George, Waleed Ahmed, Mahmoud Selim, Ahmed El-Kordy, Abuna Youssef, Hadeer Arafa, Hanan el-Tayeb, Mohammad Ammory and family, Bishoy Barsoum, Mena Youssef, Ibram Saleh, Ahmed Rowaey, Doha Ramadan and family, Hani and family, Tarek, Amr, Bessma, Roshan, Minna, Ahab, Giddū wa Tayta, Sheikh Hassan, Ahmed, Mido, Muatasim, Aya and Fatima, Philobateer, Rania, Tamer and Alia, Enass, Mohamed, Ahmed, and Taha. The friendship, insights and support of these people, along with so many others in Beni Suef, is the reason this dissertation on Egypt exists.

iii ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ——This dissertation is dedicated to the people of Beni Suef—— ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

iv Table of Contents ! ! !Acknowledgements.……………………………………………………………………………..iii !Table of Contents.……………..…………………………………………………………………v !Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One.……………………………………………………………………………………28 The Religion and Secularism of Power: !A History of “Muslim-Christian Relations” in Modern Egypt Chapter Two…………………………………………………………………………………….73 !In the Same Air: Muslim Visitations to a Miraculous Coptic Priest Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………114 !Secularism in the Vernacular at a Coptic-run Language Program Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………………..151 Practicing Politics in Provincial Egypt: !A Democratic Ethos amidst the Rise and Fall of Democracy as a State System Chapter Five.…………………………………………………………………………………..193 Everyday Life in Exceptional Times: !Church Bombings, Checkpoints and a Festival for the Virgin Mary !Postscript………………………………………………………………………………………229 !Bibliography.…………………………………………………………………………………..236 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

v Introduction ! A Place in Time ! In many ways, this is a story that begins in early 2011. It was then that I first moved to the provincial Egyptian city of Beni Suef (where I worked as an instructor at al-kūrsāt adult language program—examined in Chapter 3). Egypt, at the time, was in the throes of revolution, and would remain so until a 2013 coup d’état brought a decisive end to the uprising. Fleeing the country in the unrest that followed the August 2013 Rāb‘a Massacre, I eventually returned to Beni Suef in subsequent years to conduct extended fieldwork stints for my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. And so one might say this dissertation is really a story set during the 2011-2018 period in which I undertook my ethnographic research. However, the chapters ahead demonstrate that this highly ethnographic text is also a work steeped in the sensibilities and theories of the discipline of history. My analysis frequently reaches back in time; to the 1990s, the nineteenth century, 1967, the interwar period, 1952, and the 1970s. But, all things considered, it was 2011 that was the most formative year for my understanding of Egyptian society and politics. And so it is with this year I begin. The first thing I noticed during my inaugural visit to Beni Suef was its size. The cityscape, which came into clear view as the car I was travelling in crossed the area’s sole trans- Nile bridge, made plain that Beni Suef was not the Cairo metropolis I had flown into. I was immediately struck by how the city of 300,000 people living in dense urban quarters was still interrupted by convoys of buffalo, sheep, and farm fields. South of Beni Suef bridge, the lush green agricultural hues continued as far as the eye could see. Heading north, on the other hand, the Nile’s banks were lined with cafes, nādīs (private clubs), and the public walkway known as the corniche. The tops of apartment buildings, minarets and church towers punctuated the skyline beyond. The very first place I visited that spring day was the Saint Mark’s Language School. The church-administered school building, which housed both the daytime elementary school and the evening adult classes where I would teach was part of the large muṭrāniyya (archdiocese

1 cathedral) compound in the city centre. Touring both the children’s school and al-kūrsāt program that afternoon, I was introduced to many different people, protocols and materials. To be honest, I remember feeling quite bewildered during the visit. Everything was so new and foreign to me: the language, the social norms, the photographs of Coptic bishops on the walls and the sound of the call to prayer beyond them. Some of the teachers and students I met wore the grey robes and head-coverings of Coptic nuns, while others sported the Muslim higab. Working regularly at the school between 2011 and 2013, however, everything there eventually became normal to me. In particular, I came to take the mixing of Muslims and Christians in the church space for granted. From my perspective, it really was ‘ādī (normal). Fast forward to 2015, when I found myself in somewhat of a rut about my dissertation topic. How could my utterly normal fieldsite of Beni Suef, I wondered, offer anything to such a broad and sophisticated body of anthropological literature? Then, as I read for my comprehensive exams, it gradually dawned on me. What was so familiar to me (Muslim crossing into Christian spaces) almost went unmentioned in the anthropological literature on the Arab world. Heavily influenced by Alasdair MacIntyre’s understanding of traditions as clearly demarcated and comprehensive, many anthropological texts on the Middle East and beyond seemed to take the rigid division between adherents of religious groups as a given.1 And so a research project was born about the Muslim attendance of Coptic spaces—a project which, I believe, has significant insights for anthropological conceptions of religion, secularism, ethics, politics and history. The chapters ahead examine the overlapping traditions, ethics and histories that facilitate and shape practices of interfaith crossing at four Coptic church-run sites in Beni Suef. Three core arguments emerge from this study. First, I argue that historicism must inform ethnographic studies of political concepts, inequities and policies in order to capture the particular contexts of place and time. My emphasis on the importance of historicism critiques, among other things, the great explanatory power some anthropologists have granted to the concept of secularism. My

1 MacIntyre, Alasdair. After virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton University Press, 2015; Heo, Angie. The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. I will treat these works in more detail later in this introduction.

2 second argument is that powerful institutions and traditions can be marked by fluidity, pragmatism and flexibility, and that these entities must therefore be seen as inextricably tied to— not separate from—the everyday. Thirdly, I argue that the intersections and inflections of different discourses, categories, and identities in a given society are unpredictable, and thus the close analysis of overlapping social patterns is needed to capture how ordinary people experience formal concepts and policies. ! ! Lives and Livelihoods ! Lying 120 km south of Cairo, at the northern edges of Upper Egypt, the eponymous capital of the Beni Suef governorate enjoys little acclaim or fanfare in the country’s national imaginary. At my 2011 arrival, the only claim to fame listed on the city’s English Wikipedia page was a 1995 train crash and a large fire (the 2005 Cultural palace fire which killed 46 members of Egypt’s theatre community). The entry for Beni Suef in the Lonely Planet guidebook I was given was short and sweet: “there is now little to capture the traveller’s interest beyond the sight of a provincial city at work.” I remember this description actually piqued my interest, and the fact that my wife and I did not meet any fellow Western residents in our first few years living in the city was, I believe, of great benefit to my education. The largest mīdān or square in Beni Suef (Mīdān Mudīriyya) is situated near the central train station, with main streets branching out from it like spokes on a wheel. One of these avenues is known colloquially as shāri’ al-khuḍār or Vegetable Street—a pedestrian road that houses the city’s largest fruit and vegetable market. The produce offerings there vary considerably depending on season, as they do at the multitude of other markets, large and small, around the city. So while the sweet aroma of guava and bright yellow piles of small bananas are mainstay features of markets throughout the year, the fruit selection really ramps up with summer offerings of mango, grapes and watermelon. In the winter, on the other hand, vegetables such as cabbage, potatoes and peas gain prominence. Shops, cafes, restaurants and bakeries ran alongside the street vendors as far as the eye can see.

3 While some fallāḥīn (peasants) continued to live and work in the fields in and around Beni Suef during my fieldwork, the city has grown increasingly coloured by industry. In 2013, Samsung chose Beni Suef as the site of its first factory in the Middle East and Africa, while the German conglomerate Siemens completed construction of a massive combined cycle power plant outside the city in 2018. Other factories, mostly across the Nile in Beni Suef al-gidīda or New Beni Suef, produced cement, bricks, yeast, technological hardware, and plastics. In the latter years of my fieldwork, much of the investment in the city became led by the Egyptian army, including the gigantic Tulip Inn hotel and conference centre near the corniche. Despite all this growth, Beni Suef residents continue to emigrate to Cairo in large numbers—a phenomenon only offset by high birth rates and migration from rural areas into the provincial city. Not that Beni Suef offers newcomers guaranteed prosperity. Indeed, degraded and underserved areas are scattered throughout the city centre, and some residents continue to live in rural-style houses composed of straw, Nile silt and cow dung. Many of the people that appear in this dissertation, however, come from the provincial urban centre’s large middle class. For instance, several characters are postsecondary students at Beni Suef University, which was established as a branch of Cairo University in 1976 (before achieving autonomy in 2005). Others attended the East-bank private institution al-Nahda. Still more are teachers, bureaucrats, chemists, engineers, photographers, tradespeople, and pharmacists, among other professions. Egypt’s middle and lower-classes (who also frequently appear in this dissertation) faced tremendous financial strain in the years I undertook research. First, it was the 2011 uprising which rattled Egypt’s economy (especially foreign investment and tourism). While the new Sisi government brought at least an aura of stability after 2013, it also instituted a host of IMF-mandated austerity measures and economic policies that had a profound effect on people’s lives and livelihoods. The flotation of the Egyptian pound in 2016 led to marked inflation, and prices in Beni Suef rose accordingly. The economic hardship people faced, therefore, is a common theme across the chapters in this dissertation. Inflation was far and away the most common talking point during my latter years of research in Beni Suef; a reality made plain by a conversation with one of my key interlocutors, Abdulrahman (a longtime student at the aforementioned church-run al-kūrsāt

4 language classes). Back when I first met Abdulrahman, the charming and articulate computer programmer occasionally liked to joke about the size of his kirsh (paunch). By 2017, however, he had adopted a strict diet and exercise routine. What irked him then was that each time he went to the store to buy his six select grocery items, the prices had increased. “People are really suffering from this situation,” Abdulrahman told me as we talked on his office balcony, “this is why the government has nizlit min ‘īn il-nās (declined in people’s eyes). You have to have lots of money to be OK. I do, al-ḥamdulillāh (thanks be to God), and so do most of my friends.” —“So do they like the government?” I asked, curious. —“No!” Abdulrahman laughed, “not even the government likes the government.” Abdulrahman’s point ties into another theme, beyond interfaith crossing, that runs through this dissertation: political expression, alienation, and repression. A number of the scenes in this dissertation are set during the 2011-2013 period—a revolutionary window when Egyptians enjoyed unprecedented freedom of speech. New hopes, critiques and concerns for the country were on the tips of everyone’s tongues, and security services were rarely listening or looming threateningly in the background. Much changed, in this regard, after the 2013 coup d’état. Ever since, the revolution, for most of my interlocutors, has become but a bittersweet memory. The few interlocutors who still held a shred of political optimism in 2018 pointed to the country’s demographics. Egypt’s population pyramid mirrors the famed structures at the Giza Plateau, and therefore a change in the ruling class, some reasoned, was inevitable. The country’s youth was certainly apparent in Beni Suef’s streets. In the wintertime, children scurried about in their beige uniforms, whereas the voices of teenagers and young adults filled the summer nights. The primary destination for Beni Suef residents seeking leisure was the Nile-side corniche—a peaceful cafe-lined promenade which appears often in this dissertation. I clearly remember walking the pathway with a group of new friends in 2011. A refreshing breeze had been blowing since the day before, and the grass spaces beside the corniche were occupied completely by picnicking families and the occasional egret. As I watched a couple of children play in a large puddle created by the irrigation of nearby shrubs, a stone bounced sharply on the pavement less than a few feet from where my friends and I walked. We

5 immediately stopped. Was someone playing a prank on us? Or had I somehow come under attack as an unwelcome foreigner? Following the stone’s presumed trajectory, my eyes settled on a group of children standing up on the corniche’s stone embankment—just below where a vendor of tirmis wa ḥummuṣ (lupin beans and chickpeas) had placed his brightly-lit cart. The children’s eyes, however, were not fixed on my friends and I, but on the ripe date fruit hanging from the palm tree above. Suddenly, one of the young boys threw an even larger piece of brick, clearly trying to knock the dates down. This time it landed near a picnicking family of six. The long-bearded man in the group quickly jumped up and yelled “ḥāsib ya walad (careful boy)!” before gesturing around to all the bystanders, many of whom were laughing at the children’s innocent recklessness. The boys voiced their apologies and proceeded to walk up towards an empty bench on the landing above. So what, if anything, did religion have to do with this interaction? Mostly nothing. Indeed, it was a common scene in Beni Suef: people confidently engaging one another and living their lives together. At the same time, Beni Suef residents were profoundly shaped by the religious traditions and communities they were a part of. Ultimately the precise manner in which people’s social lives casually intersected with religion is a question I elaborate on in the next section and, indeed, throughout this dissertation. ! ! Religious Difference and Indifference ! Religion in Beni Suef was always present. What I mean by this is that every person I met, almost without exception, clearly identified as either Muslim or Christian. A communal affiliation to either religious group was a deeply ingrained part of people’s identities. Most estimates suggest Christians number about five to ten percent of Beni Suef’s population (a percentage in line with the national average), while the remaining 90 to 95 percent are Muslim. The prominence of religious identity, however, rarely translated into overt social conflict, tension or inequity. Rather, the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Beni Suef was, for the most

6 part, utterly mundane and ordinary for everyone involved—even at church-run sites. This dissertation is in some ways an attempt to engage with the question of how and when religion matters or does not matter in Egyptian society. What I want to show in subsequent pages is that, although Beni Suef Muslims were always Muslim and Christians always Christian, religious affiliation often did not dictate interactions and behaviours. Whether or not a person, ordinary Egyptian or Canadian academic, looks at Egyptian society and sees separation or overlap between Christians and Muslims really depends on perspective. One could arrive at the former view by considering how many Copts’ social lives centre around the church. For instance, a favourite evening destination for Coptic youth during my research was the church-run rooftop nādī (club) across from the archdiocese cathedral. In all my years in Beni Suef, I never met a Muslim visitor at the nādī. Likewise, many Coptic athletes went to their church complexes to play football, while Muslims tended to go to other private clubs in the city. Finally, the only time marriage between a Muslim and a Christian occurred in Upper Egypt, it was inevitably a source of scandal and humiliation for the families involved. Indeed, religious homogeneity among kin is a major generator of borders between Muslims and Christians in family-centric Egyptian society. On the other hand, a cursory glance at Beni Suef society also reveals considerable overlap between Egyptian Muslims and Christians. For example, from public and private elementary school classrooms to university lecture halls, Muslim and Christian students usually shared the same learning spaces in Beni Suef. And while perhaps Copts tended to associate with other Christians at higher rates at these sites, and vice versa, this was often more a matter of personal history and familiarity (the aforementioned family connections) than deliberate avoidance of religious others. Likewise, neither taxis, nor trains, nor microbuses or planes distinguished between Muslim and Christian commuters. In the city’s crowded commercial areas, the religion of store owners mattered little, to my eye, as to whether a person patronized a shop or not. Many of Beni Suef’s best clothing shops could be found on Saad Zaghluul Street (named after the Wafd figure who helped spearhead Egypt’s 1919 revolution against the British). It was well known that several of these textile stores were owned by Muslim Brotherhood members. Yet whenever I visited them, there were almost always women milling about, beneath

7 the stores’ constant broadcast of Quran recitations, with their hair uncovered (a telltale sign of religious affiliation in Beni Suef).2 This dissertation, however, illuminates even more counterintuitive examples of Muslims and Christians sharing the same space by exploring several sites run by the Coptic Church that were frequented by Muslims. Indeed, at a Coptic priest’s miracle khidma (service), the aforementioned church-run language program, a church-run NGO, and a festival for the Virgin Mary at a Coptic retreat centre, no one blinked an eye at the crossing of religious borders. Beyond these four sites which compose the core of this dissertation, there were many other Coptic places in the city Muslims frequented in a comfortable and confident manner, including the Salām (Peace) Hospital behind the muṭrāniyya, the private elementary schools run by the Coptic Church (such as al-tawfik Language School), and social services (such as the āghsān zaytūn [olive branch] centre for people with special needs). Even amidst the revolution, church bombings, and checkpoints that marked my fieldwork, Muslims visited these sites en masse. This reality is sparingly communicated in the anthropological literature on religion and society in Egypt. ! ! Beyond Worsening Relations ! Needless to say, there is a long history of Islam and Christianity coexisting in the Nile Valley. 3 In the last century or two, however, some very distinct changes occurred in the way religion intersected with society and politics. In Chapter one, I elaborate on this history; namely how European colonialism, religious modernism and nationalism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and the post-1967 religious revivals all played roles in transforming social dynamics in Egypt. As a result of these changes, church walls have grown higher while the

2 A telltale sign with rare exceptions: see Chapter 3.

3 Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine. “What Do Egypt’s Copts and Muslims Share? The Issue of Shrines,” in Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Albera & Couroucli, Maria (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.

8 number of violent sectarian incidents has increased. However, I believe this very real history of worsening relations, combined with the aforementioned proclivity of anthropologists to study committed piety movements in isolation, has resulted in anthropologists sometimes overstating the level of separation between Copts and Muslims in Egypt. One recent work which, at least on the surface, would seem to break away from this tendency is Angie Heo’s The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt. Yet while the broader framing of the book suggests an exploration of the many intersections of Muslim and Christian lives in Egypt, Heo’s analysis really begins and ends with an isolated Coptic perspective. Moreover, the general picture that comes to light in the text is an overwhelmingly negative one. For instance, Heo wishes to shift our sights to the “more permanent structures of repression, dispossession, and seclusion that have defined Coptic experiences of suspicion, fear, and rage.”4 Elsewhere, Heo considers “how the national frame of Christian-Muslim unity itself produces new dynamics of marginalization, dispossession, and threat.”5 The fact that the author focuses more on the materialities of sainthood than the lived experiences of ordinary Egyptians further obscures the vastly complex realities of how Egyptian society actually mediates and navigates religious difference. The question of what falls out when anthropological studies are relatively short on ethnography is even more salient when considering Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report—a book that relies much less on the experiences of ordinary Egyptians than formal legal codes and texts.6 Mahmood employs the Copts, in particular, as props for theoretical debates in the Western academy. Heeding Paul Sedra’s call for new scholarship on the Copts that portrays them as agentive actors in their own right, my dissertation avoids painting the Copts as narrowly tied to the apparently omnipresent concepts of secularism

4 Heo, Angie, 2018. pp. 6, 17.

5 Ibid. p. 26.

6 Mahmood, 2015.

9 or minoritarianism (proposed by Mahmood and Heo, respectively).7 Rather, in this dissertation, Copts are frequently the ones running the show. And as I will demonstrate, this mediation of religious difference is often unpredictable, reflexive and informed by a complex array of historically-situated forces. This dissertation is a reminder, in part, that religious overlaps and intermingling has been a normal course of affairs in much of human history—including in the postcolonial Middle East. Historically, the Eastern Mediterranean and wider Islamic worlds have been composed of religious patchworks, and from the Umayyads to the Abbasids, and the Fatimids to the Ottomans, religious homogeneity was rare.8 According to the Egyptian geographer Gamal Hamdan, the Nile valley has been particularly open to the mixing of cultures.9 Much transformed, however, with the emergence of the modern nation-state—a centralized political entity which demands varying degrees of social uniformity. Uniquely embedded in the rhizomatic relations that exist between two religious groups, my research documents how, even amidst the competing articulations about inclusion and exclusion in the nation, multidimensional networks of encounter and exchange between Muslims and Christians have persisted. My focus on the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in provincial Egypt, at first glance, might seem a complete break from the “tragic sensibility” that marks the deeply insightful work of Talal Asad.10 Indeed, many of the pictures I paint are affirming in nature, implicitly asking “what went right” in provincial Egyptian society. In some ways, my project follows Joel Robbins’ appeal to move beyond the suffering subject, and to instead write an

7 Sedra, Paul.“Writing the History of the Modern Copts: From Victims and Symbols to Actors,” in History Compass 7/3: 1049–1063, 2009.

8 Albera, Dionigi. “Crossing the Frontiers between the Monotheistic Religions: An Anthropological Approach,” in Albera & Couroucli, 2012. pp. 220-222.

9 Winegar, Jessica. Creative Reckonings: the Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. p. 123.

10 Scott, David. “The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. (Scott, David and Hirschkind, Charles, eds.) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

10 anthropology of the good.11 At the same time, and as the first chapter of this dissertation shows, I am in no way seeking to deny or downplay the sociopolitical problems that have manifested in Egypt in recent decades. In fact, I am of the firm belief that violence, tension and division between Muslims and Christians has increased markedly since the late-Nasser period. I describe numerous situations of mistrust and friction between Muslims and Christians (and frequently acknowledge how casual crossing only occurs in certain contexts). But that is not the only story of Egyptian society and politics. Nor is it, I would argue, the main one. What results is an ethnography and history that illuminates an unromanticized coexistence in Egypt. My approach builds on Veena Das’ portrayal of Hindus and Muslims in India as inhabiting “the same social world in a mode of agnostic belonging” rather than in perfect harmony. Still following Das, I “track how religious diversity occurs at different scales of social life and to understand the movements that occur connecting these different scales.”12 This dissertation is also inspired by historians of the Middle East, such as Khaled Fahmy, Juan Cole, Ussama Makdisi, and Joel Beinin, who, rather than pursuing a singular theoretical framework, commit to showing the great complexity of society and politics—nuance which inevitably undermines the heavy-handed use of formal concepts in isolation.13 What should become clear in my subsequent analysis of politics and the state is that I actually very much share Asad’s pessimistic and skeptical outlook on human history and progress. My discussions of the corruption and cynicism that naturally marks centres of political

11 Robbins, Joel. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3), 2013.

12 Das, Veena. “Cohabiting an Interreligious Milieu: Reflections on Religious Diversity,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, First Edition. Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (eds.). John Wiley and Sons: 2013, pp. 76-82.

13 Fahmy, Khaled. In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Makdisi, Ussama. Age of Coexistance: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; Cole, Juan. Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

11 power, however, also includes the dynamism and integrity that colours ordinary people’s lives— lives that go far beyond “worsening relations”.

! Coptic Sites ! My project examines Muslim crossing into Coptic spaces, and not vice versa, as a result of several considerations. First, the predominance of Islamic institutions and practices in Egyptian society means that Copts often inhabit Muslim spaces simply by being in the public sphere. A certain level of reciprocity, then, is in some ways built into the system. On the other hand, and in part as a response to this predominance (in addition to bureaucratic and theological reasons), Christians typically are either not permitted or not inclined to attend explicitly Islamic schools or festivals.14 Contemplated in isolation, the above dynamics reinforce the familiar trope of Egypt’s Coptic community as a defensive recluse. Large-scale Muslim attendance of Coptic sites, however, complicates any such assumption—and it is for this reason my analytical lens lies thusly. One way anthropologists have perpetuated the narrative of separation in Egypt is via their portrayal of how Egyptian Muslims regard Copts. For instance, Saba Mahmood asserts without any ethnographic evidence that Coptic Egyptian thinkers are “only Copts” in the eyes of their “Muslim audience.”15 Similarly, in her article on sacramentality among Copts in Egypt, Angie Heo suggests that a widely held stereotype among Egyptian Muslims is that Copts have a devious and secret nature.16 While I do not dispute that this view is held by some Egyptian Muslims, my extended fieldwork in Beni Suef calls into question its broader pervasiveness. Far

14 There are important exceptions to this. See the Christian attendance of a festival honouring a Muslim sheikh in the Minya village of Badramân (Mayeur-Jaouen in Albera & Couroucli, 2012. p. 163.)

15 Mahmood, 2015. p. 90.

16 Heo, Angie, “The Bodily Threat of Miracles: Security, Sacramentality, and the Egyptian Politics of Public Order,” in American Ethnologist, 40 (1), 2013. p. 160.

12 from narrow feelings of contempt and suspicion, many Muslims I knew thought very highly of Coptic sites and institutions. One evening in early 2017, I was out at a restaurant on the corniche with group of five friends, all of whom were young, educated men. In the process of catching up with each other, a civil servant named Taha mentioned how he and his wife had recently taken their daughter to the church-run salām hospital after she developed a bad fever. He described how kind and helpful they were in diagnosing the problem and prescribing the appropriate medication. The other men expressed thankfulness for Taha’s daughter’s recovery, before voicing their agreement about the hospital’s quality. Three of the four men, all of whom were Muslim, had also been to the hospital at one point or another. Although I was able to guess what their answer would be, I could not help but ask if they felt conflicted about going to a Coptic hospital. After everyone had responded emphatically in the negative, Hassan observed: —“Many people in Egypt actually have this idea that things from Christians are better… Christian hospitals are better… Christian schools are better. I think this is why some people…“ —“But this is not true,” Taha interrupted. “I don’t believe this at all. Fī wa fī (an Egyptian idiom literally meaning ‘there is and there is’ which figuratively means ‘it depends’).” —Hassan looked at his friend with slight annoyance and said “ya rāgal (come on man), I agree. I’m just talking about the idea people have.” Another man named Muhammad then spoke up: —“I think for most people it doesn't really matter if a place is owned by Muslims or Christians. Of course there are some people who hate Christians and will not go to Christian shops, and there are Christians like this too. But no one in my family or friends think this way. In my hometown (his family came from Qena), there was a new stationery store opened by a young Christian man. My father and I went to the store one night but forgot our money. The store owner, who didn’t know us at all, said it was no problem, and insisted we take the paper and prints we needed.” —Everyone else in the group nodded knowingly, clearly familiar with such practices, before Hassan opined, “this is what we are trying to say. For most people there is no issue of going to a Christian store or dealing with Christians in any way.” He paused, before adding, “I think

13 Egyptians are always aware of it (religion), but usually don’t even think about it— if that makes sense.” The experiences of people like Taha and Hassan illuminate how ordinary Egyptians balanced multifaceted beliefs, traditions, constraints and interests in their daily lives. My interlocutors at each fieldwork site were, by and large, pious Egyptians, whose lives were profoundly shaped by Islamic and Christian traditions. And still crossing was ‘ādī (normal). As I will detail further in the next section, what was ‘ādī (normal) in Beni Suef was not based on the separation of everyday practice and codified tradition.17 Rather people’s historically and socially- situated sense of normalcy was produced by the coalescence of everyday practice, powerful institutions and discursive traditions. The Muslim attendance of Christian spaces, therefore, provides a most fruitful lens for anthropologists to see how “traditions and borders occur within multiple levels of inclusion.”18 While religious identity and tradition was always present, there were always many other forces, motivations, and consequences that composed society. The most frequent descriptive concept for Beni Suef residents’ actions and interactions I come back to in this dissertation is Aristotelian concept of practical ethical judgement or phronesis. Following Michael Lambek, I define phronesis as “situated judgement within a tradition of values whose aim is human flourishing and dignity.”19 Across this dissertation, it is practical ethical judgement which allows my interlocutors’ economic, social, and medical interests (such as Taha’s) to sit comfortably and confidently beside their more high-minded philosophical ones. ! ! !

17 The separation of religion from the everyday is something Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando fairly critique the concept of the everyday for in “Rediscovering the “Everyday” Muslim Notes on an Anthropological Divide,” in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5 (2), 2015.

18 Lambek, Michael, “The Hermeneutics of Ethical Encounters: Between Traditions and Practice,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 227–250, 2015.

19 Lambek, Michael, The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. p. 191.

14 Everyday Traditions ! Beyond ordinary ethics, this project is also deeply influenced by the anthropological literature on the everyday. These works, typified by Samuli Schielke, Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, and Magnus Marsden, beautifully illustrate how the complexity of people’s lives cannot simply be explained by pious self-cultivation. That said, my dissertation diverges from this literature in one key regard. Whereas Schielke and Marsden often depict Muslims as filled with a sense of anxiety, doubt or failure in the way their everyday lives align with reformist Islam, I witnessed very little internal conflict among my interlocutors.20 What I show is that, though these interlocutors often did experience doubt and anxiety, it was almost exclusively in relation to the aforementioned economic and political adversity they faced. People’s day-to-day lives were far less strained by identitarian crisis and questions of piety—a fact that oftentimes escapes the anthropological literature on the everyday and pious self-cultivation. At the same time, this dissertation offers a novel contribution to anthropological debates about the extent to which people’s everyday lives align with the traditions they follow.21 While my ethnography generally corroborates the views of scholars such as Samuli Schielke that ordinary people’s lives are marked by pragmatism, ambivalence and flexibility, it also endorses Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando’s thesis that Islamic traditions should not be seen as separate, abstract and otherworldly moral systems.22 My historicist framework bridges this divide by extending the qualities of fluidity, pragmatism and flexibility to powerful traditions

20 Schielke, Samuli. Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015; Deeb, Lara & Harb, Mona. Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi‘ite South Beirut. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013; Marsden, Magnus, Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North West Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

21 Schielke, Samuli. “Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or how to make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life,” ZMO Working Papers, Vol. 2, 2010; Fadil and Fernando, 2015; Schielke, Samuli. “Living with unresolved differences: A reply to Fadil and Fernando,” in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(2), 2015.

22 Fadil and Fernando, 2015.

15 and institutions. Such entities, in turn, must be seen as inextricably intertwined with—not separate from—the everyday. In order to elucidate my point, let me reflect briefly on Michel de Certeau’s foundational concepts of strategies and tactics. According to De Certeau, powerful institutions and political orders employ strategies to produce structures of domination. In response, De Certeau claims, ordinary people pursue their own interests by use of tactics.23 Diverging from this framework, my dissertation illuminates how the leaders and guardians of powerful traditions and entities (such as the Coptic Church, the Egyptian state, reformist Islam, and the American Empire) also frequently adapt and employ tactics to pursue their own interests (such as embracing new technologies, neoliberal logics, or political alignments). Powerful entities are often incredibly flexible and pragmatic. Hence, when Saba Mahmood argues that secularism strives for coherence and regulation in the face of its own instability, her point is well taken.24 Secularism, however, is hardly unique in this regard. This is because history shows that all forms of power are “contingently produced,” and therefore pragmatically employ different tactics in different contexts.25 This plasticity, moreover, is neither a narrowly modern phenomenon nor a globalized one. Indeed, there is ample evidence of pragmatic institutions, states and traditions across the history of the Muslim World. Historians such as Khaled Fahmy, Yossef Rapoport, Knut Vikør, Songül Mecit and Christian Lange, to name a few, provide rich accounts of shifting relations between the state, the courts, the ‘ulamā’, and wider society across the Umayyad, Abbasid,

23 De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Rendall, Steven (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

24 Mahmood, Saba. “Reply to Judith Butler,” in Asad, Talal, et al. Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. pp. 146-147.

25 Ibid. p. 147.

16 Seljuq, Mamluk, Ottoman and modern eras.26 These studies make clear how Islamic categories such as the shari‘a, the state, ḥisba, maẓālim, and siyāsa transformed according to circumstances specific to time and place.27 They also show how the intertwined components of state, society and tradition can variably be sources of stability and change. Therefore any particular manifestation of Islamic tradition must also be understood to have been formed, at least to some extent, by the qualities (flexibility, ambiguity, instability, pragmatism, etc.) most often ascribed to the everyday. My basic point is that there is fluidity, pragmatism and flexibility down and up hierarchies of power, and this is why power relations unfold in such unpredictable ways. The everyday, then, must be seen as part and parcel to powerful traditions and institutions, and vice versa.

! Historicizing Secularism ! Given my interrogation of religious difference, indifference and crossing, this dissertation offers important new perspectives into anthropological conceptions of secularism. I first want to clarify that I approach this issue as neither a secularist nor an anti-secularist.28 Nor do I aim to provide some new, perfect definition of an essentially contested concept whose relevance, I

26 Vikor, Knut. Between God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Rappaport, Youssef. “Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlīd: The Four Chief Qāḍīs under the Mamluks,” in Islamic Law and Society 10(2), 2003; Rappaport, Youssef. “Royal Justice and Religious Law: Siyāsah and Shari‘ah under the Mamluks,” in Mamluk Studies Review 16, 2012; Lange, Christian and Mecit, Songül. The Seljuks: Politics, Society and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012; Fahmy, 2018.

27 The extensive sources cited in Fahmy's (2018) and Lange and Mecit's (2012) works complicate Hussein Ali Agrama’s idealized depiction of pre-modern ḥisba as form of ethical self-cultivation in Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

28 I take this neither/nor framing from Singh, Bhrigupati. Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

17 believe, is already overstated in the anthropological literature on Egypt.29 Rather my goal is to draw attention to how ethnographic and historical perspectives do or do not align with paradigmatic understandings of secularism.30 No living thinker has written so incisively and insightfully about secularism as Talal Asad. The great philosopher-anthropologist sums up the secular as “the doctrine that belief in the existence of any world other than this one is a dangerous delusion, that the essential character of this ‘real world’ is legitimately described only by ‘rational thought’—by natural science (what really exists) and by human history (what really happened).”31 Like Asad’s previous writing on the secular, I find this description both densely considered and very compelling. The picture of secularism offered by Asad’s students Saba Mahmood and Hussein Ali Agrama, however, marks a departure from Asad’s careful intellectual exercise. Both Mahmood and Agrama write about secularism as if it is an all-powerful agent, and the primary mover of modern Egyptian history. Therefore, rather than grouping Asad’s writings on secularism with those of his students as “Asadian”,32 in this dissertation I label Mahmood’s and Agrama’s framework as “agentive secularism” to reflect how it endows the concept with substantial agency. In Questioning Secularism, Agrama provides, among other things, much-needed analysis of how Islamist groups face added scrutiny in political arenas across the globe. The root of this suspicion, according to Agrama, is secularism, which engenders “an ongoing, deepening entanglement in the question of religion and politics.”33 Agrama labels the spaces immune to secularism’s dogged questioning asecular, investigating the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar as a rare example of indifference to secularism’s queries in Egypt. The fact that my interlocutors did not

29 See Gregory Starrett’s discussion of secularism as an essentially contested concept in “The Varieties of Secular Experience,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3), 2010.

30 Fahmy, 2018. p. 27.

31 Asad, Talal. “Portrait: Talal Asad: Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion,” in Religion and Society: Advances in Research 11, 2020, p. 6.

32 As Sindre Bangstad does in is excellent article “Contesting Secularism/s: Secularism and Islam in the Work of Talal Asad,” in Anthropological Theory, 9(2), 2009

33 Agrama, 2012. p. 29.

18 frequently feel tension about religious boundaries at sites of crossing, however, calls this general picture into question, and hints that Agrama's idea of asecular spaces may be more widespread. The nature of Agrama’s conclusions are undoubtedly influenced by his anchoring his project in the formal legal sphere, and above all else, Agrama is really writing about the state. This latter point is made plain, for instance, in Agrama’s conclusion that the ideology or party affiliations of parliamentarians in Egypt matters much less than whether and how the state further inserts itself into the lives of ordinary Egyptians—an assertion I wholeheartedly agree with.34 What I want to push back against, however, is how Agrama and many other anthropologists narrowly tie this penetrating state to secularism. The modern state’s sovereign and regulatory power is one thing, but is secularism really that same thing? If we see secularism through the agentive secularism framework’s lens as “the modern state’s sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life,”35 then we must conclude that all modern states are secular since they all regulate religion. But I wonder what, then, is the value of a “globally shared” concept when it manifests so differently across a diverse array of nation-states, each with their own unique historical, social and political contexts. Is the Saudi state’s intense “shaping of religious life and sensibility” really a matter of fulfilling the “requirements of liberal governance,” as Agrama suggests?36 What knowledge is lost when scholars conceptualize the United States, Myanmar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran as all secular?37 What meaning is even left in the concept? Of course, anthropologists of the Middle East have had good reason to critique secular discourses and protocols as both the tools and consequences of empire. For centuries, European powers have intervened in Muslim empires and states under the pretext of protecting non- Muslim minorities. In the nineteenth century, France and England gained greater control over the

34 Ibid, p. 235.

35 Mahmood, 2015. p. 3.

36 Agrama, 2012, p. 24.

37 While Mahmood briefly acknowledges that secularism is not “a single formation that homogeneously transforms all histories,” her discussion leans much more heavily towards secularism taking “strikingly similar forms across geographic contexts.” 2015, p. 10.

19 Ottoman economy by claiming to safeguard non-Muslim Ottoman subjects. When the Russian Empire intervened in Ottoman affairs, it was often under the guise of protecting the latter empire’s Orthodox Christian populations. The security of levantine Christians acted as a veneer for France’s opportunistic creation of Lebanon, and later justified that empire’s unsolicited stay in Syria after the First World War. More recently, American presidents such as George W. Bush, Barak Obama and Donald Trump continued the longtime White House tradition of justifying empire through the talking points of Islamic extremism and persecuted minorities. Any historical survey of international and domestic politics in the Middle East, however, also makes clear the extent to which the way states exercise discourses and policies around secularism, Islamism and “persecution of minorities” is driven primarily by opportunism. That is, Western empires have only shown concern for the supposed excesses of political Islam or plight of the Muslim World’s minorities when it has suited their political or economic agendas. Why else have Western empires demonstrated so little care for religious freedom, equality or secularism in the states of Israel, Saudi Arabia or Bahrain—all of which are highly repressive of certain religious groups? Ultimately I believe anthropologists have placed too much emphasis on the power and agency of concepts (such as secularism), and far too little on the pragmatic realpolitik that almost always guides empires and states. Looking at the Egyptian political context in the pages ahead, I show that it has been much less about the power of secularism or religion than the religion and secularism of power. The manner in which anthropologists have theorized political secularism across space and time leads to another proposition offered in this dissertation: the need to historicize. The philosopher Ian Hacking defines historicism as the theory that “social and cultural phenomena are historically determined, and that each period in history has its own values that are not directly applicable to other epochs,” and that “philosophical issues find their place, importance, and definition in a specific cultural milieu.” Hacking advocates for a “local historicism” that complicates grand unified accounts.38 None of these arguments are new to the field of anthropology, of course. Franz Boas routinely critiqued the predominant evolutionary theories

38 Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. London: Harper University Press, 2002. pp. 52-53.

20 and models of his day, calling instead for a historical particularism. Likewise, Clifford Geertz asserts how “understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity.”39 Ultimately because different states’ regulation of religion has varied so tremendously from one state to the next throughout history, anthropologists’ labelling each context as secular obscures our understanding rather than clarifying it. In secularism’s place, I propose that what the agentive secularism framework defines as secularism is actually a form of state centralization. Centralized state power, I believe, is a concept that can explain the state’s regulation of religion in Egypt, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Canada. Unlike political secularism, the concept of state centralization can accommodate the particular and divergent ways the state regulates religion in each context. ! ! A Personal History ! Before proceeding any further, I should clarify how I, a person born and raised in Southern Ontario and of European descent, ended up living in, researching and writing on provincial Egypt. From a young age, I had a strong curiosity about history, politics, and global affairs. Whether on the 1991-1995 Yugoslav wars and the 1993 Canadian federal election, or the Battle of Stalingrad and South Africa’s transition from apartheid, I read newspapers and books voraciously. The cover of the newspaper, of course, transformed after the September 11 attacks (I was in high school at the time), and the subsequent “War on Terror” profoundly coloured my political interests and outlook. The media’s constant stream of discourses and images (of war- torn Iraq, Afghanistan, and long-bearded villains) promoted the idea of a civilizational clash—a concept that seemed as dubious to me then as it does now. The bottom line is that my particular interest in the Arab World was piqued, and after I completed my MA in history (focusing on the

39 Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. p. 14.

21 modern Middle East), my wife and I signed on to move to provincial Egypt for a three-year volunteer term with Mennonite Development Organization (MDO). The mention of MDO brings up another crucial component of my Egyptian story: the Mennonite connection. This dissertation is undoubtedly influenced by my lifelong encounters with Mennonite institutions (which often understand the world through the lens of peace and conflict). Back in my adolescent years, my Mennonite background was something I was ashamed of—and for a time I would have scoffed at the thought of ever willingly affiliating with a Mennonite organization. I dreaded being tied to the Mennonite stereotypes of horses and buggies, piety and pacifism. A skeptic at heart, I spent many a family drive to and from church ridiculing Christian beliefs (and I now thank my parents for their patience). As I matured into adulthood, however, I began to develop a great appreciation for many aspects of the Mennonite community: the extended family, the strength and comfort of belief, the cultural heritage, and the support networks and institutions. MDO was one of those institutions that I had grown up with (my uncles and aunts had volunteered with MDO for many years in Lebanon, Jordan and Vietnam). So when my wife Wanda and I agreed we wanted to move to the Middle East, it was MDO we approached. By chance, we ended up being sent to the provincial Egyptian city of Beni Suef, where we would teach at a church-run English Connection adult language program (al- kūrsāt—examined in Chapter 3) until August 2013. When local Beni Suef residents asked me, often incredulously, why I chose to leave my home in Canada for Egypt, I typically responded by explaining that I wanted mughāmra (adventure) and t‘alīm (learning). The education I had in mind was immersion in Egyptian society, culture and language. And I was in luck. Except for my wife and a few MDO colleagues in Cairo, my entire community was composed of Egyptian friends, neighbours, students and co- workers. Over the years, I was deeply shaped by the Beni Suef social circles I became a part of. Not knowing a word of Arabic when I first stepped off the plane, I studied the language obsessively henceforth. I only watched Arabic programs on television, took up every conversation I could find, and pored over Arabic notebooks, vocabulary lists and texts for several

22 hours each day.40 My efforts paid off, and by 2013 strangers I spoke to often thought I too was Egyptian. That said, my blond hair, blue eyes and 193cm height, meant that at other times my foreignness was highly visible to people. While the frequent stares could be tiring, my difference also brought me far more respect, kindness and generosity than I deserved. Egyptians have an expression that partially explains the treatment I received as a white westerner—one that also further debunks any thesis of cultural clash: the ‘qdat khawāga (foreigner complex). The word khawāga derives from a Persian honorific title for lords or masters, but is used in Egypt today to denote foreigners generally. Egyptians define ‘qdat khawāga as belief in the superiority of all things Western—a view firmly rooted in colonial history that stretches back centuries to the Ottoman-era capitulation agreements (extensive privileges for European traders that were only abolished in Egypt in 1949). The complex arguably grew in the eras of indirect and direct European colonialism, when British and other European subjects were not only above the law, but were the law. Egypt’s subservient place in the American regional order since the late 1970s has sealed the continuation of white western privilege. The bottom line is that I often had an incredibly esteemed place in Beni Suef society; a reality that, more than anything, opened many doors. Having said that, the long and uninterrupted duration of my initial stay in a city with no other Westerners, my language proficiency, and my residing in the sh’abī (popular or lower- class) neighbourhood of ḥumiyyāt, allowed me to develop many friendships that went far beyond foreign identity and, above all else, it was these trusting relationships which facilitated my PhD fieldwork stints after 2013. I encountered helpful friends and acquaintances constantly during my research. The fact that I was so frequently recognized and approached as a foreigner means that this dissertation is also marked by an array of random encounters that illuminate the lives of Beni Suef residents. And the accompaniment of my wife (and, eventually, two sons) on almost all my stays in Beni Suef allowed me to bring many Egyptian women into the project as key

40 By far my favourite book was tāksī (Taxi), by the Egyptian writer Khaled Al-Khamissi. The 2006 novel, which is written primarily in the Egyptian Arabic dialect, centres on ethnographic snapshots of the experiences and lifeworlds of taxi drivers in Cairo, and provides rich insights into Egyptian politics, economics and society. tāksī ḥawādīt il-mashāwīr (Taxi: Tales of the Rides). London: Aflame Books, 2006.

23 interlocutors (in that my wife and I could meet with women at our apartment or cafes— something that would have been far more difficult had I been on my own). Perhaps most importantly, I chose a project where being an “outsider” was beneficial. Far from being labeled Christian due to my Mennonite affiliations, my Muslim and Coptic interlocutors alike regarded me as an ʾagnabī (foreigner)—and therefore neutral on highly charged discourses around “Muslim-Christian relations”. At the same time, I was uniquely embedded in a number of Coptic and Muslim communities, and the trusting relationships I developed meant that people were willing to confide in me on issues related to the said discourses. The fundamental goal of my academic career, in turn, is to make this understanding decipherable to Western audiences. Methodologically, this project relies heavily on the ethnographic research methods of participant observation and interviews. It builds on my longstanding rapport with diverse knowledge brokers in Beni Suef, and my being granted access to fieldsites by administrators and security officials alike. In addition, parts of the dissertation (especially Chapter 4) employ institutional archives from the programs where I conducted research, as well as secondary texts in English and Arabic. Throughout my fieldwork, I maintained an ongoing consent process (orally reiterating the basics of informed consent with each meeting) with both group and individual respondents in order to emphasize that their participation is voluntary. I never recorded my interlocutors. Sometimes I took down notes from a day’s participant observation research immediately after getting home to my Beni Suef apartment. At other times, I wrote down people’s words as they spoke to me in formal and semi-formal interviews. With the exception of a few church and political figures (such as Bishop Athanasius), I have used pseudonyms for all research participants. ! ! Outline of Chapters ! The first chapter of this dissertation begins with a reflection on the orientalist historian Bernard Lewis’ 2002 text What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the

24 Middle East.41 Directly confronting the history of worsening Muslim-Christian relations, I interrogate the assumption, so common in the anthropological literature on Egypt, that secularism is the primary agent in modern Egyptian history. I show how the twentieth century witnessed a marked rise in the political and discursive power of the Coptic Church, Christianity and Islam. The state’s pragmatic mobilization of religion and secularism, I argue, is more indicative of a centralized state than a secular one. I next demonstrate how, after the collapse of the Nasserist state, Egypt was transformed by competing and co-imbricated American, Gulf and neoliberal influences. The coexistence of many traditions within multiple levels of inclusion, I claim, reminds of the need to complicate religion/secularism binaries. I conclude the chapter with an investigation into the way the contemporary Egyptian state—mirroring Western empire —has inconsistently and opportunistically employed religion and secularism in its cynical pursuit of power and profit. Having established the concrete historical forces that have hardened and heightened borders between Muslims and Christians in modern Egypt, I turn in Chapter two to my first Beni Suef site of crossing that persists despite the divide. Basing my chapter at a church site where each Friday and Sunday Beni Suef Muslims crowded to the front of a Coptic church to meet with a purportedly miraculous priest, I examine how attendees of the priest’s khidma (service) went less as Muslims or Christians than as individuals seeking help for a wide variety of personal problems and interests. Because the basic realities of the human condition reigned in the khidma space, a flexible and tolerant communal culture was always salient—an outlook best captured by the Arabic idiom “iḥna fil-hawa sawa” (we are in the “same boat”—lit. same air). When my interlocutors did speak about feelings of tension, doubt or distrust, it was much more along social class lines than religious ones. This is because the miracle khidma unfolded within a broader historical context of rationalism, capitalism and modernism—conditions which have profoundly shaped how Egyptians, Muslim and Christian alike, engage their religious traditions. My third chapter analyzes a newer Beni Suef church site steeped in the historical processes of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Al-kūrsāt (“the Courses”—an adult English

41 Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002.

25 program) was founded by a Coptic Bishop in 1981 with the stated aim of bringing Muslims and Christians together, and Muslims formed ninety percent of the 300 or 400 person-large student body during my fieldwork. I show how, though almost all of my interlocutors identified as pious, they felt little to no sense of anxiety, conflict or failure about attending the church-run program. This confident and comfortable attendance, I argue, was facilitated by practical ethical judgement. At the same time, and in contrast to anthropologists who portray secularism almost exclusively as a hegemonic state project, I allow a novel glimpse into how program administrators subtly cultivated a secular ethos—which I define as a constellation of norms centred around equidistance, inclusion and a willingness to listen.42 The program’s secular ethos, I contend, only came under strain when exclusionary religious-based claims were made. I demonstrate how, more often than not, such claims that foregrounded religion were almost always asserted during debates around gender—a crucial category in Egyptian society’s maintenance of religious identities and norms. The manner in which ordinary Egyptians have experienced national politics comes to the fore in Chapter four. The setting for this chapter is a civil society club run by a Coptic priest colloquially known as the lagna (committee), and I examine the club across three distinct periods in Egypt’s contemporary history: before the 2011 uprising, during the 2011-2013 revolutionary period, and after the 2013 counterrevolution. In many ways, the utterly ordinary and relaxed interactions I observed at the lagna fall in line with those already shown at sites in the previous two chapters. What emerges as particularly salient in this chapter, however, is the influence shifting political structures have on everyday life. Consequently, this chapter takes up Talal Asad’s question about the extent to which democracy as a state system undermines democratic sensibilities as an ethos. I argue that in the case of the lagna, democratic sensibilities as an ethos increased markedly during the 2011-2013 period that Egypt experienced democracy as a state system, only for the two democratic forms to die a simultaneous death after the 2013 coup d’état. While my conclusion does not purport to any broader claims about the applicability or

42 Lambek, 2015; Taylor, Charles “Modes of Secularism”, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and Its Critics, pp. 31–53. New Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1999; and Asad, Talal “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. ed, Orsi, Robert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

26 desirability of democracy as a state system, it does remind anthropologists of the need to historicize concepts (such as democracy) rather than theorizing about them broadly across space and time. My fourth chapter ends on a low note: Egyptian security forces patrol the streets and enforce deeper and deeper constraints on what ordinary Beni Suef residents can say or do, and Chapter five begins with a similar sense of hopelessness. Using the unprecedented wave of attacks on Copts between 2016 and 2017 as a point of departure, I chronicle how a Coptic festival for the Virgin Mary was shaped by the bombs and barriers engendered by Egypt’s toxic post-2013 political climate. This final chapter directly confronts the tension between the structural violence so characteristic of Western academic and journalistic pictures of declining Muslim-Christian relations, on the one hand, and the persistent ordinary coexistence between Muslims and Christians in cities and villages across Egypt, on the other. Despite the guns and tensions that existed outside the walls of the retreat centre that played host to the festival, I find that inside those walls the power of ordinary ethics was readily apparent. The multifaceted beliefs and interests of my interlocutors sat comfortably side-by-side at the Coptic retreat centre, which was variably a place of worship, prayer, eating, visiting, fighting, fishing, and flirting. This vibrant and fun atmosphere allows a telling glimpse of how ordinary Egyptian life continually overcame the hardships and constraints imposed on it by larger political and economic forces. In turn, this chapter provides much-needed insight into why neither narratives of total separation nor perfect coexistence are sufficient lenses for conceptualizing whatever one might understand to be “Muslim-Christian relations” in Egypt. ! ! ! ! ! ! !

27 Chapter One —— The Religion and Secularism of Power:

A History of “Muslim-Christian Relations” in Modern Egypt ! ! In 2002, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis published a text entitled What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. At the time of the book’s release, Lewis had already acquired great fame, controversy and acclaim that far outstretched most, if not all, his academic peers. Even in my provincial Egyptian fieldsite of Beni Suef I met many interlocutors who were at least aware of Lewis’ work. He enjoyed personal friendships with such former heads of state as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran and Israel’s Golda Meir, and played the role of advisor to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld through that administration’s foreign policy misadventures. Hence, by the time I began my graduate studies in 2008, Lewis had long been exposed as standing “at the centre of the values and assumptions underlying Western European and North American imperial culture.”43 Still, Lewis’ 2002 text has stuck with me—a lasting impression much less a result of the book’s content than its title. What Went Wrong? The question really could be asked of any place and time. In the West at least, however, it is most frequently asked and answered on behalf of Middle Eastern states and peoples. For Lewis, the explanation was culture: the Islamic world’s totalitarian character and its inability to absorb and enact secular modernity. Over the years, Lewis’ body of work came under attack from many scholars—most notably Edward Said, with whom Lewis engaged in a decades-long debate after the 1978 release of Said’s Orientalism. Several anthropologists have also provided devastating critiques of Lewis’ arguments. Most notable among these is Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular.44 At its core, Asad’s 2003 publication is a work of skepticism;

43 Beinin, Joel. “Bernard Lewis’s Anti-Semites,” Middle East Report 147. July/August, 1987.

44 Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

28 a deconstruction of common assumptions about the genealogy, progress, and inevitability of secular modernity. It is a warning against the sort of self-satisfied understandings and prescriptions Western scholars and policymakers, such as Bernard Lewis, wield with such confidence. Finally, it is a work that is very carefully crafted and argued. In the years after the release of Formations of the Secular, a number of scholars used Egypt as a fieldsite to build on Asad’s critique of secularism. However, this subsequent body of literature—typified by Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age and Hussein Ali Agrama’s Questioning Secularism—went far beyond Asad’s skeptical position, instead portraying secularism as the primary agent of modern Egyptian history.45 Covering strained intersections of religion, politics and society in Egypt, Mahmood’s 2015 text in particular effectively asks the same question Bernard Lewis posed years earlier: what went wrong? Only, inverting Lewis’s argument, Mahmood concludes that secularism is the cause of Egypt’s problems, not the solution. One of my underlying arguments in this dissertation (as outlined in the introduction), is that this question of “what went wrong?” posed by Lewis and Mahmood is not the most fruitful one to develop our understanding of Egypt, or the wider Middle East. Looking at ongoing cordial interfaith relations at various sites in Egypt, I instead hope my dissertation implicitly and consistently asks “what went right?” Indeed, each of the chapters after this one illuminate Coptic sites where Muslims and Christians engage with and relate to one another in an altogether relaxed and flexible manner (despite often onerous economic and political circumstances). That is, much has gone right, and continues to go right, with “Muslim-Christian relations” in Egypt. In contrast to these later chapters, the following one provides an ethnohistory of the sociopolitical climate and changing place of religion and secularism in modern Egypt. It directly confronts the worsening relations between Muslims and Christians since the mid-twentieth century, which has taken form in inter-communal violence, exclusionary discourses, and a growing religious divide in Egyptian society. At many points in this chapter, I even join Lewis

45 Agrama, 2012; Mahmood, 2015.

29 and Mahmood in considering the question “what went wrong?” Where my argument about worsening relations diverges from them is this: the main story has little to do with secularism.

Given how much anthropologists have used the Egyptian political and legal context to theorize about the secular, I frequently broached the subject of secularism with interlocutors. Most often, I began by simply asking the question “maṣr balad ‘almānī (is Egypt a secular country)?” People often responded by pressing me on what exactly I meant by ‘almānī (secular). I would then reply that it was whatever they considered it to be. In some ways, this question is an impossible one to answer, because, as Asad notes, “the secular is so much part of our modern life.” Asad suggests that, due to its pervasive nature, we pursue secularism through its shadows.46 But while Asad and Mahmood rely almost entirely on historical and philosophical materials to navigate secularism’s profile, I support my historical narratives in this chapter with rich and varied ethnographic insights. When Westerners asked me, as they often did when I was living in Egypt over many years, about Muslim-Christians relations in Egypt, I liked to warn them that, though I would be happy to try to summarize the subject for them, I would likely contradict myself every other sentence doing so. I enact something similar in this chapter, which is structured around conflicting historical processes and anecdotes that, taken together, help elucidate the messiness and complexity of Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt. Following Michael Lambek’s call to “record and interpret diverse historicities along with, and perhaps in direct relation to, linear event histories and structural transformative ones,” my inclusion of an array of different Egyptian perspectives means that I provide no easy answer (such as too much or too little secularism) to the question of “what went wrong” in Muslim-Christian relations.47 In the first section of this chapter, I trace the historical rise of the Coptic Church in Egypt. I describe how nineteenth-century European colonialism initially gave rise to a lay Coptic elite. These lay Copts, I claim, enjoyed greater prominence than the clergy in Egyptian politics until

46 Asad, 2003. p. 16.

47 Lambek, Michael. “On Being Present to History: Historicity and Brigand Spirits in Madagascar,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1), 2016. p. 323.

30 the mid-twentieth century rise of the Coptic Church. I investigate how the church’s Sunday School Movement (est. 1918) was both generated by and generative of the omnipresence of religion in Egyptian society. Shifting to Egyptian politics after Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 seizure of power, I next illuminate how the postcolonial state, rather than marginalizing religion in Egyptian politics and society, mobilized both Christianity and Islam for its own purposes. These developments, I argue, were ultimately more illustrative of a centralized state than a secular one. The second section of this chapter interrogates the political, economic, cultural and social turmoil Egypt experienced amidst the Sadat’s era’s neoliberal reforms and the spread of contradictory American and Gulf influences in Egypt. Illuminating history with ethnography, I chronicle how ordinary Egyptians have experienced and tried to balance the post-1967 religious revivals and colonial influences in their daily lives. Uncovering complex, co-imbricated and multifaceted traditions around these individuals, I assert the need to move beyond binaries of religion and secularism for understanding contemporary Egyptian politics and society. The third and final section of this chapter examines two cases where Muslim-Christian relations “went wrong” in the 2011-2018 period. While my initial sketching of sectarian violence carried out by Egyptian security forces (namely the January 2011 Alexandria church bombing and the October 2011 Maspero Massacre) suggests the scourge of a religious state in Egypt, I instead situate these sectarian policies within the broader plastic politics of a state that wields ideology inconsistently and opportunistically in its pursuit of power and profit. Returning to the question of secularism, I call for anthropologists to historicize rather than essentialize concepts such as secularism, and to pay greater attention to the key variable in politics across religion, ideology, space, and time: power. ! ! ! ! ! !

31 Part 1—Empire, Church and State in Egypt (1798-1967) ! European Colonialism and the Modern State ! The fact that the quartet of Coptic church-run sites that form the core of this dissertation are popular with Muslims and Christians alike has great theoretical significance. Oftentimes there is an image of Copts—in Egypt and the West alike—as a persecuted minority, and the Coptic church as an increasingly besieged institution (by both secularism and political Islam).48 What these narratives miss, however, is that for Coptic Egyptians, the postcolonial period (1952- present) is very much a story of the rise of the church. Hence, if one wants to understand what went “right” or “wrong” in Muslim-Christian relations since 1952, the church’s ascendance is one necessary point of departure. The roots of the modern Coptic church can be found in the 1800s. It was in this century that Egypt was transformed by worldwide processes of European colonialism, modernization, and integration into global markets. All these shifts had profound effects on the way religion intersected with politics and economy in Egypt. Prior to the spread of European ideas and institutions, non-Muslim religious communities in Egypt and the wider Ottoman world enjoyed a marked degree of internal autonomy in religious and legal affairs. In this loosely-enforced Millet system, Ottoman rulers entrusted control over entire religious communities to the leading church official, and, in turn, that church leader answered on behalf of that community to Ottoman officials.49 Within decades of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, however, the contours of a modern state in Egypt began to emerge. Though Mohammad Ali (r. 1805-1848) initiated extensive centralizing administrative reforms, these changes were less ideological (i.e. secular)

48 My use of secularism here refers to the premises Jose Casanova argues compose secularization theory (the general assumption that, with modernization, religion will become separated and removed from most areas of political and social life). Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994.

49 Braude, Benjamin (ed.). Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (the Abridged Edition). Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014.

32 than they were about maximizing control over the human and natural resources in what he considered to be his dynastic mulk (an Ottoman term for private land). That is, the centralizing Mohammad Ali was of Ottoman mindset and sensibilities through and through.50 Indeed, it was not until the middle of that century that discourses about equity in public life and citizenship began to proliferate. In Egypt, calls for civil equality were driven not by the church hierarchy (which, as mentioned, had enjoyed a privileged place in the Millet system), but by circles of wealthy and landowning lay Copts. In fact, by the 1870s, it was the Coptic church that proved to be the main source of opposition to the Coptic laymen’s efforts. Up to the 1930s, the laymen held the upper-hand in their struggle with the clergy (whom the lay elites regarded as backwards fallāḥīn [peasants]).51 This success was in part the fruit of lay elites’ collaboration with the British after the United Kingdom’s 1882 occupation of the country. A Coptic layman, Boutros Ghali, even rose to the office of prime minister in 1908 (only to be assassinated two years later due to his collusion with the British).52 My point here is certainly not to celebrate the Coptic Ghali’s unprecedented attainment of the executive position or the elite Copts’ struggle for enfranchisement. Egypt was rife with colonial, political and economic inequities throughout this period. Rather I simply want to illustrate that, by the time of the time of the First World War, Egyptian politics had, in many ways, become much more secular (in that a person’s political career was less dictated by their religion). Having suffered severe hardship supporting the Allied war effort, Egyptians rose up en masse against the British in 1919. Within the crowds, people carried banners with the crescent and cross side by side (the star of David, representative of Egypt’s small Jewish community, sometimes appeared as well). It was not Egyptian religious leaders at the forefront of this

50 Marsot, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. p. 100; Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Fahmy provides one example of Muhammad Ali’s Ottoman and Muslim orientation where the Egyptian ruler swore by God and the Prophet Muhammad to target the souls of local officials who had refused his directives. p. 105.

51 Sedra, Paul. “Class Cleavages and Ethnic Conflict: Coptic Christian Communities in Modern Egyptian Politics,” in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 10(2), 1999. pp. 223-224.

52 Sedra, Paul. “Copts and the Millet Partnership: The Intra-Communal Dynamics Behind Egyptian Secularism,” in Journal of Law and Religion, 29(3), 2014. pp. 496-499.

33 movement, however, but the Wafd Party of Sa‘d Zaghlul (1859-1927) which would dominate parliamentary politics across the entirety of Egypt’s interwar “liberal experiment”. Elite lay Copts acted as pillars of the Wafd regime from early on, with affluent Copts such as Wassif Ghali, Murqus Hanna, and Makram Ebeid rising to top positions in the government.53 My argument here, once again, is descriptive rather than normative: whatever representation Egyptians might have enjoyed in the interwar period was not through religious leaders, but secular political and economic ones. That is, in the interwar period, there was relative separation between religion and politics. ! ! Secular Elites, Religious Society ! By the 1930s, many Egyptians had become alienated by their political leaders’ collusion with the British, corruption, and wholesale adoption of European values. As a reaction to the many inequities, movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood (est. 1928) emerged promising social justice, economic uplift, and the cultural integrity of an Islamic order. The great popularity the Muslim Brotherhood had garnered by World War II is proof enough that “despite the outward trappings of secularism that were so much in evidence during the years of the liberal experiment, Egyptian society as a whole remained firmly committed to its Islamic roots.”54 Arguably peaking in the interwar period, this cultural disconnect between Westernized elites and ordinary Egyptians has nevertheless remained a steady marker of Egyptian politics ever since. Marshall Sahlins observes that “history is culturally ordered” and “cultural schemes are historically ordered.”55 In Egyptian cultural schemes, colonial history is difficult to overstate. During my fieldwork between 2011 and 2018, one interesting trend I noted was that people often denied that Egypt was a secular country, but in the same breath claim ruling elites were secular.

53 Ibid. p. 501.

54 Cleveland, William L. and Bunton, Martin. A History of the Modern Middle East (Sixth Ed.). Boulder: Westview Press, 2016 p. 200.

55 Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. p. vii.

34 The disruptive role of the West, so apparent ever since Napoleon’s invasion, and perhaps most salient through the interwar period, came up often in my conversations with Egyptians about secularism. When I asked a lagna member named Usra in 2018 whether Egypt was secular, the Muslim woman looked down at her lap in thought for a few seconds before replying: “our leaders want to show this. They’re trying to. ” —“Trying to for whom?” I asked. —“For the West. For America… because of shakl (appearance). But Egyptians are stubborn. They don’t change very quickly for cultural things, or they only change in certain ways. The elites—I don’t know if they are more secular, but they are more Western…that is for sure.” When I asked two young Muslim men about the colonial legacies in Egyptian politics, one named Wesam responded right away with an anecdote from the revolutionary period: “The power of the West was very clear when Morsi was president. People like Ibrahim Eissa, Alaa Al-aswany, and Mohamed ElBaradei (liberal Egyptian intellectuals)—they acted as pawns of the West. I remember ElBaradei criticized the Brotherhood for denying the holocaust.” Wesam inhaled deeply on his Marlboro-brand cigarette and laughed, “no, that denial is not good… but who cares?!” he asked rhetorically, throwing his hands up in the air. “What did Elbaradei’s criticism have to do with anything? This country has so, so many problems, and he’s talking about the holocaust? That is Europe’s history!” Stopping again to puff his cigarette, he added, “of course, this was all for a Western audience. Because they are the ones who have the sulṭa (authority).” Ultimately, Wesam’s story corroborates Saba Mahmood’s argument about the way American Empire can shape liberal discourses around the world.56 The pervasive power of colonial Western discourses and institutions among elites was readily apparent in a number of the Sisi regime’s manoeuvres after 2013. For instance, in 2018 the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities announced plans for a Museum of Religious Tolerance in response to the growing number of attacks on Coptic civilians. While on the surface the move might seem difficult to fault, a quick consideration of the deep socioeconomic and political

56 Mahmood, Saba. “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” in Public Culture, 18:2, 2006.

35 issues behind sectarianism in Egypt elucidates the vacuous nature of the proposed museum in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital—itself a monumental mirage.57 Similarly, in late 2018 President Sisi went out of his way to celebrate female tricycle and microbus drivers in Luxor and the New Administrative Capital. Beni Suef’s own Asmaa Gouda achieved small fame weeks later as the first licensed female taxi driver in Egypt.58 Sisi used the highly choreographed ceremonies with the women to tout the importance of perseverance and hard work, while also marketing himself as the guarantor of progress and opportunity. But what exactly were these women overcoming? Was it a conservative patriarchal culture that was holding aspects of their lives back? Was it a suffocating economic situation at a time of American empire-mandated austerity? Perhaps it was both. What was clear from speaking to my interlocutors in Beni Suef was how little the emancipatory stories, so influenced by Western colonial discourses, meant to them. For them, real life was unfolding beneath the cosmetics of elites. But Sisi’s marketing, much like the ploys of the Wafd party in the 1930s, was not about the domestic audience. Rather it occurred as part of a long history of colonialism that engendered significant cultural tensions between Egyptian elites and large segments of Egypt’s sha‘b (people). So what went wrong? The disruptive influence of Western colonialism is a crucial part of the story.

! The Sunday School Movement and The Rise of Church ! In addition to the cultural disconnect between ordinary and elite Egyptians, post-1919 Egyptian history is also full of examples of Egyptian leaders catering to popular opinion. The

57 Ahmed, Sara. “Egypt is Set to Build First Ever Religious Tolerance Museum,” Egyptian Streets, July 28, 2018. Retrieved from: https://egyptianstreets.com/2018/07/28/egypt-wants-to-build-a-religious- tolerance-museum/

58 al-Samkūrī, Mohamed. “Marwa il-‘abd: il-ra’īs il-Sisi mutawada’ wa basīṭ (Marwa il-Abd: President Sisi is Humble and Simple.” Al-Masry Al-Youm, November 30, 2018. Retrieved from: https:// www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/1347330; “Sisi Gifts Female Minibus Driver with New Vehicle,” Egypt Today, 14 December, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/61955/Sisi-gifts- female-minibus-driver-with-new-vehicle

36 British-enabled activities of Western missions, in particular, led to the growth of broad-stroked anti-Christian sentiment among Egyptian Muslims of various classes. This, in turn, affected Egyptian politics, and eventually even the liberal Wafd Party pandered to resentment about the purported alliance between Western missions and interests and Copts. By 1942 Coptic participation in the Wafd executive fell to just 12 percent, down from 44 percent in 1923.59 Coptic influence in Egyptian governments would only decline further from there (see subsequent sections on the Nasser and Sadat regimes). All this complicates the picture of political secularism as somehow part and parcel to the politico-religious inequities that crescendoed over the remainder of the century (since the worsening occurred several decades after Egyptian secularism had peaked). As Coptic participation in the late interwar period declined in the political sphere, it grew in the church one. Mirroring contemporaneous Islamic movements, the Coptic Church’s Sunday School Movement combined modernist institutions and technologies with religion. Both movements were, in part, reactions to the catholic and protestant missions that had become active in Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century. Though these missions initially sought Muslim converts, they quickly learned their message was better received by Copts—much to the chagrin of the Coptic Church.60 Thus, when Beni Suef Copts demonstrated against Western Missionaries on 21 July 1933, they directed their anger not at the principle or practice of political secularism, but towards the Western church colonialism they understood to be exacerbating Egyptian politics and society.61 The Sunday School movement, officially launched in 1918, was the Coptic Church’s answer to this European encroachment. Coptic Christian education flourished, and ordinary Copts’ lives began to increasingly revolve around the church. Rather than revealing colonial mimicry or a secularization of the faith, I follow Naumescu in arguing that the reforms

59 Sedra, 2014. p. 502.

60 See Baron, Beth. The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

61 Carter, B.L. “On Spreading the Gospel to Egyptians Sitting in Darkness: The Political Problem of Missionaries in Egypt in the 1930s,” Middle Eastern Studies, 20(4), 1984. p. 29.

37 represented the Coptic church’s taking a moment of crisis “to turn orthopraxy into orthodoxy and renew the faith.”62 Most importantly, for the purposes of this chapter, “the ideals of integration and full participation in the Egyptian nation that certain Copts had at one point, were gradually replaced by a formula of social separation.”63 Two of the sites examined in this dissertation (the lagna and al-kursat) are direct descendants of the Sunday School Movement. It was Anba (Bishop) Athanasius (1923-2000) who oversaw the bulk of the Church’s expansion into the everyday lives of Beni Suef residents. Athanasius founded hospitals, schools, nunneries, youth centres, housing for people with special needs, workshops, and homes for seniors.64 These sites were staffed by Coptic priests, nuns and laypeople. Like other clerical entrepreneurs, Athanasius framed these efforts as a matter of khidma (service).65 While this khidma was extended primarily to Copts, Egyptian Muslims were sometimes targeted as well. Indeed, the writings and words of both Athanasius and his protégé Abuna Matta (who founded the lagna; see Chapter 4) reveal a sustained commitment to building and maintaining relationships with Egyptian Muslims. The Coptic Church’s purported commitment to khidma, however, has not always translated into Christian virtues of justice, charity or compassion at each site. For instance, in late 2017, a Coptic woman I knew was working her last few shifts before the arrival of her first child at a church-run daycare (where she had worked since 2013). Administrators at the daycare had told Aida that they would only discuss employment arrangements after her child’s birth. Just before Christmas, a healthy baby girl arrived. Following three days of rest, Aida visited the daycare (which Athanasius had established in 1988) to discuss when she could return to work. The longtime administrator, Tāsūnī (sister or nun) Makaria, promptly told Aida that she would

62 Naumescu, Vlad. “Pedagogies of Prayer: Teaching Orthodoxy in South India,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 61(2), 2019. p. 418.

63 Van Doorn-Harder, Nelly. Contemporary Coptic Nuns. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. p. 23.

64 al-anba Athanasius: aīqūnat ḥub wa ‘aṭā’ (Bishop Athanasius: Icon of Love and Tenderness). Committee of Release and Publishing of the Beni Suef muṭraniyya. Beni Suef: 2000.

65 thalath qurn min il-mushārika (Third Century of Participation). Special Committee of the Diocese. Beni Suef: Undated.

38 lose her job unless she was willing to start work again the next day. Aida could not leave her infant so soon, and the new mother was suddenly unemployed. Aida’s untimely dismissal was far from the only instance I observed of the church’s sometimes ruthless and business-like nature. Indeed, Coptic interlocutors frequently complained to me about how many church services had morphed into iron-fisted, for-profit enterprises. In addition to people’s resentment about the social and economic power of the Coptic church, I sometimes heard interlocutors opine that the church’s power in Copts’ everyday lives was partly generative of the growing Muslim-Christian divide in Egypt. “The church walls are getting higher and higher,” a female Coptic interlocutor named Nancy told me as we talked at a Nile-side cafe on a humid summer night. “Christians become afraid of going out from them, and the church wants this… it wants Copts to belong to the church first and foremost.” After a moment of silence, I asked Nancy whether she was unique, among Copts, in her awareness of the church’s role in Egypt’s socioreligious divide. “I guess so,” she shrugged, “most Christians see the church as their protector. And for good reason…remember, ya Isaac, the violence started with il-uṣūlīn (the [Muslim] fundamentalists).” After another moment of silence, she added, “but the church plays a role in this too of course.” Hence, the rise of the church has meant many things, and should not simply be read as a success story of community involvement and care. Regardless of church officials’ diverse motivations for administration of these sites, the significant point I am trying to make is that from the mid-twentieth century onwards, Egypt witnessed a massive expansion of the church into the public sphere, and into the lives of ordinary Copts. As the next section shows, this expansion was consolidated by deep ties that formed between church and state. ! ! The Neo-Millet System ! Egypt’s historical course was reset when Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Free Officers seized control of Egypt in 1952. For the Wafdists, Muslim Brothers, and elite lay Copts alike, political life was never the same. In many ways, Nasser was an archetypical modernizer. The ambitious

39 leader sought to unify Egypt in order to transform it economically, socially and politically, doing away with the “old order” in the process. A new bill of rights, decidedly secular in spirit, promised Egyptians freedom from discrimination on religious, sex, racial or linguistic grounds. Beneath this ḥibr ‘ala waraq (ink on paper), however, the regime was not always so welcoming. Threats to the “political unity” of the nation, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Egyptians of European descent (such as the many Greeks and Italians living in the country), were dealt with harshly. The mirage of inclusivity was further exposed by the unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of the Egyptian dictator, and the “emasculation” of the only mass political party sanctioned by the regime.66 The power of lay Copts, already in decline by the 1940s, was devastated by Nasser’s authoritarian regime. For one, Coptic officers were essentially absent from the army leadership that was assuming control over all sectors of society (and continue to be to this day). Moreover, the state’s confiscation and redistribution of massive swathes of land from large landowners— one of Nasser’s most substantial early policies—crushed the power of lay Copts who owned a disproportionate amount of the arable land in the ṣ‘aīd (Upper Egypt).67 With the elite lay Copts in decline, the modernizing church in ascendance, and any means of popular political participation fading, a new partnership between the Coptic Church and the state emerged to the satisfaction of both parties. Consolidated after Kyrollis assumed the papacy in 1959, the novel arrangement entailed the state granting the Coptic Church greater and greater internal autonomy and recognizing the Pope as the representative of “the Copts”.68 In return, the Coptic Church provided the Nasser regime with “unyielding support” in the political realm.69 Through this cooperation, Nasser and Kyrollis had effectively recreated the deeply nonsecular Ottoman millet system.

66 Sedra 2014. p. 505.

67 Cleveland and Bunton, 2016. pp. 307-308.

68 Shenoda, Anthony. Cultivating Mystery: Miracles and a Coptic Moral Imaginary. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2010. p. 72.

69 Sedra 2014. p. 507.

40 At the same time the state was stitching the Coptic Church into its umbrella, it was also taking greater control of Islamic institutions. Al-Azhar University, one of the foremost centres of Islamic learning in the entire world, was reorganized by government decree in 1961, and four new nonreligious faculties were added to the university’s curriculum, as well as an Islamic women’s faculty. In the midst of these reforms, Islam remained central to state symbols and discourses. The state publicized the adhan (call to prayer) rather than muted it, dictating Friday mosque sermons and arranging for prominent ‘ulamā’ to issue decrees confirming Islam’s compatibility with state policies. Thus, “rather than seeking to diminish the role of Islam in Egyptian society, Nasser recognized the appeal of Islamic institutions and attempted to bring them under the control of the state.”70 Reflecting on these changes in Egypt, Gregory Starrett asks “was Nasser’s nationalization of Al-Azhar university a bold secularizing move…or was it, instead, an infusion of the governing structure with religious concern, responsibility and resources?”71 Starrett’s basic point is that neither explanation is entirely satisfactory, and that scholars’ rigid distinctions between religious and secular enterprises reflect normative stances on the question of secularism rather than analytical ones. This normativity, in turn, clouds our understanding of the complex realities on the ground of any one particular place and time. So what went wrong? As this chapter progresses to the post-1967 period of “worsening Muslim-Christian relations” in Egypt, it is crucial to keep in mind the sociopolitical contexts of that time, composed of complex and multifaceted histories of colonialism, authoritarianism, and the rise of the Coptic Church in Egyptian politics and society. While Egyptian Copts enjoyed unprecedented levels of political mobility in the first few decades of the twentieth century, a popular reaction (largely against European colonialism) in the 1930s led to the growing exclusion of Copts from Egyptian politics. By the time of Gamal Abdul Nasser’s presidency, Coptic voices had all but disappeared from the political scene. Meanwhile, the church was rapidly becoming the place for Egyptian Copts.

70 Cleveland and Bunton, 2016. p. 321.

71 Starrett, 2010. p. 644.

41 Centralization, Not Secularism ! The Nasser regime’s unprecedented regulation of many spheres of life in Egypt—religion included—is highly relevant to anthropological debates about secularism. Indeed, the most prominent theorizations of secularism hinge on the state’s regulation of religion in politics and society. For instance, Saba Mahmood, citing Talal Asad, conceptualizes secularism as “the modern state’s sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life.”72 Simply put, this framing of secularism strikes me as overly broad. The modern state’s sovereign and regulatory power is one thing, but is secularism really that same thing? When debating with the many anthropologists that subscribe to the agentive secularism framework, I have frequently asked whether there are any states in the world today that are not secular. Each time the response has more or less been the same: no, all modern states are secular because they all regulate religion (indeed, such an explanation is expected if one is to draw on the agentive secularism framework). But I wonder what, then, is the utility of a “globally shared” concept when it manifests so differently across a diverse array of nation-states, each with their own unique historical, social and political contexts. What meaning is left in the concept of secularism when scholars use it to describe the state’s regulation of religion in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United States, Canada and Iran? It would be more fruitful, I believe, to categorize what agentive secularism terms to be secularism as a form of state centralization. Contrasting markedly with the decentralized empires that ruled before the advent of modernity, the modern state’s defining feature is centralized power.73 To illustrate what I mean by state centralization, I want to reflect briefly on another vast and abstract entity that came under state regulation with the ascent of the modern state: the environment. Like religion, the environment is a formerly all-encompassing concept that has become highly objectified in the modern world by state policies and popular discourses alike.

72 Mahmood, 2015. p. 3.

73 For a detailed historical analysis of the Egyptian experience of centralization and bureaucratization under Muhammad Ali and his successors, see Fahmy, 1997 and 2018.

42 Whether it is Egypt, Canada or Burkina Faso, modern states around the world today have formal national agencies that regulate the environment. If we follow the agentive secularism framework, we must also conclude that every state in the world is, to provide a name for theoretical purposes, ecologist. This is because all modern states regulate the environment. Looking more closely at each individual state, however, we find this regulation unfolds in wildly divergent manners. A select number of states are committed conservationists, while others sell off land and resources to the highest bidder—regardless of environmental impact. For some states, environmental policy and rhetoric align closely, while for others they are at complete odds (reflecting my argument about the ḥibr ala waraq [ink on paper] nature of political religion and secularism in Egypt). The disparate environmental histories and colonial legacies that mark each of these states is readily apparent too. With this diversity in mind, does it really make sense to group all these countries together as “ecologist” if we are trying to understand what is happening with the environment in any one place? Another question that emerges is whether the mere fact of state regulation dictates government, corporate or popular actions in and around the environment in any given state. For instance, though Canada, Egypt and Burkina Faso all face some form of environmental challenges, the environmental situation faced by the latter two states is much graver. I would argue, however, that these problems are much less a result of state regulated environmentalism and much more a consequence of colonialism, capitalism, and each state’s unique geopolitical histories. The fact that agentive Canadian mining companies plunder and degrade environments across the world is what is relevant—not that the governments of Egypt and Burkina Faso happen to “regulate” the environment. My comparison between “ecologism" and secularism brings me back to secularism’s critics’ suggestion that the modern state cannot “ameliorate religious inequality” or provide a solution to sectarian conflicts because it is secularism that produces and exacerbates the said conflicts in the first place.74 To me, this is akin to arguing that state environmental regulation cannot solve environmental degradation since it is the state’s regulation of the environment that

74 Mahmood 2015. p. 212; Agrama, Hussein Ali. “Thinking with Saba Mahmood,” The Immanent Frame. 2016. Retrieved from: https://tif.ssrc.org/2016/02/25/thinking-with-saba-mahmood/

43 facilitated the environmental degradation in the first place. Would it not be reasonable to allow, at least the possibility, that sound state policy and regulation can actually improve sectarian tension or environmental degradation in certain contexts? Given the predominance of the state, what really is the alternative? Acknowledging this dilemma, the ever-reflective Talal Asad cedes that although the political mechanisms of liberal democracies have irreparable flaws, “their principled abandonment may simply add to the repressiveness of the modern state.”75 I would agree. Sound state regulation can absolutely be the solution to a given problem. Take, for example, the plight caused by one of the most identifiable political forces in the world today: neoliberalism. Greater state regulation is quite obviously the solution to this highly destructive deregulating economic force.76 State regulation (of religion, the economy or the environment), therefore, is not necessarily good or bad in and of itself. Ultimately, scholars would do well to recognize the broad-stroked repudiation of secularism (and the state) so common in the anthropological literature as based more in abstract intellectual exercises than the contingencies of power, politics and history that really dictate the lives of peoples and states. ! ! Part 2—Political Religion and Society in Egypt (1967-2010) ! Neoliberalism and the Believer President ! Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1970 passing sent shockwaves across the Arab world, where the longtime Egyptian President was beloved as a populist, Arab nationalist and anti-colonial leader. The genuine outpouring of grief that resulted was striking, in part, because Nasserism had already received a fatal blow three years earlier when Israel crushed Egypt and its allies in the

75 Anjum, Ovamir. “Interview with Talal Asad,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 35:1. p. 59.

76 Wolin, Sheldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. p. 291.

44 June or Six Day War. According to the historian Ussama Makdisi, this defeat of Nasserism brought an end to the “ecumenical frame” that facilitated religious pluralism and coexistence in the Arab world through the colonial and early postcolonial periods.77 The political climate of the Muslim world instead became one “of emergent fundamentalist movements and efforts to reintroduce the shari’a.”78 Indeed, if an informed observer had to choose a single determining factor in “what went wrong” in Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt, they would be hard-pressed not to choose the novel dynamics that followed the 1967 defeat of Nasserism. Little was expected of Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s vice-president, when he rose to the top executive position in the country in 1970. “Nasser’s poodle”, as Sadat was derisively called, was considered neither charismatic nor cunning. From early on in his presidency, therefore, Sadat would surprise. Abandoning the protectionist policies of his predecessor, Sadat opened the country to unchecked capitalism in an economic policy known as the infitāḥ (opening). Knowing these neoliberal reforms would be unpopular among Nasser’s old base (the political left and organized labour), Sadat found a popular counterweight in political Islam. The new president released most Muslim Brotherhood members from prison, encouraged Islamic discourses and symbols in the public sphere, and marketed himself as il-ra'īs il-mu’min (the believer president).79 Religious symbolism, already legislated in the 1923 constitution which declared “the religion of the state is Islam”, was confirmed by Sadat’s 1971 constitution and 1979 referendum that named Islamic shari‘a as the principal source of legislation.”80 Unsurprisingly, it was under Sadat that the neo-Millet system reached its nadir. That all this unfolded amidst an influx of Western consumerism and culture, a peace treaty with Israel, as well as the Sadat family’s lavish lifestyle (in contrast to the personally austere Nasser), illustrates the great turbulence and tension

77 Makdisi, 2019.

78 Messick, Brinkley. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. p. 68.

79 Tignor, Robert. Anwar Al-Sadat: Transforming the Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Kandil, Hazem. Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt. New York: Verso, 2012.

80 Shenoda, 2010. p. 165.

45 that marked Egypt in the 1970s. The contradictions of the age eventually led to Sadat’s 1981 assassination by army officers affiliated with the clandestine Islamist group al-jihad (the sacred struggle). Because anthropologists of the Middle East have mostly opted to study Islam rather than neoliberalism, the historical significance of political economy is somewhat understated in the literature on the area.81 Neoliberalism, however, is an essential part of “what went wrong” in Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt after 1967. In some ways, Egyptian political economy from the mid-twentieth century onwards mirrored a global shift towards and then away from Keynesian economics. Economic historians label the 1951-1973 period as the Age of Keynes or the Golden Age of Capitalism—an era marked by global economic growth, low unemployment and a reduction of inequality. Under these conditions, welfare states flourished around the world, and Egypt was no exception. For all the flaws and inefficiencies of its state-run economy, the Nasser regime was undeniably committed to, and somewhat successful in, extending social welfare services to Egypt’s citizens.82 Everything changed under Sadat, to whom Nasser had left a near-impossible economic and geopolitical situation. Sadat’s solution to the country’s many structural problems was to place Egypt firmly in the camp of the global superpower: the United States. At this same time, Western states were beginning to phase out Keynesian policies in favour of neoliberal ones. According to David Harvey, the novel economic policies, which have so clearly marked Egyptian political economy since the 1970s, “celebrated the role of the rentier, cut taxes on the rich, privileged dividends and speculative gains over wages and salaries, and unleashed untold though geographically contained financial crises, with devastating effects on employment and life chances.”83

81 Elyachar, Julia. “Rethinking Anthropology of Neoliberalism in the Middle East,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, First Edition. Edited by Altorki, Soraya. New York: Wiley- Blackwell, 2015. pp. 411-412. The scholarship of Amira Mittermaier, Daromir Rudnyckyj and Yasmin Moll are notable exceptions where the anthropologies of Islam and neoliberalism are put into most fruitful conversation.

82 Cleveland and Bunton, 2016. p. 317.

83 Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 187.

46 Regardless of Sadat’s real aims in pursuing these economic transformations, the basic result was greater inequality within Egypt, and a much larger foreign debt. To remedy the imbalances, the IMF mandated reductions in basic food subsidies as part of a broader retreat of Egypt’s welfare state. Protests broke out against these policies in January 1977, and after the army crushed the demonstrations at the cost of 150 Egyptian lives, Sadat restored the subsidization of such items as bread, sugar, rice and tea.84 But significant tensions remained within an increasingly unequal and alienated society. For some disenfranchised Egyptians, religious others became convenient scapegoats.

! The Rise of the Gulf ! Sadat’s presidency coincided with another crucial historical trend that has had altogether deleterious effects on religious pluralism across the Middle East: the rise of the Arab Gulf countries. Led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, these conservative Western-backed monarchies had been in intense competition with Egypt throughout Nasser’s presidency.85 In addition to Egypt’s new state of defeat and indebtedness after the June war, the Gulf’s power relative to the Arab republics grew after 1967 because of the great wealth generated by the 1970s oil shocks. Supply and demand meant that it was Egyptian workers who laboured in Saudi Arabia’s booming economy. These labourers brought back a key Saudi export ever since; Wahhabi Islam. Mirroring the social disruption caused by the wholesale import of European ideas and practices decades earlier, Wahhabi Islam’s travel from a land with little religious diversity (the Najd in Saudi Arabia) to incredibly diverse places like Egypt, the Levant, or Iraq, upset intricate social and political configurations in those latter sites. In short, globalization resulted not only in the spread of “secular” Western cultures, but “religious” Arab ones as well.

84 Starrett, Gregory. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformations in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. p. 80.

85 See Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

47 “Shifts in power have given Egyptians an identity crisis,” a man named Mahmoud told me while sitting together at a downtown Beni Suef qahwa (coffee shop) in 2017. “We went to these countries like Saudi Arabia just for money, but we ended up borrowing a lot from them.” Mahmoud, like many Egyptians, spent his formative years around Riyadh. “My father, allah yirḥamu (God have mercy on him), used to get mad when I talked with a Saudi accent. ‘You have to keep your karāma (dignity), he would say. And frankly, a lot of Saudis are not respectful. They are the biggest hypocrites. They spread strict Islam and then travel during Ramadan so they don’t have to fast. Or they drink alcohol and do drugs in private. They just care about appearances, and Egyptians are becoming more this way too.” In a 2018 interview, a Syrian man who had arrived in Beni Suef five years earlier affirmed to me that “the Saudis are causing problems across the region.” Originally from the town of Homs, Ahmed and his family, like many other Syrian refugees in the town, settled in the quiet apartment blocks across the river in New Beni Suef. Speaking in the garden courtyard outside his building, Ahmed told me: “the majority of jihadists in Syria today are Saudi. They do not care about Syrians. They are the ones destroying our country.” Now, it was not that Ahmed was a secularist, or supported the Syrian government. Far from it, the quiet and thoughtful man descended from a family of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood members—the historic adversaries of the Assads. But he, like many other educated people in Beni Suef I spoke to, attributed insidious power to the more hardline forms of modernist Islam. Indeed, from the 1970s onwards, state and private donors from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states financed more and more religious materials and political organizations in Egypt and beyond. Saudi support for militant Islamist groups goes back to this same period. Riyadh most infamously helped bankroll the mujāhidīn during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. The politics behind “Islamic terrorist groups”, of course, have been stranger than fiction, and the fact that the mujāhidīn were also (if not primarily) backed by the “secular” United States makes plain how politics and geopolitics tend to be driven much more by plastic and cynical realpolitik than ideological (secular or religious) imperatives. Egyptian veterans of the mujāhidīn returned home at the end of the Soviet-Afghan War to lead the 1990s insurgency against the Egyptian state. Copts were frequently targeted by these

48 militants, as were soldiers, police officers, state officials and foreign tourists. Sectarian discourses proliferated in Egypt at this same time. “I know many people who have never even talked to Christians,” a middle-aged Muslim interlocutor, who was active in the Muslim Brotherhood before the coup, told me. “Their only knowledge comes from sheikhs who say all Christians are kuffār (infidels),” he continued, “and that Christians should not be allowed to build churches in Muslim lands, or that our acknowledging Christian holidays violates Islam. There are many sheikhs who talk this way, and frankly they cause a lot of problems.” Coptic church officials, of course, have embraced exclusionary discourses in similar ways (a fact that is not lost on any curious Muslim Egyptian with satellite television—see this chapter’s section “Coptic Sectarianism”).86 Events in the 1990s also made clear just how treacherous Egypt had become for secular intellectual thought. In June 1992, the prominent professor and human rights activist Farag Foda was assassinated outside his Cairo office by al-gamā‘a al-islāmiyya as punishment for his purported apostasy. For years, Foda had criticized the more radical and exclusivist nature of new forms of political Islam, arguing that Islam, at its core, had a tolerant and rationalist spirit. Also a defender of Coptic rights, Foda’s assassination was the result of new flows of political and religious thought in Egypt that launched through Sadat’s presidency and the rise of the Gulf.87 So what went wrong? One must also at least consider the socioeconomic upheaval and disenfranchisement of the Sadat era, the hardening of certain streams of political Islam, and the increasing influence of the deeply nonsecular Saudi state.

! Ordinary Experiences of the Religious Revivals ! Thus far, this chapter has focused mostly on political history. It has been a story of Western colonialism and Gulf influences shaping Egyptian political and economic structures

86 see Mahmood, 2015.

87 Esposito, John L. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, 3rd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 98-99.

49 (and also vice versa). The post-1967 crescendo of religion in Egyptian politics and society, however, has been experienced by ordinary Egyptians in the most mundane and varied ways. It is to manifestations of revivalist religion and secularism in the vernacular, therefore, I now turn. “No Egypt is not at all secular,” a bright faced young woman in a black higab told me when I asked her about her country’s identity in 2017. “It is so far away from this. People— Muslims and Christians—care so, so much.” After a pause, she added “I believe this is one of the good things in Egypt though. Religion is the thing that stops us from doing bad stuff. We know we can’t do things because it is ḥarām (forbidden).” As it happened, the woman, whose name was Aya, had a small copy of the Quran in her hand as she spoke. She told me that she liked to read it when she rode the microbus (indeed, the majority of Egyptians I saw reading on the train or metro in Cairo, both colonial inventions, held holy books). Another example of religion’s prominence in society, despite the growth of purportedly Western ideas and technologies, was the call to prayer which rang out into the air five times-a- day throughout my fieldwork. Not even people’s slumber was spared from the electronic loudspeakers’ summons. “When I go to heaven and God says I did not pray enough, I will have no excuses,” a middle-aged mother of three once told me, “I have five reminders to do so every day!” The woman, who was Coptic, said this without a hint of resentment or irony (“what went right?”). As the most basic interaction between people in Egyptian streets, the greeting is a very telling window into the social climate generated by the religious revivals. During my fieldwork, Egyptian Muslims most commonly began any communication with the phrase as-salām-alaikum (peace be upon you). Copts, on the other hand, were much less inclined to initiate this greeting, opting for the more religiously neutral ṣabāḥ-il-khayr (good morning) and masā’ al-khayr (good evening). Many times I heard Coptic Christians express longing for the bygone days before the post-1967 religious revivals when ṣabāḥ-il-khayr and masā’ al-khayr were supposedly the greetings most used by the majority of Egyptians.88

88 Samuli Schielke’s interlocutors mention these greeting changes in Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. pp. 5-6.

50 In late 2012, I was walking with a friend to a restaurant in the Beni Suef neighbourhood of Muqbil to get ḥawawshi, a greasy sandwich made of Egyptian pita bread and beef—though I learned to joke with my Egyptian friends that it was laḥmat il-ḥumār (donkey meat). Stepping up to the restaurant counter where we ordered, my friend Bassem, who was Coptic, greeted the worker with “masā’ al-khayr (good evening).” The bearded man replied quickly, without looking up, “wa alaikum as-salām (the basic Islamic greeting reply, meaning “and may peace also be on you). Bassem paid, and two minutes later we were walking again with hot sandwiches in hand. Curious about the seemingly discordant greetings at the restaurant, one I had witnessed many times previously between Copts and Muslims and had experienced myself, I asked Bassem how he felt about the exchange. At first Bassem looked puzzled by my question. Then, after taking a moment to reflect, he opined: “Look, as-salām-alaikum is alright. A few say masā’ al- khayr (good evening). It doesn’t really matter to me, but, yes, it does annoy me when they reply to me with a different greeting than the one I used. It is like they want to deny my existence, the way I am, I mean. Egyptians did not used to be like this.” Corroborating Bassem’s view of the past, Egyptians I spoke to above the age of 60 were unanimous that relations between Muslims and Christians were better before the post-1967 religious revivals. While in Chapter four I argue that practical ethical judgements facilitated Egyptians’ navigating of multiple traditions, the assertive greeting in the above vignette offers an example where such phronetic judgements were eschewed for rulebook rigidity. At the same time, my interactions with Egyptians over the course of many years of research revealed the extent to which the Muslim greeting was an unconscious social norm rather than an assertive religious one. This point was made salient in an interaction I witnessed at al-kursat between an American teacher and a group of students. The adult class had been talking about different formal and informal English greetings, when the students’ attention turned to the American instructor’s Arabic education. Mustafa, a stout and muscular police officer in Beni Suef, took the lead in the impromptu tutorial, telling the American woman: “the most important thing to know is as-salām- alaikum. It’s like saying ‘what’s up’ in English.” The other students, Muslims and Copts, laughed and nodded excitedly. There was no apparent tension or competitiveness or resentment. Muslims

51 and Christians sharing the same space—a Christian one no less—in the most relaxed manner (“what went right?”). The subject of Islam’s predominance came up many times during my observation of advanced classes at al-kūrsāt. The mostly educated and middle-class students there generally regarded Egypt to be an Islamic country rather than a secular one, though the students did not necessarily see this as a bad thing—especially if they were Muslim. A longtime student named Doha described how Egypt was a balad Islāmiyya (Islamic country), and that not being secular was for the best. “The thing is,” she opined, “we are all treated equally. There are many Christians. There are Jews. But because the ’aghlabiyya (majority) is Muslim, we are a Muslim country.” Doha’s equality claim was tested by a 2013 episode experienced by a Coptic interlocutor of mine. At the time, Samia was a teacher at public school in a town just outside of Beni Suef. “The school was full of Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers),” Samia told me in a 2015 interview. “I remember one morning during ṭābūr al-ṣabāḥ (the morning assembly) one of the female teachers at the school gave a speech to the school about how all girls should wear the higab. I remember she was so enthusiastic, going on about how God was upset when girls didn’t do this, and how it was our religious duty to wear the higab.” Even after two years, I noticed Samia’s eyes moisten slightly recalling the event. “I just recall standing up on the stage, my hair uncovered of course, and looking out at the girls in the school who I knew were Christian. How are they supposed to feel?” Ultimately Samia’s experience provides a clear example of a situation where “more secularism” would almost certainly have mitigated an instance of social inequity in Egypt. Far from celebrating secularism as the answer to Egypt or any place’s problems, I only want to encourage anthropologists to consider whether secularism can be appropriate in certain situations. That is, as Egypt is transformed by the massive historical processes of colonialism, centralization, neoliberalism and the religious revivals, there have inevitably been places and times when either religion or secularism caused things to “go wrong”. In the end, there is no question that the political status of Coptic Christians in the Egyptian state deteriorated first under Nasser, and even more after the 1967 defeat of Nasserism,

52 Sadat’s embrace of political Islam, and the revival of religion in the public sphere. As Sadat’s presidency ran to a close, relations between the Coptic Church and the state reached their zenith. The 1980 chants of “Shenouda is our President' and 'We will sacrifice ourselves for you (Pope Shenouda)’” hardly pointed to a secular orientation among Copts.89 After Sadat was assassinated, the Coptic church and the Egyptian state led by Hosni Mubarak enjoyed a gradual rapprochement—part of an anti-Islamist coalition that only became broader during the insurgency Egypt faced in the 1990s. But was this coalition a secular one? Better yet, do Egyptian Copts even aspire to secularism? ! ! Coptic Sectarianism ! Speaking specifically to Egyptian Copts about secularism between 2011 and 2018 revealed two clear trends in that community’s thinking: Copts do not see Egypt as secular, and they wish Egypt was secular. When my Coptic interlocutors spoke about wanting a secular country, they specifically meant a country where they would not be discriminated against based on their religion, where they would be just as eligible for executive positions as Egyptian Muslims, and where the state would not allow any one religion to dominate society. “Egypt secular? No, not at all,” Murqus told me as we talked over plastic cups of tea at Dayr Bayyad. “Hiyya balad Islāmiyya ’asāsan (Egypt is an Islamic country to the core). Can a Christian be President? Do you see any Christians in the upper echelons of power? They say they are secular or democratic, and open and neutral, but this is kalām aw shakl bas (talk or appearance only).” Murqus thought silently for a moment, and then told me “With some of my Muslim friends, I may be OK to say I don’t believe in Muhammad or Islam, but many Muslims will immediately change as people if they hear this. Even Muslims who deal drugs and do not know anything about their religion will kill you over it. Christians get locked up or murdered

89 Sedra, 1999. p. 227.

53 over religion all the time. And what do the authorities do in these situations? The Christian always pays. This is not secular.” A Coptic woman, named Rania, articulated a similar position when I asked her if Egypt was secular. “No! Secularism is ‘ayb (wrong) in Egypt. It is like being a mulḥid (atheist). Egypt is very close-minded when it comes to religion. There is no neutrality.” Rania had studied in college to be a tourist guide. She described how they examined Pharaonic history and Islamic history in her college program, but skipped Egypt’s rich Christian history entirely. Later in our conversation, Rania told me an interesting anecdote: “I once met a man from America in Luxor. He started apologizing for what the US did in Iraq. Can you believe that? The thing is, the people in the West are okay with saying iḥna ghalṭānīn (we are wrong). But here in the Middle East, that is impossible… because of karāma (dignity/pride). But really this is a religious matter. It is Islam.” While I understood the point Rania was trying to make, her perspective also struck me as infused with the legacy of Western colonialism. How could anyone look at the United States’ criminal and corrupt 2003 invasion of Iraq and make conclusions about the shortcomings of Egyptians or Muslims generally? Despite my Coptic interlocutors’ lamentations about secularism, my years of research revealed how the actions of Beni Suef Copts were often dictated more by religious difference than their Muslim peers. For instance, a Coptic owner of an apartment building in Beni Suef was far less likely to rent a flat out to Muslim tenants than a Muslim landlord would to Coptic tenants. Likewise, Copts were no more open to the idea of intermarriage between Muslims and Christians than Egyptian Muslims were. Most of the Copts I encountered consumed hour after hour of Coptic television programming (including programs produced by Copts in the diaspora which criticized Islam incessantly). When these same interlocutors had free time, they took trips to churches and monasteries in Egypt. Evangelical Christian interlocutors, for their part, frequently expressed to me their resentment of the highly exclusive nature of Beni Suef’s Coptic community. My point in stating all this is that it is generally a Christian, not secular or Egyptian nationalist, identity and affiliation that is the most influential force in the social lives of Copts. This, in turn, calls into question the rhetoric of Copts around secularism, and asks whether Copts

54 would even want absolute religious neutrality in society. Samuli Schielke argues that secularism should be studied as a popular tactic in a sociopolitical conflict rather than strictly a hegemonic governmental force, and the words and actions of my Coptic interlocutors largely corroborated this view.90 That is, secularism is primarily a political strategy in the church-centric lives of Beni Suef’s Copts rather than a way of political and social life they are wholly committed to. ! ! Globalization, Neutrality, and Liquid Soap ! The persistent and resurgent social power of Muslim and Christian institutions and traditions I described in the previous section should not obscure the reality that postcolonial Egypt has always been marked by a rich coexistence of multiple traditions. In addition to the colonial European, gulf, and religious revivalist influences already detailed, globalized Egypt has been coloured by the presence of Shia Muslims, Baháʼís, atheists, Sufis, and evangelical Christians; refugees from Sudan, Syria, Somalia and Liberia; footballers, squash players, idlers and black belts in taekwondo; teetotallers, drinkers, smokers and users of all kinds of street drugs. Most often, these different traditions and lifestyles manifest as incommensurable, where they “are not explicitly contradictory and do not require making an exclusive choice.”91 Naturally, Egyptians have divergent views on how precisely to manage these diverse strands of tradition. The issue of competing cultures in an era of globalization arose at a lagna 2015 event I attended titled “haqqī fī al-dustūr(My right in the constitution)”. A Muslim man named Alaa took the lead in the discussion group I was a part of. “I think the principle of freedom is important,” Alaa began, before entering into storytelling mode to support his assertion. “I will tell you all something about ṣābūn (soap). One day, when my son was seven, he suddenly only wanted to wash his hands with liquid soap. At the time, we bought bars of soap. I didn’t know where he even learned to love liquid soap… we never had it! I tried to explain to

90 Schielke, 2015. pp. 195-196.

91 Lambek, 2015. p. 228.

55 him that bar soap worked just as well, but liquid soap is what he insisted on. And so after a while, what did I do? I started buying liquid soap.” He paused for a moment before embarking on his theoretical thrust. “The world has changed and is changing. One hundred years ago—even 30 years ago—every person in a town was part of the same culture. Now you will not even find a single household where family members share the same culture! So you can’t dismiss people completely because they are different from you. When any religion is understood in certain ways, whether Islam or Christianity, it will exclude others. And the problem is that people are understanding their religion in more and more rigid ways. At the same time, globalization is the new normal now, so I think freedom and secularism are good things for us to try to do.” Alaa’s story calls to mind Michael Lambek’s understanding of ethics and tradition, where “plurality of traditions and flexibility of affiliation and articulation among them is a characteristic of life in societies above a certain scale.”92 It also relates to the philosopher Charles Taylor’s contention that “we live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.”93 With Lambek’s and Taylor’s words in mind, we might think back to the higab sermon at Samia’s public school and consider how in certain places, and at certain times, secular neutrality might actually have utility. ! ! Religion, Right and Wrong ! On the other hand, my interlocutors sometimes narrated a dramatic decline of religion in Egyptian society. Corroborating arguments made in the rich anthropological literature on piety

92 Ibid, p. 236.

93 Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. p. 11.

56 movements in the Arab world,94 people commonly described to me how the post-1970 wave of modern technologies and the Western consumerism and culture they transmitted was changing Egyptian society for the worse. Sitting in front of his kitchen supplies shop on a cool winter evening, an older Muslim man spoke regretfully about the state of the country’s youth. “Their minds are empty. They spend their days watching action movies and American wrestling, or messaging on facebook. And football too. These are all just distractions. Ma fīsh rūḥ f-il- mugtama‘ (there is no spirit in society).” This awareness of the intrusion of certain forms of popular culture into ordinary Egyptians’ lives became particularly acute during holidays. “Just look at Ramadan,” a young Muslim woman told me as we talked at a Nile-side cafe, “for a lot of people it is about watching all the new television shows (all of which were produced in the Arab/Muslim world). This is not what Ramadan should be about.” She motioned to the pink fānūs (ramadan lantern) on the large Pepsi billboard advertisement above the corniche road, and exclaimed “I don’t need Pepsi to tell me Ramadan karīm!” One day in 2012, I attended a lagna meeting in preparation for a conference in Germany, where a Muslim man expressed an opinion exactly opposite to the point Alaa made via liquid soap: “I don’t believe in secularism,” Yahia, an engineer at a local Chinese-owned yeast factory, said. “It’s against all religions. There are a lot of problems in secular countries. They become very materialistic. Getting rich changes the morality of people and countries that become rich and wealthy. I think religion is for controlling the moralities of people—in a good way.” Yahia, who was clean shaven with a faint zabība (prayer mark) on his forehead, spoke with a calm and gentle disposition. The young man read voraciously in his free time and was always asking me for recommendations of historical and philosophical works. Indicating these intellectual vocations, Mahmoud then referenced the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Nietzsche said that if God is dead, then there is no good or evil. This is a

94 Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006; Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

57 disaster for society. We must have right and wrong. If you make everything neutral, society will become weaker. This is the biggest problem we are facing.” —As it happened, it was a Muslim woman named Hadeer who spoke in reply to Mahmoud. “Egyptian society is not secular though,” she said with bemused exasperation. —“No, it’s not,” Yahia agreed, before nodding to the aforementioned cultural disconnect between elites and the everyday, “but on the official level it is. And in the movies and TV.” In many ways, Yahia’s argument was compelling. The colonial legacy in Egypt—defined by a disruptive array of economic structures, cultures, beliefs, and institutions—is hard to overstate. What I am hesitant about, though, is the agency he, like some anthropologists, grants specifically to secularism as the source of these ills. That is because any survey of other sites in Africa, Asia and the Americas reveals many of the same processes of cultural turbulence, economic exploitation and political corruption. Most of the time, however, these sites do not reveal a dichotomous struggle between religion and secularism (such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Haiti, among many, many other states). This raises the very important question as to whether the key issue in Egypt and elsewhere is secularism, or other factors— colonial, political, economic, and otherwise. ! ! Beyond Binaries: Rethinking Relations between Secularism and Religion

Around the world, cultural and religious practices have been colonized by the relentless expansion of globalized capitalism Yahia described. Sometimes it is quite appropriate to frame these transformations in binaries of West and non-West, and religious and secular. Without question, the rise of globalized capitalism is in many ways co-imbricated with the rise of secular habits and sensibilities.95 That said, anthropologists and historians of the Middle East have written extensively on how, far from going into retreat, public religion actually increased amidst

95 see Asad, 2003.

58 the rise of capitalism and neoliberalism.96 In Putting Islam to Work, Gregory Starrett documents quite convincingly how Islam’s power in Egypt’s public sphere grew exponentially over the course of the twentieth century, and many of my interlocutors’ experiences of everyday life support Starrett’s formulation. Hence, not all encounters between commodifying capitalism and local cultures fit in the aforementioned binaries so neatly. Moreover, there are examples of Western religious communities besieged by capitalist culture. As a person of Mennonite descent, I often wonder how old-order Mennonite or Amish communities, with their radical rejection of many forms of modern and capitalist life, fit into the aforementioned binaries that can still dominate anthropological understandings of the spread of secularism. Are pious old-order Mennonites in Canada, still living without electricity and riding in their horses and buggies, a part of Western culture? My point is that secular/religious and West/non-West binaries, while often helpful in understanding the vast global networks of power, sometimes mask the agency and integrity of local societies and cultures. Global capitalist expansion has been received around the world in unpredictable ways. It is never totalizing—a fact contemporary Egypt makes plain. In the end, the stories in the second part of this chapter elucidate the extent to which secularism and religion colour everyday life in Egypt in complex and unpredictable ways. While Egypt’s modernization from the time of Muhammad Ali to Gamal Abdul Nasser often had strong secular elements, religious traditions held strong in society, and, after 1967, enjoyed a place of increasing privilege the country. Hence, from the beginning of Egypt’s modern period, manifestations of religion and secularism were always co-imbricated and multifaceted.97 Ultimately the highly intellectualist nature of many anthropological theorizations of the secular to some extent obscures how secularism and other factors do or do not dictate the daily lives of ordinary people. Time and time again, interlocutors stressed to me the need to distinguish between the rhetoric of the state, on the one hand, and the actual policies and interests on the

96 Starrett, 1998; Schielke, 2015.

97 I take the idea of Islam and secularism’s co-imbrication from Sherine Hafez. An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

59 other. The state’s frequent deployment of religious principles and justifications, I was told, often mirrored its opportunistic and superficial embrace of secular ideals. The conclusion I draw from my interlocutors’ assessments of Egypt’s political arena is that questions around the secular and the religious are irrelevant to most people’s experiences of the state. That is, the most powerful forces in Egyptian politics are not primarily driven by secular or religious imperatives. The main story lies elsewhere.

! Part 3—Sectarianism and State in Egypt (2011-2018) ! A State of Religious Discrimination ! Thus far, I have narrated two key historical epochs in Muslim-Christians relations in Egypt. The first is the Nasser-era rise of the Coptic church and institutionalization of a millet system between church and state. The second narrative centres on the post-1967 religious revivals in Egypt, where in many ways Egyptian politics and society became more overtly religious amidst a rise in neoliberalism and consumer capitalism. The final period of political history I now turn to unfolded in the more recent period of 2011-2018, when I undertook my fieldwork. At first glance, the labelling of the Sisi regime as secular holds some credence. It was Sisi, after all, who led the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood president, thereby curbing the ostensible rise of religious politics in Egypt. The co-imbrication of religion and politics, however, has hardly dissipated under a new regime that has repeatedly catered to religious conservatives in the country (to take one example, Egyptian police launched a massive crackdown on LGBT Egyptians in January 2018 with no obvious political purpose other than to demonstrate its conservative guardianship over society).98 Many of my interlocutors, Muslim and

98 Ghoshal, Neela. “More Arrests in Egypt’s LGBT Crackdown, but No International Outcry,” Human Rights Watch, 22 January 2018. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/22/more-arrests-egypts-lgbt- crackdown-no-international-outcry

60 Christian, claimed that the line between religion and politics in Egypt was utterly inconsistent, and that the Egyptian regime was ultimately muṣlaḥgī (self-interested). “The regime uses secularism when it needs it,” a Muslim lagna member named Sharif told me. “It uses religion when it needs it. They use Muslims and Christians when it suits them. So we can say that is neither purely religious or secular.” Before the 2013 coup, some interlocutors pointed to the election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi as proof of Egypt’s Islamist character. After 2013, many Copts complained to me about how Sisi, in search of a counterweight to the Islamist appeal of the Brotherhood, enabled the Salafis. “It is all muṣālaḥ (interests),” a Coptic woman named Mariam told me. “They will work with al-Azhar, or the Coptic pope, or the Salafis. They will imprison and kill liberals. So long it is in their interests. They will not hesitate to use religion ever!” The scholar of comparative law and religion, Mona Oraby, argues that religious difference is made and maintained in Egyptian law, thereby calling into question the idea that secularism means the privatization of religion. Following Oraby, secularism is an altogether unsatisfactory explanation as to why the religion of every Egyptian citizen is printed on individual government ID cards.99 Likewise, secularism does not explain why Christians in Egypt are able to convert to Islam with relative ease, whereas Muslim conversion to Christianity occurs sparingly, informally, and only as a source of massive scandal. The case of Mohammed Hegazy is illustrative of this fact. In 2007, Hegazy became the first Egyptian Muslim to seek Egyptian government recognition of conversion from Islam to Christianity. Hegazy was subjected to numerous death threats (according to a 2013 Pew Poll, 86% of Egyptian Muslims support the death penalty for anyone leaving Islam),100 including from his own father. In the end, the presiding judge rejected Hegazy’s conversion request, citing Article 2 of the Egyptian

99 Oraby, Mona. “Law, the State, and Public Order: Regulating Religion in Contemporary Egypt,” Law and Society Review, 52(3), 2018.

100 Lugo, Luis et al. “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” Pew Research Centre, 30 April 2013. https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs- about-sharia/

61 constitution that shari’a was the primary source of legislation, and therefore apostasy was disallowed.101 In January of 2019, the Egyptian president came under fire in the mainstream American press due to a “60 Minutes” interview which shone light on the plight of human rights activists and political prisoners in Egypt. The day after the television interview aired, Sisi visited the gigantic new Coptic cathedral in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital in what was, at least in part, another production in a long line of political performances for Western empire. Cosmetics aside, most people I spoke to within Egypt’s borders regarded Sisi’s continued embrace of the Coptic church as problematic due to the fact that it was the regime’s violent authoritarian policies that helped generate the 2016-2018 political violence on Copts in the first place. Ultimately, the central argument in this chapter is that since the state wields both Islam and secularism so inconsistently and opportunistically, it makes little sense for anthropologists to isolate either concept as the generator of sociopolitical inequities in Egypt. What went wrong, then, has less to do with religious or secular ideologies and institutions, and much more to do with the political and economic expediencies that play out in a pragmatic state that is “both exploited and exploitative.”102 ! ! State Sectarianism ! For all the talk about the church’s historical alliance with Egypt’s authoritarian leadership, ordinary Copts (like many Muslims) are deeply distrustful of the state. Whenever incidents of sectarian violence transpired during my fieldwork in Egypt, Coptic interlocutors expressed to me their belief that the state authorities allowed the violence to happen. It was not that Copts always regarded the state’s role in the sectarian violence as an active one. Rather they

101 Ibrahim, Ekram. “A Step Closer to Freedom of Religion?” Egypt Independent, 21 February 2010. https://www.egyptindependent.com/step-closer-freedom-religion/

102 Hamdy, Sherine F. “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian Dialysis Ward,” in American Ethnologist, 35(4), 2008. p. 560.

62 just had a deep-seated belief that the state could do more to stop violence against Christians. “They choose when to clamp down,” an interlocutor told me, “and they choose when to allow clashes to happen.” On the other hand, I observed several attacks on Copts where my Christian interlocutors, quite reasonably, believed the state was responsible. A pair of 2011 instances of state violence against Copts in particular reveal the very concrete and destructive role religion has played in the Egyptian state. The first incident is the 1 January bombing of the kinīsat il-qadīsīn (The Church of the Saints) where scores of worshipers were killed while leaving a New Year’s service in downtown Alexandria. In total, 23 people were left dead and 97 injured—almost all of them Copts. While the Egyptian government quickly identified the group behind the attack as gaysh il-Islam (Army of Islam), a very different account emerged from British intelligence reports and confidential state security documents seized by Egyptian protesters in February 2011. According to the leaked documents, the former Egyptian Interior Minister Habib el-Adly established a black ops unit composed of 22 security officers in 2004. These officers were directed to coordinate networks of criminals and would-be Islamist militants to carry out the Mubarak regime’s dirtiest work. When popular protests broke out in Tunisia in December 2010, el-Adly turned to the black ops unit to safeguard the regime’s interests. The state’s aim in bombing the Alexandria church was twofold. First, it desired an incident that reinforced the regime’s supposed counterterrorist raison d’être. Secondly, the state wanted to compel Copts not to get out of line in the case political unrest spread to Egypt.103 Immediately after the New Year’s bombing, two men, Mohammed Abdelhadi and Mohamed Khaled, were arrested as patsies by the same Interior Ministry that had commissioned them. As fate would have it, the 25 January Uprising broke out weeks later, and the pair of accused were able to escape from prison. Fearing for their lives, the runaways went straight to the British embassy in Cairo’s Garden City. There, they sat down with British embassy

103 “B’ad il-iqtiḥām ’amn il-dawla b-il-iskandriyya (After the Storming of State Security in Alexandria),” il-iqbāṭ il-mutaḥidūn (Copts United). 6 March 2011. Retrieved from https://www.copts-united.com/ Article.php?I=734&A=32260 March 6 2011

63 employees and recounted how they were recruited and directed by the Interior Ministry to carry out the attack.104 The significance of the 2011 Alexandria bombing is largely lost in contemporary history. The event is overshadowed, in part, by the earthshaking political events that succeeded it. But the bombing is also deeply scandalous for the Egyptian state, and for that reason credible information about it has become harder and harder to come by since the deep state struck back in 2013 (most major Arabic and English-language news services, such as the BBC, have removed their stories on it entirely). My most trusted and informed sources in Egypt, however, assured me that the above account of the bombing is true. And scans of documents, seized by protesters from the Sixth District State Security headquarters in Nasr City (particularly the December 2010 file “A Full Memorandum for Presentation to the Minister—Very Confidential”), can still be found online.105 Far from being the stuff of conspiracy theory, the evidence is compelling, damning of a state, and of great relevance to anthropological understandings of secularism. But first, let me survey a second major instance of state sectarianism. On 9 October 2011, just nine months after the Alexandria church bombing, Coptic activists were protesting in Cairo in response to the destruction of a Church in Aswan. The unarmed Coptic demonstrators, who began their march at 4pm in Shubra Square, were destined for the Maspero state-run radio and television building near Tahrir Square. Carrying crosses, candles, flowers and singing taranīm (hymns), protesters were attacked sporadically with stones while they cut through the downtown. As darkness fell and marchers made their way around the Ramses Hilton Hotel to meet the crowd already protesting at Maspero, Egyptian soldiers began attacking people indiscriminately. I will never forget watching the massacre unfold live on television from my apartment in Beni Suef. The state television cameras, hiding little of the carnage, showed Egyptian armoured personnel carriers swerving wildly through the crowds. Some soldiers could be seen firing live

104 “Niyyabat ’amn il-dawla tihaqqaq fī itihām al-‘ādalī b-il-tawwaraṭ fī tafjīr il-qadīsīn (State Security Prosecution Investigating Accusation of Al-Adly’s Involvement in the Saints Bombing),” al Youm al ﻧﯿﺎﺑﺔ-أﻣﻦ-اﻟﺪوﻟﺔ-ﺗﺤﻘﻖ-ﻓﻰ-/Sabea, 7 February, 2011. Retrieved from: https://www.youm7.com/story/2011/2/7 347570/اﺗﮭﺎم-اﻟﻌﺎدﻟﻰ-ﺑﺎﻟﺘﻮرط-ﻓﻰ-ﺗﻔﺠﯿﺮ

105 il-iqbāṭ il-mutaḥidūn (Copts United), 2011.

64 ammunition at the marchers, while others beat the protesters with rocks and batons. In the end, 24 people were dead and 212 injured. Quite incredibly, though, the state-run news channels described only deaths of “martyr” soldiers in the clashes (zero soldiers died in the massacre). Even more egregiously, newscasters on the state-owned channels chastised the Copts as violent and conspiratorial, calling upon Egyptian citizens to come down to Maspero in order to “protect the army from the Copts.”106 The next day, I left my flat in Beni Suef expecting the night’s events to be casting a pall over society. To my surprise, though, I found things to be completely normal. The many Muslims I spoke to, almost without exception, blamed either the Copts for the Maspero violence or claimed that some “foreign hand” had caused the massacre in order to divide the country. It was only when I talked to Coptic Egyptians in private that I heard a different take. For them, the attack was yet another exhibit of their inferior political status in Egypt and a devastating reminder that the authoritarian state could do with them whatever it wanted. No one in Egypt, the then-popular Muslim Brotherhood included, spoke up. Reflecting on Maspero in a 2017 interview, an exiled Muslim Brotherhood official spoke regretfully to me about his party’s muted response to the massacre. The man, who worked as a doctor in Scarborough, remarked that the Maspero Massacre turned out to be a test run for the much larger 2013 Rāb‘a Massacre (indeed, the two incidents of state violence share many parallels). It is my opinion that, prior to the 2013 coup d’état, there was no greater blow to the revolution than the Maspero Massacre. Egypt’s 10 million Coptic Christian citizens were reminded that religion and politics could be inextricably linked in Egypt, and, in that regard, they were utterly alone. ! ! ! ! !

106 Gaber, Yassin. “Reconstructing Maspero’s Bloody Sunday: An Ahram Online Investigation,” Ahram Online, 1 November 2011. Retrieved from: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/25521/Egypt/ Politics-/Reconstructing-Masperos-Bloody-Sunday-Ahram-Online.aspx

65 Realities of Realpolitik

It might appear that the theoretical significance I derive from the Alexandria church bombing and the Maspero Massacre is that the two incidents centre on the actions of a nonsecular state. In both instances Egyptian state executives who happened to be Muslim cynically manipulated and incited religious divisions in the country for political gain. On the surface, both instances would also have been ameliorated somewhat, if not entirely, by political secularism (whether the separation of religion and politics, or political equality across religious lines). My point, however, is not that Egypt is in need of a more secular state generally or that Islam was the cause of the state violence, because beneath the surface, neither religious nor secular imperatives were the key element in either attack. My argument, rather, is that scourge of the Egyptian state is far bigger than questions of secularism or religion. A third instance of revolutionary state violence illuminates this fact. On 1 February 2012, less than four months after the Maspero Massacre, dozens of al- Ahly Ultras (fans of al-Ahly football club) were massacred by armed thugs during a match at Port Said Stadium. Seventy-two unarmed football fans, most of them shabāb (young men), punched, kicked, stabbed and bludgeoned to death. Evidence and eyewitness accounts of the event demonstrate that the massacre was highly coordinated and could only have been orchestrated by Egyptian security forces present. It soon became clear that the murders were retribution for the Ultras’ past involvement in the 25 January Uprising, and a warning against potential future disturbances. Unlike the 2011 Alexandria bombing or the Maspero Massacre, the Port Said massacre had nothing to do with religion or secularism. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, however, the two former incidents actually had little to do with religion and secularism either. Despite the amount written in the anthropological literature on how Egypt is a secular state, the historical record of the post-1952 Egyptian state shows quite clearly that political secularism and religion usually amount to ḥibr ala waraq (ink on paper—devoid of consistency or longevity). In Alexandria and Maspero, the state turned sectarian to pursue its political aims, while at Port Said (and Mohammed Mahmoud Street, among many other revolutionary protests),

66 the state killed for reasons neither religious nor secular. When the time of the horrific 2013 Rāb‘a Massacre came, the state embraced colonial tropes about Islamic extremism (and has done so ever since). Surveying all these instances of state violence, we can see that the state’s actions are above all else driven by plastic and cynical realpolitik rather than religious or secular imperatives. Political interests and imperatives, of course, shift with time, and the current Egyptian regime genuinely desires to prevent large-scale attacks on Copts because its purported ability to end chaos has always been its key promise to Egyptians. But these more recent political configurations, like policies past, centre much more on political calculations and interests than ideological affinity. Ultimately the above instances of state violence speak to my argument about the fluid, pragmatic and flexible nature of powerful institutions and discourses. Each case is a clear example of where, in an inversion of De Certeau’s framework, powerful entities employ tactics in pursuit of their own interests. This flexibility and pragmatism, of course, is hardly unique to contemporary Egypt. Indeed, throughout world history, the ideology marketed by the state has often been the result of cold and cutthroat political calculation; a veneer for the naked pursuit of profit and power. ! ! To Essentialize or Historicize? ! The way some anthropologists have theorized political secularism across space and time, for me, is reminiscent of the way political scientists often wield the categories of democracy and secularism. Anthropologists have simply embraced the inverse argument: secularism is the problem, not the solution. I am hardly the first anthropologist to notice the problem with the way in which the secular has been theorized.107 Veena Das draws attention to how the Begriffsgeschichte School, on which Talal Asad relies heavily in his genealogy of secularism, “has a somewhat restricted notion of context,” thereby creating “a picture of the secular as a

107 Bangstad, 2009; Cannell, Fenella. “The Anthropology of Secularism,” in Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 39, 2010. Schielke, 2015; Starrett, 2010.

67 unitary system.”108 Citing the philosopher W.B. Gallie, Gregory Starrett helpfully classifies the secular as an essentially contested concept—one that is internally complex but is portrayed by some anthropologists as whole.109 It should be obvious that religious categories are essentially contested too. To take one example, Brinkley Messick’s masterful The Calligraphic State is about the manifestation of shari’a across a particular place and time, not the sharī‘a as an essence. Indeed, Messick clarifies early in the book that “the practical status of the sharī‘a has varied widely according to place and time in the Muslim world.”110 Talal Asad makes similar acknowledgements about secularism: that “secularization follows different paths according to different historical circumstances,” and that “it is one thing to seek essential origins, quite another to identify elements of a tradition that have been retrieved, reorganized and put to modern use in contemporary formations.”111 However, when Saba Mahmood argues that the legal grammar of political secularism cuts across West and non-West, it leads me to wonder: if the divergent politics of Egypt, Italy, eighteenth- century France and the United States are all secular, then what precisely is the essence of secularism? Such generalizations strike me as the inverse of Bernard Lewis’ later-career Islamophobia which claims “what went wrong” in any given Islamic society, past or present, can be explained by Islam. True, the hardships faced by poor people in Egypt or Pakistan, or war-torn Iraq or Syria, all unfold in largely Muslim contexts. It is also true that Islamic political rhetoric is regularly deployed in each of these situations. But would any serious and informed observer really conclude Islam is what is generative them? Beyond formal doctrine (which is itself highly contentious among Islamic scholars) there is little sociopolitical essence to the ocean that is lived

108 Das, Veena. “Secularism and the Argument from Nature,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Scott, David and Hirschkind, Charles (eds.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. p. 101.

109 Starrett, 2010, p. 635.

110 Messick, 1992. p. 4.

111 Asad, Talal. Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. p. 20; Asad, Talal. “Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain and Liberal Politics,” Cultural Anthropology, 26(4), 2011. p. 672.

68 Islam. Why are scholars not willing to grant even a fraction of such complexity and diversity to secularism? No, Islam is not the cause of all the Muslim world’s problems, just as secularism is not “what went wrong” in every modern nation-state. The greatest drawback to the academy’s devotion to an abstract and intellectualist critique of the concept is that it often completely misses the mark as to how political power functions in practice. Take Saudi Arabia’s domestic and foreign policies as an example. The Saudi state, which enforces a strict creed of Wahhabi Islam domestically, supports Salafi jihadists in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, violently represses their Shia population at home, while at the same time backing the ostensibly secular army in Egypt. Why? Because Saudi policy revolves around flexible and pragmatic considerations of power and interests, not codified ideology. What about the United States? True, Washington has long targeted the Islamist Ayatollahs in Iran and Hamas in historic Palestine. But the Arab leaders most vilified by the American Empire in modern history are more outwardly secular heads of state like Gamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein. Why? Because American policy, like the British Empire’s before it, has revolved around flexible considerations of power and interests. Thus, when the United States supported Salafi jihadists against the ostensibly secular Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, it was not about religion or secularism either. Nor can the United State’s longtime ties to the more religious states of Israel and Saudi Arabia, or its opposition to the more secular regimes of Venezuela or Russia, be explained by codified secularism. Ultimately, history shows quite clearly that political religion and political secularism can be variably used to support empire or oppose it. And yet the academy remains rife with the assumption that secularism and imperialism are synonymous. What knowledge is lost in this assumption? What is the cost of losing sight of where ever-shifting power really lies? ! ! ! ! !

69 Conclusion: The Distraction of Secularism ! Between the 2003 release of Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular and Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age, the manner in which anthropologists discussed secularism transformed in fundamental ways. What began as a skeptical, critical and deconstructive exercise became a descriptive one about the supposed omnipotence of secular power.112 According to Mahmood’s selective 2015 reading of Egyptian history, secularism is the primary mover and generator of interfaith strife. This chapter, on the other hand, has shown Egypt’s history of “Muslim-Christian relations” to be much more complicated than that. Ultimately the decline of interfaith relations in Egypt, so often assumed by anthropologists and ordinary Egyptians alike, is the result of a complex mix of European colonialism, the rise of the Coptic Church and political Islam, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, the religious revivals, and the influence of the Gulf states. Across these historical narratives, I have argued against uncritical presumptions of the religion-secularism binary. From the time of British colonialism, through the “liberal”, Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, and revolutionary and Sisi periods, Egyptian history has revealed deep co-imbrications of religion and secularism in Egyptian politics and society. As subsequent chapters show, the concerns and experiences of my interlocutors ultimately hinged far more on material matters around livelihoods and dignity than questions of religion, secularism or a moral order. At times in this chapter, people evoked religion and/or secularism as the force that was hegemonic or oppressive in their lives. But most often, people’s experiences revealed the power to shape sociopolitical conditions as laying elsewhere. Unfortunately, this nuance is often lost on North American university campuses today, where junior scholars frequently answer the question of “what went wrong” in any given place and time with the highly scripted answers of secularism or liberalism. The ever-pragmatic power of empire, meanwhile, goes on dominating and exploiting people around the world. The greatest detriment in the academy’s often static view of secularism is that it can distract from more

112 Mahmood, 2015; Agrama 2012.

70 significant political forces. Secularism means little for the ongoing oppression suffered by Canada’s indigenous peoples, Arab Muslims and Christians in Israeli-occupied Palestine, or non- Arab Kurds in Arab nationalist Syria (even though each of these places has a strong and penetrating state). In turn, we see the anthropological definition of secularism—“the modern state’s sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life”— is simply too broad.113 I propose we instead consider secularism to be one of many forms of state centralization. Centralized state power can explain the state’s regulation of religion in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, Egypt, and Canada. Unlike political secularism, the concept of state centralization is able accommodate the incredibly divergent ways religion is regulated in each state.

In the final paragraph of Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason, Talal Asad expresses his doubt as to whether secular reason can resolve the “unpredictable catastrophes in our life—collective as well as individual.”114 Asad’s skepticism contrasts sharply with Charles Taylor’s aspiration that secularism can facilitate negotiation and understanding in our time.115 I hope this chapter has bridged the gap between the two views. On the one hand, I could not agree more with Asad’s pessimism. The human world is fundamentally broken. In regimes Muslim, Christian, secular, modern, ancient, democratic, authoritarian, marxist, and otherwise, there has always been corruption, suffering and injustice. Utopia is never coming around the corner, and politicians and intellectuals of every political stripe (perhaps especially privileged Western proponents of secularism) would do well to remember this. At the same time, and across space and time, one finds integrity, resilience and striving for justice in a wide array of human societies (see subsequent chapters on ordinary ethics in Egypt). Ultimately, the flexible and fickle nature of humanity (and human institutions), as well as the complexity and diversity of historical context, means that formal concepts tend to apply in

113 Mahmood, 2015. p. 3.

114 Asad, 2018. p. 161.

115 Taylor, 2011.

71 unpredictable ways. Hence, intellectual reflexivity is key. As I have shown throughout this chapter, the political variable that can be theorized most safely across space and time is power. Power is flexible, and power is pragmatic. Politics (secular or religious), therefore, tend to be flexible and pragmatic as well. And so, if we as anthropologists are to understand the political situation in any one place or time, we must be specific and historicize. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

72 Chapter 2 —— In the Same Air: Muslim Visitations to a Miraculous Coptic Priest ! Introduction ! I lived in Beni Suef for several years before I ever witnessed Abuna Bishoy's miracle khidma (service) at the Dayr Bayyaḍ church of al-‘adraʾ (the Virgin Mary). Looking back I am surprised, given that the Dayr Bayyaḍ retreat centre was one of my favourite destinations from the time I first moved to Beni Suef in early 2011. In those days, however, my interest there was neither in churches nor miracles. Rather I went to the retreat centre for its beautiful and secluded Nile shoreline, its restaurant and event rooms where I sometimes took part in meetings and conferences, and its lively Virgin Mary festival that I tried to attend at least once each August (see Chapter 5). During these visits, I saw little reason to ever enter the centre’s church for more than a cursory glance. And while I imagine I must have at least heard about the miraculous works of Abuna Bishoy in my early years in Beni Suef, I cannot say I recall giving any special thought to them. My interest in Bishoy's khidma was piqued in the spring of 2015, when I escaped from my coursework at the University of Toronto to conduct two months of research in Beni Suef. Sitting in one of the newly-constructed marble booths at the south end of Dayr Bayyaḍ’s shoreline, I explained to my close friend Mariam, a middle-aged Coptic woman, about my emerging dissertation project on the Muslim attendance of Coptic NGO programs. Mariam nodded her head in approval as my wife nursed our one-year old son beside her. When I listed off the NGO sites where I planned to base my project, however, Mariam furled her brow in thought and then suggested “why not here?” —“You mean the mūsim (festival)?” I asked her, remembering vaguely that I had seen Muslims at the annual Bayyaḍ festival between 2011 and 2013.

73 —“Yes, the mūsim is OK,” she said, “but I am thinking more of Abuna Bishoy. He removes shayatīn (spirits). Many Muslims go.” —“Really?” I asked, intrigued. —“Kitīr (many),” she replied, waving the back of her hand expressively, before abruptly pulling it in to look at her watch. A smile spread over her face, and she said “go there now. You will see.” Suddenly, my interest gave way to apprehension. How could I, a visible foreigner, just waltz into what I pictured to be sacred acts in a sacred space? —“Tygī ma‘aya (will you come with me)?” I asked Mariam coyly. —“Don’t worry,” she laughed, “you will be fine. No, I will stay here with Wanda and Zay. Don’t hesitate to talk to anyone there. Just go and come back!” So with that short advice, I set off from the waterfront to find the purportedly miraculous Abuna. The church of al-‘adraʾ sits cloistered in the main courtyard of the Bayyaḍ centre, surrounded by four stories of dusty white buildings. I walked up the three steps to the church’s entrance, past two men and a woman who were selling what was left of the Friday qurbān (Coptic offering bread). The first thing I noticed inside was the sound. Reverberating out from the front of the church, a woman cried over and over again “Mish adra. Mish adra. Mish adra (I can’t, I can’t, I can’t).” I must admit the woman’s shrill call sent chills up my spine. A crowd of about thirty people huddled together on the raised platform at the front of the church where the pulpit normally stood. The first couple rows of church pews were full, and smaller groups of children and adults visited elsewhere in the largely wood-panelled and stained-glass church. “Mish adra. Mish adra,” the woman called again, before letting out a long mournful wail. Walking steadily up onto the platform, I peered over the shoulders of a section of the crowd. In the middle of everyone was a Coptic priest in his traditional black garb crouched on the red carpet floor, head bowed. Beside him sat a young woman who rocked back and forth, hitting herself on the legs over and over again. I could not see her face, but her red higab made plain that she was Muslim. I glanced around the circle of people who were watching. There were men and women who looked to be of all ages and social classes. Most importantly though, for my purposes, was that many of the people standing there waiting to see the Abuna were Muslim —a fact made plain by the colourful array of higabs on the majority of women in attendance.

74 For the next hour, I excitedly observed and talked to as many people in the church as I could. I felt like I had caught lightning in a bottle. Here was a Coptic church on a Friday morning in the ostensible post-1970 epoch of “worsening sectarian relations”, and it was filled with Muslims wanting to pray with a Coptic priest. From my perspective as a researcher, it seemed too good to be true. But real it was, and I now know that I could have relaxed more that day. As I would learn over the weeks, months, and years ahead, this practice of Muslim attendance was anything but extraordinary.

This chapter analyzes the practices in and around Abuna Bishoy's miracle khidma as both a lens and point of departure to investigate social patterns foundational to contemporary Egyptian society. The first component of the chapter sheds light on the basic functions and questions of who attends the service, why they come, and how they interact when they are in the church. I argue that the khidma is marked by a flexible and tolerant communal culture that facilitates the coexistence of solemn and personal exchanges with the lively intergenerational church atmosphere. I suggest this culture is rooted in the belief “iḥna fil-hawa sawa” (we are in the “same boat”—lit. same air). The second section demonstrates how people usually come to the khidma not as Muslims or Christians, but as individuals due to a wide variety of personal reasons. I suggest that most khidma attendance should be understood through the Sartrean visage of the world offering itself to us as “a field of instrumental possibilities.”116 I contend that visitors navigate the heterogeneity of co-imbricated traditions that compose their lives by employing practical ethical judgement. I then examine specific manifestations of this phronetic or practical judgement by highlighting instances where religious identities come to the fore at the khidma, such as the complimentary and affectionate foregrounding of religious difference, as well as distrust and condemnation. Having not discovered religious identity to be a major source of tension in the church, I use the final component of this chapter to examine the boundary that inflects most heavily upon

116 Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Frechtman, Bernard (trans.), The Philosophical Library, 1948, pp. 53–58. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Smith, Colin (trans.). London: Routledge, 1962, 136–47.

75 attendance of the khidma: social class. I give voice to my interlocutors' debates and skepticism about the Abuna’s khidma by contextualizing them within broader historical narratives around rationalism, modernization and reform in Egyptian history. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the nexus of material and spiritual need in both the contemporary Egyptian context and the universal human condition.

! A Setting for Miracles ! There are few residents of Beni Suef, Muslim or Christian, who do not at least know of the Coptic retreat centre of Dayr Bayyaḍ that lies across the Nile from the main city on the West bank. The white cross-topped twin towers of the centre are visible from the city’s popular corniche. Any taxi driver in Beni Suef recognizes exactly where to go upon hearing the simple direction of al-‘adraʾ or il-dayr (the Monastery—though it was over two hundred years ago that it was a functioning monastery). And en masse people go. Throughout the year, traffic to the retreat centre is heaviest on Fridays and Sundays, when the Coptic church at the centre becomes a locust of activity housing two very different consecutive functions. The first event is the Coptic mass that runs from 7am to 11am. This mass is attended exclusively by Coptic Christians. Immediately following the mass, the second function springs to life as the front of the church fills with a mixture of Muslims and Christians wanting to see the purportedly miraculous Abuna Bishoy. Officially the church at the centre serves Coptic Christians in the town of Bayyaḍ al-‘arab —which sits about one km inland from where the centre lies on east bank of the Nile. Each day of mass, lines of Egyptians can be seen walking along the country road that connects the retreat centre to the town of 20,000. Residents of Beni Suef city, on the other hand, commute to the retreat centre by car, bus and taxi. These urbanites first cross the Nile at Beni Suef Bridge, almost three km south of al-‘adraʾ. Commuters established a shortcut to al-‘adraʾ in the relative lawlessness of the revolutionary years (2011-2013), cutting through a road median at the bottom of the bridge, however, that breach was filled in 2014, and now a u-turn further down the bridge

76 road is required to get back to the retreat centre’s narrow country road. Motorcycles and microbuses constantly zip along the lush farm field-lined street, paying heed to the occasional speed bump or pothole. Many visitors shared my own predilections for the centre as a site of leisure, and a good number of those who visited on a Friday did not even enter the church. People often gathered in groups along the beautiful shoreline where egrets hunted and kingfishers hovered. Children and adults would join the birds in angling for the small bulṭī (tilapia) fish that populated the weedy shoreline of the bay. Other vacationers congregated on blankets and in booths, eating snacks and drinking tea together. Occasionally I would hear Coptic choirs perform on a small platformed seating area under the great sycamore tree above the shoreline. Other residents chose to visit further from the river in the enclosed garden cafe behind the church courtyard, while still more filled the centre’s restaurant adjacent to the hotel. One thing I came to learn was that just as ordinary life buzzed around the Dayr Bayyaḍ retreat centre, Beni Suef’s rich social tapestry also unfolded inside the church.

! Needing the Divine: The Miracle in Egypt’s Past and Present ! During the early stages of my fieldwork at the church, I frequently played the role of wide-eyed ʾagnabī (foreigner). “What is happening there?” I would ask onlookers, who responded almost without exception “howa biy‘amil mu‘gizāt (he is doing miracles)” or “howa baytallaʿ shayatīn (he is removing spirits).” It is important to clarify here that Egyptian belief in everyday miracles was not unique to attendees of Bishoy's khidma, nor was it without some continuity with Egypt’s long history. In pharaonic Egypt, magic, medicine and religion were fused together in Heka—a hybrid of the god, practice and concept of magic. In these ancient times, the power of Heka was housed in the figure of the physician-priest.117 Egypt’s Copts claim that, more recently, Christianity came to Egypt in the form of a miracle when Saint Mark healed

117 Zucconi, Laura M., “Medicine and Religion in Ancient Egypt,” Religion Compass, 1(1): 26–37, 2006.

77 an Alexandrian shoemaker’s hand in 60 CE. Egyptians’ attachment to the miraculous has wavered little in the centuries after Islam’s 641 arrival.118 Instead, there is ample evidence of exorcisms, apparitions of light, the granting of fertility and virility, and the lifting of curses at Muslim and Christian sites over the centuries. Egyptian Christians and Muslims alike have also long celebrated the Holy Family’s passage through the country, venerating churches, gardens and springs as sources of holiness and healing, and Egyptian Muslims have displayed special fondness for Marian shrines and sanctuaries such as the al-‘adraʾ church.119 The existing church at Dayr Bayyaḍ was built in 1963, but contains several elements from much earlier times. This material history includes a Greek inscription on a granite column above the small baptistery building attached to the main church. Finally, the church has two haikals (altar rooms): one dedicated to the Holy Virgin Mary and the other to Saint Damiana—a fourth-century Coptic martyr who is regarded as the founder of female monastic life (Damiana was tortured and killed by the Romans along with forty other virgins). Today mu‘gizāt and karāmāt (as many Muslims call miraculous works) are done by both sheikhs and priests.120 While it is exceedingly rare for Christians to visit a sheikh (see Introduction), the Muslim attendance of Bishoy's church is mirrored by similar patterns of Muslim crossing across the country. Likewise, books detailing instances of miraculous healing, the evil eye, and spirits are sold and consumed in the countryside and in cities.121 The phenomenon of the miraculous is even televised, where millions of Egyptians tune in to watch Abuna Makary Younan perform his khidma in Cairo each week. Ultimately, the sustained engagement with the miraculous into the modern period is remarkable, in part, because Egyptian

118 Shenouda, 2010.

119 The namesake of the Bayyaḍ church and retreat centre is the only woman who is identified by name in the Quran. See Albera, Diogini. “Combining Practices and Beliefs: Muslim Pilgrims at Marian Shrines,” in Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places, Glenn Bowman (ed.), Berghahn Books, 2012. pp.11-14.

120 Mittemaier, 2011.

121 Mittermaier, Amira. “Dreams and the Miraculous,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. Soraya Altorki (ed.), John Wiley & Sons, 2015, p. 113.

78 secular and religious reformers alike have been expecting modern technologies, sciences and reason to displace ties to the supernatural in the country since the nineteenth century.122 These traditions and practices, however, were more than adaptable to new contexts.

! The Miracle Priest ! Following the three-hour Coptic mass, the miracle service at al-dayr typically lasted for two hours. During this time the Abuna alternated between two spaces at the front of the church: first the elevated pulpit area and then an enclosure of benches at the sanctuary’s side. In both locations, the Abuna could be found either sitting on the wooden pews with his guests, or crouched on the maroon carpeted floor, enveloped by attendees like the eye of a storm. A modern “appearance of order” it was not.123 Whenever the Abuna alternated locations, the people waiting around him hurriedly manoeuvred alongside in attempt to secure a closer spot. Occasionally the Abuna left the church for short breaks over the course of the two-hour service, but this was rare. Other times I saw him recognize visitors—especially elderly people—sitting further back in the church, and subsequently get up to meet with them for a few minutes where they were sitting. Longing eyes always followed the Abuna as this happened. Despite the throng of people who came to see him each Friday and Sunday, the Abuna did not have a large support staff. Eventually I learned to identify the key figure in keeping the organization: the khādim/a (servant). Between 2015 and 2018, I met three different individuals who sometimes worked as the khādima for the Abuna—two men and one woman. It was the khādima who decided who would see the Abuna next, as well as when and how persons in the oft-indiscernible queue could move closer to him. So long as the khādima was doing their job, the khidma by and large operated on a first come, first served basis.

122 see Barak, On, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. p. 98. See also Mittermaier, Amira, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

123 Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

79 Abuna Bishoy was 57 years old when I first undertook extensive fieldwork at the church in 2015, and by the end of my fieldwork had passed sixty. Throughout these years, the man’s incredibly calm and thoughtful presence remained. He was short in stature with a slender build. A pair of spectacles adorned his intelligent, cat-like eyes, and a long beard flowed down smoothly off his chin. The son of a goose is a swimmer (ibn il-wizz ‘awwām—an Arabic idiom equivalent to the English “the Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”), Egyptians like to say, and Bishoy followed in the footsteps of his late priest father who served Beni Suef a generation earlier. When the time for Bishoy's ordination came, it was the beloved Anba Athanasius who lifted his status to that of priest. “I was the last priest made by Athanasius before his death,” Bishoy once told me, his face glistening with pride, “I could see at the time that Athanasius understood this as well, and the next week after my ordination he passed away.” Whenever I asked the Abuna about the nature of his miracle work at the church, he responded with some version of the same mantra: “Kūll da bita‘ rabbinā (all this belongs to our God).” It was somewhat striking that I never heard him cite the power of yisū‘ (Jesus) or Allah (the word for God more commonly used by Muslims). He always said rabbinā (our God)—a name more religiously neutral and inclusive in tone. Muslim and Christian visitors consistently used the term rabbinā as well—a practice I will discuss later in this chapter. As deferent as the Abuna was to rabbinā and the celestial realm, he was also a man of earthly entrepreneurship. The Abuna especially loved to relate to me his church’s administration of clinics, daycares and worship areas in Bayyaḍ al-Arab and villages further in the countryside. His main interest the last time I spoke to him in the summer of 2018 was a new church he was establishing in a village 20km north of Bayyaḍ. With the many infamous controversies over Coptic church-building in mind, I asked him if it was difficult to get local Muslims to agree to the construction of the new church. The Abuna shook his head resolutely, “No, not at all),” he replied, “They are very happy. They know the church provides many services.” I then queried the Abuna about how he felt about serving Muslims. Bishoy responded easily: “Muslim, Christian, ay haga (any thing). Kūlina bit‘a rabbinā (we all belong to God). To differentiate in service is wrong.” He paused for a moment, stroking his long wispy beard, before adding, “ana bakhdim il-nās (I serve people),” stressing the last word heavily. “If Muslims did

80 not want this, they wouldn’t come.” He then gestured back to the worship space where he had spent the previous five hours, “most of the people are Muslim. Do you know this?” I nodded that I did. “And this is ‘ādī (normal)?” I asked him. “‘ādī khālis (totally normal),” he answered, shaking his head with a smile. ! ! Interrelationality at the Khidma: with Each Other and with Our God ! I should acknowledge that the primary aim of this chapter is to explore the stories of individual visitors to Bishoy's site in order to illuminate foundational social patterns in provincial Egypt. I was always interested in investigating Bishoy's work as a social phenomenon and, in the interest of space, have largely bracketed it as such in this chapter. But as a prelude to this focus, I want to specify that people’s needing of the divine runs far deeper than the social. Above all else, the Egyptian engagement with the miraculous at al-‘adraʾ illuminates two key conditions of interrelatedness: interrelatedness with each other (iḥna fil-hawa sawa- we are in the same air), and interrelatedness with rabbinā (our God).124 On the one hand, Bishoy's site, like other places of miraculous healing in the literature, was marked by visitors’ desire for understanding rather than the isolated and impersonal mathematical diagnoses of modern health institutions.125 In contrast to the inherent loneliness of the doctor’s office, people in the community that formed at Bishoy's khidma were together and able to see that they were all breathing the same air (fil-hawa sawa). At first glance, this sense of togetherness may seem quite separate—a distraction even—from the basic aim of rescue from whatever personal adversity visitors brought. But human action and the universe’s reaction can be unpredictable. Reflecting on this reality, Hannah Arendt writes that while “action almost never achieves its purposes'' in the web of human relationships, it inevitably “produces new

124 I take the term “conditions of interrelatedness”, from Mittermaier, 2011. p. 237.

125 Flueckiger, Joyce. In Amma's Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. p. 106.

81 stories and realities.126 Of course, interlocutors did recount instances of miraculous absolute healing. But most subsequent stories in this chapter show the khidma visitation to be more often than not part of a longer life process for the visitor. In addition to interrelatedness with each other, the Egyptian attendance of Bishoy's khidma reveals an interrelatedness that goes beyond the human—an openness to “the (in)visible, the barzakh, the imaginary, and the emergent.”127 Writing about shared sacred spaces in the Mediterranean world, Albera describes how the existential condition of Christians and Muslims is the same: “given life’s difficulties and the threat of illness, they all need supernatural help.”128 Indeed, no matter how much technological or biomedical advancements might shift the goalposts of life, the basic human condition of vulnerability and mortality always remains. This reality is not something the rational, autonomous subject can overcome in the end. Thus in some ways, visitors went to the khidma hoping the power of rabbinā could save them from the physical world’s cold, inescapable facts. All this helps explain why, although the fruits of Bishoy’s khidma were often not readily apparent from a biomedical perspective, more was always going on. Ultimately the openness khidma attendees were demonstrating was not strictly to a Coptic priest, but to the emergent— specifically, rabbinā (our God). In turn, and in turning to the divine, visitors were doing the only thing possible to overcome “the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability”—an action that might be seen as the new miraculous in impossible personal, political and economic times.129

126 Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 (originally published in 1958). p. 184.

127 Mittermaier, 2011, p. 56.

128 Albera, Dionigi. “Conclusion: Crossing the Frontiers between the Monotheistic Religions, an Anthropological Approach” in Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Albera & Couroucli, Maria (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. p. 238.

129 Arendt, p. 178.

82 The Atmosphere across the Ages ! Having lived in Beni Suef for over four years, the enduring image of the country for me is people—people of all ages—but children especially. Children were almost everywhere in Egypt, and the church at Dayr Bayyaḍ was no exception. It is true; the stained-glass pictures of saints and martyrs remind of the church’s great history in the country, as do the wooden icons and encased relics at the back of the building. But the church of al-‘adraʾ is no museum. Rather the culture inside the church during the khidma is much like the culture in most other places in Egypt, in that it is highly social across generational lines. Usually a diverse array of Coptic visitors not there for the khidma entered the church in the hours after mass. They included intergenerational families, groups of children, and elderly married couples who chose to rest in the church space. Sometimes guided tours made their way into the church as the Abuna worked. In the summer of 2015, I was standing with the crowd at the front of the church watching a young Muslim woman tearfully confide in the Abuna her problems. A couple of male shabāb (youth) across the circle from me, their arms covered with tattoos of crosses and the Virgin Mary, chatted casually as they watched the Abuna work. Suddenly a large tour group of prepubescent boys bustled in from the rear of the church. Leading them was a middle-aged man, who called for the boys to sit down in the back few rows of the church. Once the boys were sitting not-so-quietly, the chaperon began detailing the history and structure of the church in a loud clear voice. I glanced back at the Abuna and the young Muslim woman—the guide’s voice ringing over them. Neither they, nor anyone in the circle, seemed at all perturbed by what many Canadians would have considered a real disturbance. Eventually, the Abuna lifted his head from its bowed position and the woman stood, smiling sadly at him, before briskly making her way with a bearded male companion past the tour group and out of the church. I looked to see if any of the Christian boys would react to the presence of the Muslim woman in the church, but there was nothing. Meanwhile, a decidedly haggard-looking man had taken her seat on the bench next to the Abuna. As Bishoy leaned back and listened to the man’s petitions, the boys in the tour group stood up and formed a long queue at the front of the church. Then, one at a time, they prayed at an icon of the virgin Mary on a

83 curtain behind the pulpit. The boys quieted down considerably when they noticed the transpiring khidma beside them, though the jokes and playful sparring continued at a whisper. The next week I was joined by my friend Philobateer, who worked as an engineer, for a morning of research at the church. As we snacked on ta‘miyya (falafel) sandwiches at the side of the sanctuary, a group of young boys and girls came literally hurdling over the pews past us. The middle section of the church had become their own personal jungle gym. They laughed loudly as they went, and I was impressed at how deftly they lifted their legs and manoeuvred over each row. One of the younger boys was struggling to keep up with the rest, due in part to his insistence on clutching a bag of shaṭa (spicy) potato chips in one of his hands. No one at the khidma in the front was bothered (or even seemed to notice the noise). Later that morning, I noticed a young couple sitting in a pew five rows in front of where we were sitting. A small male toddler wriggled in the arms of the father. What struck me about the child was the shirt that adorned his back, which in bright pink English letters read “Princess” and below it “Not a single fuck will be given.” I nudged Philobateer, whose grasp of the English language was sufficient to see the humour in the shirt on such a happy, curious, and chubby baby, and we both laughed. Eventually Philobateer and I got up and made our way to the front left corner of the church to stand in the crowd huddled around Bishoy. Peering over the women and men of various ages, I saw a young woman and her mother just sitting down with the Abuna. Judging by their higabs, they were both Muslims. The daughter sat next to the Abuna and immediately started talking as Bishoy—placid as ever—listened on. The mother watched the conversation intently, her right hand holding onto her daughter’s left. A back and forth between the Abuna and the young woman followed until they were interrupted by the Abuna’s female assistant. The khādima was holding the same baby whose shirt we had laughed at earlier. It seemed the long wait had turned the baby’s happy demeanour into a stormy one, and he now kicked and fussed in the khādima’s arms. Verily, zero fucks were being given. The Abuna took the baby confidently and prayed over it as the two Muslim women looked on with loving smiles. After fifteen seconds of prayer, Bishoy passed the baby back to his assistant, who carried it to his doting parents, smiling down and giving him a big kiss before the hand off.

84 All these scenes are illustrative of a striking juxtaposition at the khidma: the oftentimes solemn and emotional personal exchanges between the Abuna and his visitors, on the one hand, and the lively post-mass atmosphere of the church more generally, on the other. Overall, the social coexistence that most marked the church’s relaxed and social atmosphere was the pervasive presence of the young (and old). The sharing of the same space across generational lines revealed the remarkable level of accommodation and flexibility in Egyptian society. Indeed, people barely blinked an eye at hurdling children, a Canadian researcher, or even raucous tour groups—let alone “Muslims” or “Christians” in the church. Almost like a microcosm of the densely-populated Nile valley, ordinary people usually found a way to get along in the small church space.

Demographics of the Devoted and the Desperate ! Beyond the diversity across generations, it would be difficult to generalize too much about a typical attendee of Bishoy's service. For one, there were usually equal numbers of male and female visitors. Interestingly, mixed parties of men and women generally kept together—a marked contrast to the gender segregation that occurred elsewhere in the city, including in the Coptic mass that preceded the khidma. In addition to gender diversity, there was also a mix of wealthy and poor, and urban and rural Egyptians. Social class differences were sometimes apparent to me because of a person’s traditional dress, while at other times I only learned where people came from through conversations with them. Across all the age, class, religious and gender lines, it was the individual visitor’s reason for coming that was most deterministic of demeanour and behaviour. Many of the visitors were said to be possessed by shayatīn (spirits). Although I had had little exposure to the phenomenon of spirit possession prior to my research there, certain visitors displayed mannerisms that aligned with my vague preconceptions. Indeed, some people really did look possessed. There were women and men who could barely lift their heads or walk on their own—bodies sunken and eyes closed. There were others whose muscles would not stop twitching their bones in different

85 directions, faces included, suggesting of storms and torments that swirled within. One morning I observed a middle-aged woman, her hair covered in the style of rural Copts, collapse to the ground the moment she entered the church. She screamed as she fell, and continued to do so as she lay face down, splayed out on the red carpet floor. Several men and women, Muslim and Christian, immediately rushed over and picked her up to carry her to the Abuna’s inner circle. Most of the overtly troubled people, however, did not emote their struggles until they met the Abuna. One clearly rural man who I saw several times at the khidma had once been laying still in a pew until popping up abruptly when his time came. He walked to meet the Abuna on his own power, though I am not sure how he guided himself as his eyes never seemed to open. The man said nothing to the Abuna upon arrival, so the priest leaned forward and began to pray. After thirty seconds, the man lurched back violently and extended his body to be as erect as possible, from his toes to his brow. The sound from his equally taut mouth was as if he was struggling to breathe. Abuna Bishoy remained calm. After about ten seconds, the man collapsed forward onto the carpeted floor, his head and mouth still pulled back and open. The assistant gently laid a heavy polyester blanket over him and there he remained, in the middle of the circle, for the next twenty minutes. The Abuna, meanwhile, moved on to the next. In addition to spirit possession, people also came to see the Abuna for the healing of physical conditions and maladies. Adult children brought their aging parents to the Abuna to ease or cure their kidney disease, diabetes or cancer. Others came with no affliction at all, simply wanting to receive the holy man’s blessing. Much like sites of dream interpretation in Egypt, Bishoy's khidma space was both private and public.130 Although every little interaction was visible to everyone, the Abuna’s communication with his visitors was rarely audible. Oftentimes, the ailments and afflictions that troubled visitors to the Abuna were not readily apparent on their faces and bodies. And so I would stand or sit off to the side, watching people and wondering: why had these individuals come and what did their lives look like outside of the church? Over my years of fieldwork at the khidma, I learned to approach visitors and their family members, ever so delicately, about their reasons for attendance. I never really enjoyed

130 Mittermaier, 2011. p. 75.

86 this, as I always anticipated (and sometimes sensed) a level of discomfort or embarrassment on the part of my interlocutors. That said, visitors and their kin were usually willing enough to entertain my queries. ! ! Attendance as Personal Initiative ! On a chilly winter morning in 2017, I noticed a former student of mine from al-kūrsāt make his way to the front of the church khidma with two other young men. I immediately got up and started over to him. “Izzayak ya Ahmed (how are you Ahmed?)!” I said excitedly. Ahmed’s face immediately lit up with a bright smile: “Izzayak mister Izaak!” We quickly exchanged pleasantries and he introduced me to the men he was with, Muhammad and Abdulrahman. He did not explain to me why they were there and I opted not to ask given the reserved demeanours of his companions, instead leaving them in peace after just five minutes of conversation. Ahmed and I did exchange phone numbers, however, and five days later we found ourselves sitting together at an outdoor cafe on Beni Suef’s corniche. Sipping Nescafé with milk under the few stars that had revealed themselves, we first talked about Ahmed’s job (he was an engineer at the Siemens plant), and then Egypt’s economy and the rampant inflation in the country. At one point, Ahmed looked over his shoulder and then leaned in to curse Egypt’s president and the army (I clearly remembered Ahmed to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011-2013 years). I quietly expressed my understanding of his frustrations. A short moment of silence followed that was punctuated by the long, melancholic call of the karwān (curlew)—a quintessential sound of the Nile valley. I seized on the break to broach the subject of Ahmed’s visit to the church. My friend chuckled as I did so. “It occurred to me you would ask this,” he mused, “those men, they are my cousins. One of them just got married and he is marbūṭ (literally: tied). Do you know what this means?” he quizzed me, his mouth stretching into a wide grin. I shook my head that I did not, though I could already guess.

87 —“It happens sometimes after marriage,” Ahmed explained, “you will have a young, totally healthy man who suddenly cannot perform. This is all in their head of course, but many people believe it is a curse or something like that—maybe from a different woman who wanted to marry the man. Anyways, my cousin asked me to go with him to the priest to get yitfukk (untied), so I went.” —“And did the priest help him?” I asked. —“I don’t know. We will see. He just prayed over him and wished the spirits away.” Ahmed paused, before adding, “but I don’t believe in any of this.” —“But your cousin does.” I replied, “why is that? Is he less educated?” —Ahmed shook his head, “we can say maybe sometimes the issue is education, but my cousin is a very wealthy, successful person. He is a lawyer. We go to the mosque together.” —I then asked Ahmed why they went to a priest rather than a sheikh. “We have gone to sheikhs,” Ahmed responded emphatically, “two of them! They both just said to pray and do wuḍūʾ (Islamic ritual washing).” —“And people in your family know about this and talk about it?” I asked him. —“Yes, they talk about it,” Ahmed replied, “but it is not like gossip. It is in an understanding way. They believe it and want to help.” Ahmed laughed, “I don’t believe and I want to help.” Our conversation was interrupted by the buzzing of Ahmed’s mobile phone. He picked it up after a couple of rings: “Aywa ya Mama (Yes, mother).” As Ahmed conversed, I stared out over the riverbank where a few sharply-dressed young couples made their way onto one of the city’s colourfully-lit party boats. Sha‘bī (popular) music blared from the boat’s speakers, serenading what looked to be a group of young people in formal courtships or relationships. The men in the group laughed and conversed enthusiastically while the women moved about the boat calmly and evenly. Across the river, the twin towers of Dayr Bayyaḍ shone out into the dark night sky. What I heard from Ahmed overlapped with many other instances in the anthropological literature where the constraints of official religion recede temporarily when it comes time for an individual or family member to satisfy needs or relieve suffering.131 In the most intimate rural

131 Keriakos, Sandrine. “Apparitions of the Virgin in Egypt: Improving Relations between Cops and Muslims?” in Albera & Couroucli, p.186.

88 and familial settings, silence and double standards can be essential to “living a good life as an individual, a family member, and a neighbourhood or village resident.”132 For most Egyptians, family is the primary social structure. While family can be the site of incredible constraints, its often unconditional love can also be both a root and motor for the most flexible practical judgements. In addition to showing the importance of personal initiative and phronesis, my conversation with Ahmed elucidates the consequence of families in Egypt, and utility of flexibility within them. What was also clear in the discussion with Ahmed, and most other Muslims at the church I talked to, was that people came on their own private initiative. That is, they went to the church not as Muslims, but as individuals and families who happened to be Muslim. What struck me was how my Muslim interlocutors in the church seemed no different from the majority of Muslims I knew, in that they espoused confidence that they lived within the norms of Sunni orthodoxy. And yet their visitation of the church clashed with many of the discursive precepts of Sunni orthodoxy and reformist Islam that circulated so widely in Egypt.133 In his discussion of the coexistence of different religious and moral ideals, Samuli Schielke cites the Arabic proverb sa’a l-qalbak w-sa’a l-rabbak (there is an hour for your heart and an hour for your lord). Schielke’s point is that Egyptians, and humans generally, live lives with contradictory desires and obligations. Indeed, in Beni Suef I met many Muslims who had an hour for the mosque, an hour for the cafe, and an hour for the church. While Schielke’s grand scheme framework is very helpful, I want to push back against his assertion that people’s relations to any of these places revolve around fundamentally unrealized perfectionist promises.134 At Bishoy's khidma, I saw how the mundane and messy concerns of ordinary life were the promises. Ahmed and his cousins, who lived in a society steeped in revivalist religiosity, did not need to replace one external grand scheme (Islam) in their lives with another

132 Schielke, 2015. p. 62.

133 See Chapter 1 in Mittermaier (2011) for extensive discussion of these reformist discourses.

134 Schielke, pp. 22-23; 62.

89 when they came to the church because their day-to-day outlook did not centre on one or several totalizing discourses in the first place. It was more immediate than that. Instead, the phenomenon of crossing at the church is sometimes best captured by the view espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that human action is rarely preceded by a conscious idea of intention. Decoding Sartre, Michael Jackson clarifies that the lack of conceptualization should not be understood as rule by blind habits (James Laidlaw critiques Mahmood’s and Hirschkind’s classic ethnographies on piety in Egypt precisely for this emphasis on the habitual and unthinking, and omission of ordinary ethics).135 Instead, most Muslim visits to Bishoy's church should be understood through the Sartrean visage of world offering itself to us as “a field of instrumental possibilities.”136 Schielke is aware of this fact, acknowledging that moral voices and registers in Egypt are not “neatly ordered drawers from which one can choose a moral judgement.”137 To clarify this further, I find helpful Michael Lambek’s discussion of morality as “the practical judgements people make about how to live their lives wisely and well and, in the course of making them, do live their lives, albeit in the face of numerous constraints.”138 Thus morality is not “a coherent, imposed system, a specific set of rules, and equivocal code, or an uncompromising disciplinary order.” Ultimately the concept of practical ethical judgement best explains the way in which Ahmed and other Muslims’ attendance of the khidma was completely ‘ādī (normal).139 I witnessed another striking example of this phronetic individual initiative on a beautiful summer day in 2018. A Muslim couple in their fifties had brought their young adult daughter, Usra, to the church because she could not sleep at night. Sitting together in a row of pews at the

135 Laidlaw, James. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

136 Sartre, 1948; Merleau-Ponty, 1962.

137 Schielke, p. 53.

138 Lambek, Michael. “The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy,” Current Anthropology 41(3): 309 –20. 2000. p. 315.

139 Lambek, 2003. p. 191.

90 back of the church after their meeting with Bishoy, Usra described to me how she was usually able to sleep only two or three hours a night. —“I am so sorry,” I told her, “that must be very difficult.” —“Yes,” she replied simply, her heavily-mascaraed eyes slightly welling with tears. Her father shook his head, frustrated by his daughter’s ongoing struggles. The face of Usra’s mother, meanwhile, wore a gigantic grin that had not left her face since the moment I, the visible foreigner, had started conversing with them in perfect Arabic. When I asked Usra how she had heard about Abuna Bishoy, she replied: “We did not know about him until recently. A friend on my street told me. She is Christian, and she said he helped her before with an illness. She told me that the morning after she met with him she was fine—without any treatment!” —“Inshallah (God willing) you will experience a similar improvement,” I told her. —“We will see,” she replied, her tone revealing more than a hint of skepticism. —“If you would permit me to ask, what exactly did the Abuna do for you?” I inquired. —Usra answered, “he just listened as I talked, and then we prayed together—” Usra’s father, who had told me he ran a clothing shop out of the front of their home in the village of Tizmant, interjected: “He is a respectful man,” and then after a short silence opined further, “huwa ragil bita‘ rabbinā (he is a man of our God).” The mother, her smile having briefly left her face, nodded earnestly in agreement. —“Have you already tried seeing a doctor about this, or a sheikh?” —“Of course,” the father answered, before his daughter took over the reins of the conversation: “I have seen several doctors,” she told me flatly, “but they did not help. They prescribed me drugs that I didn’t like.” She paused, before adding “and they didn’t really help with my sleeping.” Having established a comfortable rapport with the family, I then felt sufficiently bold to push deeper with my questions: “do you consider the problem to be shayatīn (spirits)?” —“Some people say that,” she answered carefully, “I think there is haga… haga ruḥiyya (something… something spiritual).” “There is no simple solution to this,” her father said firmly, “ so we will try anything to help.” He then patted his wife on the shoulder with his phone in hand, and said “yalla? (let’s

91 go?).” We all stood and I shook the father’s hand goodbye and wished Usra peace and healing. As they walked out of the church, the father turned back to make me promise to visit him at his shop in Tizment, and everyone laughed. Sitting alone in the church after they left, a small part of me wondered what might “actually” be at the root of her insomnia. Earlier in our conversation she had told me about how busy she was with her studies. Perhaps she, like so many young Egyptians, was concerned about employment or marriage prospects. But what did I know? Life in Egypt, like life anywhere else in the world, could be messy—filled with adversity, uncertainty and suffering. Obviously the family would not have visited the Abuna that day had there been easy explanations for Usra. In addition to showing personal initiative, the above story also illustrates how the comfortable Muslim attendance of the church was facilitated by, in part, the often limited ways people invoked religious theologies and cosmologies.140 Mirroring how Abuna Bishoy consistently embraced ambiguity in his framing of the khidma with “bita‘ rabbinā” (rather than naming the human incarnation of God according to Christians, Jesus Christ), Usra’s father referred to the Abuna as belonging to rabbinā rather than Allah (the name for God used more consistently by Muslims in Egypt). The use of rabbinā by Muslims and Christians in the khidma space, however, was not a fusion of their religious forms. Indeed religious theologies or cosmologies were not even a conversation. Instead, the use of rabbinā was emblematic of the way ambiguity was instinctively cultivated by everyone at the khidma with regards to religious doctrine.141 Of course, Egyptians’ utterances of rabbinā (our God) should be interpreted for their literal meaning. But rabbinā should also be recognized as a social act of compromise—a neutral expression that overtly focuses on religious interrelatedness rather than difference.

140 Similar to my Egyptian case, Joyce Flueckiger (2006) observes that healing transcends differences in India. Veena Das, meanwhile, describes how “movements of ideas did not happen at a deep theological level or through deliberative reasoning—it was as if a certain mode of speaking and feeling seeped into one’s narrative of the self simply because of intimacy created by proximity and friendship.” Das, 2013, p. 77

141 Magnus Marsden (2005) details a similar cultivation of ambiguity in North-West Pakistan.

92 One God, One People ! To this point in the chapter, I have argued that Bishoy's khidma was marked by people’s diverse reasons for coming, as well variation in visitors’ age, gender, and class. Hence, attendees never came to the khidma as just one thing. They came in the form of a person that could not sleep who happened to be female and of urban origin, or a husband that could not perform in the bedroom who happened to be from the urban-professional class (and Muslim). This multidimensional nature of visitors still begs the question as to how, when, and even whether, people came to the church as Muslims and Christians. My overarching answer to this query is no and yes. In the following section, I interrogate when and how religious difference was foregrounded and backgrounded at the church. Religion at Bishoy's khidma was always present. What I mean by that is that every visitor to the church very clearly identified as either Muslim or Christian. Religious communal affiliation was a deeply ingrained part of everyone’s identity. At times, religious identity at the khidma was plain to see for other Egyptians.142 Similar to contexts in other regions of the world, Egyptian women were the most obvious carriers of Muslim identity in Beni Suef due to their range of veiling practices that were quite distinct from the kerchiefs Coptic women sometimes wore in the church.143 The religion of male attendees was often less visually salient, though certain appearances were telling. On Friday mornings, some Muslim men could be recognized by white prayer galābiyyas that Coptic men would rarely wear. In addition, discolouration at the centre of any man’s forehead strongly suggested him to be Muslim, and an especially pious one at that (the zabība or prayer mark, can develop from vigorous prayer practices). Beards were not a totally reliable religious signifier in the church, though they were known to be more common on Muslim men in Beni Suef (moustache-less beards in particular pointed to Muslim identity). Finally, the Christian identity of some Coptic men, especially shabāb (young men), could be confirmed by large tattoos of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the cross

142 Flueckiger, p. 9.

143 Bringa, Tone. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Flueckiger, p. 9.

93 that sometimes adorned their arms. Egyptian Muslims generally regarded tattoos as ḥarām (forbidden), while the vast majority of Egypt’s Copts had, at the very least, a small cross tattooed on the inside of their wrist. The coexistence of visible (and invisible) religious differences in the church, however, was utterly ordinary to all parties, and for that reason I only heard or observed each person’s religious affiliation to be comfortable and confident. It was the summer of 2018, and I had become hungry after a morning of research in the church. Making my way outside, I found a popcorn vendor in the courtyard. The woman working the machine, whose hair was uncovered and who sported a large wooden cross around her neck, happily took my order—though she initially refused payment in typically generous Egyptian fashion. Idling around the stall were a few school-aged boys and an older bearded man whom I guessed to be sixty years. I could tell the boys were whispering about me to each other, so I entered into conversation with them. They told me they were from the town of Bayyaḍ and came to the church together every Friday. After I was handed my bag of popcorn, the old man asked me where I was from. I replied, telling them a bit about Canada as well as a personal history of my time in Beni Suef. Motioning to the church, I then asked them what they interpreted to be happening inside the place of worship. “Abuna Fanūs is taking out arwāh (spirits),” the popcorn vendor informed me. —“He is a wise man,” one of the boys added, “very close to rabbinā, so many people want to see him.” As he spoke, a Muslim family passed by us and entered the church. —I motioned to the church entrance and said: “it is interesting that Muslims come to the church too. Is this ‘ādī (normal) here?” —“‘ādī giddan (it’s very normal)!” the older man responded, as the children, almost nonplussed by the very question, nodded their heads in agreement. The older man then touched his fingers to the chest of his baby blue galābiyya and said with a grin, “ana Muslim (I am Muslim).” The smiles of the boys, who were watching me intently, grew even more pronounced as he said it. “I have been coming here for many years,” the man, whose name was ‘Adil, continued, “and look around you. Muslim? Christian? ‘adī, ma fīsh mushkila (it’s normal, there is no problem).” ‘Adil explained that he lived in the Minya town of Mallawi (almost 200 km south of Beni Suef) and that he visited Abuna Fanūs at Dayr Bayyaḍ once or twice each year, staying with a

94 friend in the city each time. I asked him why he needed to come all this way to see a priest. Was there not someone in Mallawi? He smiled, and let out a long sigh. “There are other priests and sheikhs, of course. But none shāṭir (smart) like Abuna Bishoy. He paused, and then gestured towards a picture of the Virgin Mary on a banner that hung over the walkway, “We believe in Mary and Jesus. We believe as Muslims. There are no problems.” I turned to find him now staring at me intently, his index finger pointing up to the sky as he talked, “There is one God. One river. One sun,” and then, with added emphasis, he finished “one people.” Writing today, I remember so clearly the incredible calm ‘Adil emitted. He was at home at that retreat centre, and the children and vendor at the popcorn stand were at home with him. I witnessed this comfortable and confident act of crossing time and time again. This is not to suggest that religious identities in these cases were ever meaningless. On the contrary, even in ‘Adil’s case, being Muslim or Christian, a believer in rabbinā (our God), was essential. But no tension came from ‘Adil’s religious difference. ! ! Sites of Religious Difference

On the other hand, I sometimes witnessed subtle actions that revealed religious difference in the church. One site of divergent practices was church relics. Coptic Christians have venerated the bodily remains of martyrs and saints, which many Copts attested having miraculous powers, since the earliest days of the church. Today relics are found in many churches in long cylindrical boxes, and the ‘adraʾ church at Dayr Bayyaḍ is no exception.144 While Coptic visitors frequently stopped to pray at the glass cases that contained the relics, Muslims never did (due to the fact that the relics were the bones of Coptic saints). Thus, no matter how relaxed Muslims felt in the church, there were inevitable reminders of religious difference—a reality my next story makes plain.

144 Meinardus, Otto. Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1999. p. 104.

95 At the end of a long day of fieldwork, I noticed a young man sitting alone near the front of the church. He wore a long white galābiyya, which suggested to me that he was a Muslim dressed for ṣalāt al-jum‘a (Friday prayers). The man was not angling to see the Abuna like the other Muslim visitors, though, instead relaxing in his church pew seat like Copts who came to the centre recreationally. As I approached, I saw he was about thirty years old, with a proud and handsome clean-shaven face. The man smiled as I sat, greeting me simply “ahlan, ahlan (welcome, welcome).” In the conversation that ensued, he told me his name was Sharif, and that he was from a town West of Beni Suef called Ihnasya Al Madinah. When I asked whether he had come to see the Abuna he shook his head and told me that he came with a friend who had an errand elsewhere in the sprawling retreat centre. —“And why do you wait for him here?” I queried, “and not on the beautiful waterfront?” —“I like to come here,” he responded, staring straight ahead, “makān ruḥī (spiritual). —“If you will permit me to ask,” I continued as politely as possible, “are you not Muslim?” —He nodded that he was and said “‘ādī giddan (it’s totally normal).” The brooms of the cleaning ladies banged away in the background as he continued. “Masr kida. Kūlina wāḥid (Egypt is like that. We are all one). I’ve come to this church many times, ‘ādī (it’s normal). We grew up this way. The same schools, the same streets. I have come to the mūsim (the Virgin Mary Festival examined in Chapter 5) many times as well.” He then steered our conversation to Egypt’s economy and how difficult it was to find good employment in Egypt. He told me that he had a friend in Cyprus and another one who had started a coffee business in Greece. But Sharif was not as desperate to leave as most other Egyptians his age. “I have land that I am developing,” he told me, “there is lots of money in construction these days.” As Sharif uttered the last sentence, a muscular young man wearing jeans and a tight green polo shirt walked briskly to where we were sitting. Sharif turned to him and asked “are you done Abanoub?” —“Just a bit longer,” the newcomer with the Coptic name answered. —“Well I have to go,” Sharif replied quickly, looking at the time on his phone, “I need to pray.” —Abanoub glanced around the sanctuary for a second before nodding towards the front corner

96 of the church, opposite to where Abuna Bishoy was still surrounded by visitors, and suggesting “just pray here.” Sharif’s first reaction to the idea was simply to laugh, but two seconds later a pensive expression came over his face and it seemed he was really considering praying in the church. —“Seriously, I could do that here?” Sharif asked, peering inquisitively at the vacant carpeted front corner of the church. —“lay la’a (why not)?” Abanoub answered in earnest. A moment of silence followed, during which I could tell the Coptic man was feeling far less conflicted than his Muslim companion. After five more seconds of reflection, Sharif exhaled deeply, “No, let’s go. I need to go home after that anyways.” —“Fine, I’ll go with you,” Abanoub responded, and moments later he and Sharif bid me farewell. Throughout this manuscript, I use thick description based on years of participant observation to show, following Das, how the “heterogeneity of everyday life invites us to think of networks of encounter and exchange instead of bounded civilizational histories of Hinduism, Islam, or Christianity.”145 The stories of ‘Adil and Sharif I just recounted demonstrate how, despite the increasing separation between Muslims and Christians in Egypt since the 1970s, Muslims have continued to attend Coptic spaces in a spirit of love and respect. This fact has been obscured in the literature, both implicitly and explicitly, where the sharing of sacred spaces in Egypt is portrayed as something purely of the past.146 My basic insight in this section is an empirical one: that love, friendship, and respect still very much exists between Muslims and Christians in Egypt. These emblematic scenes should have repercussions on any future theorizing. At the same time, Sharif’s indecision and unease was indicative of the fact that he, as a Muslim, did not feel totally comfortable in the church. Religious differences still mattered. And

145 Das, p. 80.

146 Works in the literature that assume the separation between Egyptian Muslims and Copts include Heo, Angie, “The Virgin Between Christianity and Islam: Sainthood, Media, and Modernity in Egypt,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81(4) 2013; and Mahmood, 2015.

97 just because love and respect existed between Muslims and Christians at the church did not mean it was all and always love and respect. Indeed, people’s assertions of religious boundaries at the khidma occasionally bubbled to the surface in a far less affable manner.

! Silence, Distrust and Phronesis ! Coptic Christians generally had a very tight sense of community when it came to instances of conflict with Muslims in Egypt. For instance, Beni Suef Copts acutely absorbed rumours of the kidnap of a Coptic girl or the burning of Coptic homes or shops in far parts of the country. Occasionally rumours about more local tensions abounded. A couple of times Coptic interlocutors claimed to me that salafis in the town of Bayyaḍ wanted to attack Bishoy because he was touching Muslim women, however, neither Bishoy nor any other official ever corroborated these stories. Other accounts by Bayyaḍ Copts were more general. “Of course there are Muslims in Bayyaḍ who are against Bishoy,” a young Coptic man told me, “the salafis, the Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers). They maybe say or act like there is no problem, but we know there is.” One morning I was visiting with Bishoy briefly in the main aisle of the church when a well-dressed older man came up to us, grabbed my forearm and pleaded with me in English: “You have to save us. The Muslims are trying to kill us! The Muslims are trying to kill us!” Before I could respond, Bishoy put his hand gently onto the wide-eyed man’s shoulder and guided him away from us with a kind but dismissive look on his face. Bishoy turned back to me, rolled his eyes and shook his head, and made his way to the front where the usual crowd of Muslim and Christian visitors was waiting. I eventually made my way to a pew just behind the rows of the waiting. A man with three children in the aisle behind me smiled as I passed. As soon as I sat, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the pew, and asked “where are you from?” I began to answer, but before I could he reclined back and said “ta‘ālā, ta‘ālā (come),” instructing his children to move down to make room for me. For the next twenty minutes, we sat together talking as people came and went from

98 the front of the church. His name was Youssef, and he had brought his father-in-law, who was very ill with kidney disease, to the church that day as part of the reciprocal act of nadhr (vow). Youssef told me he was going to sacrifice a sheep for the Virgin Mary if his father-in-law was healed, providing a glimpse into economies of sacrifice also widely present in Egyptian mosques.147 Youssef told me he lived in the town of Nasr. “People come from very far to see the Abuna,” Youssef remarked, before adding unsolicited, “many Muslims come.” He smiled proudly as he told me this last fact. When I asked him what he thought of the Muslim attendance, he pointed and bumped together his index fingers on both hands and said “ihna akhwāt (we are siblings).” He paused, before continuing “Muslims are just Christians who couldn’t pay,” referring to the jizya tax that was collected from non-Muslims at various points in Egypt’s history since the 642 Arab conquest. —“Do Christians go to a Muslim sheikh ever?” I asked. —“No!” Youssef replied emphatically, “they do dagal (quackery). It is all about tricking people… getting people’s money.” He paused again, and I waited to see if there was anything he wanted to add. Sure enough, he resumed talking with statements characteristic of the complexity, multiplicity and contradiction that marks Egyptian society: “Ma fīsh dīn āṣlan (they don’t even have religion in the first place). They are very nice to us, and if you visit my town or any place in Egypt you will see that things are good. But da mish min guwa (that kindness does not come from inside). They are self-interested. No, there is no love.” My detailing indifference, distrust, and even hatred alongside the many instances of love and respect aims to capture the messiness and complexity that marks social life in Egypt. On the one hand, these scenes illustrate how Coptic behaviour and discourses cannot be narrowly summed up by meekness and victimhood. More importantly, they show how Egyptians tended to be mindful of their audiences. The widespread Coptic act of welcoming Muslims into the church was ongoing precisely because flexible and practical judgements were so embedded in Beni Suef’s crowded society. Reflecting on social relations in India, Veena Das suggests that Hindus

147 Mittermaier, 2011. p. 156.

99 and Muslims “inhabit the same social world in a mode of agonistic being.”148 In Beni Suef, agonistic feelings and discourses were everywhere. Where tensions did exist, they most often fell by the wayside in everyday life—backgrounded by people’s judgements that are imperative to the art of living amidst a multitude of traditions in Egypt’s heterogeneous society.149 What cannot sufficiently explain the large-scale Muslim attendance of Bishoy's khidma is Alasdair MacIntyre’s understanding, so prominent in the anthropological literature on religion, of the great traditions as clearly demarcated and comprehensive.150 As I have shown, many Muslim visitors to Bishoy went to the church having already attempted biomedical and Islamic spiritual treatment, and they did this without any sense of contradiction. The khidma, therefore, makes clear how people pragmatically shift between overlapping and co-imbricated traditions. Ultimately my interlocutors show how these different institutions, practices and discourses coexisted in people’s lives precisely because the instability of the everyday demanded it. This speaks to my broader argument about the co-constitutive nature of powerful traditions, institutions, and everyday life. ! ! Islamic Modernism and Muslim Skeptics ! While this dissertation focuses primarily on Muslim Egyptians who choose to attend Coptic-run spaces, I was assured by Muslim interlocutors that some Muslims, out of dislike for Christians, would never even go to a Christian-owned shop—let alone a church in a Coptic retreat centre.151 This practice of avoidance runs directly counter to my Introduction’s discussion of the many Egyptian Muslims who patronized Christian-run shops, schools or hospitals over

148 Das, p. 76.

149 I take the term “art of living” from Lambek (2015) p. 246.

150 MacIntyre, Alasdair. After virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; Asad, Talal. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1986. Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2005.

151 Needless to say, there are many Copts who similarly avoid Islamic sites (see Introduction and Chapter One).

100 Muslim-run ones because they regarded the Christian institutions as superior. Muslim practices and discourses around khidmas such as Bishoy's usually fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Anthropologists describe how rural Muslims are sometimes more inclined to visit a Coptic priest because they judge them to be inferior beings and therefore more in touch with the chthonian forces that provide them their mystical power.152 Hence the fact that Bishoy was Christian made some rural Muslims more likely to go. However, possession over the supernatural can manifest as an entrenched battleground between faiths; and Muslims, like Egyptian Christians, have been observed to ridicule the religious other’s miracles and irrationality generally.153 Ultimately my research around Beni Suef illuminated how many Muslims’ condemnation of Bishoy's khidma emerged less from a hatred of all things Christian then it did from a modernist Islamic impulse to deny all things supernatural beyond certain doctrinal frameworks. From the nineteenth century onwards, Islamic modernists and reformists across the Arab world advocated a more rational version of Islam. These reformist thinkers and policymakers drew a clear doctrinal boundary between the “true Islam”, on the one hand, and the superstitious and supernatural on the other.154 Across the colonial world, reformers purged folk elements from religious practices, and the rural culture in Egypt that allowed the sharing of shrines withered significantly over the course of the twentieth century.155 This process only intensified from the 1970s onwards, when an even more ideological and scripturally-oriented religion emerged in Egypt (see Chapter 1).156 The following conversation captures the pervasiveness of this modernist religion in Egypt during my fieldwork.

152 Mayeur-Jaouen, 2012. p. 161

153 Mittermaier, 2015. p. 115; Shenoda, Anthony. “The Politics of Faith: On Faith, Skepticism, and Miracles among Coptic Christians in Egypt,” Ethnos, 77 (4): 477–495., 2012.

154 Mittermaier, 2011. pp. 38-53.

155 See: Das, p. 80; Mayeur Jaouen, 2012. p. 164; Barak, 2013.

156 Schielke, 2015. p. 3.

101 One Friday night, after a long day of research at Bishoy's church, I was sitting out at a cafe on the corniche talking to my friends Taha and Amr. Both men were middle-class professionals, and both had visible prayer marks on their foreheads. —“Why do you spend your time there?” Taha laughed, derisively referring to my field site. —“Wa malo (what’s the problem)?” I fired back with a grin. —“You don’t believe in that do you?” Taha quipped, looking over at Amr. —“I am interested in it as a social phenomenon,” I replied, before turning back to Taha: “why, what about you?” —“I don’t believe in these things at all. In Islam it is forbidden. Christianity I don’t know. But I think these things are just superstitions. It is a traditional activity, rooted in gahl (ignorance). I once consulted with a sheikh about this issue specifically,” Taha continued, “I trust him, and he assured me these things have no power. But people like to exaggerate, so they act like they are possessed by a spirit.” Amr, who had been quiet to this point, spoke up with a conciliatory tone. “In Islam it was about ‘amāl ([magical] works), not real spirits. Some Muslims make confusion about this. In the Quran there is lots of magic, but it only existed in that particular time and place—like Sayyidna Musa (our prophet Moses).157 These stories were passed down and now some Muslims think that because it is in the Quran, it exists today…“ Amr smiled, and looked out over the Nile, “which it doesn’t.” Taha entered back into the fold just as I noticed a couple of bats dart about the palm trees above us: “When magic appears in the Quran it is all to show that magic is not real or helpful. Like where Allah tested two angels.” The young man was referring to the angels Harut and Marut, whose exploits in the second surah of the Quran have been the subject of great

157 Amr was referring specifically to the miracles, plagues and splitting of the Red Sea performed by Mūsa/Moses, according to the Abrahamic faiths.

102 controversy over the centuries (Islamic exegetes “have disagreed concerning every phrase and even word in it”).158 Taha, though, was confident in his interpretation. —Amr then leaned toward Taha and engaged him in a quieter tone. “What about what happened with Abdullah?” —Taha smiled and shook his head “no, I don’t think that was real.” —“What happened to him?” I asked. —Taha replied matter-of-factly: “We have a friend named Abdullah. A woman wanted to marry him but Abdullah was not interested, so they say she went to a Coptic priest to get a special potion that would put a curse on him. When Abdullah drank it, they say, he fell in love with the girl. Everyone believed this story when it happened, but I never did.” —“So how did it end?” I queried. —“Our friend (Abdullah) eventually went to a sheikh, who cured him of the curse so that he no longer loved the woman. He never wanted to see her again.” —“And you don’t believe this?” I asked. —“No, not at all,” Taha replied, “not the priest, not the sheikh, wala ay haga (or anything).” Amr nodded in agreement. Ultimately the perspectives voiced by these two pious, modern Muslim men indicate the way in which Islam is rationalized for so many Egyptians. In this view, the miraculous and the supernatural overlaps with superstition, ignorance and backwardness. When I asked other middle-class Muslim interlocutors around the city of 300,000 about Bishoy's khidma, some professed to have no knowledge of it. I tended to follow up such responses by asking interlocutors about Muslim sheikhs who performed similar services. More often than not they were similarly disinterested or unaware. I regularly heard some version of “these things are not even a part of Islam.” Like Amr and Taha, my rational and skeptical interlocutors spoke

158 Ayoub, Mahmoud M. The Qur'an and Its Interpreters: Volume 1. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. For instance, some interpreters have contended that Harut and Marut were not even angels, but rather men who learned magic from satan, while others distinguish the magic of the angels from satan’s magic. Moreover educated Muslims I spoke to in Beni Suef, such as Taha and Amr, regarded the story of Harut and Marut to strictly be dīnī (religious) and not applicable to everyday life, whereas other Muslims, such as those whom I met at the Sayyida Horiya mūlid in Beni Suef, saw the verse as proof of the existence of magic in the world.

103 confidently in their interpretations of a religion and holy book that was eminently open to contestation and interpretation. On the other hand, and as detailed earlier, Egyptian Copts were both more inclined to believe in contemporary miracles and also widely derisive of Muslim miracle workers. What is interesting is that I also regularly encountered Copts who expressed contempt for Christian miracle workers. In these cases, though, the skepticism was expressed less in doctrinal terms (as Taha and Amr did) and more in modernist and class-based sensibilities that were almost atheistic. It is to these Coptic types I now turn. ! ! Coptic Doubt, Social Class and Tradition ! Needing to use the washroom one morning, I left the church khidma and walked to the men’s room across the courtyard. Entering the dimly-lit space, I angled past a man using one of the sinks. This washroom was putrid, and after choking back on my first breath, I dared not breathe through my nose again. When I went to wash my hands after relieving myself, the man at the sink was still there. I saw a fishing pole leaned against the wall beside him, and that he was working bread into tightly formed balls with his hands. “That is for fishing?” I asked him. He nodded with a smile, before inviting me to join him. I replied that I wanted to go back into the church to watch Abuna Bishoy at work. The man, who I judged to be around 60 years old, was smartly dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved collared shirt with a pen and pad in his breast pocket. He laughed when I mentioned Bishoy's khidma: “you like that, do you?” —I responded, as I often did, that I found it very interesting. —“And what do you think?” he asked me, a knowing smirk covering his face, “do you believe what he does is miracles?” —“I don’t know,” I replied. The man laughed and rolled his eyes, before dropping his last ball of bread into his plastic container. “Ta‘ālā (come),” he said, and we stepped out of the bathroom together.

104 The summer sun was beating down as we walked across the courtyard, though in no way did I miss the refuge of the lavatory. The fisherman who I had suddenly decided to follow introduced himself to me as Abram. He was born and raised in Beni Suef, and ran his own pharmacy in a neighbourhood not far from the corniche. As we made our way down to his shaded fishing spot on the shore, he explained to me what he saw transpiring in the church. “Egypt, as you know, has many problems. Most of these people are illiterate… ignorant,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “They find happiness and hope from miracles.” He paused to cast his baited hook into the water. It was immediately approached by several hungry small fish. “The Abuna is aware of this, of course,” he continued, “do you know he refers people to doctors?” I told him I did. “There is so much poverty in Egypt,” the man said, shaking his head, “nās maskīna fi‘lan (truly pitiable people).” Not unlike Taha and Amr in the previous section, the Coptic pharmacist confidently dismissed the khidma in a highly rational manner. For Abram, the khidma was a diversion—a social scourge even. I heard similar views espoused by two young Coptic women I met at the retreat centre waterfront. Nancy was employed at a Swedish-run development NGO that supported poor people in Egypt’s countryside, while Rania worked as a doctor in Beni Suef. Upon hearing of Rania’s profession, I asked her if she ever sent her patients to see Abuna Bishoy. Rania laughed before I could even finish my question, “no, of course not.” —“What,” I asked, “do you not believe in what he does?” Rania thought for a moment before responding “it depends. But I think mostly it’s just ‘agib (spectacle).” —Nancy then interjected “but Abuna Bishoy is good. He is very famous—” she paused, fumbling her fingers, “I went to him once before.” —“Really?” Rania asked with restrained amazement. —“It was when I was much younger,” Nancy answered, “maybe 16 or 17 years old. I had a mushkila (problem) and he was very helpful.” —Rania nodded, “OK, this is what I was trying to say. It depends on the priest. But I think the problem is that oftentimes people who have real physical problems and illnesses go to a priest thinking that their issue is spiritual. This is related to education.” Rania then motioned back to the church with her head and said “many of these people come from the countryside. In Cairo

105 this does not happen as much because people are educated and have open minds. But here in the Saīd it is often ‘agib (spectacle).” The view espoused by the two young women, as well as the fisherman pharmacist, was one I had heard from middle-class Egyptians many times before. According to this narrative, the attendance of Bishoy's church (as well as Muslim sheikhs) centred on class; that is, the poor and ignorant lower classes. In some ways, then, it was through constellations of social class where Muslims would attend the same Coptic priest’s khidma that Christians condemned. So to what extent was khidma attendance really a question of Muslim or Christian? Some of my conversations revealed that the counterintuitive phenomenon of intermittent Muslim and Christian church attendance was rooted as much in Egyptian tradition as it was the Abrahamic faiths. In the spring of 2017, my wife and I, along with our children, met with three of our friends that we had made years earlier at il-kūrsāt. Two of the women had young children of their own, so we chose to visit at the judges’ nādī (club) on the corniche because it had a playground (albeit a completely dilapidated one). They were each professional young women; two of them worked in government offices and the third was a pharmacist. Each wore a brightly coloured higab. When I told them about my research at Bishoy's church, one of the women (Hanan) rolled her eyes a little while the other two smiled and listened intently. —“I know of this priest,” Roshan, one of the latter two women, said. “I heard about someone who went to see him” —“Really, who?!” the other two women gasped in amusement. —“Mariam’s sister,” Roshan replied to the women, leaning in with a quiet and discreet tone. Hanan nodded knowingly while Doaa did not seem to recognize the name. Meanwhile, Roshan had turned back to me: “my friend’s older sister had been trying to get married but was unable to, even after searching for several possible men. I remember hearing then that another woman had put a la‘na (curse) on her so she could not get married.” —Hanan now spoke up: “this is just a way for people to save their pride. And it is a business too. They go to the sheikh who will ask for lots of money. We call this person daggāl (swindler).” —“But you said she went to Abuna Bishoy,” I said, turning to Roshan.

106 —“Yes, she did. She went to sheikhs and the Abuna. People will try anything. It is a matter of desperation.” —“And did she get married finally?” I asked. —“No, lissa (not yet),” Roshan answered. —“Is it a problem—for her or her family—to go to see a priest at the church?” I then asked. Roshan began to shake her head, but it was Hanan who replied “No—priests or sheikhs, it’s the same thing for stuff like this. It is not real. This is more for people in the countryside.” Early in the conversation, I had noticed something hanging from Roshan’s neck; a gold and turquoise pendant…the Hamsa Hand to ward off the evil eye. I pointed to Roshan’s necklace and asked, “if none of this is real, then what is that ya Roshan?” Everyone laughed immediately except for Roshan, who, momentarily embarrassed, clasped ahold of the necklace and hid it in her hand. It was the more introverted Doaa who spoke next: “No, il-ḥasad (envy) is different. il- ḥasad exists everywhere in Egypt… it exists in the Quran,” she finished, justifying her belief by confidently citing her holy book—as I had heard many Muslims do prior. What was interesting was that in the conversation that followed, the three women, including the skeptic Hanan, were unanimous in their belief in the existence of the evil eye. In Egypt and elsewhere, the evil eye is an everyday power that is allegedly invoked when someone expresses admiration for another person or their belongings, or even just glances at them in an envious way. Egyptians say this invocation has the potential to do harm to or take away whatever was being envied after—from new cars and physical attractiveness to the lives of children.159 What is significant about the concept of al-ḥasad and the evil eye is that belief in it is far more widespread across Egyptian social classes than belief in the acts Abuna Bishoy was engaged in. In 1929, the pioneering Egyptian anthropologist Muhammad Ghallab published his doctoral thesis “Les survivances de l’Égypte antique dans le folklore Égyptien moderne.” Ghallab was based at the University of Lyon and was heavily influenced by colonial social

159 Ghosh, Amitav. “Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village,” Ethnology, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 211-223, 1983. For more on the evil eye see Mughazy, Mustafa A. “Pragmatics of the Evil Eye in Egyptian Arabic,” Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2000.

107 scientific practices. At the same time, Ghallab challenged dominant narratives about Egyptian culture by European anthropologists, such as R. R. Marett, that the existence of “primitive” culture in the twentieth century was proof Egypt existed in a non-contemporaneous premodern time. Part of Ghallab’s argument was that Egyptian culture was not essentially Arab or Muslim in character, but was permeated by many old and ancient influences going back to pharaonic times. In some ways, Ghallab’s argument should be understood as a product of the times, when Egyptian nationalist discourses wholeheartedly embraced pharaonism. But Ghallab also made the important point, still relevant today, that Egypt is at once thoroughly modern and pervaded by folk traditions.160 The three women in the previous story all identified as pious Muslims. Their religious identity was steeped in the rational, modernist version of Islam that increasingly permeated Egypt in the colonial and postcolonial periods. They were educated, urban, middle-class professionals. All things considered, it was not entirely surprising they were dismissive of Bishoy's khidma and miracle workers generally. And yet they were resolute in their belief in al- ḥasad (envy). The significance I find in this conversation and many others I had like it is the extent to which they reveal the primacy of Egyptian taqālīd (traditions). Regardless of Doaa’s Quranic justifications, Egyptian belief in al-ḥasad or magic or even miracles is not something that solely emanates from al-Azhar mosque or university, but also from the Egyptian countryside. At the same time, we have seen how attachment to miracles and certain Egyptian traditions cannot be narrowly understood as a rural or lower-class phenomenon. So how to conceptualize the coexistence of miracles and modernism; urban rationalism and rural superstition; skepticism and al-ḥasad? Above all else, the stories in this section elucidate the basic fact that Egyptian lives are characterized by a complex heterogeneity and co-imbrication of multiple traditions, not just commitment to one.161 ! !

160 El-Shakry, Omnia. The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. pp. 47-53, 239.

161 Hafez, 2011. See also Lambek, 2015.

108 The High Cost of Living ! The pervasiveness of discourses around poverty and economic hardship in the previous section speaks to a difficult reality for many in the country. At Bishoy's khidma, the extent of people’s wants and needs manifested in different ways. On the one hand, the open nature of the church had a levelling effect on class differences. All were welcome to come inside, and all were given equal opportunity to meet with the church executive, Abuna Bishoy.162 On the other hand, the atmosphere in the church served to magnify the economic tribulations Egyptians faced. Scarcity and hardship were sometimes evident on people’s weathered faces, missing teeth and frayed clothing. But more than simple appearances (which could mislead), it was people’s stories that routinely shone light on economic struggle. When I undertook my fieldwork at the church, it was one of the bloodiest periods of extremist violence against Copts (and Egyptian civilians generally) in Egypt’s modern history. Yet, even in the days immediately following attacks, Coptic interlocutors were far more prone to voice their frustrations about il-ghalā or il-taḍakhum (inflation) than extremist violence. In November 2016, the Egyptian government caved to International Monetary Fund and World Bank pressures for economic reform, floating the country’s currency and imposing wide-ranging austerity measures. The value of many Egyptians’ savings plummeted as a result, while the prices of most consumer goods doubled or tripled. Wages in most job spheres, meanwhile, remained stable (that is, low). Many middle-class people I met had to work two or three jobs to support themselves and their families. These earnings, however, were rarely enough to afford a good hospital for one’s parents, school for one’s children, or refrigerator for one’s home. Meanwhile, Egypt’s young buckled under the increasingly prohibitive financial expectations of engagement, marriage and child-rearing. In 2015, I met a petite elderly woman named Naglaa who looked to be 80 years old. She had brought her husband, who was suffering from cancer, to see the Abuna for healing. Naglaa

162 This egalitarian treatment contrasted sharply with most other popular sites for gathering in the city (including places run by the Coptic Diocese), such as schools, hospitals, nādīs (clubs), restaurants and cafes.In recent years, the latter two began steadily enforcing entrance fees and minimum charges that effectively barred the entry of most Beni Suef residents.

109 told me that she still worked in order to support herself and her husband. Seven days a week she took the microbus into Beni Suef from her town of Tuwah in order to buy a stack of newspapers. She then transported the newspapers back to her town in order to sell them to people there. I did not bother asking how much she could possibly earn by nickel-and-diming in such a way. One rural man at the khidma told me how he had taken his son to a hospital in Beni Suef, but that they sent him away because he did not have enough money to pay for treatment. “I eventually took him to a government hospital,” the man explained, “but the service is no good. I will try anything though.” Finally, in 2018 I had a telling interaction with two young men sitting a few rows back from the khidma crowd. When one of the men got up and left the church, I made my way over to the remaining visitor and struck up a conversation. He told me his name was Mahmoud and that he came to the church that day because he had a sharīra (evil spirit). Though Mahmoud did not have the qualities of the stereotypical possessed attendee, he did strike me as particularly forlorn. The young man lived in the town of Kafr Manṣūr (just south of Beni Suef) but worked five days a week in Giza as a Metro employee. When I told him where I was from, he responded almost automatically “I want to go there!” —“Really?” I asked, not actually surprised at all to hear it. —“Ana itkhanayt min hina (I have had enough of here. Literally: I am strangled by this place),” Mahmoud said, touching his fingertips to his neck. The young man continued softly, “I am thirty- three years old. And still I am not married.” The weight of his shame and sadness was palpable in both his voice and eyes. Gazing back at him, I tried in vain to exude whatever empathy and understanding I had. —“How can I ever get married?” he then muttered, almost to himself, “I have no money,” before twice repeating “ana itkhanayt (I am strangled).” After a short pause, he asked “is it easy to immigrate to Canada?” —I shook my head and told him I did not think so, before inquiring as to whether he had considered going to the Arabian Gulf for work.

110 —“The Gulf takes lots of money too. I have no money,” he answered, before looking at me straight in the eye again and musing: “Maybe I should just go throw myself into the Nile,” chuckling half-heartedly as he said it. —“No, no. Don’t say that!” I told him quickly, and then more slowly: “but I understand you. Those are very difficult conditions.” —He nodded and stared ahead soberly, before repeating “no. maybe I’ll go throw myself into the Nile.” Soon Mahmoud’s friend, who showed no interest in talking to me, returned to our pew, and I left them shortly thereafter. The conversation left me shaken and depressed. Mahmoud seemed so kind and capable. And yet he was totally hopeless. In closing with this story, I do not mean to suggest the widespread Egyptian attendance of miracle khidmas can be theorized purely in relation to economic and political crises. For one, like the demographics that visit dream interpreters in Cairo, many of my interlocutors at the khidma came from the educated, wealthier classes.163 Moreover, Egyptians have been going to miracle priests and sheikhs for hundreds and even thousands of years, whereas material need in contemporary times is largely inflected by much more recent historically-situated developments (such as neoliberal reforms and Egypt’s place in the global economy). Rather the conclusion I draw from Mahmoud’s and others’ stories in this section is that their problems can at least partially be explained by earthly concerns. In the end, khidma attendance was often a result of crisis. But it was of a personal kind more than a political and economic one (though the personal could obviously be exacerbated by these broader forces, such as in Mahmoud’s case). Mostly the personal crisis at the khidma was a result of the human condition—a condition of vulnerability, pain and suffering—that is not unique to any one specific place or time in Egyptian history. What is clear is that Egyptians went to Bishoy's khidma looking for, and with openness to, something more. ! ! !

163 Mittermaier, 2010, p. 235.

111 Conclusion ! Back in 2015, I told one of my closest Egyptian friends, Walid, about my emerging dissertation topic. Standing out on his balcony as he smoked a cigarette, the Muslim man bristled immediately. “That topic is so complicated,” Walid told me, stressing the penultimate word of the sentence. “What side of it are you going to show? There is respect. People are friends, neighbours and coworkers. There are others who hate each other because of their faith. So what side of it are you going to show?” I replied by detailing my focus on crossing, stressing the example of Bishoy's khidma. Walid became at once more and less defensive. “OK Isaac. That is good, but now you will just show people in the West that we are superstitious and backwards.” Walid’s words revealed how colonial legacies and modernist sensibilities could intersect in Egyptians’ perceptions. Indeed, from certain perspectives, the widespread attendance of Bishoy's khidma does not align so comfortably with some standard iterations of what it means to be “modern” or “rational”. I hope to have shown that, although informed by a confluence of traditions, old and new, Bishoy's khidma was entirely modern. That should go without saying. The sustained khidma attendance, rather, amidst all the hardships, distractions and temptations of the modern world, says a great deal about the inherent vitality and dynamism of Egyptian society. Even in 2018, where modern bureaucracies, commodities and technologies were everywhere, Egyptian society at the khidma demonstrated remarkable openness and interrelatedness. Above all else, I have shown Abuna Bishoy's khidma to be a place of great coexistence. It is a site where Egyptians can exercise their interrelatedness with each other (iḥna fil-hawa sawa) and their interrelatedness with rabbinā (our God)—all amidst trying personal, political and economic times. The smooth practice of Muslim church attendance (the reason why I selected the site for fieldwork in the first place) is one aspect of this resilient coexistence. My focus here, as in my other chapters, however, is not to deny that there are systemic problems in the way Muslims and Christians relate to one another in Egypt. One does not need to spend much time with Coptic Christians to hear them espouse feelings of resentment and distrust of Muslims and Islam’s predominance in Egypt. What I hope to have shown, rather, is that amidst this worsening,

112 there has also been systemic peace between Muslims and Christians in the country (typified, in part, by people’s use of rabbinā). Ultimately the attendance practices and discourses by Muslims and Christians about Abuna Bishoy's khidma illuminate both the tensions and the ease with which socioreligious coexistence unfolds in provincial Egypt. Far more than a matter of overcoming tension and embracing friendship across religious difference, however, the primary revelation of the Abuna’s khidma is the complexity that marks people’s lives, and the co-imbrication of a heterogeneity of traditions within them. Visitors to the khidma do not come solely as Muslims or Christians, or as descendants of the pharaohs, but as phronetic individuals; fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, children and the elderly. Individuals and families with burdens of pain, torment and hardship; and joys as well. Most people I know experience the country’s poverty and want in very similar ways. The rap of political oppression likewise stings across the board. Neither does disease or accident distinguish by religion. It is the shared human condition— iḥna fil-hawa sawa (we are in the same air)—that regularly defines the lives of Muslims and Christians in Beni Suef. So Muslims and Christians fall down and bow the same to life’s mystery. “Irḥamna ya rab, kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy).” Whenever I describe to Canadians, including people of Egyptian descent, about the widespread Muslim attendance of Bishoy's church in particular, their jaws literally drop. It is as if this interfaith phenomenon is something impossible to believe. As shown repeatedly throughout this chapter, however, Muslims and Christians together in the church at the khidma was completely ‘ādī (normal) and mundane. No one blinked an eye. Writing today, amidst it all — the decades of worsening relations, the string of church bombings, and the ever-growing poverty and destitution in Egypt—the forever renewed khidma attendance, completely normalized against all probability, almost does seem something of a miracle. ! ! ! ! !

113 Chapter 3 —— Secularism in the Vernacular at a Coptic-run Language Program ! ! Introduction ! It was the calm before the storm. The manager of al-kūrsāt (“the Courses”—as the Saint Mark’s English Courses were popularly referred to), a woman with short dark hair named Rania, put on a kettle of water while two instructors visited in the small office at the entrance of St. Mark’s School. It was early evening, and the instructors, visibly tired after a long day of teaching in government schools, feigned conversation about upcoming Christmas celebrations. Large photos of Pope Tawadros and Bishop Gabriel hung on the wall behind the desk where Makram, the program administrator, sat. Rania adjusted the sugar to everyone’s liking and passed out the hot glasses of tea. Before anyone could even sip their hot drinks, however, two young men came to the door. “As-salām-alaikum (peace be upon you)” they greeted us, before continuing in Arabic, “we are here for the test.” Barely looking up from his notebook, Makram responded in kind (wa alaikum as-salām) and instructed the men to go upstairs and wait in the first classroom on the right. Moments later a woman in niqab and someone I judged to be her mother came to the office door also asking for the placement test. Before Makram was even done directing them where to go, three more young women wearing higabs appeared over the first women’s shoulders. “Well I guess we better get started,” Rania said, picking up the cassette player and heading down the long hallway to the stairwell. The other teachers and I followed behind, boxes of test materials in hand. Looking over my shoulder, I could see more students coming in past a large nativity scene in the school foyer. Once upstairs, we entered the open classroom where the first two young men were already sitting together. The classroom walls were entirely bare, save for a large whiteboard at

114 the front of the room. An obsolete chalkboard poked out from underneath. Rania walked across the room and opened the windows to let the cool evening air in while Makram pulled out the pencils and paper notebooks from a large plastic bag. Five minutes later the room was full of over 30 students, many of whom smiled nervously in anticipation of the test. Looking across the room, I was confident that all of the 30 individuals sitting in the desks were between the ages of 15 and 40, save for one man who looked to me to be in his mid-fifties. The women in the class slightly outnumbered the men, and their colourful array of headscarves lit up the otherwise drab physical surroundings. Rania, who had moved to the front of the classroom, cleared her throat and in loud clear colloquial Arabic welcomed everyone to the program. She then outlined the test protocol, concluding her instructions with a warning about cheating (placement tests, which cost 10 Egyptian pounds—approximately one American dollar—were administered before each course solely to determine the appropriate level for new students). A hush then prevailed as the one-hour exam began. I ventured out into the hallway to find two more classes already full of students and a fourth filling quickly. One would never have guessed that the upcoming course was during the program’s “winter lull”.

Established in 1981 by the Coptic Bishop Athanasius, al-kūrsāt has long been a Beni Suef institution. Thousands upon thousands of Beni Suef adults have attended the classes over the years, and during my fieldwork it was rare to meet young people who did not at least know of the program. The courses were always held at St. Mark’s Language School, a building part of the large muṭraniyya (church diocese headquarters) complex which also included an adjacent youth club, social service building, and convent. Without question, therefore, al-kūrsāt was a Coptic- run program in a Coptic place. Yet each evening, the classrooms at the program filled mostly with students who were Muslim. In what follows, I first reflect on the reasons why so many Beni Suef adults, especially those who identified as pious Muslims, decided to attend the church-run classes. What I demonstrate is that the vast majority of students attended the courses for a mix of economic, social and personal reasons, and that generally attendees did not feel any conflict or anxiety

115 regarding the large-scale Muslim attendance of the Christian space. This confident and comfortable attendance, I argue, was made possible by practical ethical judgement. The second component in this chapter sheds light on, what I term to be, the secular ethos that emerged in al-kūrsāt classrooms among teachers and longtime students alike. Building on the sometimes divergent theories of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor and Michael Lambek, I define a secular ethos as a constellation of norms centred around equidistance, inclusion and a willingness to listen.164 In particular, I focus on classroom discussions where students critically engaged the topics of racial and religious difference. Rather than privileging the agency of the state in these discussions—as some anthropologists have done in investigating secularism—I consider how ordinary Egyptians have exercised secularism in the vernacular. Having not observed religion to be a frequent dividing line in the classroom, I then turn to the more common site of contestation in al-kūrsāt social dynamics and debates: gender. I show how it was disputes around gender that most often lead to exclusionary religious-based claims. The sustained social power of these claims, I argue, illuminates how the program’s secular ethos was ultimately a precarious one; besieged less by the ostensibly secular state than by the discourses of reformist Islam.165 I conclude that, despite these tensions that sometimes emerged, the ubiquity of people’s practical ethical judgement facilitated a smooth and durable coexistence of different traditions in the church-run space. ! ! Practical Judgements and Economic Interests ! As detailed in Chapter 1, the role of the Coptic church in modern Egypt has been inextricably tied to the shifting fortunes and aims of the Egyptian state. In many ways, then, the adult learning program reflected two separate government impulses in Egypt’s modern history.

164 Lambek, 2015; Taylor, 1999; and Asad, 2011.

165 This is not a story of reformist Islam versus everyday Egyptians, however. As I will show, al-kūrsāt have always been extremely popular with adherents of reformist Islam (such as members of the Muslim Brotherhood).

116 On the one hand, al-kūrsāt was a developmentalist and utilitarian program that mirrored the Nasserist (1952-1970) and contemporaneous Coptic Sunday School Movement’s impulses to provide social services for all Egyptians. The neoliberal Egyptian state of Sadat and Mubarak, as well as the many shortcomings and inefficiencies of the Nasser regime, on the other hand, were what made the church and private sphere so integral to the provision of services such as adult education. Hence, the prominence and place of the church-run al-kūrsāt in the twenty-first century. At the start of every al-kūrsāt term, teachers passed out a short welcome brochure to each student. Written in Arabic and English by an administering Coptic priest in 2004, the brochure stressed that the program was “a gift from the Coptic church to all the people of Beni Suef". Bishop Athanasius’ explicit desire was for the courses to bring people together and to build relationships and familiarity in the community, and it would seem the late Bishop’s (he passed away in 2000) vision came to fruition.166 Students included men and women who travelled in to the courses from villages, married couples who left their children with grandparents, Beni Suef University professors, police officers, Muslim brothers, Coptic nuns, and a host of others from different social positions. So why is it that Egyptians from such varied social milieus, with such a range in beliefs and interests, chose to attend this particular church-run program? In a most basic sense, most students’ presence at al-kūrsāt was the result of practical judgement. My point here is that people exercise judgement all the time, and in all they do.167 In emphasizing students’ practical ethical judgement, I do not mean to deny that there were Egyptians who attended or avoided the program for other reasons. But as I will show in the pages ahead, the interactions at al-kūrsāt most often showed how practical ethical judgements were what listened to and balanced each individual student’s multifaceted beliefs and interests, both instrumental and ideological, helping them to carve a path corresponding to Aristotle’s virtuous golden mean.

166 al-anba Athanasius: aīqūnat ḥub wa ‘aṭā’ (Bishop Athanasius: Icon of Love and Tenderness). Committee of Release and Publishing of the Beni Suef muṭraniyya. Beni Suef: 2000.

167 Lambek, 2003. p. 191.

117 One additional reason why so many Egyptians across socio-economic lines judged the program to be suitable was that classes were heavily subsidized by the Coptic Church. As a result, students paid a fraction (150 Egyptian pounds/course) of what other private language programs charged (400-600 Egyptian pounds/course). This relatively small fee covered all materials needed for the 6-to-8-week-long courses, including a workbook photocopied from the Cambridge New Interchange textbook series. The extant financial hardship many Egyptians faced is a recurring theme throughout this dissertation, and it was in this increasingly difficult economic climate that students enrolled in the program, not as Muslims or Christians, but as pragmatic individuals and family members. The demographic most inclined to attend the courses were shabāb (young adults)—an unsurprising predominance given shabāb were most concerned about qualifying for jobs. In the first class of any course, teachers would ask students to introduce their names, occupations and reasons for attending the courses. Students often squirmed in their seats waiting for their turn, nervous about speaking in front of 20 or more other adults—and in a second language no less. The vast majority of students framed their responses in terms of their professional development. “English is the key for everyone in Egypt nowadays,” Aisha, a recent graduate from pharmacology college, explained in one class, “it is what gives you an opportunity to get a good job, so you have to be good in English. I will have job interviews in the months ahead, so this is why I registered for the courses.” While all Egyptians grew up being taught English as a subject in public schools, people were unanimous in their criticism of how the instruction—centred on rote memorization— (dis)functioned. Typically teachers and students in government schools alike treated the classroom as a space to narrowly prepare for the final exams that were so deterministic of young people’s lives. Al-kūrsāt’s teaching philosophy stood in stark contrast to the one practiced in government schools. Conversation was the key activity at the program across levels, and teachers constantly encouraged students to speak (I will return to the types of dialogue created by this atmosphere later in the chapter). At times, especially for lower-level students, it seemed that the program’s novel approach represented too drastic a shift from the norm, and learners sometimes asked for more tests,

118 assignments and grades. The program, however, basically functioned on a pass/fail basis (to place students in the appropriate level in subsequent courses more than anything). Almost all the young people I encountered appreciated the program's teaching philosophy centred on talking and listening. As the following story shows, though, the informal dimension could dissuade potential students as well. Every few months during my research, the administrators and teachers met with the managing priest Abuna Youssef at his church to discuss the program. Usually the meetings dealt with very mundane issues, such as which teachers would teach which levels and how to manage scheduling around university exam times and religious holidays. Though I never once got the impression that teachers were bothered by the overwhelmingly Muslim makeup of the student body, the unwillingness of some Copts to attend the church-funded program was something that vexed the Abuna. And so one warm fall evening, with a biscuit in one hand and nescafé with creamer in the other, Abuna Youssef initiated a discussion about how to get more Copts to attend, eventually assigning two teachers to do a speaking tour of church-run programs such a bible studies and sports clubs to advertise al-kūrsāt. Following the meeting, I rode back to downtown Beni Suef in a car with Maryam and Makram, two longtime workers at the program. As we passed by a new-but-abandoned shopping centre in New Beni Suef, I asked them why they thought more Coptic youth did not go to the al- kūrsāt. Maryam answered immediately in a way that suggested that she had pondered the question before: “I think, personally, it is the way Christians are raised. The parents are very protective of their sons and daughters in a Muslim society. This is bad because they become afraid and lazy.” After a brief pause, she quipped: “Awlādna khaybīn (our children are failures),” and both her and Makram broke out into laughter. —Makram, who was the father of two school-aged children, then opined: “This is definitely true of some Christian children and youth. They don’t take opportunities. We are too protective.” He paused, before adding, “but this is because we have this fear.” —“Fear of what,” I asked. —“Fear we’ll be attacked, Makram replied, “especially for girls. Parents are very protective of girls.” Maryam nodded in agreement as we passed a group of idling men on Beni Suef bridge.

119 One week later, I met with a large group of young Coptic men and women at the St. Mark’s youth club (which neighboured the al-kūrsāt school). The eyes of some of the men were fixed to a football match on the club’s large TV, but most people were simply visiting around a few plastic tables. None of the people present attended al-kūrsāt, though a couple of the young men had taken the classes before. At one point I asked the group why they did not sign up for the courses when they were so much cheaper than other classes in the city. The response was swift and near-unanimous: al-kūrsāt did not offer formal accreditation. A young woman named Madonna who was studying to be a pharmacist at Beni Suef University explained: “if you are looking for a good job—any good paying job—then you will need to have diplomas. The courses at St. Mark’s are maybe good for learning conversation, but they don’t actually help with finding work.” The other people at the table nodded in agreement. With Maryam and Makram’s words fresh in my mind, I queried whether there were any other reasons they did not attend the courses, to which they shook their heads and Madonna repeated “no, that (lack of diplomas) is the reason).” In the end, the fact that religious demographics among students at al-kūrsāt were reflective of the city’s demographics more broadly is suggestive of how little religion factored into the average person’s decision whether to attend the classes or not. The calculus most young people employed when judging whether to attend the program hinged on economic concerns rather than the religious affiliation of the program or teachers. Finally, it never struck me that Coptic students at the al-kūrsāt seemed timid or intimidated by the presence of so many Muslims in the church-school setting. In fact, my extensive observation of al-kūrsāt classes did not reveal any relationship between religion and willingness to engage with other classmates. Rather individual personalities seemed to dictate who spoke up and who did not—a dynamic I will elaborate on later in the chapter. ! ! ! ! !

120 Foreigners and the Culture of English ! My presence as a Canadian researcher at the provincial Egyptian al-kūrsāt language program was no accident (see Introduction). Nor was the presence of Westerners at al-kūrsāt unprecedented. Far from it, native English speakers have regularly taught classes at the program since its 1981 inception—a result of Bishop Athanasius soliciting the logistical and financial support of Western development organizations. Consequently, the program has employed between two to four native English speakers from Canada, the United States and Great Britain at various points over the past four decades. My sustained stint of teaching began in early 2011 before coming to an abrupt end when the Canadian NGO we were affiliated with pulled us out amidst the violent unrest that followed the 14 August, 2013 Rāb‘a Massacre. In the fall of 2014, after much lobbying by Abuna Youssef, MDO agreed to again place volunteers in Beni Suef. Unfortunately, these workers too were evacuated in the fall of 2015 when American intelligence agencies discovered a violent plot specifically targeting them, the only westerners in the city. Ever since, native English speakers have only taught on rare and short-term occasions. Thus, the ethnographic data I collected between 2011 and 2018 was gathered both during periods where foreign teachers were present at the program as well as when only Egyptian teachers were working. Program archives show that while course enrolment has been highest during periods with foreign instructors (fluctuating between 200 and 500 students per cohort), even in periods without native English instructors attendance still never fell below 100—a number that still exceeded course enrolment for several of Beni Suef’s other private language academies. Moreover, even when foreign teachers were present, the majority of students in any given cohort were taught by Egyptian nationals. When I asked Rania, manager of al-kūrsāt, if students ever dropped the courses because they were not placed in a classroom taught by a native speaker, she thought for a moment and then shook her head no, adding that the mere presence of foreigners at the program drove attendance up across levels. No other language academy in Beni Suef was able to offer English instruction from native speakers, and this is part of what set al-kūrsāt apart.

121 In the imaginaries of many Beni Suef residents, native English speakers were a key component of the al-kūrsāt brand. A young MDO-affiliated American couple was teaching during my fieldwork at al-kūrsāt in the summer of 2015. University classes had just ended for the year, resulting in robust numbers for the new al-kūrsāt cohort. Sitting in on the advanced conversation introductory class taught by one of the Americans, I made my way around the room as pairs of students discussed why they were attending the courses. I knew one of the students, Ahmed, from my time at the program years earlier. Pulling up a chair next to him and his partner Kyrollis, I asked when they first attended the program. “I think it was back in 2006 or 2007,” Ahmed answered. “I heard about the courses from friends. It was famous even then. Famous for foreigners. I was thinking of becoming an English teacher at the time, and to be with foreign teacher… it was such a great experience for me… for Beni Suef. And it was not just about the English, but because of the culture. It was a new culture for us—other people from other countries.” Like Ahmed, students routinely expressed the appeal of native speaker instructors in terms of “getting a good accent”, improving their listening, and maximizing the quality of instruction. Beyond these more practical considerations, though, students also justified their presence at the courses with their love of the culture English represented. In one conversation class, I listened to a young woman named Reem talk to her class partner about how English was the first international language. “It is my dream to travel around the entire world,” Reem explained, “so I take these courses to be as good as possible. I feel free when I talk English, almost like I am already travelling.” Picking up where Reem left off, a former student of mine named Sherine turned to me and explained “Look ya Isaac, it is very difficult for us to travel. Even if we had lots of money, our families would not approve of us going abroad on our own. So this is like travelling… getting to know different people. Even just by showing us pictures of snow and trees, or telling us the history of Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X. This exchange even made me curious about religion.” Sherine paused a moment and then laughed, “not in a way that I doubted my own or anything. I just wanted to learn more about other religions and cultures. And seeing people like you made me understand the West more. There are a lot of good people. The west is not just what

122 we see in the movies with the drinking and violence and sex. In the end, the foreigners make us search more in ourselves.” While I will return to Sherine’s last point momentarily, I want to note the significance that, although the classes were church-run, I always felt that my students at al-kūrsāt, such as Sherine, saw me exclusively as a foreigner (as opposed to a Christian). This locus of difference, in turn, opened spaces for dialogue where Egyptian teachers could not so easily traverse. During my fieldwork, I interviewed a group of longtime students who had taken courses at the al-kūrsāt both when foreign teachers were present and absent. While all the students identified the program as a space where they could critically debate social and cultural issues, they also believed students’ openness to different opinions peaked when foreign instructors were present. One middle-aged man named Ahmed suggested to me that native speakers were like a neutral third party. When I then asked him which Egyptians represented the other two parties, he replied: —“It can be about anything. Two Egyptians can be debating about culture, or women’s roles, or politics, and maybe no one on either side is really listening. But since foreigners come from a totally new perspective, it opens everyone up. Without any doubt native speakers are very important to the freedom at the al-kūrsāt.” —A woman in the group named Fatima then spoke up in disagreement, saying: “just last week I almost yelled at a man in a discussion over women in the workplace. So no, I don’t agree… we do not depend on foreigners for this.” Fatima’s argument reminds that the lively and engaging atmosphere that emerged in the program’s classrooms was not entirely dependent on the presence of foreign teachers. At the same time, most interlocutors assured me that foreign teachers did shape interactions at al-kūrsāt. For instance, Sherine stating that Western instructors made her search more in herself (something several interlocutors said to me, in so many words), could be conceptualized in a number ways. In some regards, the presence of a Canadian English teacher (and ethnographer) in provincial Egypt falls in line with the long history of Western colonialism and neocolonialism that has so profoundly reshaped cultures around the world. Foreign teachers at al-kūrsāt could also be seen as agents of globalization or cosmopolitanism, providing Beni

123 Suef residents a type of dialogue, learning or understanding they might not have had otherwise. Of course, this influence went both ways, in that I was deeply shaped by my years living in Beni Suef—another reminder that foreign teachers’ influence on al-kūrsāt was varied and unpredictable. Across this complexity, however, the words of my interlocutors make clear that the presence of foreigners allowed the multifaceted relationships and traditions in Beni Suef to come together in very specific ways. Perhaps this is what Bishop Athanasius had desired: for new borders (between foreigners and Egyptians) to shift the way existing ones were seen. This was not so much a culture of English, then, as it was a culture of dialogue.

! Islamic Revivalism and Other Traditions

The cosmopolitan character of some students at al-kūrsāt begs the question as to whether the student body that was so comfortable in the culture of English was really reflective of wider Beni Suef society. When I asked Rania, the longtime administrator of the program if she thought al-kūrsāt attracted a certain type of person, she replied: “maybe. But not really. As you have seen, there are many young people and students. But there are also lots of Salafis and Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers) who come too; men with big beards and zabības (prayer marks) and women wearing niqabs. Il-Ikhwān (The Muslim Brotherhood) especially like our classes.” —“Why do you think that is?” I asked. —“Because they are a very old organization, with lots of experience dealing with people, and adapting and manoeuvring in society,” she answered, Then, corroborating my argument about practical judgement and economic interest earlier in this chapter, she added: “they see they can benefit from the courses, so they come. And to be honest, Ikhwānī students are often very friendly and polite. Salafis are less like this. They look at the ground when they talk to me because I am a woman… and not just a woman, but a Christian woman! But they never cause any problems either; as long as you don’t talk about religion. They know they are the ones coming to us. Beni Suef has Jihadis too. The people who belong to Sheikh Ahmed Youssef (the

124 longtime leader of the local branch of al-jamāʿa al-islāmiyya [Islamic Group]) But I don’t think Jihadis really come.” This diversity is relevant to discussions of al-kūrsāt precisely because dynamics there often undermined purported conceptions of a secular/islamist dichotomy. For instance, there were many Muslim students—whether politically or culturally Islamist, liberal or secular— whose embrace of the courses fit in with an intellectual history that wedded Islam with modernist reason. In the late nineteenth century, Egypt was the global centre of an intense debate regarding the relationship between Islam and modernity, and the three central figures of Islamic modernism —Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida—spent much of their lives in the Egyptian capital. Moreover, skepticism and reason are far more than a colonial inheritance in the Islamic world.168 Hence, to embrace the culture of English, or to attend the Western-affiliated church-run al-kūrsāt, was not necessarily to submit to Western colonial power. In the highly insightful literature on the tensions between everyday life and reformist Islam, scholars sometimes depict their Muslim interlocutors as filled with a sense of failure or anxiety about whether they are able to live up to the tenets of their religion. The Pakistani villagers in Magnus Marsden’s Living Islam, for instance struggle with the never-ending decision-making process that marks their open-ended social, emotional and intellectual lives.169 Samuli Schielke, on the other hand, draws a distinction between the grand schemes (Islam being one) people are constantly falling short of and the challenges, twists and turns of ordinary life.170 The thoughts and actions of my interlocutors offer an interesting point of contrast to Marsden’s and Schielke’s accounts, in that Muslim students at al-kūrsāt rarely gave the impression they were somehow falling short as Muslims or felt any anxiety about attending the church-run courses. For many Muslim students at al-kūrsāt, the Coptic administration of the courses was not even on their radar.

168 Mittermaier, 2011. p. 43.

169 Marsden, 2005.

170 Schielke, 2015.

125 In the summer of 2015, I chatted with two sisters, both longtime students, in the school courtyard after classes. Having come to know them quite well over the years, I felt comfortable asking them outright: had they ever felt conflicted, as Muslims, about attending the church-run courses? The older sister, whose name was Basma, smiled right away and shook her head, before delving into why it was no big deal at all. But as Basma talked, my focus could not help but stray to her younger sister, Nora, who appeared wide-eyed and deep in thought. Bassma noticed too eventually, turning to her sister and asking “What is it Nora?” —Nora smiled and shook her head slowly before professing “it never occurred to me that it is a Christian program.” —“Bigad (really)?” Basma quickly laughed, looking at her sister as intently as ever. —“Bigad (Really). I am realizing it now and of course it makes sense. But I just never thought about it until now.” We all laughed about it together, and reassured Nora that it was nothing to be embarrassed about. Conversely, there were many other Muslim students who confided in me that they did have at least some awareness that it was a Christian program. Several of these students explained that it was the introductory brochure which brought the program’s church affiliation to their attention. Others told me that the church affiliation had always been obvious to them; but this awareness did not engender a sense of inner conflict. “The goal for me was always learning,” Muatasim, a thirty-year old pharmacist, explained to me after class, “and I never once doubted whether I should attend the courses or not.” —“What do you think the goal of the church is?” I asked. —Muatasim thought for a moment before replying, “I think the church wants to make community. I think they are trying to help.” He paused, stroking his large beard many Egyptians judged to be salafi in style, before continuing, “of course, anyone who attends the courses knows it is not about spreading their religion.” I next asked Muatasim whether anyone had ever criticized his attendance of al-kūrsāt because it was a church program. He thought for a moment and then replied, “criticized? No. Some of my friends joked, saying that I belong to the church. But they do not really believe this… You know how we love to joke,” he smiled, holding out his hand for me to slap. “Many of

126 these same friends eventually went to the courses too. But they don’t love English like I do. Anyways, the reason why we went in the first place is because it is a successful program. It is famous in Beni Suef. Now that there are no foreigners, maybe it doesn’t have the same reputation. But still everyone thinks of it in a good way.” Certain works in the anthropological literature have obscured the way many Egyptian Muslims regard religious others. For instance, writing about the Egyptian intellectual Samir Murqus, Saba Mahmood claims that for Egyptian Muslims, the thinker’s Coptic identity trumped any other way of seeing him.171 For every Muslim student I spoke to, on the other hand, the fact that al-kūrsāt was run by the church was of little to no consequence, suggesting that al-kūrsāt was not just a Christian program, but a program that happened to be Christian, or better yet, just a program. One thing that struck me in my interviews of Muslim students was that they never invoked religion to explain their attendance—a phenomenon that contrasts with the way other anthropologists have framed the motivations of pious learners.172 In fact, Muslim students only ever related al-kūrsāt to Islamic doctrine in response to Islamic critiques of the ostensibly Christian, Western or English colouring of the program. One did not need to look long on TV or radio to hear certain sheikhs explicitly discourage Muslims from attending Coptic places (see Chapter 4).173 Knowing these exclusivist discourses were circulating, I occasionally queried Muslim students as to whether the courses were in some way against their religion. In a 2017 interview, one young woman named Hanan replied: “yes, two of my mother’s friends have mentioned this. They are old. They tell me it is a Christian place only for Christians. I tell them: show me the mosque that offers these courses, for these prices.” She looked back and forth between myself and her friend who was next to her in the school courtyard, challenging us to prove her wrong, before continuing, “look, the church is doing me a huge favour. Where is the

171 Mahmood, 2015. p. 90.

172 Mouftah, Nermeen. Building Life: Faith, Literacy Development and Muslim Citizenship in Revolutionary Egypt. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014.

173 Copts, of course, had parallel exclusivist discourses.

127 other way around? Where is the mosque? I believe in my religion, prophet, God. But this is education. It is not something related to my religion.” In a 2018 conversation class, meanwhile, one longtime student named Heba described to me how older relatives had criticized her love of English. Reciting to me her response, the young woman wearing a baby blue higab explained: “even if you look at our prophet, peace be upon him, it is not right to say English is bad. Learning anything new is good for us. Even in our religion it is a good thing. Look at the English countries, they are so developed in things like medicine and technology. It would make no sense to reject this. It does not mean we are not religious people. Look around, we are very religious. And we learn English, and we use social media. We want to be successful, we want to learn.” Another student named Doha, who was paired with Heba, then turned to me and referenced Sūrat an-Naḥl from the Quran (“And from the fruits of the palm trees and grapevines you take intoxicant and good provision. Indeed in that is a sign for a people who reason”). After quoting her holy book, she added “Islam is about using reason. Like drinking water inside and out. I am a Muslim first, but other things can guide me as long as they are not against Islam.” —“But do you think the church has a goal in running the program?” I asked the two women. —“Frankly I don’t care,” Heba replied, “the courses are helpful to me. There are native speakers. We don’t get this in Beni Suef. You know what it is like here,” she said, motioning around to the city beyond the school walls. “I have my religion, you have yours, the teachers have their religion. No one is going to put pressure, and no one has ever tried to force me to believe anything. hiyya mish mawḍū‘ dīnī (it’s not a religious matter). As long as they leave religion out of it I am happy. Now if you are critical of my religion or prophet, I will stay away from you, or maybe try to teach you right. But that is never the case at St. Mark’s.” Doha nodded in agreement. Ultimately, for the Muslim students at al-kūrsāt, it was not a question as to whether they were pious Muslims or not, but rather whether they were living a full and successful life. This dynamism calls to mind the young Beirut residents in Deeb and Harb’s Leisurely Islam, where

128 young people live out things like fun, learning and piety.174 In contrast to Magnus Marsden’s “village Muslim” interlocutors who joked that seeing Muslims made them want to run away (in that reformist Islam had alienated them from their own religion), the Muslim students at al- kūrsāt never gave me the impression that their participation in the program was something counter to or detached from Islam.175 Rather they at once comfortably expressed their Muslim identity and love of learning English (and all that comes with it) in a church space. The pious/liberal dichotomy so prevalent in the anthropological literature, therefore, makes little sense at al-kūrsāt.176 A most helpful concept for understanding this reality is incommensurability. Traditions can be incommensurable when they “are not explicitly contradictory and do not require making an exclusive choice.”177 The fact that neither Coptic nor Islamic institutions in Beni Suef demanded its members make an exclusive choice regarding al- kūrsāt attendance is indicative of the flexibility and pragmatism powerful institutions and traditions sometimes use to engage people’s everyday lives. At the same time, it also shows how people’s flexible and practical ethical judgements undergirded this incommensurability, enabling students to assume what was essentially a cosmopolitan stance despite occupying a peripheral place in global, and even Egyptian, circulations of soft power. ! ! A Muslim, Christian and Secular Space ! The adhan (call to prayer) commonly occurred during lessons at al-kūrsāt. When I first began teaching there, I was new to Egypt, and was careful to show respect to the religion and culture of the vast majority of my students by pausing the lesson whenever the call rang out into the evening air. After ten or twenty seconds, I would then look around the classroom to read

174 Deeb & Harb, 2013.

175 Marsden, 2005.

176 For a thorough critique of this dichotomy, see Hafez, 2011. Hafez questions the consistency of Egyptian women’s subjectivities and desires.

177 Lambek, 2015. p. 228.

129 Muslim students on whether it was okay to continue with the discussion or cassette. My keenness to follow the social code, I could tell, was amusing to many of the students, some of whom seemed to roll their eyes at the purported sanctity of loudspeakers, motioning with their hands to “go ahead”. Egyptian Coptic teachers at the program were much less deliberate in pausing their lessons for the adhan. When I asked a teacher named Abram about his practices for dealing with this issue, he acknowledged that Muslim students sometimes requested that he stopped talking or using the cassette recorder during the adhan. “I don’t like this,” he remarked, “usually I keep talking and do not respect the request. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t like when they do this— when they insist like they often do.” I observed another teacher named Bassem barely stop teaching at all for the adhan. When I approached him about this after class, he told me that the students were there to study, not to pray. “I promise you Isaac, most of the students appreciate this. They choose to come here to learn.” While perhaps this was true for many students, some students did come to the courses expecting to both learn and pray. One evening in 2015 I was visiting with Makram, the program administrator, in the front office, when two young men came to the door. Aside from their prominent zabības (forehead prayer marks), they looked like any other shabāb who attended the course. They explained that they were students in the level 3 class, and needed a place to pray in the school. Makram replied casually, almost like a bored tour guide, that there was a large mosque just a three minute walk from the school gate where they could pray. A slightly perturbed look came over one of the men, but the reaction between them was otherwise neutral. The one then whispered something to the other, and they made their way to the street, bidding us farewell with as-salām-alaikum as they left. Afterwards, I was curious as to whether the teacher’s refusal had complicated their attendance of the program, so I made sure to pass by Ashraf’s level three class two days later. There were the two men, sitting together in the far corner of the room, with their eyes fixed firmly on the teacher at the front. Similarly, one night in 2017 I observed a class taught by a teacher named Kyrollis. Part way through the lesson, a male student got up from his desk and left the room without saying where he was going. Two minutes later, with the students immersed in pair activity, Kyrollis left

130 the room, telling me he would be back shortly. Returning to the class soon thereafter, the teacher walked to the corner where I was standing and whispered in English: “it is as I thought. That student who left the room is praying right now in the corner of the hallway.” I asked Kyrollis how he would respond, and he replied that he would not interrupt the prayer, but that he would tell the student that praying on the school property is not allowed. I watched keenly after class as Kyrollis picked the student out of the departing group to wait “daqīqa wāḥida (one minute).” When Kyrollis informed him of the rules, the student seemed more apologetic than anything. Kyrollis told him about the mosque down the street, and the student thanked him before wishing peace upon us as he left the room. Later that night, as the teachers were chatting in the office before their commutes home, Kyrollis recounted to Makram his interaction with the praying student. Makram listened to Kyrollis’ experience in full before simply stating “kwayyis (good).” In the brief moment of silence that followed, I took the opportunity to ask them why they did not want Muslims praying at the program. Kyrollis responded quickly: “We don’t want Christians praying here either. It’s not a church or a mosque, it is a school. They cannot make this into a mosque, into a Muslim space. This is a Christian space. And no Christians or Muslims are allowed to pray here.” At once, Kyrollis had declared the program to be both Christian and secular. What is significant is that it was exceedingly rare to encounter a space in Egypt in which Muslims did not at least claim the right to pray. I regularly observed Muslims praying in all kinds of public and private spaces, including offices, hospitals, schools, parks, sports clubs, restaurants, and transit stations. Yet at the church-run al-kūrsāt, teachers felt both comfortable and compelled to enforce the school as a prayer-free zone. On the one hand, this is striking because Muslim students continued to attend the program en masse. And while prayer was not a problem at all for most Muslim students, even those who took issue with it seemed to take things in stride and respectfully adapt. On the other hand, the Coptic administrators’ policing of the space poses fascinating questions about interactions between Islam, Christianity and secularism in the church-run space. With this latter point in mind, in 2017 I asked a female teacher named Mariam if she thought al-kūrsāt was more a Christian space, a Muslim space or a secular one. She thought for a

131 moment and then responded, “maybe it’s more secular. It is true that Christians have more power at al-kūrsāt. All the teachers are Christian. It is part of the church. But the people who attend the program are 80%, or even 90% Muslim, so you cannot say it is Christian. At the same time, I would never say it is Muslim domination either.” She paused, deep in thought, before adding “we usually do not speak about religion, which I guess makes it secular.” As Mariam was talking, Abram joined us in the office. Nodding his head as Mariam finished speaking, he opined “more than anything, I think the philosophy of the program is service. It really helps people. But it is also a way of getting people to sit next to each other and to learn how different people think. For me it’s teaching. The relationships come out of teaching. They see we care about their learning, not about money or religion. Then the relationships come naturally. Bishop Athanasius was a very wise man for seeing this. I think he did have a secular space in mind, even if he did not say it.” By this point in the discussion, two more teachers, Ashraf and Bassem, had joined us in the office, and soon enough Ashraf interrupted with his own thoughts: “we don’t try to involve religion. It is almost like the one chance in Egypt where we can leave religion aside. I tell my students I would sooner talk about politics than religion. The students appreciate this. We all know this belongs to the Muṭraniyya, but I am not here to promote Jesus.” —“But is there a certain idea or way of thinking you do try to promote?” I quickly followed up, “what would you say the ideology of the courses is?” —Ashraf, who always insisted on speaking to me in English, answered immediately: “I do not have an ideology inside the four corners of the class. I always say to students that here I am neutral. If people ask me if I am for or against the president, I say that I will talk to them in private outside of the class precisely because I do not want to seem like I am pushing any ideas. So when my students debate about things like politics and culture, I try to just make sure things do not get out of control. At the same time, I always show my respect for Islam. You see Isaac, when you teach people you try to change them. But it is not about ideology. It is more simple than that. Just showing respect and making relationships.” In the first chapter of this dissertation, I discuss how the anthropological literature on secularism’s state-centric framework oftentimes conflates secularism with centralized state

132 power. In both Mahmood's and Agrama’s texts, secularism is portrayed almost exclusively as a state project which is near-hegemonic in society; controlling, transforming, and subsuming the religious at every turn.178 Talal Asad, meanwhile, locates the origins of secularism (religious toleration in Europe) as “a political means to the formation of strong state power.”179 This European history I do not dispute. However, there are many problems with the way the agentive secularism framework extrapolates from the origin story, and my first chapter’s history of modern Egypt makes clear that secularization and centralization are hardly mutually necessary. That is, there are many more sides to secularism than centralized state power—a reality made plain by interactions at al-kūrsāt. To this point, the anthropology of secularism has been relatively devoid of ethnographic insights into how secularism is experienced and lived by ordinary people. In a 2011 book chapter, Talal Asad offers a compelling starting point for understanding secularism in the vernacular. Asad distinguishes between “democracy as a state system”, which is regulatory, exclusive, and characterized by a nationalist fervour and “democratic sensibility as an ethos”, which is characterized by a willingness to listen, concern for truth and desire for mutual care.180 In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Agrama effectively terms the latter concept asecularism: a situation where the question of whether norms are religious or secular is not seen as necessary.181 What is striking is that Agrama conceives of Asad’s democratic/secular ethos as something detached from secularism. My own ethnographic observations at al-kūrsāt, on the other hand, demand that I take secularism as a positive force seriously. Charles Taylor argues that the core of secularism is marked by equidistance and inclusion—a view that at least echoes Asad’s picture of democratic sensibilities as an ethos.182 While it is true that equidistance and inclusion rarely, if ever,

178 Asad, 2003; Agrama, 2012; Mahmood, 2005; Mahmood, 2015.

179 Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. p.206

180 Asad, 2011.

181 Agrama, 2013. p. 231.

182 Taylor, 1999. p. 52.

133 characterized how ordinary Egyptians experience the state’s opportunistic use of secular rule and rhetoric, interactions at al-kūrsāt highlight a secularism more akin to what Taylor describes; and what I term to be secularism as an ethos.183 Earlier in this chapter, I argued that the primary aim, function and experience of al-kūrsāt was (socio)economic. That is, the majority of students have attended the classes with an eye on their studies and the job market. At the same time, and much as Bishop Athanasius had hoped, many returning students came to appreciate and embrace the culture of dialogue, inclusion and openness (the secular ethos) at the program. As discussed, Western instructors have historically helped oversee certain skeptical and critical modes of engagement at the program. But the oral, conversational culture at al-kūrsāt was not strictly a Western import. In the early nineteenth century, Egyptian kuttabs (village schools) were marked by a more open-ended oral culture of learning. In the decades that followed, English missionaries and Egyptian reformers alike worked to establish a textual, disciplinary mode of education—one that would ultimately ensure students’ loyalties to the state, mosque or church.184 This modern, disciplinary education system continues to mark Egyptian public education today. As shown, the approach at al-kūrsāt diverged in fundamental ways from the state education system. With the aforementioned kuttabs in mind, the program’s emphasis on conversation, skepticism and dialogue, must be seen as having, at least in part, Egyptian roots, and therefore cannot fit so easily into the Western/non-Western binary so prevalent in the anthropological literature on secularism. During fieldwork in 2017, I arranged a gathering at a local cafe with a number of longtime students who I had taught between 2011-2013. Rather than opting for a seat next to the Nile’s soothing drift, I decided instead on an enclosed garden cafe with a small playground (as my priorities had changed as the parent of young children). My wife and I made sure to arrive early to the cafe, and shortly thereafter students began to show. Pushing together a few round

183 My concept of a secular ethos is inspired by Sindre Bangstad’s call (2009) to study secularism as a vernacular experience and Fenella Cannell’s appeal to observe secularism ethnographically in ordinary, lived situations.

184 Sedra, Paul. From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth Century Egypt. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011.

134 tables in the shade, our eventual group of fourteen ordered beverages and ice cream, and spent the next two hours enjoying each other’s company. At one point, the group discussion shifted to the fact that there were no longer foreigners at the program, and one woman hinted at subtle differences in the culture of the program. —“What has changed exactly?” I asked. —“Generally it is the same, but I miss the political debates we used to have,” replied Hanan. —“All of Egypt is like that,” Ahmed interjected, referring to the state’s virtual strangulation of public debate after 2013 (see Chapter 4). —“But we still talk a bit about politics, ‘ādī ya Hanan (it’s still normal Hanan),” said Mustafa, who continued to attend the advanced conversation classes. He then added “St. Mark’s is very open I think.” —“I first started going to al-kūrsāt in 2008, so before the revolution,” a young woman named Amany agreed, “and even then we talked about politics. I will never forget two students, one who liked George W. Bush and one who was against him. This was fascinating to hear and see.” —An English teacher named Fatma spoke up next: “I will always remember al-kūrsāt for its debates, especially about women’s issues. I never got bored of this. It was like we got a chance to show men how we feel.” All the women at the tables voiced their agreement, before Fatma continued, “and I learned things from foreigners too, like how when you (talking to me) explained to the class about the problem of Hollywood’s portrayal of African Americans. It taught me that black people are not threatening. I think the program does help with learning to accept others… especially with foreigners there.” Others in the group nodded. —“I loved debates about culture too,” Amira said, before being cut off by Ahmed: —“But Isaac, you said the words īdiyyulūjiyya (ideology), ‘alamāni (secular) and lībrāliyya (liberalism). Before the revolution, we didn’t even know these terms. Then after the revolution the media started talking with them. Most people don’t think with these terms.” He paused, taking a small sip from his qahwa (coffee), “but I guess we can categorize al-kūrsāt as a liberal program.” —“Liberal how?” I queried.

135 —Ahmed responded: “Liberal in that there is an emphasis on accepting others; accepting difference.” —“And sharing culture too,” Hanan added, again giving voice to a cosmopolitan inclination I had heard time and time again among Beni Suef shabāb. Our conversation was interrupted by my two sons running up to the table, the younger of whom had become tired and unruly. My older son, meanwhile, was holding a few sprigs of fresh mint he had picked in the cafe garden, and walked around the table letting people smell it—much to everyone’s delight.

! A Secular Ethos ! Critical discussions about politics, society, and culture at al-kūrsāt were most likely to occur in advanced language classrooms, if for no other reason than the basic ability to communicate. In the summer of 2015, there was one group of advanced students I observed that were especially keen to question and engage key issues in their country. It initially appeared to me that ten of the students in this class were Muslim and three were Christian, with eight males and five females. All of these students were in their 20s, college students or graduates, and came from middle and upper-middle class homes. The Egyptian instructor Ahab asked the students to arrange their desks in a circle at the centre of the room for a discussion about the topic of the day: diversity. The discussion began with the simple question as to whether Egypt was a diverse country or not. The students offered a range of opinions in response. Some declared Egyptians to generally be the same across the country, while others disagreed. A young woman named Hadeer listed off the many types of Egyptians in the country including Nubians and Bedouins. “OK, there is some diversity” an accountant named Mahmoud allowed, “but they are still Egyptians. I do not think people get treated differently here based on race like in America. Everyone is equal in Islam.” “You really think there is no racism in Egypt?!” a woman named Doha asked, full of indignation. “I am from Aswan and people have been telling me I am black my entire life, and

136 yes, some people say it in a bad way. People even curse me for being black.” The other students shook their heads and offered their sympathies. “It is OK,” Doha said, “I used to feel like an outsider but now I am comfortable in myself.” Another young woman named Hadeer spoke up, “My brother works with a development NGO in Cairo. The main group they work with are Sudanese refugees. He tells me that life is very, very difficult for them in Egypt. That they experience lots of racism and a lot of hardship.” A couple other students nodded knowingly, obviously aware of the dynamic. Hadeer continued “I do not think that Egypt is special in this regard. There is racism and xenophobia all over the world. Just look at Europe. But I think it is really naive to suggest that Egypt or Muslims are somehow perfect and racism does not exist.” Maher, an Engineering student at Beni Suef University then spoke up, “I think a lot of this racism is related to economic problems. Our economy is very bad right now, right? There are no jobs. So when poor and uneducated people see refugees coming to the country, I think they see them as a threat.” Beni Suef, like most Egyptian cities had absorbed many Syrian refugees since 2012—a fact that was not lost on a student named Muhammad, who asked: “is the economy in Beni Suef very good? Of course not. Is there lots of unemployment and poverty? Certainly. And yet we have thousands of Syrians living in the city… and I think they feel welcome. I have seen this many times on Facebook where Syrians say Egypt has treated them better than any other country.” —Picking up where Muhammad left off, Hadeer added, “Yes, and I think poor Egyptians, and simple Egyptians in villages, are the most welcoming to others. If you are lost and you go to any village in the ṣaīd (Upper Egypt), the poorest people there will give you everything they have no matter who you are. Rich, poor, white, black. This is the real Egyptian culture.” —Doha quickly responded, “OK, but it is also Egyptian villages where there is less diversity and so people regard difference as especially strange. It can be difficult. I always felt more relaxed in Cairo because there is everything in Cairo, and no one knows who I am. But in smaller towns I felt people noticed by darker skin more.” The other students agreed, however, a potential for discord loomed:

137 “Guys, I think I need to say something here,” a longtime student named Ahmed began unsolicited, “we also have a problem in this country with the treatment of Christians. Oftentimes it is fine, but I am Muslim and I would be lying if I hadn’t seen or heard of Christians being treated differently.” Hadeer and Dona nodded in agreement while the rest of the group sat at their desks in silence. The bearded young man continued, “like if there is a job opportunity and one candidate is Muslim and the other is Christian, the Muslim boss will more likely hire the Muslim. This is discrimination.” —A student named Mahmoud quickly retorted, “No, but I don’t think this always happens. I also think Christian businesses do the same thing.” Several students nodded in agreement. —“You know, the difference here is that we Muslims are powerful,” Ahmed replied, “and any society needs to watch for this. Like what happened to Jews in Europe or blacks in America.” —“But this is the point,” Mahmoud shot back, “Muslims and Christians have lived together here for thousands of years. Of course there are sometimes problems, but often it is good.” At this point, one of the three apparently Coptic students in the class finally spoke up. Her name was Sara, and the current slate of classes marked the first time she had ever attended al-kūrsāt. She had long straight black hair and wore colourful, stylish clothes. What Sara said, I believe, surprised everyone a great deal: “Look, I think I have an interesting perspective on all this,” she began, “I am Muslim.” The face of every other student I could see revealed at least a degree of surprise or amazement. In Beni Suef it was incredibly rare for Muslim women to not at least wear the higab. In fact, I never encountered another Muslim woman in Beni Suef with her hair uncovered. We were hanging on her every word. —“I choose not to wear the higab. It is my choice. As a Muslim, I do not feel it is something demanded of women. If you look, it actually has no relationship to the religion. Il-muhim (What is important)” she said, switching to Arabic, “is that here in Beni Suef strangers always think I am Christian. They judge me on my appearance. This is why I like Cairo much better.” I sensed the other students had follow-up questions but were not totally comfortable asking. The teacher Ahab then spoke up, asking how people in Beni Suef treated Sara because of her unique decision. Sara replied “Well my family and friends are accustomed to it. They know

138 me as a person, so it is no problem. But, with strangers it is very funny. Shop owners, taxi drivers, anyone who I meet in the street thinks I am Christian. What I notice is that both Christians and Muslims will treat me very well when they think I am Christian, but when they learn I am Muslim something changes and I feel then they treat me worse.” —“Muslims and Christians treat you worse?” Hadeer asked, clearly very intrigued. —“Yes,” Sara answered, “I just sense they feel uncomfortable. Like I have upset society in some way.” The discussion then turned back to the subject of how it is easier to be different in Cairo, and while her experiences never came up again, Sara’s words no doubt left a trail of thoughts and memories for all involved. Ultimately her insights were fascinating because of the way they elucidated how the line dividing line in Beni Suef society could be drawn less along religious borders, than between performing certain norms and acts of religiosity and not performing them. Illuminating the great and pervasive power of religious identity and norms in the country, Sara’s experiences complicate some anthropologists’ depiction of secularism’s predominance in Egypt. Given the displeasure Sara had already encountered many times prior, one imagines she was hesitant to deem most places a viable platform to communicate her views. Yet, there was something about al-kūrsāt—its secular ethos, perhaps—that made the exchange possible. At the end of Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Saba Mahmood asks, in passing, whether secularity can “provide the resources for a critical practice that does not privilege the agency of the state.”185 Certain interactions at al-kūrsāt, such as the one documented above, help answer Mahmood’s rhetorical move decisively in the affirmative. Remembering Taylor’s definition of secularism, Asad’s conception of democratic sensibilities as an ethos, and the teachers and students’ words in this section, I propose that it is secularism as an ethos that emerged at al-kūrsāt, and many other places in contemporary Egypt. Overall, people at al-kūrsāt were particularly committed to listening, inclusion, and a concern for truth, reflecting the fruition of the type of atmosphere the late Bishop Athanasius had aimed to cultivate when he brought Muslims and Christians together in the first place.

185 Mahmood, 2015. p. 212.

139 Phronetic Silence ! One thing Sara’s experiences reveal is how crucial the head covering could be to women’s communal identities in Beni Suef. This reality was particularly salient for Christian women, many of whom lamented how their uncovered hair distinguished them from Muslim women in Beni Suef society. Some of my middle-aged Coptic interlocutors could remember bygone years when a substantial number of Muslim women in Egypt did not cover their hair, and expressed longing for a return to those days when their religion was not so clearly marked on their bodies. The subject of women’s head coverings was most pressing during the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi’s 2012-2013 presidency, when critics charged the Islamist group of planning to impose a variety of new restrictions on non-Muslims. In a January 2013 advanced conversation class composed entirely of Muslim students, I observed an interesting debate about the subject of non-Muslims in a Muslim society. During the discussion, Zeinab, a student who found particular enjoyment in stimulating critical discussion, asked whether non-Muslims ought to be forced to wear the higab in Egypt. The reply from the class of twelve students was a resounding no. —“That is their choice,” argued Ahmed, “and I don’t think you will find many people in Egypt who think Christian women should be forced to wear the higab.” Other students nodded. —“I don’t see why the higab is such a big issue for Christians,” a woman wearing a pink higab named Hawaida posited, “do Coptic women not cover their heads when they go in the church? Is our Lady Mariam’s head not covered in the paintings in churches? What then is the difference?” At no point did the instructor of the class, a Coptic man named Peter, contribute to the debate, and no one in the class solicited his opinion. Sitting together in the office with another teacher named Madonna after class, I broached the subject with Peter, who had just returned from filling a kettle with water from the doorman’s sink. As he plugged the kettle into an outlet behind the main desk, I asked if he agreed with the students that there was no pressure on Christian women to cover their hair. Before Peter could even begin to answer, however, Madonna spoke up: “la, la, da ay kalām (no, no, that is

140 nonsense). Of course they do not like that our hair is uncovered.” Madonna waited a moment as another teacher named Nancy made her way to a couch in the office, before clarifying: “I think it depends on the person. Most Muslims I meet I think are very respectful and I do not get a sense that they are bothered by my hair or my being Coptic generally. The problem are il-uṣūliyyīn (the fundamentalists).” While Madonna’s words were representative of the suspicion many Beni Suef Copts had for Islamist movements, they provoked an interesting response from Nancy—one that reminds of the complexity of sociopolitical formations in Egypt. “This may surprise you,” Nancy began, “but from my experience, members of the Muslim Brotherhood are very good to deal with. They go out of their way to be kind and respectful. Salafis are respectful too, though, they do not even look at me.” I was somewhat surprised to see Madonna, who had just finished criticizing so- called fundamentalists, nodding in agreement. Nancy's next words, though, illuminated a tension between tacit and explicit religious difference in Beni Suef: “none of this respect is genuine, however. Both groups want women covered. Regardless of what they say on TV; they want me covered. The Ikhwan are the same, except on the surface they are not. They are th‘ābīn (snakes).” The entire evening of interaction, both among the all-Muslim student body and the all- Christian staff, illustrated certain limitations and adaptations inherent to the secular ethos of the program and the practical ethical judgements of the people who populated it. The views of my Coptic interlocutors showed skepticism about the ostensible true intentions and fake appearances of their Muslim peers. These opinions, however, did not tend to communicate across religious borders. Citing Wittgenstein, Michael Lambek suggests that oftentimes the best practical judgement entails keeping silent, arguing that “the primary ethical situation is one of listening and judging when to speak or act and what to say.”186 The reason that the secular ethos of al- kūrsāt still existed, amidst a toxic politico-economic climate as well as a decades-long trend of worsening Muslim-Christian relations, is precisely because practical ethical judgements were so deeply embedded in Beni Suef’s densely populated society. That said, provocative views

186 Lambek, 2015. p. 233.

141 occasionally did escape through people’s practical ethical judgements across religious borders. An interaction I observed on an al-kūrsāt field trip illuminates how phronetic silence navigated manifestations of explicit tension as well. ! ! A Trip to Beni Suef Museum ! When most visitors to Egypt think about pyramids or museums, they picture the Giza pyramid complex or the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Residents of Beni Suef are no different. In all my years in the city, it was rare that I encountered Egyptians who had ever been to the local Matḥaf Beni Suef (Beni Suef Museum). Indeed, the mere suggestion of going provoked laughter and self-deprecating humour among my Egyptian interlocutors—for whom comedy was often an art. Regardless of these tendencies, students responded enthusiastically in late 2011 when al- kūrsāt administrators announced a field trip to the museum. The Museum was located at the northern end of the city, immediately adjacent to the zoo and not far beyond the main campus of Beni Suef University. The exterior of the building was not particularly striking, though it did include a facade of rose granite pillars to commemorate the temple of Heracleopolis which once stood in Ihnasya el-Medina (a town less than 20 km to the west of Beni Suef). By the time I arrived at the museum at 10 a.m., there were already two young male students waiting. Soon thereafter, we were joined by one of the instructors, Fady, and his cousin, a professional tour guide who we had arranged to guide our visit. Eventually all the students on the signup list arrived, and Fady paid the one Egyptian pound entrance fee for each person before we made our way inside. The dimly-lit building interior was far larger and more open than I expected. The guide explained that this architecture was inspired by Beni Suef’s Meidum pyramid—another favourite site for al-kūrsāt field trips. The tour would be chronological, the guide explained, moving from the pharaonic, to the Christian, to the Islamic and then modern periods. Together we shuffled to and from the display cases of artifacts, jewelry, sarcophagi and paintings—almost all of which were collected from the local area (though Beni Suef’s most famous ancient artifact, the

142 “Meidum Geese”, resided permanently in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo). The mood amongst the students was light and jovial as it often was in Egyptian gatherings. At the same time, the group was focused and interested in the tour, and we had the quiet solitude of the museum all to ourselves. Many students asked questions of the guide, who usually began by trying to answer in English before reverting to Arabic as the exchanges extended in detail and duration. We eventually made our way up the stairs to the Coptic portion of the museum. As students explored the section, the guide, who was Coptic, concluded his explanation for ancient Coptic burial artifacts by telling the group in English: “these are a very important part of Egyptian history, because Copts are the original Egyptians… the real Egyptians.” I looked around at the students, the vast majority of whom were Muslim, after the guide spoke. Most students did not react at all, though two students, one male and one female, visibly scrunched up their noses. The male student, a quiet and thoughtful young man named Ahmed, then spoke up, saying: —“but Christianity came to Egypt just like Islam. Egyptians became Christian, just like they became Muslim after.” —The guide was not deterred: “No, but I am talking about the original inhabitants. The Copts are the descendants of those people. I mean pure descendants. The first Muslims in Egypt were Arab and Islam in Egypt grew from that.” The male Muslim student frowned, raised his eyebrows and looked down. A couple of other male students who were Muslim whispered something to one another, and the guide called on us to continue the tour. Moving chronologically from the Coptic section of the museum, the guide’s framing of Islamic history in Egypt presented another moment of contention. While the guide generally described the Islamic artifacts with the same level of reverence he did Pharaonic and Coptic pieces, a selection of arms and armours from the Mamluk period compelled him to list a number of hardships Christian faced over the centuries, including forced conversion, discriminatory policies, the destruction of churches, and anti-Coptic riots and violence. As the guide was speaking, I saw Iman, a longtime student who I knew to be unafraid of debate, roll her eyes and let out a big sigh, before confidently addressing the guide: “OK fine, things were not perfect over

143 the course of a thousand years. Inta ‘ayz aye? (what do you want [expect]?). Any place has problems between people. To have some problems is very normal.” The guide shook his head in objection at first, but then proceeded to nod as Iman finished speaking. “Tamam, tamam (OK, OK), but we are talking about history. This is not my opinion… these are the facts.” It struck me that all the students’ demeanours, Coptic or Muslim, remained calm during the exchange. Some appeared to look down in avoidance while others listened to the exchange as if it was just another part of the tour. When we reached the end, the students clapped politely for the guide and we all posed together for a group picture—men standing on one side and women on the other. The teacher Fady then announced that we would be going to a Nile-side cafe for drinks. A couple of the students who had cars offered to drive a number of the students, while the rest of us packed into taxis. Aside from a female student’s brother acting as chauffeur, the commute was totally segregated along gender lines. As I sat in the taxi watching the city pass before me, I reflected on the adversarial exchanges between the guide and some of the students. Many times I had heard Coptic Egyptians privately speak about Copts as the true Egyptians, or emphasize their historic persecution at the hands of Muslims. It was less common to hear these discourses pronounced to a group of Muslims. Ultimately the exchange illuminates two key phenomena of Egyptian society. The first is that Copts, despite their subordinate position in Egyptian society, were not mere or meek victims, and that Coptic circles were marked by their own exclusivist discourses and practices. The second, and more significant, conclusion I draw from the highly contentious exchange is the way the majority of students, Muslim or Christian, dealt with it: silence. Again Lambek’s discussion of “what to say and when” comes to mind. Egypt today, like most places in the world, is full of exclusivist discourses. In most interactions, though, you would never know it; practical ethical judgements are simply that ubiquitous. ! ! ! ! !

144 The Primacy of Gender and the Limits of the Secular Ethos ! The secular ethos at al-kūrsāt, as shown in the previous sections, always had a partial and precarious existence. The co-imbrication of different religious and modern traditions in Egypt, like most of the world, made tensions between different ideas and identities inevitable. While I have argued that every person, and thus every interaction, in Beni Suef was composed of multiple strands of tradition, belief and interest, at certain times, some strands were more powerful than others. In the case of al-kūrsāt, it was appeals to religious authority that could occasionally act as trump cards; halting discussions—and the secular ethos generally—in their tracks. Despite the occasional instances where disagreements at al-kūrsāt centred specifically on religious difference (such as at the museum), the most prominent subject of debate facilitated by the secular ethos of the classroom was gender. The importance of gender was always immediately apparent in student seating patterns, where it was exceedingly rare for a man and woman to sit together in the same wooden two- person desk. In fact, the only cases where I witnessed this on a regular basis were when students were siblings or a married couple. This gendered division, however, never kept students engaging one another across gender lines. For instance, female students were not shy about complaining about the double standards that had emerged in Egypt’s rapidly changing society. Female students decried how spoiled their brothers were in the home, or criticized expectations that they do all the cooking and cleaning, as well as child rearing, while at the same time working a full time job. Others frequently criticized the level of sexual harassment women faced in Egypt. One cool winter evening in 2017, I observed an advanced class debate whether it was acceptable for women to work as judges in Egypt’s courts. In a class of Muslim and Christian students evenly divided between women and men, the debate began when two women gave a short presentation that outlined why women should be allowed to act as judges. Their main point was that since women in the West successfully held such positions, the inability of Egyptian women to do so came down to matters of culture, not biology. When they finished, the male

145 opposition grasped at straws to reply. Taking the lead was Essam, who entered into a short lecture on how women actually have a privileged place in Egyptian culture. A longtime student named Muhammad then put up his hand and opined: “I think the women are right. If they can balance their family life, then that is their decision. Egyptian women are very intelligent.” As he spoke, a young man with a trimmed beard, who had kept quiet until that point in the debate, raised his hand. In a quiet even voice, he declared “women cannot act as judges. Our religion is very clear on this. Our prophet, ṣalla Allāhu ‘alayhī wa- sallām (peace be upon him) only appointed men as judges. Islam forbids women from acting as judges because they are more emotional and moody by nature.” The man’s point was followed by complete silence. Within seconds, the teacher Ahab picked up his textbook and instructed the students to turn to the activity on the next page. After the class, I asked the teacher Ahab what he thought of what had transpired. He shook his head, and said: “You enjoyed that, did you? This is very normal here. Any time it goes to religion, it stops. Because no one can stand against religion. Of course, Christians in the class cannot argue with this, myself included, but Muslims can’t either—that is, unless they are educated in areas such as the Quran or the Hadith. This is a shame, because you saw the women. They were very excited to discuss the issue.” Over the course of my years of research at al-kūrsāt, I witnessed many other class debates about the role of women in society and the workplace, and oftentimes they unfolded similar to the discussion above, with women pitting themselves against men until one of the men cited the Quran or the Hadith. These were confidently pious Muslim women who, thanks to practical ethical judgement, had no problem embracing the secular ethos of the Christian-run program, but who were still no match for religious-based claims. As one longtime teacher summarized, “I think gender is the most powerful divider in the classroom, until religion divides again.” That said, sometimes female students weaponized religious authority for their own purposes. In the summer of 2015, I observed a mid-level class dominated by a particularly provocative male student named Ayman. He was married, and worked as an engineer at the new Sieman’s Plant. One evening, as the classroom discussion turned to household chores, Ayman

146 asserted, “my wife should be quiet the minute I enter the house after work. My children should do this too. I expect to find my dinner ready, and I expect her to do my laundry and iron my shirts. This is something in our culture, in our religion,” he finished. “She’s not your maid,” a student named Hanan shot back forcefully. Hanan then took up a tact, long employed by Islamic feminists, by seizing upon the example of the prophet Muhammad. Detailing how Muhammad partook in cooking, cleaning, sewing and milking the goats, she concluded emphatically “and still he was able to help his wife.” The other female students in the class literally cheered with delight, though the two Christian girls barely reacted at all— perhaps not wanting to become involved in questions of Islamic doctrine, but clearly amused. After class, I got a chance to ask Hanan in private about her opinion of the exchange with Ayman. “This makes me very angry,” she began, “when I hear someone treating their sister like a maid. And they will use the religious stuff to justify it, and then it’s hard for us to disagree. It’s not about Islam though, it’s about the mentality—how you are raised. Look at Taha or Mahmoud (two of Hanan’s friends from the conversation class). They would never act this way towards women. But if people are raised by fathers and brothers who think this way? Then khalās, ma fīsh fayda (then forget about it, there is no use). This is why I love al-kūrsāt, these men get exposed to new cultures and new friends. You then understand the hard way that people are different from you. That there are other ways to think.” Sitting at home in my apartment living room the night after Hanan and Ayman’s debate, there was an unexpected aspect of the day’s discussion that stuck with me. It was the way Muslim students in the class had talked in terms of “our religion”. In this large conversation class, there were several students whom I knew were Coptic Christian. I never heard these students nor any other Christian students ever address the class with the term “our religion”. Muslim students, however, did this frequently. Thus speaking for a religious collective in the first person was an exclusively Muslim prerogative. This difference is reflective of the great numerical superiority of Muslims in Egypt, as well as Islam’s permeation and predominance in the public and political spheres.

147 This latter point is of relevance to anthropologists who have theorized about the place of religion and secularism in contemporary Egypt, and beyond. In contrast to anthropologists who have focused solely on how the state tries to manage Islam, this chapter, and indeed this entire dissertation, explores the question of how ordinary Copts direct the place of Islam and Christianity in sites of crossing under church jurisdiction. At al-kūrsāt, I argue, Copts employed a secular ethos to accommodate different traditions. However, contrary to Hussein Ali Agrama’s picture of the religious/secular boundary as consistently pressing and vexing for all Egyptians, I have demonstrated how the program’s secular ethos mostly enjoyed a smooth coexistence with the religiosity of the people that populated it (and wider society that housed it).187 And just as program participants were routinely indifferent to the question of whether the program was Christian, Muslim or secular, I suggest wider Beni Suef society was often, though not always, marked by a similar level of accommodation to the endless entanglements of secular and religious discourses, institutions and traditions. Finally, the last section of this chapter has shown that when the secular ethos of the program did come under threat, such as during debates about gender roles, it was less at the hand of a “secular state” than it was from certain streams of reformist Islam. My illuminating the precarious place of secularism in the vernacular in ordinary Beni Suef society ultimately reminds anthropologists of the way the religious can variably push back against the secular in contemporary Egyptian society. ! ! Conclusion ! The secularism that exists at al-kūrsāt was not a product or part of Egyptian state secularism. Nor was it governed by any sort of formal program policy. Rather the secular ethos that emerged at al-kūrsāt was a tacit one, seized upon and facilitated by Bishop Athanasius—not from abroad—but from within Beni Suef society. The manner in which I witnessed the secular

187 Agrama, 2012.

148 ethos extend both beyond and into the classroom from outside society complicates assertions that secularism in Egypt entails a constant struggle and anxiety over the secular/religious problem- space. At the same time, I have shown instances where the program’s secular ethos was undermined by more powerful religious discourses and loyalties—ones that were regularly manipulated by the ostensibly secular Egyptian state. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, state secularism in Egypt has often amounted to ḥibr ‘ala waraq (ink on paper) that has no real substance until the authoritarian state becomes interested in wielding it. The secular ethos at the program and beyond in Beni Suef, in contrast, was very substantive. It was what enabled people to navigate the cramped quarters of a religiously diverse city. It was a secularism that was vernacular and lived. The secular ethos in Beni Suef, however, is not what motivated so many young Egyptians to attend the Coptic-run, Western-affiliated courses. The first section of this chapter showed that students’ concerns were far more practical. Generally speaking, young Egyptians required English for their studies and employment, and Al-kūrsāt just so happened to offer English classes (sometimes taught by native speakers) at a fraction of the price of other private language academies. Hence the main story of al-kūrsāt is a mundane, practical one. The ordinariness of this phenomenon runs counter to much of the literature that focuses on piety, liberal/religious binaries or feelings of doubt, failure and anxiety. While students articulated outright despair about the state and direction of the country’s political and economic spheres, I observed only self-confidence in students’ understanding of themselves as Muslims or Christians, as well as in the program’s institutional and ideological affiliations. It was practical ethical judgement which allowed students’ economic interests to sit comfortably and confidently beside their more high- minded philosophical ones. The student body’s engagement with cosmopolitan beliefs, ideas and discourses was not a reluctant one either. That someone could be a pious Muslim or Christian and still be liberal simply went without saying in most Beni Suef circles. In part, this coexistence was a result of the intense co-imbrication on a multitude of scales between modern, liberal or secular ideals on the one hand, and Islam and Christianity, on the other. Historically, this co-imbrication often unfolded in a colonial manner, serving to promote the interests of Western empire on the ground.

149 But colonial history is far from the whole story of liberalism, secularism or even Christian missions in the Middle East.188 Marshall Sahlins has wisely cautioned scholars against narrowly writing tristes tropes of Western hegemony by collapsing the lives of our subjects into a familiar story of colonial domination.189 Following Sahlins, Beni Suef residents who have embraced cosmopolitan, liberal or secular positions deserve to be taken seriously. The secular ethos at al-kūrsāt and beyond is one aspect of how the multiple strands of tradition coexisted in the lives of Beni Suef residents. Far from abetting the Egyptian state’s widespread efforts to control and repress the population, the skepticism, dialogue and inclusion that marked the secular ethos was inherently antagonistic to any form of authoritarian governance. Moreover, the precarity of the secular ethos was not only a result of an oppressive authoritarian state, but also the crescendo of exclusivist religious discourses that have permeated Egyptian society since the 1970s. Hence, when pious Muslim women spoke out against deeply ingrained patriarchy in Egyptian society, it was exclusivist and modernist understandings of religion that shut them down. Regardless of the state’s rhetoric, or the ink on its paper, the religious constantly encroached upon the secular in everyday Egyptian life. On the last day of an eight-week course in the spring of 2017, I asked the manager of the program, Rania, to reflect on whether the program succeeded in fulfilling Athanasius’ stated goal of bringing Muslims and Christians together. She told me “I think it works, as in it changes people, maybe we can say fifty percent of the time. Many really are affected long-term and keep a good feeling about Christians in their hearts. And many already have these feelings when they come to the program. But I don’t think this change happens that they suddenly say ‘now I love them’ when they hated them before. On the contrary, many people leave with the same feeling— neutral or even negative. But regardless of how they feel about these things… most of the students will be back.” !

188 Sharkey, Heather J. American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

189 Sahlins, Marshall. “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History,” in The Journal of Modern History, 65(1), 1993.

150 Chapter 4 —— Practicing Politics in Provincial Egypt: A Democratic Ethos amidst the Rise and Fall of Democracy as a State System ! ! Introduction ! On a blustery afternoon in the fall of 2015, a throng of people gathered outside the Beni Suef markaz al-nīl al-a‘lām (Nile media centre). Some in the crowd were Muslim sheikhs while others were black-robed Coptic priests. Heavily-armed police officers and soldiers from the Egyptian army were standing guard. Eventually a large black SUV pulled up to the front of the centre, and the muḥāfiẓ (governor) of Beni Suef emerged out of one of the rear doors. Soldiers enclosed upon him immediately, as bystanders got out their phones to take pictures. A single Coptic priest then approached the muḥāfiẓ and the two men kissed cheeks and exchanged pleasantries. Three of the sheikhs subsequently did the same, before the governor made his way up the steps and into the imposing beige building. Everyone else followed. People were gathered for an event titled “tagdīd il-fakr il-dīnī wa il-d‘wa l-il-wasṭiyya il- m‘tadila (Renewal of religious thought and a call for moderation)”. The conference was formally hosted by a civil society NGO run by the Beni Suef Coptic Diocese named the lagna il- igtamā‘iyya (the Social Committee—I refer to it simply as the “lagna” henceforth). The lagna was founded by a Coptic priest in 2005 with the stated aim of spreading a thaqāfat il-salām (culture of peace) in Beni Suef. I first conducted research at the lagna in early 2011. At that revolutionary time, lagna workshops and seminars were filled with calls for socioeconomic justice and political reform. Muslim and Christian voices there were highly critical of the state, and by and large lagna members articulated a vision of freedom, equality and democracy. The 2015 event, however, was something quite unrecognizable from the 2011 version of the lagna. At the head table of the large meeting room sat the muḥāfiẓ. He was flanked by the

151 Beni Suef undersecretary of the Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments), and the Coptic priest who had first greeted him. It was the muḥāfiẓ and the Awqaf minister who spoke first. The content of their message, broadly speaking, centred on the need for iṣlāḥ khiṭāb il-dīnī (reform of religious discourse) and a move towards moderation—all for the sake of al-waṭan (the country). The crowded room of Muslim and Christian clergy and laypeople sat and listened to the state officials’ message. The final person to speak was the Coptic priest at the head of the table. This priest, who I had never before seen at a lagna event, first apologized on behalf of Beni Suef’s Bishop Gabriel for his absence. The priest then delved into his prepared speech; an oration that quickly revealed itself to be an exegesis of a recent speech by Egypt’s President Sisi. The long-bearded man described how Sisi called for the togetherness of Egyptians, and that al-dīn (religion) hates al- shar, al-‘unf, wa il-irhāb (evil, violence and terrorism). The priest concluded his speech, and the event generally, by leading everyone out to the front steps of the centre to chant “la, la, l-il-irhāb (no, no to terrorism)” and “taḥyā maṣr (long live Egypt), yaḥiyā il-Sisi (long live Sisi).” As I stood outside watching the priests, sheikhs and other attendees cheer in unison, I reflected on how the lagna, and the country in general, had arrived at that particular historical moment. Of course, the key political development since the 2011 Uprising was the 3 July 2013 coup d’état, when the ostensibly secular military ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi from power. On the surface, the reassertion of the repressive and penetrating deep state fits neatly with the narrative most prominent in anthropological theorizations about politics in Egypt: that secular power is predominant in Egypt and political secularism is generative of the country’s political problems.190 Beneath the surface, however, shifting political practices and discourses at the lagna paint a much more complicated picture.

Above all else, this chapter is a contemporary history and ethnography of politics in provincial Egypt. The key concept that emerged in working through my materials, to my genuine surprise, was democracy. Rather than authoring a critique of democracy as a “Western” concept,

190 Agrama, 2012; Mahmood, 2015.

152 however, I provide a case study of tensions that might underlie any state in the modern world— tensions about the distribution of power and wealth, and the freedom to identify and critique that distribution. In the small 2011-2013 historical window Egypt experienced democracy as a state system, this freedom, and the country’s democratic ethos generally, was never higher. In the authoritarian present, on the other hand, such inequities are never discussed. This chapter is in many ways an engagement with the question Talal Asad poses about the extent to which democracy as a state system undermines democratic sensibilities as an ethos. Asad defines the latter as involving the desire for mutual care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the truth more than for immutable subjective rights, the ability to listen and not merely to tell, and the willingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmental toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity.” Democracy as a state system, on the other hand, “is jealous of its sovereignty, defines and protects the subjective rights of its citizens (including their right to “religious freedom”), infuses them with nationalist fervor, and invokes bureaucratic rationality in governing them justly; it is fundamentally exclusive.”191 My first response to Asad’s productive query, and my overarching premise in this chapter, is that we must historicize. This is because history shows quite clearly that the manner in which any one principle, ideology or ethos interacts with and within a state system depends entirely on the social and political contexts of the particular place and time. That is, historical developments are always contingent on a constellation of factors. This chapter will ultimately examine the ones that shaped political discourses and practices around democracy at the lagna before, during, and after, the 2011-2013 revolutionary period. In the first section of this chapter, I shed light on the principles upon which the lagna was founded and operated between 2005 and 2010. I illuminate how in its early years, the lagna was infused with peace-building discourses, a developmentalist logic, and a democratic ethos—all of which were part of the founding priest’s stated aim of bringing Beni Suef Muslims and Christians together to discuss common social issues. I contend, however, that the watchful eye of

191 Asad, 2011. p. 56.

153 the authoritarian police state prevented certain forms of truth-telling and incisive political critique, and as a result the lagna’s democratic ethos only went so far. Next, I chronicle lagna practices during the 2011-2013 period, elucidating how the fall of the Mubarak regime ushered in a two-year period where democracy as a state system manifested in Egypt. I demonstrate that the democratic ethos (particularly concern for truth and desire for mutual care) increased exponentially at the lagna, as well as Egypt in general, amidst the unprecedented levels of political freedom. I next consider ways in which democracy as a state system engendered exclusivist discourses that did undermine people’s democratic ethos. I argue these tensions were nevertheless grounded not so much in concern for subjective rights and much more out of legitimate concerns for the economic and political direction of the country. These worries were manipulated and then mobilized by authoritarian powers in the summer of 2013. The third component of this chapter examines how the lagna was transformed by the repressive political climate that followed the July 2013 military coup d’état. I show the 2013-2018 lagna to be a shell of its former self (both in terms of the number of active members and the enthusiasm of their engagement), where any political speech necessitated “playing along” in the political theatre of the regime. I return to the conference in the opening scene of this chapter to show that, although the political theatre lacked substance, it had very real effects; namely a cycle of sectarian discourses and violence. I conclude that this sectarianism was a distraction from the primary cause of problems in the country: the minority (not democratic) rule of a state that has been exploitative domestically and exploited internationally. ! ! Part One: The Early Years Lagna (2005-2010) ! The Sociopolitical Origins of the Lagna ! In How Economics Forgot History, Geoffrey Hodgson takes his discipline, and social science generally, to task for neglecting historical particularity in favour of abstract and

154 formalistic understandings.192 I believe the answer to this problem, not only rife in economics and political science but anthropology too, is historicism. According to the philosopher Ian Hacking, historicism is the theory that “ social and cultural phenomena are historically determined, and that each period in history has its own values that are not directly applicable to other epochs,” and that “philosophical issues find their place, importance, and definition in a specific cultural milieu.” In the end, Hacking articulates a need for “local historicism” that complicates grand unified accounts.193 Of course, none of these arguments are new to the field of anthropology: Franz Boas spent much of his career critiquing the predominant evolutionary theories and models of his day, advocating instead for a historical particularism. From a different era, Clifford Geertz reminds how “understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity.”194 Still in the necessarily deconstructive wake of postmodernism, I believe anthropologists of secularism could benefit greatly from adopting Boas’ rigorous empiricism and attention to particularity in order to develop our understanding in new ways. “Which comes first,” Hacking asks in Historical Ontology, “theory or experiment?”195 If we are to analyze a concept (such as democracy), we must first recognize, as Hacking does, that “a concept is nothing other than a word in its sites.” Hacking continues: “that means attending to a variety of types of sites.”196 In 1992, sporadic clashes between clandestine radical Islamic groups and security forces escalated into a full-scale insurgency across Egypt. The roots of the conflict were the same social, economic and political tensions that fuelled the 1970s rise of Islamic opposition in the country (see Chapter 1). The struggle in the 1990s, however, witnessed many more attacks by Islamist militants on Egyptian policemen, soldiers, politicians and foreign tourists. Coptic

192 Hodgson, Geoffrey M. How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

193 Hacking, 2002. pp. 52-53.

194 Geertz, 1973. p. 14.

195 Hacking, 2002. p. 15.

196 Ibid. p. 17.

155 Christians were also a frequent target for insurgents—especially in the region of Middle Egypt where Beni Suef lies. The Egyptian government responded to the violence with a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that held little regard for human rights or due process. By the late 1990s, the government’s efforts were successful and the insurgency had petered out.197 With the most threatening form of opposition to the Mubarak regime crushed, the repressive mechanisms of the dictatorial state began to recede slightly in the early 2000s. Amidst this change, the disastrous 2003 American invasion of Iraq helped act as the catalyst for peaceful opposition to the Egyptian regime, and over the remainder of the decade, the Kifaya movement, organized labour, and the April 6th movement carved out more and more territory for popular engagement.198 Far less political than these groups, the Beni Suef lagna was initially more a response to the socioreligious tensions that partly undergirded the 1990s insurgency than a call for democracy or governmental reform. Lagna founders saw that, though the Egyptian state’s draconian measures had muted the threat of violence Copts faced in Middle Egypt, the divide between Egyptian Muslims and Christians was only growing wider. It is important to note that the Coptic Church played a major role in the social gulf that grew along religious lines after 1967, and many Coptic officials have proven more interested in building walls than bridges over the years (see Chapter 1). Thus the lagna’s founder, Abuna Matta (Priest Matthew—ʾabūnā literally means “our father”), like his mentor Bishop Athanasius, was somewhat unique in his ecumenism. The Abuna was in his early fifties when I began fieldwork. He was of short and solid stature, and the manner in which his black garb fell off his body suggested a round, muscular build. He had a thick grey beard, and wore spectacles over his brown eyes that possessed a youthful luminosity. He expressed little cynicism and his words revealed openness to an enchanted world. His voice, which had a slight rasp to it, was warm and soft. Not surprisingly, the Abuna was beloved in Beni Suef, and people usually smiled at the mere mention of him.

197 Cleveland and Bunton, 2016.

198 See El-Desouky, Ayman A. The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amāra and the 2011 Revolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

156 When the Abuna emigrated to the United States for family reasons in 2015, however, these smiles turned melancholic. As I show later in the chapter, the administration of the lagna was strongly affected by the Abuna’s departure. One evening in 2012, I rode in a car to a lagna event with Abuna Matta, who was, as always, wearing his full religious uniform. As we moved along a mid-sized street lined with vegetable sellers, a couple adolescent boys on bikes swerved suddenly in front of us, forcing the Abuna to step on the brakes. Without hesitation, the Abuna honked his horn and pulled ahead to give the youth a quick lesson on road safety. The boys, who to my eyes were twelve or thirteen years old, had a rougher look to them. However, when the Abuna spoke, the two boys stopped immediately and respectfully listened to the Abuna before apologizing and pulling away. It goes without saying that Coptic youth show church leaders special deference, and I did not know the religion of the youth the Abuna scolded in the street. But based on the religious demographics of the city, it was highly likely they were Muslim. Why did the Abuna feel so comfortable lecturing those boys? Was it because of his position as a church authority? Or was he comfortable speaking up despite this position? Better yet, maybe his position and dress were irrelevant to his behaviour then, and it was more a result of the Abuna’s sociable personality, or, most likely, the disparate ages of the involved parties. As we drove away, I broached the subject of the exchange by asking the Abuna if he knew the boys he scolded. “No,” he chuckled, “they were just not being very careful.” The image of the Coptic priest scolding the two tough looking shabāb remained with me, however, so I prodded him further, asking if people in the street treat him with extra respect because of his position. He replied: “I think many people do. Other Christians do of course. And many Muslims do too. But there are other Muslims that I know hate me because I am a priest. To be honest, I don’t always feel safe walking in the street. But I continue to do so because I want to show that this gallabiyya is not strange. I learned this from Anba Athanasius, who always liked to walk the city’s streets. Growing up, I saw that with priests in my hometown of Maghagha too. Now priests do not go out as much as before. You know in recent years some priests have been killed just because of their dress.” He paused, before continuing, “I hope that the situation is changing now for the

157 better. I encourage other priests to walk in the street and to have a voice. This shows that we are people, and creates ma‘rifa (familiarity).” Ultimately, the exchange between the Abuna and the shabāb was significant for a number of reasons. For one, although the Abuna admitted feelings of vulnerability as a conspicuous Coptic priest, the religion of each party did not seem to matter to how he addressed the boys. Rather, it seemed so familiar and mundane to the involved parties—an example of how everyday Egyptian society functioned despite the spectre of exceptional violence (see Chapter 5 for my extended juxtaposition between the everyday and the exceptional in Egyptian society). The situation also shows how the behaviours and experiences of Coptic priests in the Egyptian street were complex and multifaceted. Here was a priest who admitted to feeling afraid, and yet who was also not afraid at all. Regardless of his mixed feelings, Abuna Matta had a strong inclination to engage his community and to build relationships and familiarity across borders—an ambition that would take form in the lagna. ! ! Organizing in Mubarak’s Police State ! A 2011 document estimates that lagna events attracted 1300 participants each year— though demographics fluctuated greatly from year to year, and event to event.199 The document makes no reference to the age, religious, gender or professional demographics that composed attendees, however, I observed the bulk of meetings to be made up of educated and professional middle-aged and young adults. Residents of Beni Suef were first made aware of the organization in 2005, when the Abuna advertised his group at such sites as al-kursat (which I examine in Chapter 4), the Young Muslims Association, the Coptic Association for Services and Training, Coptic churches in the city, the Association of Young Muslim Women, CEOSS, and the Egyptian Red Crescent Society.

199 “Muqtaraḥāt l-al-qā’āt al-thaqāfiyya il-mushtarika (Proposals for joint cultural meetings),” al-lagna al-igtamā’iyya Beni Suef, January 2014. From the Lagna Archives.

158 When the nascent organization began to publicize their meetings around town, Abuna Matta was contacted by the āmn al-dawla (state security). “They requested I come to the local station,” Abuna Matta recounted to me. “When I arrived at the office, they had a large file on me sitting on the desk. I was nervous.” The Abuna paused, sipping his nescafe with non-dairy creamer (a near-necessity for practicing Copts during the approximately 200 days a year they undertook their vegan fast—see Chapter 5 for more detail on Coptic fasting). “Funnily enough, the officer said they were actually happy we were creating this committee. He said they were thinking of telling the church to start something like this.” The Abuna rolled his eyes, skeptical of the last point. “They also offered to send soldiers to protect us. I did not really want this, but of course I could not say no. You can’t do anything away from ’āmn al-dawla (state security).”200 What can be learned from the fact that the Egyptian security forces were amenable to the lagna? Is it proof that the Abuna and lagna members were somehow complicit in the ambitions of the Egyptian state, and, as some anthropologists have reasoned, the geopolitical interests of the American empire behind it?201 To consider this, I want to briefly reflect on what exactly the state’s ambitions were. On the one hand, neoliberalizing states, such as Egypt, have welcomed the activities of private NGOs because they provide the types of services (civil society, education, health care) that the state no longer will. On the other hand, the late-Muburak era Egyptian state likely saw the lagna as working towards a more tranquil (and therefore more governable) society. Sectarian violence, after all, has sometimes not been in the state’s interest (though sometimes it has—see my discussion of the 2011 Alexandria church bombing and the Maspero Massacre in Chapter 1). My point is that the state allowed the church-run lagna to function because it was superficially apolitical, easily monitored, and of potential use to state interests—not because of any sort of ideological (i.e. democratic, pacifist, or secular) affinity. Besieged by an authoritarian police state from the very beginning, lagna members knew they had to watch what they did and said.

200 Emphasis mine

201 Saba Mahmood makes this latter argument in “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” 2006. p. 345.

159 Soon after meeting with āmn il-dawla, the Abuna visited with the head imam of the Ministry of Awqaf on Abdul Salam Arif street—one of the main arteries of Beni Suef. “This Imam is like a muwaẓaf (employee) of the government,” the Abuna explained, “but I met with many other Muslim sheikhs beforehand as well.” From the beginning, the Abuna made clear he wanted to hold his relatively nomadic lagna meetings at charitable and social organizations —“āmākan ‘āma (public places)—not religious ones.” The first few meetings, and most subsequent ones, were held at either Dayr Bayyaḍ (the Coptic retreat centre examined in Chapters two and five) or the meeting rooms at the Arwam Church. As a slight aside, the fact that Egyptians considered these sites to be non-religious places makes plain the extent to which religion and secularism are co-imbricated in Egypt, and how religious institutions infuse Egyptian society. In a 2015 interview, the Abuna recounted to me his memories of the first lagna meeting at the Dayr Bayyaḍ conference centre a decade earlier. The Abuna detailed how “the conference room had become crowded with attendees, and everyone was hesitating to start. I wanted to leave the leadership of the meeting to a lay person—to appear more neutral. But of course some people knew that I started the initiative, so I stood up and started to explain the idea. I said ‘don’t look at me in this black dress, see me as a person.’” The Abuna smiled with the characteristic glint in his eyes, “I think they did see me this way. There was already that m‘arfa (familiarity) with each other—between Muslims and Christians I mean. What I aimed to do with the lagna, like Athanasius did with the English Connection, was to create more avenues to build this familiarity. Thanks be to God the state was OK with this.” The Abuna paused, before leaning back in his chair and adding “I am sure God led us to do this. God helped us, because I am certain God was planning for future events.” The Abuna’s last comment, indicative of his faith, referred to the fact that Coptic sites in Beni Suef were completely spared during the country-wide violence that followed the 2013 Rāb‘a Massacre. Indeed, the Abuna had expressed to me many times his conviction that institutions like the lagna and al-kursat were the reason Copts in Beni Suef were left alone, when elsewhere in the country Christian shops and churches were burned. While the veracity of the Abuna’s view is impossible

160 to measure, it speaks volumes to the Abuna’s general belief in a familiarity/relationship/peace nexus. It is to this perspective I now turn. ! ! A Culture of Peace

According to several program reports published in Arabic and English between 2005 and 2014, the goal of the lagna was to hold seminars and workshops to “bring Christians and Muslims from Beni Suef community together to discuss common issues and concerns.”202 In interviews, Abuna Matta often framed his efforts as spreading a thaqāfat il-salām (culture of peace) in Beni Suef. As the lagna established itself, the primary means with which the organization pursued this goal was through semi-regular seminars and workshops with local priests, imams, charities and development NGOs. For instance, the lagna regularly hosted professors from Cairo and Beni Suef universities to impress upon attendees the importance of “accepting difference…with the ultimate goal of trying to widen their perspective and thoughts in order to create a good and tolerant new generation.”203 Peace discourses dominated lagna discussions throughout my fieldwork. This was in part a result of the fact that a Mennonite NGO, Mennonite Development Organization (MDO), was a principal funder of the lagna. Pacifism has been a central creed for Mennonites since anabaptism first spread across parts of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century, and the American couple who were MDO Egypt directors in 2005 told me in an interview that the lagna’s stated commitment to peace was the main reason why MDO agreed to help fund it. The lagna’s pacifism, however, was far from just a case of an Abuna’s financial opportunism. In many ways, pacifist discourses permeate Coptic churches and communities in

202 “Lagna Annual Report,” al-lagna al-igtamā’iyya Beni Suef, 2006; 2011. From the Lagna Archives.

203 “Implementing Group or Organization,” The Lagna of Beni-Suef Diocese, January 2014. From the Lagna Archives.

161 Egypt.204 The majority of Copts I spoke to situated their pacifism in Christian theology and the example of Jesus Christ. The Abuna liked to quote Jesus in the gospel of Matthew: ṭūba l-Sāna‘ī al-salām, la’anhum ābnā’ Allah yuda’wūn (blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God).” Some Copts, however, attributed their religious community’s relative pacifism to lessons learned from the sometimes harsh reprisals Copts experienced if and when they dared to fight with Muslims. Oftentimes the holders of this latter view considered Coptic pacifism to be a weakness, and cause of Copts’ alleged passivity not just in the social arena, but in the political one as well. Ever the idealist, and despite the many naysayers in his own faith community, the Abuna forged forward with his vision for spreading thaqāfat il-salām at the lagna. Seminar and workshop leaders’ presentations tended to be one hour long. Sometimes presenters used powerpoint presentations with bullet points, images, graphs and videos. At other times speakers passed out surveys and activity forms for participants to fill. It was common for attendees, as well as Abuna Matta, to interrupt seminar leaders with questions or comments. Spontaneous debates and discussions often followed before Abuna Matta handed the reins of conversation back to the speaker, and additional question and discussion time always came after the main presentation. On one occasion, a professor from the department of African Studies at Cairo University came to Beni Suef to address the lagna about “al-t‘āīsh al-silimī wa al-t’āuwwan fī al- mugtama‘” (the peaceful coexistence and cooperation in society). The professor, who happened to be Muslim, was introduced by Abuna Matta after he had provided general introduction to the group. There was less discussion at this event, in part because there were easily more than fifty people in attendance. The professor talked a good deal about social and political violence in different African contexts, and stressed the need for conflict resolution at a grassroots level. Seizing upon this theme, the next month the Abuna prepared a survey for people to fill out in order to stimulate discussion about conflict management. One prototypical question asked: mata akūn ana il-shakhṣ dhū al-nafūdh fī mawqif il-nizā’ (when can I be the person with the most influence in a conflict situation)? People’s multiple-choice options were: a) Be frank and let

204 Botros, Ghada. “Religious Identity as an Historical Narrative: Coptic Orthodox Immigrant Churches and the Representation of History,” in Journal of Historical Sociology, 19(2), 2006. p. 17.

162 others know my perspective, b) Try to negotiate the best settlement, c) Ask others about their feelings and perspectives, d) Focus on supporting others as much as possible, e) Intervene directly in conflict, but as objectively as possible.205 When it came time for participants to voluntarily share answers for the questions, the Abuna was careful to not to argue that one tactic was better than the others. “What is important is that we are thinking well,” he counselled, “so that we can consider every option in peaceful conflict management.” Open discussions, where people were encouraged to provide and listen to different opinions followed each multiple question. What the above examples illustrate, more than anything, is the inclusive and open-ended intellectual climate the Abuna sought to cultivate in his promotion of peace. The Abuna’s attempt to encourage dialogue and build relationships across religious lines mirrors Talal Asad’s democratic sensibility as an ethos, as well as Charles Taylor and Harvey Cox’s view of secularism as centring on the acceptance of human difference.206 The diversity of lagna content reveals deep flexibility and engagement with different ideas, and ultimately a tendency towards greater inclusivity. Far from being about cynical interest in these early years, the Abuna’s lagna was ultimately driven by Christian pacifist inclinations and a democratic ethos.

Roots of a Democratic Ethos ! The study of democracy in the Western academy has largely been the purview of political scientists (and to a lesser extent historians and sociologists). Anthropologists, meanwhile, have not been inclined to embrace the category. Stephan Feuchtwang wonders if anthropologists’ “squeamishness” about democracy is a result of the discipline’s purported “doctrine of non- interference in the politics of the field of study” or its “unwillingness to think about criteria of

205 “Anmāṭ ādārat al-ṣarā’ (Conflict Management Patterns),” Survey, 21 September, Lagna Archives.

206 Taylor, 2007; Cox, Harvey. The Secular City. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

163 judgement, of political improvement.”207 As I see it, the problem with anthropology’s reluctance to engage such prominent political concepts more directly is that the academic (and popular) discourse becomes dominated by political scientists’ sometimes uncritical and prescriptive assumptions about how abstract political categories operate in practice (such as the common trope that political problems in the Arab World are rooted in Arabs’ inability to democratize).208 An exception to anthropology’s disengagement with conventional political categories is Saba Mahmood’s and Talal Asad’s extensive scholarship on secularism—which I believe functions best as a critique of how political scientists wield the concept. Mahmood’s and Asad’s engagement with the category of democracy, on the other hand, is quite limited. The key opposition Asad sets up (between democracy as an ethos and democracy as a state system) is provided only at the end of his 2011 book chapter “Thinking about religion, belief, and politics,” and explicitly asks to be teased out more; hence, the theoretical and conceptual lens of this chapter. In some ways, Asad’s democratic ethos calls to mind Amartya Sen’s view of democracy’s grassroots origins; centred on discussion, debate and public deliberation.209 This understanding sees democracy as something that can be quite separate from specific state institutions or functions. Similarly, Andrea Muehlebach argues democracy has a sensorium that leads to local assembly, while Laura Kunreuther suggests democracy has a sound—the voices of shouting, and chanting, and debating that help form the message of collectives.210 Asad’s democratic ethos is also reminiscent of the intersection of compassion and restiveness that composes Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea of a “democratic soul”—a soul which, according to Tocqueville, is ultimately

207 Feuchtwang, Stephan. “Peasants, Democracy and Anthropology: Questions of Local Loyalty,” in Critique of Anthropology 23(1), 2003. p. 94.

208 As far back as 1868, John Lothrop Motley wrote about democracy as the “destiny of advanced races,” (see Motley, “Historic Progress and American Democracy”, 1868) while the routinely disproven “democratic peace theory” was proposed even earlier.

209 Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005.

210 Muehlebach, Andrea. “Commonwealth: On Democracy and Dispossession in Italy,” in History and Anthropology, 29(3), 2018.; Kunreuther, Laura. “Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity,” in Cultural Anthropology, 33(1), 2018.

164 marked by a desire for people’s well-being.211 Taken together, these different perspectives give breadth to Asad’s vision of a democratic ethos concerned with truth, understanding and mutual care, and helps elucidate my own use of the term in the remainder of this chapter. The lagna before the 2013 coup was in many ways marked by what Asad terms a democracy as an ethos. During the 2005-2010 period, however, the democratic principles and rhetoric employed by lagna administrators were not overtly political in that lagna members did not discuss such things as democracy, political reform, or political representation. In surveying the lagna’s textual and video archive, I did not find a single instance where Hosni Mubarak or the key arms of the state (the police, the army, state security) were referred to by name. This was not the result of a lack of desire on the part of participants, but because the taking up of any form of political opposition in Egypt was a perilous endeavour. Beneath the muted political language, however, the democratic intellectual roots of the lagna are made more decipherable by looking at the historical intellectuals and cultural figures lagna leaders cited in this early period. One of the most frequently mentioned of these was the Egyptian journalist Abdullah Nadim (1845-1896). A key intellectual of the 1879-1882 ‘Urabi Revolt, Nadim travelled the Egyptian countryside in attempt to educate the Egyptian masses about the need for political, economic and social justice in Egypt. Nadim’s mode of political mobilization was decidedly grassroots, where real political change could only come through social work—a view reminiscent of the one espoused by lagna members.212 Other cultural figures presented over the years include intellectuals such as Salama Musa, Raymond Williams, Louis Awad, and Gamal Hamdan, and poets such as Ahmed Fouad Negm, Abbās al-Aqqād and Bayram al-Tunisi. All these historical figures shared basic characteristics: Most of them were Egyptians who lived and worked in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Many advocated for the redistribution of political and economic power in the country, and several identified as democrats or socialists. Much of the intellectuals’ thought was rooted in anti-colonial sentiment. Finally, nearly all of these thinkers spoke out against the political powers

211 Smith, Steven B. Political Philosophy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

212 see Fahmy, Ziad. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011 and El-Desouky, 2014, pp. 51-56.

165 of their age (the British, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak regimes) and advocated for some form of democratic representation. Thus, the intellectual traditions lagna leaders and members embraced makes clear the democratic orientation of the organization. Unable to address political reform directly, the pre-2011 lagna, like many other Egyptian grassroots organizations before 2011, instead championed a developmentalist logic. Members frequently spoke in terms of al-tanmiyya (development)—whether human development, sustainable development or social development, rather than al-‘adāla (justice) or al- dīmuqrāṭiyya (democracy). Educated middle-class professionals talked passionately about dealing with the unemployment and poverty faced by Egyptians living in the countryside and slums. Lagna events and members often extolled the virtues of education in combatting these issues. At a 2011 lagna meeting, a Muslim woman named Hadeer (who worked for the charitable organization Resala) argued “if people are educated, then everything else will follow: employment, health, and political awareness. We need to make people literate so they can understand what is good for them.” Several times I heard Abuna Matta and other session leaders claim that getting more Egyptians to read would benefit Egyptian politics and society. “In previous generations, reading was very important,” the Abuna once explained to a room of adults at Dayr Bayyaḍ, “but now people read less, and people often only learn from propaganda or rumours.” Finally, lagna members asserted the need for better healthcare, sanitation and vaccinations. A July 2009 meeting, for instance, aimed to educate attendees about the swine flu that had broken out across the globe. During this episode, the Egyptian government responded to the threat of disease by slaughtering approximately 300,000 pigs despite there being no evidence the virus was transmitted by that species. Given Islamic prohibitions on pig consumption, it so happened all the pigs in the country were owned by Coptic Christians. The Coptic Zabbaleen (informal garbage collectors) in Cairo were most affected by the cull because of their reliance on the pigs to process urban waste. The entire ordeal led to the sentiment, widespread among Copts, that the government’s nationwide pig cull was more a strike by a Muslim state on a Coptic

166 minority than a policy aimed to contain disease.213 Lagna members did not dare to address this feeling at the July 2009 meeting, however, nor did they voice the sentiment, also widespread among observers, that the government’s extensive H1N1 policies were a means of intimidating and distracting Egyptians from the drastic decline in Egyptian healthcare.214 Instead, the presentation benignly listed methods of prevention, such as general cleanliness and hand washing, and avoiding crowded and closed places. Thus while the lagna—with its desire for mutual care, concern for truth, and cultivation of critical thought and listening—reflected what Asad defines as a democratic sensibility as an ethos, the above example of self-censored discussion suggests the democratic ethos only went so far. But what was limiting it? Was it democracy (or secularism?) as a state system? Though in some ways the state’s culling of pigs reflected the bureaucratic and technocratic rationality of modern state power, the state’s heavy-handed policy was rooted neither in democracy nor secularism.215 Rather it was a result of the reach and power of a modern centralized state, a state which, because it was authoritarian and violent in its use of coercion, was impossible to challenge or criticize. Unable to critique the inequities, corruption and excesses of the Mubarak regime outright prior to 2011, the lagna’s embrace of certain aforementioned intellectuals and discourses made critique implicit, and therefore, beneath the surface, a democratic ethos reigned. Still, an authoritarian police state (not a democratic one) was watching, and therefore political opposition at the lagna, like at any other civil society group (religious or secular), had its limits. In January 2011, however, Egyptians descended to the street calling for the downfall of the regime, and everything changed. !

213 Leach, Melissa and Tadros, Mariz. “Epidemics and the Politics of knowledge: Contested Narratives,” in Medical Anthropology, 33(3), 2014. Leach and Tadros detail how pro-government media united political, medical and religious narratives in their coverage of the cull.

214 Ibid. See also Tadros, Mariz “State Welfare in Egypt Since Adjustment: Hegemonic Control with a Minimalist Role,” in Review of African Political Economy, 33(108), 2006; “Panic or foresight? Swine flu in Egypt,” in The Economist, Vol. 393, Issue 8651, Oct. 3 2009.

215 The state also banned all Muslim mulids in 2009. See Schielke, Samuli. The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012, p. 1.

167 Part Two: The Revolutionary Years (2011-2013) ! Democratic Egypt ! The word democracy comes from the Greek demokratia—demos (the common people) and kratia (power).216 For most of Egypt’s history—and Egypt is hardly unique in this regard— political elites ruled the land with little concern for the wants or needs of the people. As shown in Chapter 1, the modern Egyptian state became less and less responsive to popular want or opinion from the 1970s onwards. A minority ruled, and the demos or sha‘b (common people) were left an afterthought. First called out in the Arab Spring’s birthplace of Tunis, “ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an- niẓām (the people want the downfall of the regime)” was very clearly marked by what Asad terms a democratic ethos, or Tocqueville’s democratic soul. And in early 2011, Egypt’s sha‘b made it known they wanted their opinions heard. There is considerable debate, among scholars and ordinary Egyptians alike, about how precisely to conceptualize what occurred in early 2011. Was it a revolution? Was it a coup? Was the uprising doomed to fail because of the powerful counterrevolutionary forces both within and without? What is not up for debate, however, is that Egypt eventually experienced relatively free speech and free and democratic elections for the first time in its history. Granted, these elections were marred by back room intrigue and dealings by different power players, but these sorts of dealings are characteristic of any political system of a certain scale. At the end of the day, Egyptians were able to form political parties, campaign and vote quite freely. Living in Beni Suef between 2011 and 2013, I often watched small Muslim Brotherhood parades weave through my lower-class neighbourhood’s side streets. Campaigning for the Islamist group’s new hizb al-huriya wa al-a‘dāla (freedom and justice party), Muslim brothers and sisters carried flags painted with the organization’s green and white emblem—the word wā‘dū (prepare) emblazoned across the bottom. A car with speakers on the roof typically separated the men at the front of the parade from the women in the back. People often told me

216 Wolin, Sheldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. p. 243.

168 Beni Suef was balad ikhwānī (Brotherhood country), and indeed the governorate provided the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi with one of his highest rates of support in the 2012 presidential election. Salafis in Beni Suef also mobilized around the new political potentialities. On a warm fall evening in 2011, my wife and I were walking to al-kursāt to teach our evening classes when we ran into the front end of a hizb al-nūr (Party of Light—the main salafi party) march down Beni Suef’s main Abdul Salam Arif street. Unable to get out in front of it, we were forced to stand and wait for several minutes while the long line of 300 bearded men, many of whom were holding long banners and ropes, walked slowly passed. As highly visible foreigners, we attracted lots of stares, and some of the marchers paused their chanting to offer us a short “welcome” in English before continuing on. The hizb al-nūr party would go on to finish only second to the Brotherhood in Egypt’s 2011-2012 parliamentary elections. In 2012 I attended several presidential candidates’ rallies in Beni Suef, such as one in the centre of town by Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (an Islamist activist and politician who contentiously left the Muslim Brotherhood to run for president). Standing under a dark night sky with a few friends who were lagna members, I listened to Aboul Fotouh speak passionately to his provincial audience about social justice, job creation and empowering the masses of Egypt’s young people. There was no obvious security presence, and we did not have to look nervously over our shoulders for being there. When election time came, long lines of voters wound about the city for blocks. My elderly neighbours, having voted for the first time in their entire lives, proudly showed me the election ink on their fingers. That the victors in every election during these years were figures from the Muslim Brotherhood, the longtime nemesis of Egypt’s ruling elites, is proof enough of the country’s electoral freedom. My basic point is that Egypt between 2011 and 2013 was very much experiencing democracy as a state system.

! ! !

169 The Lagna under Democracy as a State System ! So, to return to Asad’s question: how does democracy as a state system undermine democratic sensibility as an ethos? Looking at the case of the lagna, it would seem democracy as a state system allowed Egyptians’ democratic ethos to thrive like never before. But how exactly? The late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes: “If democracy is about participating in self- government, its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom.”217 The 2011 fall of Mubarak’s dictatorial regime opened the door for this very sort of culture. Politics was suddenly the topic of conversation everywhere; in shops and cafes, in factories and universities, and in mosques and churches. Egyptian intellectuals could live and work in Egypt and appear on Egyptian, Arab and international media while maintaining intellectual integrity. Television programs, most notably Al-Bernameg (The Program) with Bassem Youssef, drew millions of viewers to their accessible, satirical and humorous form of truth-telling. And the aforementioned Zabbaleen (informal garbage collectors), previously dispossessed by the government’s 2008 pig cull, asserted themselves, like many other Egyptians, through street protest.218 All this points to the availability of knowledge, honest judgements, and intellectual integrity Wolin claims composes a supportive culture for democracy.219 The lagna, for its part, made a concerted effort to spread a democratic culture after the 25 January uprising. In the summer of 2011, lagna administrators organized a biweekly discussion group for adults to discuss their hopes for the country. The group, which was usually around thirty individuals, met at the social services building on the Arwam church grounds. I recognized many of the attendees from al-kursat, where the Abuna advertised the group regularly. Almost all of them were between the ages of 18 and 35, and were split evenly between males and females, and Muslims and Christians.

217 Wolin, 2008. pp. 260-261.

218 Leach and Tadros, 2014, p. 249.

219 Wolin, 2008. p. 262.

170 Attendees were unanimous in their celebration of the revolution, and their hope for democracy. Like elsewhere in the country, open-ended discussions allowed attendees to articulate their ambitions and optimism in all different directions.220 To provide one example, lagna members agreed education reform was a crucial starting point for the country. —“It is not that we need to reform the education system,” a young man named Mahmoud quipped, “it is that we must nafaggaro (blow it up).” Everyone in the circle laughed and nodded. —“But what does that mean?” the Abuna asked. —A woman named Asmaa replied: “We must teach students to think critically—not just to memorize and repeat. People need to ask questions more. We never used to question our government.” —“Yes,” Mahmoud agreed, “awareness is critical for il-dīmuqrāṭiyya (democracy). People must learn to understand what is good for them, and good for the country.” Mahmoud’s assertion touched on an argument made by many Egyptians at the time, and claimed by Plato almost 2400 years earlier, that many citizens “did not know what was good for them” and “were not ready for democracy”.221 —“The problem,” a man named Philobateer said during another meeting, “is that there is a lot of ignorance in the countryside. So what happens in elections? Just like what occurred during the istiftā’ ta‘dīl al-dustūr (the March 2011 Constitutional Referendum), most Egyptians will just listen to what their priest or sheikh says.” Others in the room nodded, recalling how heavily religious leaders had weighed in on the question of constitutional amendments.222

220 Mittermaier, Amira. Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.

221 Plato. The Republic. New York: Books Inc., 1943.

222 Responding to an article by Hussein Ali Agrama in The Imminent Frame, Samuli Schielke emphasizes the political mobilization of religion in the 2011 constitutional referendum, detailing how “in Friday sermons on the eve of the referendum, a regular argument made by preachers in Egypt’s mosques was that voting ‘Yes’ was ‘an obligation by Islamic law’ (wagib shar’i) to prevent Egypt from falling under godless liberal and/or Christian rule.” See https://tif.ssrc.org/2011/03/11/asecular-revolution/. Accessed 11 November, 2020.

171 —“So that is why we have to educate people!” Asmaa responded enthusiastically. “It does not mean democracy is not suitable for us. It is. It just means that we will have to work for it. At least we now have the spaces to do it!” At a meeting in late August 2011, a professor from Cairo University came to present at a lagna meeting—an event that attracted over 50 attendees to the Dayr Bayyaḍ conference room. “The revolution was good,” the professor told the audience in his presentation, “we were living under tyranny and oppression with Mubarak. The police were violent and corrupt. Living conditions, health and education deteriorated. Ordinary Egyptians did not have a voice. Unfortunately, these problems will not be easy to change.” The professor paused, before continuing: “But Egyptians can accomplish anything. In order to succeed, we will have to change their own traditions, attitudes and behaviours that have been altered by the corruption.” According to the professor, the key for changing these values was “al-dīmuqrāṭiyya (democracy), al-iḥtirām l-al-akharīn (respecting others), qabūl il-ikhtilāf (accepting difference), al-hiwār (dialogue), and ‘amal al-gamā‘ī (collective action).” Attendees were very receptive to the professor’s encouraging, if not somewhat vague, message, which was organized on plain powerpoint slides, offering him gracious applause upon his conclusion. Another example of the thriving democratic ethos was a 2012 presentation given by Abuna Matta titled “Mabādī’ fī ḥulūl il-ṣarā‘āt wa binā’ al-salām (Principles in conflict resolution and peace building). In the presentation, attended by 26 individuals at an office building on the church of Arwam grounds, the Abuna stressed that conflict is natural and can be productive, before providing a list of pros and cons of conflict. On the pro side, the Abuna listed things such as deeper understanding of each other, personal and communal growth and improvement, building relationships, and clarity of ambiguous issues. On the negative side, the Abuna listed the problems of violence, division, loss (of values, life, identity and purity), discrimination, isolation, and al-ẓulm al-siyāsī (political oppression).” The appearance of the last point was unique to the 2011-2013 period—a significance I will return to later in this chapter. Politics was not the lagna’s only focus during the 2011-2013 period and administrators continued to run educational and developmentalist workshops. For instance, a large 2012 workshop focused on environmental sustainability, while a seminar in early 2013 centred on

172 leadership and communication skills. But political language, and critique of specific leaders and branches of power (such as SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, the police, or the army), was ubiquitous at these events too. Thus the lagna leadership’s primary mission, vocabulary and talking points continued to centre on the noble ideals of a democratic ethos—respect, education and inclusivity—rather than exclusive nationalistic ones. The main difference from pre-2011 manifestations of the lagna rested on the fact that the organization now operated amidst the social and political freedom of democracy as a state system. Egypt’s authoritarian police state was in full retreat, however temporarily. And so the democratic ethos flourished. ! ! Breaking Down Church Walls ! Unlike some Egyptian Muslims (who had oppositional outlets mostly in the form of political Islam) political avenues for Copts were severely limited after Gamal Abdul Nasser crushed the power of the Coptic laity in the 1950s. Ever since then, the state dealt with Egyptian Copts through what was essentially a millet system (see Chapter 1), where the institution of the Coptic church was treated by the state as the sole voice of Egypt’s millions of Coptic citizens.223 Political secularism this was not. As detailed in Chapter 1, the Coptic church benefitted immensely in terms of wealth, influence and status under the neo-millet arrangement. But come 2011, Coptic figures like Abuna Matta were daring to think and dream in new ways. One thing he and other Coptic members of the lagna did was lead a number of workshops at Coptic churches in Beni Suef and surrounding towns and villages in the summer and fall of 2011. When I asked the Abuna why he made those meetings Copts-only, he answered: “when we are talking specifically about voting, and political parties, I have to be very careful with Muslims. They see me as a representative of the church, of course, so it is difficult for me to reach them in the same way other people would. On the other hand, if you want to reach the most Coptic Egyptians, you must go to the church.”

223 Sedra, 2014.

173 The Abuna’s touring presentation for Copts was titled tafa‘īl al-mushāraka al-waṭaniyya (Activating National Participation). Each meeting began with Abuna Matta leading a prayer and introducing his work with the lagna. Subsequently delving into his message, the Abuna then petitioned his audiences to see that the revolution made more direct engagement with political topics a necessity. He explained that the goal of the seminar was to educate the villagers about the political possibilities created by the revolution, and information about how to choose what party and presidential candidate to support. In the final section of these talks, the Abuna provided an overview of the major political parties, including the Wafd Party, the Front Party, the Egyptian democratic party, the hizb il-nūr, the Freedom and Justice Party, and the Free Egyptian party. These party overviews were very general in nature, providing the names of key figures and reciting the official party platforms and avoiding normative statements. Circling back at the end, the Abuna asked “why do we go to the priest to ask him about politics before we go beyond the church walls to face political life? The Coptic priest is your waṣī rūḥiyyan wa laysa igtamā‘yyan (spiritual guardian, not social).” The Abuna followed this rhetorical question up with a non-rhetorical one: “But why do we, as Christians, not have a role in the political developments?” People’s immediate responses to the question at each church were similar: there is no time; there are no organizations to encourage us; there is tafriqa (discrimination) against Copts. The Abuna responded by telling the group that in the new political climate it had become the duty of every Christian to be present in society. The main conclusion I draw from these talks, and Abuna Matta’s administration of the lagna generally between 2011 and 2013, is that democracy as a state system emboldened Abuna Matta to work as hard as ever to spread a democratic ethos in order to break Egyptians out of the socioreligious division and isolation that had plagued the country since 1967. He encouraged his audiences to participate more fully in politics and society with a critical eye and concern for truth. This was because, for the Abuna, democracy as a state system provided an opportunity for the majority of Egyptians to have their voices heard, and to pursue a country invested in their mutual care. Like Abuna Matta, many other Egyptians seized upon the democratic climate to challenge previously taken for granted power structures. For instance, I observed several protests

174 by Copts in Beni Suef against the rigidity of Coptic divorce law, while in Cairo parallel protests on a much greater scale. In August of 2011 I witnessed a wave of protests after Israeli forces killed a number of Egyptian soldiers in Sinai. In Beni Suef, activists painted a giant Israeli flag on the pavement of a major mīdān (square) for local residents to drive over, and in Cairo protesters raided the Israeli embassy. All this was indicative of the tension between the anti- Israeli sentiment of most Egyptians, and the pro-Israeli policy of the Egyptian state. Finally, labour protests became a regular occurrence in Beni Suef and beyond in the 2011-2013 period, and even police officers were found protesting their wages and working conditions. All this smaller-scale activism calls to mind Sheldon Wolin’s view of democracy as something best experienced locally and episodically. A democratic ethos, a democratic soul, a democratic culture—ultimately each of these concepts aptly describe what unfolded in Egypt when democracy as a state system was allowed to gain traction. !

Exclusivist Politics in Democratic Times ! By early 2013, however, the hopeful political climate in Egypt was in some ways beginning to change. The 2012 election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi as president was a polarizing development—one which some Egyptians (many Copts included) were not inclined to accept. Indeed, the majority of Copts I spoke to in the two years after the uprising perceived an increase in the power of Islamists in Egyptian state and society. Sometimes this power was obvious, such as in election results. At other times, the precarity Egyptian Copts felt during the revolutionary years was more subtle. In late 2012, I got onto a microbus with my friend Bassem (who was a lagna member) to go down to the corniche. The bus was mostly populated by middle-aged higab-wearing women and children, while the driver was an older man with a large beard. A sermon was playing on the speakers. Choosing not to focus on what the orator was saying, I looked out at the crowded street’s blur of bakeries, shops and cafes. We had just passed the charred skeleton of the ousted hizb al-waṭanī’s (National Democratic Party or NDP) headquarters (set alight in the 2011

175 uprising) when Bassem nudged me and said in English with a low voice “try to listen to what the preacher is saying.” Not yet two years into my Arabic education, my understanding of spoken fuṣḥa was limited. However, I was able to glean that the speaker was talking about children and schools. There was a word the preacher kept saying, though, that I did not recognize: “ta-na-ṣir”. I gathered from Bassem’s demeanour that it was not the time to discuss the sermon further. No one else on the bus seemed to be reacting to the sermon tape one way or another. The driver calmly smoked his cigarette, occasionally honking and motioning to other motorists, and everyone else sat looking out the windows. At last we reached the end of the road, and Bassem and I got out. —“So what did you understand?” Bassem asked, as we began walking down the corniche to meet a friend at a cafe. —“Nuṣ-nuṣ (half and half)” I replied. —Bassem explained: “The preacher was talking about Muslims going to Christian schools. He said that his friend’s son went to a Christian school and when he came home he prayed like them. He was saying that Christians in Egypt want to spread Christianity and therefore Muslims should never send their children to Christians schools.” I then asked Bassem about the word the preacher said repeatedly that I did not understand: “It was something like ta-na-ṣir?” —“Tamam, bravo a‘layk (Good, well done). Tanaṣir means to convert to Christianity. So do you understand what the preacher was arguing? This kind of talk has become very common since the revolution.” In the climate of free speech, Coptic Christians also espoused exclusivist discourses and opposition, not just to the Muslim Brotherhood, but to the revolution generally. For example, in February 2013 I listened to the mudīr (manager) of Beni Suef’s main CEOSS (Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services) branch give a meandering talk about such issues as health, education and modern farming in the countryside. My interest was piqued at the end of the talk when the CEOSS mudīr dove headfirst into Egypt’a political situation. “Our economic and social problems only really started to become worse after the revolution. Il-Islamiyyīn (the Islamists) are ruining everything. We now see Hosni Mubarak was good. There was stability,

176 there was security.” A couple members in the audience shook their heads and audibly cast doubt on the mudīr's historicizing. The mudīr just stared back at them, repeating matter-of-factly “la, Mubarak kan kwayyis. Kan kwayyis (no, Mubarak was good. He was good).” Over subsequent months, popular Egyptian dissatisfaction with Morsi crescendoed in what was still a climate of remarkable political freedom of expression. I encountered many other Christian opponents of Morsi in the first half of 2013, and like the mudīr, they were not especially shy about it. Most of the people I first witnessed handing out anti-Morsi Tamarrud (rebellion) pamphlets were Coptic taxi drivers—their car interiors sometimes covered with images of crosses, popes, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary. Likewise, when I asked a young Coptic man on the eve of the June 2013 protests if there would be many Christians in attendance, he quipped “it will all be Copts!”224 My interlocutor’s jest was more revealing of the level of political freedom Egyptians—Copts included—enjoyed in the Morsi period. And yet many Copts, and many Egyptians generally, were compelled to rebel against the democratically-elected leader. Thus I want to be clear, in some ways democracy as a state system did undermine people’s democratic ethos. Though the freedom of the 2011-2013 period did not give birth to exclusivist religious discourses, it did provide a platform to many individuals and groups that had not had one previously. The microbus story illustrates why and how Egyptians of different stripes averred concern for the subjective rights of Egypt’s citizens and especially citizens’ religious freedom (recalling Talal Asad definition of democracy as a state system). In effect, these sectarian actions and discourses worked to distract and divide Egyptians, and ultimately undermined people’s democratic sensibilities. The main oppositional talking points to the Morsi regime, however, centred less on matters of subjective rights (as Asad suggests) and much more on the president’s alleged incompetence, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s purported desire to simply replace Mubarak’s NDP in order to “yisayṭar a’la al-balad” (dominate the country). Egyptians blamed Morsi if the trains

224 Needless to say, many Egyptian Muslims also helped propel Morsi’s fall. One thing that is significant about experiences and memories of these events during the ostensible “Islamist Winter” is that we find conditions of relative peace, freedom and security during which Copts felt safe to politically engage.

177 were late or if the power went out. On Al-Bernameg, Bassem Youssef savaged Muslim Brotherhood figures at every little misstep they made. This freedom of speech was part of the Brotherhood’s undoing, ultimately, because of the way the deep state (a powerful clique of overlapping government, military, intelligence and security forces and figures) was able to coordinate and escalate it.225 In the end, much of the opposition to Morsi was grounded in concerns for the economic and political direction of the country. Writing in 2020, Egyptians hold these concerns more than ever. Only now, and ever since the summer of 2013, the freedom to critique has not existed. ! ! Part Three: Egypt after the Coup (2013-2018) ! Political Theatre after 2013 ! Beginning in April 2013, the ostensibly grassroots Tamarrud, or Rebellion, movement (which was supported by various foreign and domestic elites),226 would aim to force early presidential elections. Tamarrud eventually culminated in the 30 June protests, which in turn facilitated the military coup that ousted the democratically-elected Morsi from power, with the Egyptian military seizing control on 3 July 2013. Over the course of July, security forces committed a number of smaller atrocities against coup opponents, before the 14 August Rāb‘a Massacre signalled the final nail in the revolution’s coffin. In an instant, ordinary Egyptians were made more vulnerable than ever to the coercive arms of the deep state. Politically, democracy as a state system ceased to function. Every election held in Egypt since the coup has been a farce, lacking in the most basic qualities of what one might consider free or fair elections. Moreover, the new Egyptian leader has ruled as a dictator—

225 See “sū’āl al-dawla al- ‘amīqa fī maṣr (The Question of the Deep State in Egypt),” Al Jazeera News, 11 June, 2012 for the Egyptian intellectual Fahmi Huwaidi’s reflection on what constitutes a “deep state”. ﺳﺆال-اﻟﺪوﻟﺔ-اﻟﻌﻤﯿﻘﺔ-ﻓﻲ-ﻣﺼﺮ/Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.net/opinions/2012/6/12

226 Ibrahim, Arwa. “Leaks from Sisi's office allege far-reaching UAE 'interference' in Egypt,” Middle East Eye. March 2, 2015. Retrieved from http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/fresh-leaks-462283720

178 unaccountable to everyone except a select few Egyptian military and business elites (as well as his foreign benefactors, of course). Egypt has certainly not been a democracy since mid-2013. Unsurprisingly, political discussion at the lagna faded markedly after the coup. Reminiscent of the pre-2011 years, the suddenly-besieged lagna administrators opted to embrace the organization’s developmentalist thrust more, while talking about politics only in vague terms and with no pretence of any sort of mobilization. Complicating lagna administration was Abuna Matta’s immigration to the United States for family reasons in 2014 (the Abuna had preferred not to leave, but other family members were adamant). The Bishop of Beni Suef selected Abuna Thomas as Matta’s replacement. Abuna Thomas had a reputation among my Coptic interlocutors as a “company man”—someone without any history or inclination of political activism, and who could be trusted not to rock any boats in the future. Not surprisingly, Abuna Thomas proved to be disengaged from the lagna in subsequent years, and was absent from most lagna events I attended between 2015 and 2018. The result of the broader political climate was the cheapening of lagna discourses around peace and justice. “There is no use now,” a longtime lagna member named Muhammad told me in 2017 when I asked him why he no longer went to events. Life for Muhammad had changed dramatically since 2013—less a result of politics than his having become a husband and father that year. “I am busy,” he explained as we sat in his living room amidst an array of Islamic art, artificial flowers and heavily-airbrushed photographs of family members. “You know there is no freedom now. People at the lagna know this too. You think they don’t want to talk freely anymore?” he asked expressively. After a moment of silence, Ahmed inhaled deeply and said “la, al-amal mātat (no, the hope died).” While hope may have died in reality, the Sisi regime worked tirelessly to project hopefulness.227 And so long as the regime talked the talk (about subjective rights, religious freedom and exclusivist patriotism), others in Egypt were forced to as well. In late May of 2015, I attended an event hosted by the lagna titled “haqī fī al-dastūr (My right in the constitution)”. Although the seminar was formally hosted by Abuna Thomas, the actual presentation on the

227 See Amira Mittermaier’s discussion of the Sisi regime’s use of “hope” in Chapter 6 of Giving to God, 2019.

179 constitution was given by a man named Adil, who worked as an English teacher in Beni Suef. Adil’s seminar focused most on Article 50 (which outlines the Egyptian state’s commitment to Egypt’s cultural and religious diversity) and Article 64 (which centres on freedom of belief and religious practice in Egypt). Some discussion broke out at different points, but it was far more truncated than before the coup, and no one bothered to point out the obvious: that the constitution was mere ḥibr ‘ala waraq (ink on paper). Significantly, the event’s focus on subjective rights was occurring in the wider political context of authoritarian dictatorship—not democracy as a state system, as Talal Asad implies. After the event, I went to a cafe with two members of the lagna named Youssef and Kareem. Sitting out over the peaceful crawl of the Nile, I asked them about what they thought of the constitution workshop. —“Ya‘nnī, kan helw (I mean, it was good [lit. sweet]),” Kareem responded initially, his voice leaking reservation. —“Lakin… (but)?” I replied. —“Lakin (but)… lākin al-dustūr mayhimminīsh (but I’m not interested in the constitution). We all know what this government is, so what is the point?” —I then asked the men what they thought the lagna administration's goal was in running the event. —“what else are they going to do?” Kareem answered. “Nowadays anyone who talks about politics has to follow the rules or they will end up in jail.” —Youssef nodded in agreement, and then said to me in a low voice “the politics in our country now are like a giant masraḥiyya (play). The government and politicians say and do many things; about freedom, about democracy, about rights, but all that is kalām fāḍī (empty words). It is just a big masraḥiyya.” —Kareem looked at Youssef with a grin: “Is the play a comedy or a tragedy?” Before Youssef was able to answer, the cacophony from a large wedding convoy flew past our seats at the side of the corniche road. The front few cars swerved sharply from side to side, blasting sh’abī (popular) music, and everyone in the party honked and cheered boisterously.

180 —“It depends,” Youssef replied, turning back to us once the noise had passed, “but mostly tragedy.” A sad smile came over his face. In Democracy Inc., Sheldon Wolin contends that “in modern dictatorships lying to the public was a matter of systematic policy and assigned to a special ministry (sic) of propaganda. Statecraft as an especially bad joke…”228 The cognizance Kareem, Youssef, and most other Egyptians I spoke to, had of the political charade in Egypt’s dictatorship lends support to Wolin’s argument. Critics of Western democracies have pointed out that, while people living under dictatorial rule are exposed to a barrage of lies and propaganda from their politicians and press, at least they know they are being lied to. On the other hand, people in Western democracies are far more likely to take the words (and lies) of their leaders and mass media as fact.229 Another striking feature of my conversation with Kareem and Youssef was the passing of the wedding party as we talked. Everyone in the party looked so happy. And happy they were, despite the violent political climate and bleeding economic one. In most ways, it would be fair to say, day-to-day life in Beni Suef did not change all that much over the seven years that spanned my time there. Even under Sisi, people were free to live their lives, work their jobs, and marry and have a family. But anyone who dared to hang on to their political memories or ambitions, of democracy as a state system or democracy as an ethos, was bound to be disappointed—or worse.230 Self-preservation meant either just not thinking about it or playing along. Emblematic of the latter tack, the conference in the opening scene of this chapter is most representative of how democratic sensibilities as an ethos in Egypt died amidst the political charades of authoritarian rule, and so to it I now return. ! ! !

228 Wolin, 2008. p. 261.

229 McChesney, Robert. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New York: The New Press, 2000; Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

230 I take the concept of democracy as a form of political memories from Muehlebach, 2018, p. 355.

181 Taḥiyyā Sisi (Long Live Sisi) Conference ! The Beni Suef markaz il-nīl il-a‘lām (Nile media centre), which played host to the event, sits alongside numerous other government buildings at the far north end of the city, just past the city zoo. The meeting room inside was filled to the brim with people. At the one end of the large, main table sat the muḥāfiẓ (governor), the undersecretary of the Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments), an Azhar sheikh, and the main Coptic priest. As mentioned, it was the muḥāfiẓ who spoke first. The tall and strapping state official, who had a decidedly arrogant demeanour, initially seemed less interested in the subject of the seminar (about religious reform) and more intent on recounting his apparently many achievements as governor. The Minister of Awqaf then stood and orated a nostalgic view of Egypt’s recent past. “How can we return to the beautiful past,” he asked, “there was no difference between anyone and everyone had a voice.” Immediately after the wazīr finished speaking, the muḥāfiẓ stood, announced he had another engagement to attend, and hurried out of the room with his team. Finally, the priest provided the exegesis of a recent speech by President Sisi. As people shuffled out of the meeting room afterward to chant Sisi’s name on the front steps, I met a longtime lagna interlocutor named Roshan. “What did you think of the meeting?” I asked her. She replied with a giant eye roll as chants of “la, la l-il-irhāb (down with terrorism)” rang out in the background. Roshan then opined in a low voice: “this is Egypt now.” Though an ocean away, Abuna Matta continued to follow his former flock and activities in Beni Suef—the lagna included. On one phone interview in late 2015, I asked the Abuna if he had any opinion about the lagna conference with the muḥāfiẓ earlier that year. Somewhat to my surprise, the Abuna did not seem to think the event’s nature was that out of the ordinary. “It was like this before 2011 too,” the Abuna asserted, “in that you must do everything with permission or in partnership with the government. This is not optional.” —“but what about the lagna chanting ‘long live Sisi’? That was new, right?” I asked. —“That I cannot comment on. I was not there, as you know. I really do not know how the government deals with the church now.”

182 I could tell the Abuna was not comfortable talking about certain aspects of the conference, so I changed the subject. It was of little use to prod the Abuna about the obvious. The Taḥiyyā Sisi lagna conference took place in an era when political freedom in Egypt was at an all- time low. As a result, the lagna was effectively reduced to acting as an arm of the Egyptian state. This transformation, however, was not unique to the lagna. Indeed Sisi’s counterrevolutionary regime had worked tirelessly since coming to power in 2013 to crush all political opposition. Still, the Coptic Church’s overt cooperation with the Sisi regime, as evidenced by the taḥiyyā Sisi conference, made Egyptian Christians an easy target of criticism for the regime’s opponents, and starting in late 2016, ordinary Copts began to foot the bill with their lives. ! ! The Politics of Resentment ! The hierarchy of the Coptic Church supported the Sisi regime from the moment of the 3 July 2013 coup d’état. Since then, Pope Tawadros and President Sisi have shared the same stage many times, with the Egyptian President making unprecedented visits to the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo for Coptic holidays. The photo-ops these visits generate have afforded the Egyptian state the ability to portray itself, both domestically and abroad, as the defender and protector of Coptic Christians. More broadly, the state has marketed its relationship to the Coptic Church as illustrative of the type of inclusive politics it has claimed to facilitate. Coptic Christians consequently became a target for militant opponents of the Sisi regime in late 2016. The violence started with the 11 December Botroseya bombing that killed 29 people at a church adjacent to the main Coptic Cathedral in downtown Cairo, and several other major attacks followed in 2017. Days after the 9 April 2017 Palm Sunday attacks on Coptic churches (which killed 45 people), I met with two interlocutors named Ahmed and Walid at an air- conditioned indoor cafe just off Beni Suef’s corniche. We all sipped ahwa (Turkish coffee) and the two Egyptian men smoked a type of shīsha called mu‘sal al-salūm (an unflavoured, harsh- tasting water pipe tobacco that my interlocutors assured me “real men” smoked). As an Egyptian football match played out on a TV in the background, I asked the men their opinions of the

183 attacks. Ahmed, a chemical engineer, answered quickly: “many people blame Christians for the problems now. Everyone knows they supported Sisi, and now they are paying for it.” “But the attacks on Christians are attacks on the government,” Walid interjected, thick smoke emanating from his mouth, “they are trying to discredit Sisi by showing he cannot provide security.” He paused for a moment to inhale from his water pipe before adding: “But I think many Muslims know the Christians don’t like Sisi anymore either. Everyone is suffering from the prices. Really the only people who like the President today are old people and women… and the army and police of course!” Ahmed, however, did not agree entirely. “But of course the Christians have a deal with the regime too. They are afraid of the Islamists. But the Christians actually have it good. If there is a problem between a Muslim and a Christian, the police will take the Christian’s side. The Christians have it very easy. What is important,” Ahmed continued, “is that Christians can complain to āmn il-dawla (internal security) about Muslims and have them go behind the sun (an idiom for police disappearance). And they are wealthier. They are mostly doctors and pharmacists. They can control and effect authority. They are very powerful—with their connections in the West too.” Eventually Ahmed, Walid and I left the cafe in Ahmed’s car to drop me off at a church NGO event I was attending at the Arwam Church. Walid pulled his car right up to the metal barricade that had been erected outside a block away from the church and both men got out to embrace me goodbye. When I subsequently walked through the checkpoint, a police officer stood up and gruffly told me to open my knapsack and a couple other armed officers walked over to look at my passport. Thankfully a young Coptic acquaintance recognized me and came over to smooth my entry into the church. “Welcome to Egypt!” Ahmed waved with a smile as I finally made my way past the security. The meeting at the church that evening was a planning session for an annual youth conference in Germany, with which the lagna was affiliated. A total of twelve Beni Suef youth were being sent that September—all of them Copts. Further indicative of the detrimental social effects of a dictatorial police state, it was only in the freedom of the 2011-2013 period that Abuna Matta felt comfortable sending Muslim participants. After the meeting, I went with two Coptic

184 friends from the lagna, Mariam and Hani, to a cafe on the corniche. It was just before dusk, and golden rays of sunlight splashed out across the river. We ordered tea from the waiter, devouring the chicken Banne (breaded chicken) crepes we had picked up on the way before the hot drinks even arrived. Once satiated, I asked Mariam and Hani, recalling my conversation with Ahmed and Walid earlier that day, whether they thought Christians got better treatment in Sisi’s Egypt. Mariam just laughed, while Hani answered “of course not.” —“But isn’t it true that a disproportionate number of political prisoners are Muslim?” I asked them. —Mariam replied swiftly “they are in prison because they are against the government, not just because they are Muslim. The government simply does not want more protests. This is their only real goal.” She paused, before adding: “Sisi knows Christians won’t do anything and will never leave him, so the regime really does not have to worry about us. Of course the police are bad, but their discrimination is siyāsī, mish dīnī (political, not religious). If anyone, Muslim or Christian, tries to organize against the government they will be in trouble. But if they leave politics alone, they will be fine.” Hani nodded. “We are actually angry at the president. He is not doing his job to protect people. He is stopping moderate Muslims like Ibrahim Eissa and Islam Bahiri while aligning with salafi sheikhs who defend the craziest hadiths in al-Bukhārī.231 If we really wanted to help the country, he wouldn’t encourage taṭarruf (extremism)” Hani finished emphatically, referring on the one hand to the state’s repression of “liberal” commentators, and on the other to Sisi’s close alliance with conservative Egyptian Salafis and their Gulf backers. —“So many Christians criticize Sisi now?” I asked. —“kiteeeeer (lots)” Hani replied, waving his hand expressively, “but the main reason for this is economic, not political. Just look at the prices.” Indeed, by 2017 only members of Egypt’s uber- wealthy did not feel the pains of the country’s rampant inflation and stagnant wages.

231 ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī is one of the six major hadith collections (al-kutub al-sitta), and was written in the ninth century by the Sunni hadith collector Muhammad al-Bukhari.

185 After we finished our tea, the three of us decided to walk for a bit on the corniche. A chorus of frog croaks filled the night air, and families sat about the grassy patches picnicking on blankets. Just before coming to a small children’s amusement park on the corniche, we met a group of young men I had played football with at the church nādī (club) years earlier. “Izzayak ya Izaak (Hello Isaac),” one of the young men grinned jubilantly, holding out his hand for me to shake. Having not seen me in some time, the next thing the young Coptic man thought to say was: “wa ay ra’īk fī al-Sisi bita‘na (so what is your opinion of our Sisi)?” All the young men, the questioner included, then broke out into howls of laughter. Continuing our walk moments later, Mariam made sure it was not lost on me that this group of young men had been entirely Christian, and yet Sisi was a complete punchline to them. “Maybe a few more Christians (than Muslims) are tricked into thinking the regime is good for them,” Mariam mused, “but this regime definitely does not belong to us (Christians).” Ultimately sectarian discourses in Sisi’s Egypt, whether ones blaming Copts or about protecting them, have proven to be a means of divide and rule and a distraction. But a distraction from what exactly? In short, minority rule in Egypt. I am referring not, however, to the sort of minority (religious, racial, ethnic) that typically comes to mind when people encounter the term. Rather I am thinking more about wealth and interests; the interests of a few that dominate policy over the interests of the many. In order to best understand how Egypt has shifted away from democracy since 2013, one must look beyond distracting discourses around sectarianism and into the cynical and flexible world of power politics. ! ! Minority Rule ! It felt like it had been forever since I last saw Mahmoud. The young man was a regular at lagna events in the 2011-2013 period, as well as during my fieldwork in 2015. However, he was nowhere to be seen during my research at the lagna in early 2017. Then suddenly in April of that year, there he was, sliding in, characteristically late, to a Dayr Bayyaḍ lagna event. I

186 immediately recognized the trademark grin on his face, though the thick beard I remembered was absent. Mahmoud was accompanied by his best friend Mena, another longtime lagna member. The meeting that day centred on the topic of secularism, equality and non-discrimination. The discussion seemed to boomerang from one vague anti-discriminatory platitude to the next, and at no point did members engage in the kind of incisive political critique of specific political figures and institutions that marked the 2011-2013 lagna. When the seminar ended, I made my way across the room to greet Mahmoud and Mena. “Wishak wala al-amar (Is that your face or is it the moon—an idiomatic greeting to someone one has not seen in a while)?” I asked, to the amusement of both young men. “Mr. Izaak!” Mahmoud responded enthusiastically, “I was in the army. Do you see my face? Maybe it was like the moon before, but not now!” he quipped, pointing to the darkened skin on his face. “I was stationed in the Western desert for the past year. They call our cohort the ‘slave cohort’ because everyone looks black at the end of their service.”232 As the three of us made our way out of the meeting centre, Mahmoud asked me if I wanted to walk back to Beni Suef with them. I assented happily. Skirting past the heavy army and police detail that had been stationed at the centre’s entrance since the 11 December Botroseya church bombing, we turned right out of the centre and walked south along the winding country road. “So how was the army?” I asked Mahmoud as a pickup truck stacked high with red onions swerved past us with two friendly honks. —At first he just shook his head and let out a heavy sigh. Then, without even a hint of levity, he muttered “I hate them so, so much.” —“Who?” I asked. —“The Army, the officers. I never thought I would meet someone worse than our president, but some of them are so, so close-minded,” Mahmoud said with exasperation, “I mean, really, these

232 Mahmoud’s understanding that dark skin colour was related to slavery might have been rooted in Arab and American conceptions and presentations of the African slave trade, or, perhaps more likely, as a remnant of Egyptian colonial and nationalist stereotypes of the Sudanese as slaves that crescendoed in the late nineteenth century (see Troutt Powell, Eve. A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

187 people do not even think,” He sharply rapped his own forehead with his fingertips as he finished speaking. Mena simply offered a sad, knowing laugh. As we arrived at a section of the road bracketed by rows of banana trees, Mena told a story about army corruption. “When I was in the army, I was stationed in Alexandria,” he began. “The army had built a new hotel there, and my job was to help set everything up. The officers I worked under were totally unqualified to do this, but they were there because they had kūsa (idiomatic for connections—literally ‘zucchini’). Of course, on the surface this is already very corrupt. Why is the army building a hotel? Or a gas station, or grocery store, or food production, like they do in our country?” He fell silent as we passed by a small fruit stand in front of an orange grove. A ragged, brown donkey brayed next to the dusty display. “Anyways, the general in charge decided to create a kahk (biscuit) bakery in the hotel basement in order to make extra money. I did the inventory for this equipment since I was almost the only soldier who could read or write. What I noticed was that the forms listed all the machinery as German-made, but what we were setting up was all Chinese. When I asked the supervising officer about this, he said to enter everything as German. Overall I’d say they budgeted for five million pounds of German equipment, but only spent 500,000 on Chinese. They pocketed this money, and then the kahk business made them even more.” —“And others in army leadership have no idea this is going on?” I asked. —“That is the funny thing!” Mena answered, “other generals did find out. But then they just wanted a piece. So it just carries on. And this is just what I saw personally. Just think how vast the corruption is at the top.” As we turned onto the final section of the country road before Beni Suef bridge, Mahmoud, who seemed to already know Mena’s story, spoke up. “Since the coup, this army corruption has only gotten worse. Sisi needs the army as his power base. We have thousands of retired generals, lieutenants, and officers, and they retire young; maybe 40 or 45. Their pension is not as high as they would like. So what do they do? They appoint them to all the civilian positions—electricity, water, waste management… everything. This is the real inequality,” he finished, motioning back to the retreat centre where the lagna’s inequality discussion had taken place.

188 —“But you would not say any of this now at the lagna?” I asked. —“No, of course not,” Mahmoud replied. “Everyone there knows not to now. But I bet most people at the lagna do not like the army or the president.” —With my own research in mind, I could not resist a follow-up question: “but the lagna supports secularism. Is the army ‘almānī(secular)?” —“‘‘almānī ay ya ‘am?! (what secular uncle?!),” Mena blurted as Mahmoud started to laugh loudly. “You think the army is committed to any idea or ideology? No. It is about maṣālaḥ (interests). Maṣāliḥ wa sulṭa (interests and authority).” After a moment of walking in silence, Mena added “and the army is hardly secular. Was Maspero secular?” he asked rhetorically, referring back to the army’s 2011 massacre of and sectarian incitement against peaceful Coptic protesters (see Chapter 1). “And how many Christians are in the army’s leadership? There are many other areas and positions in this country where I cannot enter simply because I am Christian.” Mahmoud nodded in agreement. “And of course the root of this is not Islam either,” Mena added, “It’s the soldier mindset. Show me one country where army dictatorship is good. They are all failures. No one thinks and no one has a voice. It is all following orders.” We arrived at the base of the Nile bridge as Mena finished speaking. A dozen or so women sat selling bulṭī (Nile tilapia) out of large metal containers which emitted an offensive fishy odour. On the road beside us, a steady line of taxis, cars, microbuses and motorcycles zoomed by. After walking a while up the bridge sidewalk, I seized upon the last thing Mena had said. —“If everyone is following orders, who is at the top of the pyramid?” I queried. —“Sisi of course,” Mahmoud replied quickly, before elaborating: “and the other generals and business elites. But they really just belong to amrīka, wa Isrā’īl, wa is-sa‘ūdiyya (America, Israel and Saudi Arabia). That is who controls this country now and this region. And they all just care about their own interests, not ours. This is what we tried to change,” Mahmoud said, referring back to the 2011 uprising, his voice trailing off. In the silence that followed, I turned to gaze out over the Nile, the city, and the barren desert mountains in the distance.

189 In her insightful ethnography on lower Egyptians with kidney disease, Sherine Hamdy argues Egypt’s “pursuit of neoliberal economic policies and the concomitant normalization of relations with the United States and Israel left Egyptian citizens, in the view of many patients, defenceless in a weak state, one that is both exploited and exploitative, one that leaves its people feeble and diseased.”233 Exploited and exploitative—this is how I heard so many Egyptians, in so many words, describe their state. Ultimately Egypt’s path to this present was historically contingent on a constellation of complex factors: colonialism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, local corruption, as well as the general tendency, so common in human history, for wealth and power to congregate in the hands of a few. The 2011 uprising, and the democratic state system that followed, was an opportunity to change the country’s course; to guide the state back towards its earlier promises of universal welfare. When the fall of Mubarak’s dictatorship gave way to democracy as a state system, one could suddenly hear the voices of the majority: democracy as an ethos. At no point in this chapter have I suggested that the majority spoke in unison, or could agree on much of anything. Rather I simply mean that, quite literally, the majority of Egypt’s 90 million people were free to speak and demand. By the time of my 2017 conversation with Mahmoud and Mena, it was all a distant memory. ! ! Conclusion ! This chapter is not a call for democracy. It is certainly not suggesting democracy is “the solution” to the plethora of political and economic inequities that cut across human history and geography. Democracy did not prevent Canada’s government from riding roughshod over indigenous peoples, nor did it obstruct almost 100 years of institutionalized slavery in the United States (or that country’s often anti-democratic foreign policy). Democracy can be, as the saying goes, two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch. As I write this in 2019,

233 Hamdy, 2008. p. 560.

190 purportedly democratic states—from India to Turkey, Brazil to Hungary, Israel to the United States, among many others—lurch further and further towards violent exclusivism and authoritarianism (while retaining the name and trappings of democracy as a state system). Likewise, history is full of examples where non-democratic rule has brought great benefit to the demos (common people). For instance, the Arab world’s early postcolonial period was marked by modernizing regimes that were generally committed to the social and economic development of the lower and middle classes within. No Egyptian ruler tried harder to lift up the Egyptian masses than Gamal Abdul Nasser (that Nasser’s many failures profoundly shape Egypt today is besides the point). None of these early postcolonial regimes, whether in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere, were democratic. A more recent example is China, where an authoritarian government has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty—all this without the slightest pretence of democracy. Needless to say, authoritarian rule has also caused great suffering in human history. My basic point in stating all the above is that, given the mixed record of any system of government, it makes little sense to theorize too much about categories such as democracy, authoritarianism or secularism across space and time. Likewise, this chapter is a story of multifaceted intersections between religion and politics: how religion and religious institutions variably opened and closed possibilities for dialogue and democratic sensibilities as an ethos. And likewise, I am not inclined to distill these highly contingent intersections into scientific theory. In the end, this is a chapter rooted in local historicism and historical particularism.234 My primary argument is that democratic sensibilities as an ethos increased amidst the rise of democracy as a state system at a certain place and time: Egypt between 2011 and 2013. At both the lagna and more widely, ordinary Egyptians in this period were free to talk, complain and agitate, and, as a result, displayed a renewed interest in dignity, truth and mutual care. Abuna Matta combined the lagna’s existing democratic ethos with the freedom of democracy as a state system to encourage Beni Suef Copts and Muslims to think critically and question taken for granted power structures.

234 Hacking, 2002.

191 My corresponding thesis is that, after the 2013 coup d’état, democracy as an ethos and democracy as a state system died a simultaneous death. Thus it was not democracy as a state system that undermined democratic sensibilities as an ethos, as Asad wonders, but authoritarianism. Once again, the interests of the majority in Egypt have been silenced by the rule of a minority of political and economic elites. Sectarianism grew as both a consequence of and distraction from the situation. The penetrating political and economic power of the highly corporate Egyptian army represents a further privatization of decision-making, and the silencing of all dissent facilitates this process of de-democratization.235 In his description of inverted totalitarianism, Sheldon Wolin writes: “The fact of terrorism, combined with the imaginary it has assumed in the national consciousness, will provide justification enough for retaining the security apparatus, subsidizing the defense industry, and nurturing ‘the fear factor’.”236 Though Wolin was writing about the United States at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, he may as well have been referring to post-2013 Egypt. After Mahmoud, Mena and I had crossed the bridge into the city, we walked for a while down Abdul Salam Arif street. “The problem,” Mahmoud said, as we passed a large poster of the president, “is that they made everything so hateful. No one even wants to talk to the other sides anymore.” In the distance, a heavily-armed police convoy rumbled up the street. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

235 I take the term “de-democratization” from Muehlebach, 2018. p. 348.

236 Wolin, 2008, p. 241.

192 Chapter 5 —— Everyday Life in Exceptional Times: Church Bombings, Checkpoints and a Festival for the Virgin Mary ! ! Introduction

On Palm Sunday 2017, the day Coptic Christians were celebrating Jesus Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem, twin suicide bombings ripped through Coptic churches in the lower Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Tanta. Forty-seven people lost their lives and many more were injured. Although my provincial fieldsite of Beni Suef lies more than 200 km south of the delta centre of Tanta, and even further from Alexandria’s Mediterranean coast, the Palm Sunday attacks hit close to home. Like for many Egyptians, the twin bombings engendered fears inside me that the country was spiralling out of control. After all, the violence came less than four months after a suicide bomber killed 29 people at a Coptic church adjacent to the main Coptic Cathedral in Cairo. On the day of the Palm Sunday bombings, I was engaged in fieldwork at Abuna Bishoy’s miracle khidma (service) at the Beni Suef Coptic retreat centre of Dayr Bayyaḍ. Upon hearing the news as I ate lunch in the centre’s cafeteria, my mind quickly (and self-centeredly) went to the well-being of my wife and our two young children seated across the table from me. Was Egypt safe for my boys? Had I made a mistake in bringing them there in the first place? My fears, like the concern of Egyptians generally, increased weeks later when gunmen opened fire on a bus convoy carrying Copts on their way home from a Minya monastery, killing 29. The state’s response to the unprecedented violence was swift. In Beni Suef, all roads surrounding churches were blocked off with metal barricades. Heavily-armed security forces were placed at checkpoints arranged outside the church wall perimeters, asking any passer-by for identification and explanation. Even more dramatically, the church announced the cancellation of

193 all church trips to mawlids (saint festivals) and monasteries—a decision the church undoubtedly made in close consultation with state authorities. How, in this season of violence, I wondered, would I be able to undertake meaningful dissertation research on the Muslim attendance of Coptic places and programs? As the weeks passed, the days grew longer, and the stifling heat of Egyptian summer set in, I was relieved to discover that, despite the new security measures, social dynamics actually changed very little at my three ongoing fieldsites (Bishoy’s miracle khidma, al-kūrsāt, and the lagna). Muslim and Christian visitors to each place continued to come and go in a generally free and relaxed manner, albeit with more frequent ID checks and bag searches. In many ways, I felt this persistence of crossing in particularly trying times vindicated my attempt to shine light on the dynamism of Muslim-Christian overlap in Egypt. That is: even in a season of church bombings, lives marked by crossing went on. It was not until August of that year, during the annual two-week festival of al-‘adraʾ (the virgin Mary), that the harsh realities of securitization would set in for my research, and for Beni Suef festival-goers generally. The Virgin Mary festival, referred to colloquially by most Beni Suef residents as the mūsim (season), has been held at the Coptic retreat centre of Dayr Bayyaḍ for centuries. In the summer of 2017, however, there was considerable doubt among Beni Suef residents—clergy and laypeople alike—as to whether the mūsim would take place at all. When I finally got confirmation that the mūsim would happen, I called the retreat centre to make sure my room reservation, made months earlier, was intact. The desk worker on the other end of the phone assured me that a room would be there for me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “there are less reservations this year.” On the first day of the festival, my friends George and Bassem picked me up from my Beni Suef apartment to drive to the retreat centre. It was late afternoon, and as we crossed over the Nile on Beni Suef bridge, George mentioned there would be a lengthy wait time to get into the retreat centre. “How long?” I asked. George shook his head that he didn’t know. My question was answered minutes later, when we came to the back end of a long line of vehicles more than one-and-a-half kilometres from the retreat centre. Somewhere in the midst of the mass of idling cars and buses stretched out ahead of us, the first of several armoured police barricades sat.

194 Many people were simply getting out of their buses and walking to the festival. I slouched back in my seat and fanned myself with my blue and gold Canadian passport, preparing for a long wait. Ninety minutes and two car searches later, we arrived at the makeshift parking lot that had materialized in a farm field across from the retreat centre. Police officers, clutching large automatic rifles, lined the perimeter. With my knapsack of personal belongings in tow, I followed George and Bassem across a small canal bridge to the centre’s main gate. We passed many visitors coming and going, including a middle-aged mother and her adolescent daughter—both Muslim, judging by their maroon higabs. To my eye, the pair looked happy and relaxed enough. I, on the other hand, felt like I could cry. As a visible foreigner, I attracted extra suspicion in Sisi’s Egypt (“remember, you are a tourist,” Bassam had coached me in the car, “inta mish bita‘rif ‘arabi [you do not know Arabic]”), and all the questioning by Egypt’s notorious security forces was testing my nerves.237 The last barrier to the festival was a pedestrian checkpoint outside the main gate—an entrance bracketed by a pair of white towers, each reaching about five stories into the sky. Above the gate, and between the cross-topped spires, was a large mural of the holy family walking along the Nile. The timeless pyramids of Giza loomed benevolently in the mural’s background. Following George and Bassem, I handed my bag to a police officer and walked through a grey metal detector. The machine made no sound, but I was patted down by a police officer anyway. Moments later, an officer returned my thoroughly searched bag and then greeted us with “kul sana wa intū ṭayyibīn (happy holidays).” As a final test, George, Bassem and I, like all other festival-goers, had to walk between two long parallel rows of armed officers, whose selection appeared to hinge on physical stature. The men’s eyes fixed threateningly upon me as I passed, and at the end of it I felt like I had run a gauntlet. If the outside of the mawlid hit like a metal-plated glove, I was happy to find that the inside still received like a soft catcher’s mitt. All the familiar sights, smells, and sounds were there. The laughter, the deep-frying, the artwork, the children, the beggars, the smoke, the palm

237 The tragic 2016 torture and murder of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni by Egyptian security forces was always in the back of my mind during my later dissertation research.

195 trees, the shops and, of course, the Nile. Better yet, there were no police officers or soldiers in sight. “il-ḥamdulillah ‘ala-is-salāmak (thank God for your safe arrival—an expression Egyptians typically use for long-distance travel),” George quipped once the final security checkpoint was behind us. I smiled sheepishly, feeling like I could now cry tears of joy instead of fear. “The security truly is faẓiyya‘ (horrible),” Bassem then said to George, with a shake of his head, “no one will go!” Speaking with George, Bassem and many others in the days ahead, it became clear that most people shared my negative experience of the security around the festival. What had once been an event where anybody could go and come with relative ease had become a virtual fortress. How could Egyptians, Muslim or Christian, not feel intimidated by it all? Thinking of my research, I tried to contemplate what the violent political realities would mean for my study of Egyptian society in and around the festival. How would Egyptians cross boundaries at a time of heightened walls? In the pages that follow, I first trace the roots of the annual mawlid at Dayr Bayyaḍ in order to illuminate why the festival has had sustained significance to local Egyptians over the centuries. I show how, for many festival-goers, the place and time of the mūsim is infused with the religious power of the Virgin Mary—a belief that draws Muslims and Christians alike. I next show how, in contrast to accounts of unstructured Muslim mawlids that appear elsewhere in the anthropological literature, the Beni Suef festival was policed and ordered in profound ways by Coptic Church administrators. Engaging with the scholarship of Samuli Schielke, I demonstrate how ordinary Egyptians nevertheless continually overcame the grand constraints imposed by the state outside the festival walls and the centralized church inside them. The second section of this chapter analyzes the manner in which heterogeneous traditions and practices intersected at the Christian mawlid. I illuminate how, not so different from broader Beni Suef society, the mūsim was a place of fun, food and festivity during the 2017-2018 period. I then employ the lens of recreation and leisure on the retreat centre’s Nile-side shoreline to interrogate assumptions about the purported division between explicit religious beliefs and identities, on the one hand, and mundane interests and practices on the other. Rather than finding festival-goers bogged down in feelings of failure and contradiction, however, I show how people

196 exercised practical judgement to navigate the variable needs of work, livelihoods, sex and marriage—all amidst highly constraining economic conditions. The chapter concludes with an examination of the concept of security in contemporary Egypt. I contrast the idea of security provided by the state’s armed guards and checkpoints with the form of safety that manifests immanently from within everyday society. I propose that violence in Egyptian society is almost always communal, marked by the involvement of members of society with strong inclinations to “do the right thing”. Thus, while an increase in state securitization might seem to some the antidote to political violence, I suggest it may only perpetuate it by further constraining the ordinary ethics that underlie security in everyday life. My conclusion, building on Amira Mittermaier, is that an ethics of immediacy has the potential to undo the constraints created by church bombings and checkpoints alike. ! ! History of a Season ! According to historical sources, the dayr (monastery—now a retreat centre rather than functioning abbey) at Bayyaḍ that plays host to the mūsim was built in the fifteenth century. The great medieval Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī documented a visit to a monastery in the area sometime between 1417 and 1436—though there is some debate among historians as to whether he was referring specifically to the site at Dayr Bayyaḍ. Coptic sources in Beni Suef, meanwhile, trace mawlid celebrations for the ṣiyām il-sayyida al-‘adraʾ (St. Mary’s Fast—the formal name for the festival) back at least to the 1700s, when families are said to have come to the monastery’s shoreline for worship, picnics and retreat between the 7th and 22nd of August.238 The longest serving pope in the history of the Coptic church, Pope Kyrollis V (born in the Beni Suef town of Tizmant), was baptized in Dayr Bayyaḍ’s Nile waters in 1832. Finally, the English

238 Dawūd, Nabīh Kāmil. Tarīkh muḥāfẓa Beni Suef al-kinisī (The Church History of Beni Suef). Beni Suef: Lagna al-taḥrīr wa al-nashr, 1979. pp. 52-53.

197 traveller and Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson provides the first Western mention of a dayr at the retreat centre’s current location in his 1843 description of the Nile Valley.239 Like most places in Egypt, the site of the annual mūsim is marked by a wide array of traditions—old and new. Coptic Christians frequently told me that the retreat centre was situated at the very spot on the Nile shoreline where the babe Mūsā (Moses) was found in a basket by the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter (this narrative contrasts slightly with the Islamic version of events where the woman who discovered Mūsā was Asiya—the Pharaoh’s wife). My interlocutors at the mūsim were even more proud to inform me that the Holy Family had stayed at the site of the monastery on its escape from King Herod into Southern Egypt. Because of Jesus, Joseph and Mary’s footprints, many Beni Suef residents believed the retreat centre possessed a special blessing from the ‘adraʾ, or virgin Mary. The retreat centre’s building complexes experienced many renovations in the past half- century, and there was not a time during my 2011-2018 fieldwork when the site was not under some form of construction. Much of this building was driven by the ever-growing number of pilgrims and visitors that came to the centre throughout the year. During the mūsim, the centre’s ability to accommodate visitors becomes especially pressing, when, according to a Dayr Bayyaḍ administrator, over 40,000 visitors came in a single day. Similar to the esteem provincial Muslim mawlids engender for local communities, this great popularity was a source of great pride for my Coptic interlocutors.240 Egyptian mawlids have garnered the attention of Western anthropologists in recent years. These scholars have mostly analyzed mawlids through the lens of Sufism, though a couple works have fruitfully shone light on festival practices at Coptic mawlids in Egypt.241 This latter scholarship, however, generally paints the picture of shared Muslim-Christian mawlid celebration as a thing of the past.242 For instance, Anthony Shenoda details how the Coptic

239 Wilkinson, Gardner. Modern Egypt and Thebes: A Description of Egypt. London: J. Murray, 1843.

240 Schielke, 2012. p. 64.

241 Schielke, 2012. pp. 8-11.

242 Heo, 2018; Shenoda, 2010.

198 Church hierarchy has actively cultivated distance between Coptic and Muslim saint festivals by employing the Arabic word iḥtifāl (celebration or festival) in place of mawlid.243 For my part, I did not sense much tension on the naming of the festival during my fieldwork in Beni Suef, and rarely heard the term iḥtifāl evoked. That said, some Coptic interlocutors told me they preferred the term mūsim (season), since mawlids were to celebrate birthdays and the St. Mary’s Fast was not the Virgin Mary’s birthday. This view points to one key distinction between Christian and Muslim mawlids: that while the latter commemorate the natural birth of a walī (holy person), Egyptian Copts interpret their mawlids as celebrating their saint’s second birth or birth into Life Everlasting.244 At the end of the day, it is because the majority of my interlocutors referred to the festival as al-mūsim (the season) that I mainly employ the term in this chapter (rather than in attempt to distinguish it from Muslim mawlids). ! ! Rituals of Practice and Belief ! The crowds descend upon dayr bayed during the mūsim for many overlapping reasons; religious, social, cultural, and otherwise. At first glance, the mūsim might appear more a religious event than anything. It is, after all, the celebration of a religious figure (the ‘adraʾ or Virgin Mary) on religious grounds, and often structured around and guided by religious activities. Liturgical services, bible studies and sermons run almost constantly during the festival. And so as much as I preferred the beautiful scenery and fresh air on the retreat centre’s Nile shoreline, I spent a substantial amount of time conducting my participant observation at the festival in and around the church. On one Sunday morning in 2017, I entered the retreat centre’s church with my Coptic friend Makram. The young man immediately went, as most Copts do, to the icons at the back of the church and kissed them. Like all Coptic masses, male and female worshippers were divided

243 Shenoda, 2010. p. 153.

244 Meinardus, 1999. p. 97.

199 by the sanctuary’s centre aisle. I could not see any Muslims in the church (it was exceedingly rare for Egyptian Muslims to attend Coptic mass under any circumstances), but I had noticed a couple groups of women in higabs, along with several men in white galābiyyas, waiting outside the building to see the miracle priest. Makram and I found one of the few remaining empty places in a pew at the back left of the church, and proceeded to stand and sit in unison with other worshippers for the remainder of the mass. Following the first four portions of the service (the preparation prayer, the offering, the sermon, and the reconciliation prayer), people pushed forward to the front of the church to take communion. The momentum and popularity of the mass, by this point, was always palpable. The sweet smell and thick smoke of incense filled the air, as did the rhythmic clanging of the sajjāt (cymbals) and muthallath (triangle). A Coptic priest then walked up and down the middle aisle, throwing holy water onto worshippers, who received the liquid with open hands and expressions of devotion. I frequently sensed elation among the worshipers at this time of closing—delirium even. After the mass ended, worshippers leaving the church immediately encountered another focal point of the ‘adraʾ festival, the saint shrine to the Virgin Mary. Like Muslim mawlids, saint shrines are a significant site of religious ritual at Coptic festivals.245 The shrine at Dayr Bayyaḍ was no bigger than a large clothing dresser. A wooden clock sat on top of it, its face adorned with an image of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. Above the clock were two great icons—one of the Virgin Mary (holding baby Jesus) and one of Saint Demiana and the Forty Virgins (who are said to have been executed by the Romans in the early fourth century). Between the icons sat a large placard imprinted with the kalimāt madīḥ il-qadīsa il-‘adraʾ Maryam (Words of praise of the blessed Virgin Mary). The repetitive lyrics, which Copts often sang as a hymn, listed an array of names and blessings for the Virgin Mary. It was a rare thing to not see people crowded around the shrine during the festival; praying, touching the icons, and lighting small candles. These visitors were a complete mix of young and old, male and female, urban and rural, and Muslim and Christian. One evening in

245 Schielke, 2012. pp. 23-25.

200 2018, I noticed two Muslim women, along with a man following behind them, go to the shrine, light candles and then remain there in prayer for a couple of minutes. When they finally turned away from the shrine, I could see one of the women had tears in her eyes. The three visitors then walked across the courtyard and sat beneath a large green shrub that had been carved into the shape of a cross. After a few minutes, I approached the trio, introducing myself as a foreigner who was interested in learning more about the mūsim. They smiled, and one of the women replied that they would be more than happy to answer a few of my questions. The two women (Radwa and Dina) were sisters, and the man (Amr) was Radwa’s husband. When I asked the group, who were from the Gazīra (island) neighbourhood of Beni Suef, how long they had been coming, it was Radwa who answered: “Seven years ago, we were in a car accident with a microbus on the agricultural road near Biba (a town south of Beni Suef). Thanks be to God my husband was generally okay. But my neck, back, and face were badly injured.” She pointed to a large scar on her right temple. “I was in hospital, and then home in bed for a long time after. I became very depressed.” She paused, before looking at me intensely and professing: “Then one night, when I was lying in bed, I saw the ‘adraʾ at my window. It was the ‘adraʾ, I am certain. After this I started to feel better and better. The next summer, I came here to the mawlid for the first time, and have been coming ever since.” Radwa and her kin’s attendance is one example of festival visitation guided by reasons of faith. Radwa’s visitation shows that Egyptian Muslims were genuinely devoted to the Virgin Mary, and, in contrast to Angie Heo’s account, continued to cross into Christian spaces in large numbers to take her blessing.246 Radwa’s religious devotion contrasts somewhat with the explanations and actions of many of my interlocutors that appear later in the chapter, and for whom the festival was primarily a social activity. But the social and religious, as in Egyptian society generally, tended to link inextricably at the festival. That Radwa was not dissuaded by the exclusionary discourses (examined in earlier chapters), church bombings, and checkpoints that

246 Heo, 2013.

201 partially structured Egyptian life speaks to the dynamism and multi-faceted nature of provincial Egyptian society. Ultimately, this ordinary Muslim woman’s actions were shaped by what she regarded as her own experience of divine power. She was touched by the ‘adraʾ and so she came to the festival. ! ! Grand Constraints ! One of the most common observations made by my Canadian friends and family who visited over my years living in Egypt was how warm and kind people in Beni Suef were. Muslims at the mūsim always struck me as particularly generous in spirit. These were people who had variably come to take the blessing of the Virgin Mary (as typified by Radwa in the previous section), to celebrate, and to socialize with friends. A significant number of them told me they had been to a variety of Coptic functions in their lives, including friends’ weddings, funerals, miracle khidmas, and picnics at the retreat centre. A few Muslim attendees even acknowledged that they attended the festival to make the political statement about Muslim-Christian unity. Sabah, a Muslim woman who worked as a teacher in the city of Beni Suef, told me in 2017 that she was determined to come after the attacks on Copts earlier in the year: —“That is not Egypt,” she stressed to me as we talked on a bench overlooking the Nile. I expressed my understanding, before asking her if she had been to the mūsim before. —“Yes,” Sabah replied, “but only when I was a girl. Maybe fifteen years ago. My parents took my brothers and me with our Christian neighbours and their kids.” Sabah’s face lit up as she recounted the experience, “I remember we spent the whole night here, and only went home to sleep after the sun rose in the morning.” —“Does the festival feel similar or different now?” I asked. —“Similar, I guess. I remember it felt so big and crowded then. More than now. But maybe those are just my memories.” She looked around at the people milling about, and added: “my Christian friends say fewer people will come this year because of the checkpoints, but I don’t know.”

202 —“Well, you came because of the security situation!” I told her. —Sabah nodded earnestly. “This is true. And there are many people like me. Nobody wants violence. Even if a Muslim does not like Christians… huwa hiy‘amil ay (what is he going to do)?” she asked rhetorically, throwing her hands up in the air. “Believe me, it is very peaceful between Muslims and Christians.” Given the broader political dynamics in the country, one thing I wondered was whether Muslims, in particular, were less likely to attend the festival due to the state security’s presence. “They see that I am Muslim on my rukhṣa (driver’s license),” a middle aged-Muslim man told me when I asked him about it, “but it is not like they then become suspicious of me. Many Muslims still come to the festival. But less, of course, because of the security.” The man, whose name was Wesam, paused for a moment, before opining: “I think al-niẓām (the regime) really does want to stop al-irhāb (terrorism).” He then leaned in a bit towards me, “but they do it in a very stupid way so that it just creates more. All the time, young men get refused entry from places, or taken off of buses, when they are just trying to find work or see family. “ He nodded back towards the security detail at the gate, “all that is sometimes a part of the problem. It is like the prisons… many people are in prisons. But does it solve the problem of terrorism or cause more of it?” With this perspective in mind, I want to reflect briefly on my choice to commence this chapter by focusing on sectarian church bombings and securitization. In Egypt in the Future Tense, Samuli Schielke provides a compelling glimpse into how the lives of ordinary Egyptians revolve around the promises of grand schemes such as romantic love, religion, and the economic promise of capitalism. These schemes, according to Schielke, “appear to be external and superior to everyday experience, a higher and reliable measure and guideline for living.”247 Schielke illuminates how, since the lives of ordinary Egyptians are so often marked by ambiguity, contradiction and experiences of failure, they rarely reflect the totalizing and perfectionist models of living offered by the aforementioned grand schemes.

247 Schielke, 2015. p. 13.

203 While Schielke’s framework around grand schemes acts as a fruitful lens for understanding the struggles the vast majority of Egyptians face, my own fieldwork in Beni Suef, especially after 2013, makes me wonder about the affectively positive and promising nature of the greater forces that structure people’s lives. This is because many of the grand social, political and economic factors I observed condition people’s lives were more constraining than promising. For instance, Chapter 1 of this dissertation details the historical and discursive power of “worsening Muslim-Christian relations”. The second and third chapters allow glimpses into the socioeconomic pressures created by neoliberalism, austerity and unapologetic inequality between Egypt’s social classes. The fourth chapter, meanwhile, describes the grave political constraints ordinary Egyptians face. Finally, this chapter shows how securitization and separation has structured the mūsim since at least 2017. Nevertheless, at the mūsim, al-kursāt, the miracle khidma, and elsewhere, Egyptians continued to live lives of dignity both within and across the borders created by the aforementioned difficult conditions. In many ways, then, my argument in this chapter builds on Schielke’s grand scheme framework by turning it on its head. Rather than framing Egyptian lives as constantly falling short of the promises of grand schemes, I propose ordinary Egyptians also be seen as constantly overcoming the constraints of grand conditions (such as political repression, growing sectarianism, economic hardship, modernist religion and securitization). That is, the everyday lives of ordinary Egyptians are as much about overcoming dystopia as they are about falling short of utopia. Far from a dismissal of Schielke’s framework, I intend this argument to be read parallel to it in attempt to generate an even richer understanding of the different ways ordinary Egyptians navigate an array of transformative and structuring historical and cultural processes.

Disciplined Classes ! In his ethnography on joy and festivity in Egypt, Schielke argues that Muslim mawlids represent “a utopian exception to the order of the everyday where everybody is welcome and

204 many things are possible that otherwise would be deemed out of place.”248 The unstructured nature of the Muslim mawlid stands out in Schielke’s account, where the very space of the festival reflects the cramped urban quarters of the older sections of Egyptian cities less touched by European colonialism. Beni Suef’s sayyida ḥūriyya mawlid, a mostly Sufi affair which I attended many times, had a similar layout; twisting through and around homes, shops and alleyways in the city centre. The church-run mūsim stood in sharp contrast to the Muslim mawlids, in that the physical space of the retreat centre had been tamed and ordered by the centralized church. The state security’s aforementioned presence at the mūsim only made the festival’s domestication more salient. Prior to 2017, festival vendors and activities of all types extended out and around the front exterior of the retreat centre. But all this was banned after the unprecedented violence against Copts in the first half of that year. Moreover, civilian cars, which had previously parked in a large lot inside the main gate, were directed to a makeshift lot in what was otherwise a farm field across from the monastery. And, as mentioned, several checkpoints guarded by heavily armed police officers, soldiers and vehicles gave the retreat centre a fortress-like feel during my fieldwork. These transformations call to mind Wesam’s earlier point, and one I had heard interlocutors make many times prior: that the schemes imposed by the state onto society actually constrained and disrupted everyday life more than they engendered possibilities. Accommodation practices were one of the most stark examples of how practices inside the festival have been constrained and disciplined by modern institutions. Earlier historical accounts of the mūsim describe festival-goers setting up tents in the large courtyard that surrounds the main church. These spontaneous camping practices were the only means for festival-goers to stay the night until the monastery was renovated and expanded by Bishops Athanasius and Gabriel in the final decades of the twentieth century. Before this, entire families ate, visited and slept side by side on carpets and blankets laid out in the courtyard under cover of textiles hung above. The construction of the large building that surrounds the courtyard, along with adjacent buildings for room and board, transformed these dynamics. Ever since, hundreds of

248 Schielke 2012. p. 7.

205 individual rooms have been made available for families to secure their own space under lock and key (usually for one or two weeks at a time). Of course, all this has come at a cost, and the relatively unconstrained space of the courtyard is free no more (the church banned the tenting practices in 2009). When I asked the middle and upper-class tenants of the retreat centre’s rented rooms about the banning of tents, people were unanimous in expressing their support for the policy. “The tents were not clean,” a small group of professional men explained to me as they sat playing cards outside their room, “they are not good for health. We know diseases are spread this way, so they should not do it.” As far back as the nineteenth century, Egyptian administrators conformed to Western biomedical theories and assumptions about health and contagion.249 In this early colonial period, Egyptian reformers had hoped that the country’s technological development would enable peasants to leave their supposed superstitions and backwardness behind. These same modernizers were dismayed to find that the Egyptian masses instead adopted technologies such as the train to attend the “unmodern” mawlids on an even greater scale.250 More recently, in 2009, the state banned all Muslim mawlids during the swine flu pandemic. This crescendoing regulation is hardly unique to Egypt either, and worldwide, governments have manoeuvred against popular festivals.251 Interestingly, in 2017 I began to hear a new explanation from middle-class interlocutors about why tents should be banned. “It is about security,” a priest told me, “the church and the police are scared about a terrorist attack. With the tents, it would be impossible to monitor people. For this reason I agree with the Bishop’s decision to get rid of the tents.” When I asked the priest, as we talked on a bench next to a large statue of the Virgin Mary, about how the rented rooms were different, he thought for a moment and then replied: “we know these people. They pay, and log their information. Fī niẓām (there is order).” While I was not entirely convinced of

249 Esmeir, Samera. Juridical Humanity: a Colonial History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012; Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

250 Barak, 2013.

251 Schielke, 2012. pp.1-4.

206 the priest’s explanation about security, I did not dispute his general point about the primacy of order. Though sleeping in tents was banned from the large courtyard in the church’s striving for order, festival-goers continued to make the courtyard a place of informal gathering. Visitors still laid blankets and carpets across the tiled floor to eat, drink and visit where tents had been raised years earlier. The blanket placement was often dictated by the way surrounding buildings provided shade from the indomitable August sun. Having lived in Beni Suef for many years, I constantly ran into friends and acquaintances during my fieldwork at the festival. However, I rarely ever recognized anyone I knew from Beni Suef picnicking on the courtyard floor. This was in part due to the fact that my social circles in Beni Suef were primarily middle-class, while the courtyard floor was typically embraced by lower-class Egyptians. The even more significant reason, though, was that the overwhelming majority of those visitors came not from the city of Beni Suef, but from the towns and villages of the countryside that surrounded it. “We are from Baha (a town 15 km northwest of the city),” a moustached man named Maged told me, as he and his family snacked on lib (seeds) and hot tea in the church courtyard, “we come to the ‘adraʾ every year.” Maged’s large, muscular hands suggested a life of labour, and dwarfed the cigarette he was puffing on intermittently. I could see a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on the portion of his arm left uncovered by the short sleeves of his galābiyya. Most people in his party of fourteen were under the age of twenty, and the children in the group gathered around me closely with amused curiosity as we talked. The women in Maged’s party, unlike the urban middle-class women who occupied the rooms above, were wearing black scarves on their heads—a rural practice clearly distinguishable from the headscarves on Muslim women elsewhere at the festival. “Il-jaw jamīla jiddan fil mūsim (the atmosphere is very beautiful at the mūsim),” one of the women named Teresa told me. The woman’s pronunciation of the words revealed her rural stock. That is, the major distinction of the Arabic accent within Egypt is the Cairene dialect that dominates the northern portion of the country (and pronounces words with the Arabic letter jeem as “g”), and the Ṣa‘īdi dialect that is spoken in much of the Nile valley south of the capital (which pronounces jeem with a “j”). Reflecting its geography as a borderland between the two regions, Beni Suef’s urban

207 dwellers spoke of higabs and the hagg in the Cairene dialect, while people in Beni Suef’s countryside talked of hijabs and the hajj. Eventually I asked the party from Baha about whether they wished people were still permitted to camp out in the courtyard. “What?” Maged quipped back with a furrowed brow, “look around you. Look at us. Iḥna lissa benfarfish we beniḥtifil (We still have fun and celebrate) as we like.” I didn’t know what to say in response except for a simple “saḥ (that’s true).” It was clear from the man’s face that the church’s banning of tents really did not mean much to him. Indeed, he was not thinking about the church’s regulation—even after I brought it up. Ultimately, the disciplinary role of the church I observed stands somewhat in contrast to Schielke’s picture of the Muslim mawlids as places of no authorities, moral limits, or discipline.252 Like Schielke, the Coptologist Otto Meinardus depicts the Coptic mawlid as a manifestation of folk religion. Arguing that the folk religious attitudes and practices are quite separate from the “dogmatic and catechetical treatises of the church,” Meinardus locates its roots instead in the religious practises of pharaonic Egypt.253 The ‘adraʾ mawlid I observed, on the other hand, was highly structured by the church that oversaw it. As the power of the centralized church has grown since the mid-twentieth century (see Chapter 1), the mawlid, among other Coptic sites, has been fundamentally structured by the church. Hence, whereas Schielke regards the Muslim mawlid as a battleground socially, the Church-run mūsim, in some ways, represents a social struggle that the church and state have effectively already won.254 Still, as evidenced by Maged’s outlook, everyday life persisted and not all was lost to institutional constraints. Maged’s response to my analytical inquiry into structural limitations revealed a dignified and resilient outlook ubiquitous among my interlocutors at the festival. Ultimately it is the dynamism and resilience of Egyptian society that allowed people like Maged to, at least in some ways, overcome the grand conditions that constrained their lives. To use a

252 Schielke, 2012. p. 71.

253 Meinardus, 1999. p. 95.

254 Schielke p. 202.

208 chess metaphor: the rooks of the state stood guard outside the walls, and the bishops of the church criss-crossed within them. Despite all this, the pawns kept playing. ! ! Fasting, Food and Festivity ! The Beni Suef mūsim was always marked by a variety of smells, sounds and tastes. The entire event centres around the St. Mary’s fast, and eating practices therefore represent a core social component of the festival. For Egyptian Muslims, fasting entails a month-long dusk-till- dawn abstention from food and drink in the holy month of Ramadan. Egypt’s Copts, on the other hand, practice a vegan fast. The St. Mary’s Fast is but one of many in the Coptic calendar, and practicing Copts eschew meat and dairy most days of the year. Copts consider fasting on certain weekdays (Wednesday and Friday), the Great Lent Fast, the Epiphany fast, the Ninevah fast and the Paramon fast, among others, to be first-class fasts—meaning no animal products are permitted whatsoever. The St. Mary’s fast of the mūsim, conversely, is a second-class fast (along with the Advent Fast and the Apostles’ Fast) during which fish is allowed on all days except Wednesdays and Fridays. The duration of the St. Mary’s Fast reflects the fifteen days the apostles are said to have fasted while waiting for the Virgin Mary’s ascension into heaven. The majority of food stalls at the Dayr Bayyaḍ mūsim were situated along the walkway just inside the main gate of the retreat centre. Often the first thing that hit festival-goers when they entered the mūsim was the enticing smell of deep-fried batter. The most popular festival foods included fiṭīr (a flaky, deep-fried pastry), zalābiyya (deep-fried balls of dough soaked in syrup or honey) and ṭ‘amiyya (Egyptian falafel—made with fava beans rather than the levantine chickpea variety that is more prevalent in Middle Eastern restaurants worldwide). A full-fledged ʾakīl (foodie) myself, I enjoyed watching the process of fiṭīr being made from balls of white dough, rolled and stretched-out like a pie crust, and placed and puffing up in large baths of bubbling oil. Other food stalls sold nuts, seeds, candies, and additional snacks, which people could purchase by weight. Since seafood was still on the fasting menu, several vendors also sold

209 containers of fermented, salted fish such as ringa (herring) and fasīkh (mullet). Festival-goers with strong jaws might have opted for dried carob pods, which are dark maroon in colour, extremely tough in texture, and sweet in flavour. Organizers always erected the largest sūq (market) on the festival grounds adjacent to the church in the middle of the centre. With colourful carpets blocking the sun's rays overhead, people could shop for clothing, icons, religious artifacts, and home and kitchenware. The majority of items these latter items had no obvious religious significance, though some products, such as shirts, mugs or rugs, were imprinted with images of Coptic popes, saints and iconography. Another popular stall at the festival was the tattoo artist. While most Egyptian Muslims abstain from body art entirely, the vast majority of Egyptian Copts have a small cross tattooed on the inside of their wrist. These tattoos are a true marker of the community, and Coptic interlocutors admitted to me they sometimes looked for them when they encountered strangers. Copts are usually given these tattoos at a very early age, and I witnessed many children, sometimes in tears, receive the highly symbolic mark at the festival. Occasionally, Coptic men elected for more extensive inking of their bodies—most typically elsewhere on their arms. The tattoo artist at the festival had a large poster of possible images for imprint, such as a variety of crosses, and images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. The inking process was a public event, and people of all ages gathered round to watch with amused and excited expressions on their faces. The line between the festival’s religious, social, cultural and secular vending and consumption practices rarely seemed clear to my eye. Interestingly, it was a priest whom I interviewed on site in 2018 that made the clearest distinction. “At the festival,” he began, “we have activities that are thaqāfiyya (cultural) and we have activities that are dīniyya (religious).” When I asked the priest which festival practices fell into each category, he replied “If we talk about cultural activities, we can talk about the food. Companies rent places to sell things. When people shop, it is cultural. For many Muslims the festival is cultural. But Christians too. They love to visit and eat together.” He then looked at me smiling intently and asked, “have you tried the zalābiyya?” I grinned back that I had, before asking if he thought the cultural activities were a good thing. The priest replied, “I will say to you that even I, as someone who wants to stick to

210 scripture, think there is no sin in the cultural activities. The people like it. It is a way of celebrating.” All this speaks back to my argument about the flexibility and heterogeneity of institutions and traditions. Whether inside the festival walls, or beyond them in the city of Beni Suef, I almost always discovered Egyptian social and religious life to be “heterogeneous and heteroglossic, offering different avenues of interest and cultivation, multiple accumulated means to enable or enhance different human capacities, singly or in specific combinations or constellations.”255 Of course there were limits to this heterogeneity: a Muslim was no more likely to buy a shirt with Pope Tawadros on it than they were to sit on the tattoo artist’s stool. Hence, the categories of Muslim and Christian still mattered sometimes at the festival. As evidenced by the case of the dockworker in the following section, however, at other times they did not.

! The Dockworker ! The retreat centre’s beautiful waterfront location was undoubtedly one of the festival’s main attractions. A large island, over one kilometre in length, separated the monastery’s shoreline from the main body of the Nile. What resulted was a tranquil bay that festival visitors could explore by boat at their leisure. Fishing was a favourite mūsim pastime. While a few people would bring their own fishing equipment from home, most visitors rented it from the brothers who staffed the retreat centre’s dock. At the start of every day, the dockworkers leaned about thirty bamboo rods against the side of their small wooden shelter that sat at the end of the pier. Visitors paid five Egyptian pounds to borrow a rod, and two more secured four earthworms for bait. During the festival days, the majority of the rods were rented out by men, women and children who then staggered themselves along the metal railings and stone walls above the shoreline.

255 Lambek, 2015. p. 236.

211 The shallow water below the embankment was densely stocked with litter, fish and plant life. That said, just about the only fish I ever saw caught at Dayr Bayyaḍ was bulṭi (Nile tilapia— a longtime Egyptian staple food that appears regularly in Old and New Kingdom hieroglyphs and artwork). Most fish I observed reeled in, though, were not going to feed many people at all. “The best fish are on the other side of the island,” the dockworker told me, motioning to the main body of the Nile a couple hundred meters to the west. No matter, people at the mūsim fished for sport, and children were ecstatic to drop their two or three inch-long catches into clear plastic bags or water bottles. Life for the fish was often cruel and short from there. The dockworker who oversaw the boating operation during my years in Beni Suef was something of an institution at the retreat centre. I remember seeing him at my very first visit to the centre back in early 2011. He had a large powerful body and a weathered clean shaven face that stretched widely when he smiled. Over the years, I occasionally used his services to cross the bay to go for walks on the island, or to take the small wooden row boats out with friends. In these early years, my interactions with him were always short and straightforward; a business transaction about a water vessel. It was not until an extended stint of fieldwork at the monastery in 2017 that I even learned his name: Muhammad. The Muslim man’s story, as he told it, began forty years earlier, before Beni Suef Bridge (the only bridge crossing the Nile in the city) was built in 1982. In those days, boat ferries were the only means for people to cross the river, and Muhammad’s father owned several small wooden boats—part of a larger fleet of local ferries. Beni Suef’s extensive residential and industrial developments on the East bank of the Nile had not yet begun, and so the retreat centre at Dayr Bayyaḍ was the only trans-Nile draw for most Beni Suef residents. The construction of the bridge in 1982 transformed life for all ferry operators. The East bank of the Nile was suddenly just a short drive or donkey ride away from the homes in Beni Suef proper. Boat work, therefore, all but dried up. By this time, Muhammad and his brothers (their father passed away in 1980) had established a port at the very monastery site where we sat and talked in 2017. Rather than doing away with his presence completely after the bridge’s construction, church administrators tactfully invited Muhammad to keep a few rowboats in the

212 bay in case they were ever needed for transportation or recreation. He had been coming to the retreat centre ever since. The comfort level Muhammad and his brothers enjoyed with the Coptic visitors at the centre was plain to see. Many Copts knew the brothers by name, sometimes greeting them respectfully with as-salām-alaikum and other times engaging with them in jest. One night I witnessed a young Coptic man with numerous tattoos playfully provoking Muhammad’s younger brother Hazem with jokes about his sexuality. The powerfully-built dockworker laughed heartily and then twisted the Coptic man’s arm back before reaching behind him and putting him in a headlock. The Coptic man shook free and they grappled for a few moments, giggling and slapping at each others faces half-heartedly. One evening, while I was sitting with Muhammad at the end of the pier in the summer of 2018, I asked him directly about his experience of being a Muslim in the Christian space. The man paused for a moment, and the only sound was the Coptic choir singing taranīm (hymns) on the landing above us. After a couple seconds, Muhammad turned to me and asked what I meant exactly. —“Well,” I replied, “have you ever had any problems here because you are not Christian?” —“La (no),” he said quickly, “ma fīsh haja ismaha mesīḥī wa muslim aṣlan (there is no such thing as Christian/Muslim). We are all one… jānb ba‘ḍ (together).” I had heard Egyptians, especially Muslims, espouse similar sentiments many times earlier. Indeed, any time I called attention to religious difference at the festival, my Muslim interlocutors there evoked a number of platitudes: “iḥna akhwāt (we are siblings); ma fīsh mushākil (there are no problems),” and “ma fīsh farqa bayn muslim wa masīḥī (there is not difference between a Muslim and Christian).” But clearly there were and are practical differences that came with being Muslim or Christian at the festival (who attended mass, who got tattoos), and in Egypt generally. Another mark of distinction was Islamic ritual prayer—a frequent sight at any workplace populated by Muslims in Egypt. However, I had never witnessed the brothers who worked the dock perform the ritual Islamic prayers at the waterfront. With this fact in mind, I once asked Muhammad where he prayed at the centre. A coy smile came over his face, and he said “ana mabaṣalīsh aṣlan (I don’t pray at all).”

213 —“Not even at home?” I asked in genuine surprise. —He laughed and then opined simply: “What is important is ʾalbī ʾabiyyaḍ (my heart is white— an idiomatic way of saying good-hearted).” When I asked him, Muhammad identified as Muslim. His words at other times, however, almost suggested that he did not identify as Muslim (“there is no such thing as Muslim or Christian”). How to make sense of this seeming contradiction? By parsing Muhammad’s words and practices, I do not mean to deny his faith or identity. Rather, I want to illuminate how Muhammad’s ethical life was dictated by a sense of practical ethical judgement, dignity and respect. Muhammad exemplified a Muslim man whose day-to-day rituals and interactions centred less on codified Islam and more on ordinary ethics. I routinely saw this phronetic art of living on both sides of Beni Suef’s supposed confessional lines (as well as the absence of it at times). These ethics were not necessarily separable from codified Islam, however. Rather Muhammad’s life and words revealed a both/and approach to concepts in his life that were ultimately incommensurable. ! ! Love and Longing ! In the summer of 2017, I came to know another Muslim man on the Dayr Bayyaḍ shoreline. Every morning during my fieldwork that year, one or two soldiers took a small motorized dinghy from the Nile’s West bank in Beni Suef proper to the large agricultural island facing the retreat centre. The soldiers then hiked across the island to a spot where Muhammad, the centre’s main dockworker, came to row them across the bay to the retreat centre’s main shoreline. Having been cautious to not arouse suspicion about my presence as a researcher at the retreat centre, I initially kept my distance from all security forces at the mūsim. I never once ventured to engage the security detail outside the retreat centre’s main gate (due to its large size and gruff demeanour). The staggered soldiers guarding the shoreline, on the other hand, were almost always alone, and I quickly gleaned that in their boredom, they were often happy to talk.

214 An interesting thing I learned from my conversations with them was that these men who had been entrusted to carry loaded rifles inside the relative sanctuary of the retreat centre were all Muslim. One of the soldiers I came to know was named Abdullah. He was originally from al- Faiyūm, the oasis city not far north of Beni Suef. His full-time job outside of the army, however, was at a fiṭīr (fried bread) shop more than 100km northeast of his home, in the manshiyyat nāṣr neighbourhood of Cairo. When I asked him why he ended up with a job so far from his family abode, he replied simply: “that is where the work is,” before delving into an all too familiar account of Egypt’s deteriorating job market. “There is no work in Faiyūm. No money.” Abdullah yawned and stared across the bay, “Inshallah (God willing) I will go to the Gulf after the army.” When I asked Abdullah if he liked the retreat centre, he replied “Of course, the people are respectful.” I then queried him as to whether he had ever been to a Christian space before. Abdullah, ever the young man of few words, shook his head, making an idiomatic clicking noise with his tongue that meant “no”. —“So what are your impressions of it? Do you ever feel odd being here as a Muslim?” I asked him. —“La, ‘ādī khāliṣ (no, it’s totally normal),” he said, almost frustrated by my persistent questions, “like I told you, it is a nice place. The people are kwayyisīn (good) and I love the peace and quiet.” Abdullah then confided in me what he really disliked about being at the retreat centre. “The thing is,” he said, turning to me with a slightly mischievous grin, “I want to see ḥabibtī (my darling)…girlfriend y‘anī (I mean).” The young man then relayed the story of his relationship with a young woman he met while working in Cairo. He described how she lived at home with her parents, helping them to run a small clothing store. I asked him whether her parents knew of their romantic relationship, he quickly replied “of course not. This is a difficult thing in Egypt. And even if I want to marry her, it is no easier. I need money. Because of that, I will go to the Gulf.” And so, in a time of church bombings and securitization, the Muslim soldier Abdullah spent his time inside the church grounds thinking more about his everyday concerns than the

215 grand conditions that had brought him there in the first place. Moreover, Abdullah was hardly the only person at the festival with love on their mind. While very much a favourite destination for pious Egyptians and families across generations, the mūsim was also a popular place for Coptic youth to see and be seen. The August festival, I was told by my single male Coptic interlocutors, was the very best time to see eligible young women. After dark especially, Christian boys and girls linked up with their peers to roam the retreat centre grounds in gendered packs. Marriage between a Muslim and a Christian is deeply scandalous in Beni Suef, and therefore courtship at the festival was a strictly Coptic affair. Hence while Abdullah could only dream of his darling many miles away, the allures for Coptic shabāb were very much present. It was 10pm and the night air was filled with music, laughter and the festivities on the penultimate night of the 2018 mūsim. “Do you see them” Youssef asked me, nodding towards a small group of idling teenage girls, as we sat on a concrete ledge above the retreat centre’s Nile bay. I nodded I did. Each of the four young women Youssef alerted me to were dressed in tight jeans, and their straightened dark hair was exposed and down. —“I only go the il-‘adraʾ to see the mawzas (beautiful women),” Youssef laughed, clearly not joking. The young man had been engaged once, however, the wedding plans came apart after his fiancé danced with her male cousin at a family wedding (an act that fundamentally unsettled both Youssef’s pride and his sense of his fiancé’s chastity). Now single, Youssef prodded me about dating practices in Canada: —“Is sex very easy in Canada? Does everyone have sex before marriage there?” I summarized Canadian sex and dating practices as best I could, before turning the line of questioning back to our Egyptian setting. —“No, you cannot have sex with your girlfriends here,” Youssef replied, “kissing yes, and touching too—but hands have to be on top of clothes. Even after engagement we have to be very careful. This is part of why marriage is so important.” The very next day, my conversation with two longtime friends—one Coptic and one Muslim—shifted to the same subject matter. Muhammad and Mido had a similar look to them. Both men were of medium height, with lean, athletic builds (I had first met them playing football at a local nādī [club] back in 2012). Neither had ever been married or engaged. “I tried to

216 become engaged to my girlfriend twice before,” Mido told me, as we sat in a marble booth beside the water, “but her parents said no both times because my monthly wage is too low. Even though our families have the same wealth, they said no!” The young men then ruminated on a subject I had heard Egyptian shabāb bemoan many times prior: the cost of marriage. “No one can get married, buy an apartment, and buy shabka (wedding gold) without their parents’ help.” Mahmoud sighed and shook his head at the thought of such financial constraints. “In Mido’s case, even having the money saved was not enough because he does not earn enough. It is an impossible situation. We are from good families. We have enough money to buy nice clothes and vacation in Sharm El-Sheikh. But marriage is haga thānya (something else).” Because engagement and marriage had become so difficult to attain, young Egyptian men sometimes opted to look elsewhere—away from the institution of marriage and expectations of respectable behaviour—to find a woman’s touch. Once in 2017, I met a couple of young men at the mūsim who told me they were planning a trip to the oasis town of Faiyūm later that night. —“Why are you going all the way there?” I asked, genuinely curious as to why the men would leave a warm mūsim evening at the height of the festival. The one young man inhaled deeply on his cigarette and grinned: “we will drink bīra (beer). And there will be girls.” When I asked them what was wrong with the girls here, they laughed and told me there were girls there who would “go upstairs” with you. All it would cost was 300 or 400 Egyptian pounds. The men insisted I join them. While I was somewhat inclined to go for research purposes, I stayed at the festival in the end and played it safe (the thought of riding their motorbikes on the dark provincial roads at night was what really kept me from examining the contours of Faiyūm’s illicit nightlife further). —“But are there not places here in Beni Suef for sex?” I asked the men. —“Yes, there are. Maybe they are not apparent, but of course they exist. But Faiyūm is better.” With my dissertation research in mind, I could not help but ask one more question: whether the prostitutes were Muslim or Christian. The one Christian man, who wore a leather jacket over his heavy-set, muscular build, answered my question with a simple, dismissive “la (no). They are sharāmayṭ (whores).” So did that mean the men saw the prostitutes as neither Muslim nor

217 Christian? I could sense the men wanted to keep their voices low and away from other people in the vicinity, so I didn’t ask. That aside, however, they did not seem at all guilty or conflicted about talking this way or doing such practices. Rather the men seemed quite at peace with their past and present plans. In Chapter 3 of this dissertation, I argue that the literature on everyday life and reformist Islam sometimes puts too much emphasis on feelings of failure and anxiety among ostensibly pious subjects. The point bears repeating here. Unlike the constant sense of falling short among villagers in Marsden’s and Schielke’s illuminating ethnographies, my interlocutors in this section struggled less with their images of self and much more with the difficult material conditions that surrounded them. My young male interlocutors maintained their sense of confidence and self- worth, despite engaging in the illicit world of prostitution, precisely because their everyday virtues were of the Aristotelian sort—“never abstractions or categorical buy always a matter of judging the right balance to fit the immediate circumstances.”256 Abdullah, Youssef, Muhammad, Mido, and the Faiyūm crew all found themselves in the same difficult circumstances: the relative inaccessibility of romantic love, intimacy and sex. Many other men in the city faced similar constraints. Most, I would guess, did not seek out prostitutes to fill that void. However, those that did go to brothels did so in the flow of everyday life—not in a momentous failing of one grand scheme or another. These men, like most Egyptians I met, were ‘ashīn yawm-bi-yawm (living from day to day). And more than everything, this day-to-day living in Beni Suef was made possible by “the tacit (latent, implicit, ambiguous, subjunctive, aporetic, paradoxical, uncertain, transgressive, possible), and between the application of criteria and the recognition of their limits.”257 In an Egyptian society besieged by the difficult grand conditions of economic hardship, political repression and rapid social change, practical ethical judgments were a way of life. ! !

256 Lambek, Michael, (ed.). Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, p. 19.

257 Ibid. p. 28.

218 Leaving Limitations ! One morning on the third last day of the 2018 festival, I ducked into the small canteen to get a drink. The dark room was crowded with children pushing forward with their orders of pop and chips. I angled my way to the counter and placed my request for coffee mix without sugar. Minutes later I was sitting under a tree on a rock ledge eight feet above the shore of the bay. It was a scorching hot day, but the light breeze blowing in off the river was enough to make my shaded seat comfortable. Several farmers and donkeys were working the fields on the island across the bay. Nearer to me, a large family was sitting picnicking under a tree to my left, while a group of boys were fishing to my right. I looked back out over the bay, the island, and the Beni Suef apartment buildings further beyond across the river, closed my eyes, and inhaled the relative peace and solitude. My moment of zen was interrupted by the scolding yell of a young woman, “bas ya Ahmed (stop Ahmed)!” Looking over to where the group was sitting on the other side of a tree, I could see a boy around the age of four loosening his grip on another young boy’s hair. The aggressor had a mischievous grin on his face, while the other boy, who was a bit younger, flailed at him once before escaping to the rock ledge above the water. There were a few other children and babies loitering in the area. Of the six women who were supervising the group, all of them wore galābiyyas that suggested a rural origin, and three wore Muslim higabs. I watched the women for a bit out of the corner of my eye until I noticed the arrival of a lone young man beside me. He was timid at first, completely unsure of who I was or what to say, so I decided to greet him and we began talking. I learned his name was Romani and that he was from the town of Bayyaḍ. Small in stature with a thin moustache above his lips, he had a decidedly odd manner, peering quickly at me, then around, then at me again, and so on and so forth. As I finished explaining my ties to Beni Suef, he motioned to the group of picnicking women and asked “do you see?” I shook my head that I did not know what he meant. No matter, Romani had already turned to one of the young boys fishing next to us and, gesturing to the women, asked: “are they married? Are they engaged?” The oldest boy barely responded beyond a slight shrug.

219 —“You want to propose to one of them?” I asked Romani jokingly. —“They are very beautiful,” he responded, staring over at them and then quickly away. In the moment of silence that followed, I told him “at first I wondered if you were looking at them because some of them are Muslim.” —“What?” he quickly blurted, glancing at me with a furrowed brow. “la, ‘ādī (no, that’s normal),” he continued, before setting his gaze upon them once again, “‘ādī khāliṣ (totally normal).” I then asked him if relations between Muslims and Christians were good in Bayad, to which he responded. “there are good relations,” he paused, “but it doesn’t come from their (the Muslims’) hearts.” He stopped talking for a moment before turning to me again and asking: “are there Muslims in Canada?” —“There are,” I replied, “but only a small percentage.” —“So most people are Christian?” Romani asked, “and there are more churches than mosques?” —“Yes, you could say that,” I answered. A wide smile spread across his face as he imagined a weakened version of the religious community he knew to be so predominant. After another ten seconds of silence, he declared rather abruptly, “I want to go to Canada with you.” —“Why?” I responded. —“There is no money here. No work. No cleanliness. We want nizām (order) but there is none.” He looked at me again ever so intently and grinned “take me with you?” I joked back that he would not like the Canadian winter. We both knew full well, however, that if it really was an option to leave he would be on the plane later that night. In the silence that followed, I watched him as his eyes then shifted away from me and his dreams of Canada, to his other dream which picnicked down the shoreline. The title of this section, leaving limitations, has two different meanings. On the one hand, it refers to the desire many young Egyptians have to leave the difficult limitations that structure their lives. The trying economic situation of low wages, high unemployment and rising inflation —not church bombs or terrorism—were the main reason the majority of young Egyptians I spoke to were so keen to escape. Most, though, were not able. This reality speaks to the second meaning of the section title—the severe limitations Egyptians faced when it came to leaving. For many Egyptians, the robust job market and general wealth of Canada, Germany or Australia

220 never amounted to more than a distant dream during my fieldwork. Because of these limitations, working in the gulf or neighbouring Libya were more feasible options. Few people I spoke to, however, saw these regional destinations as long-term solutions for themselves or their families. Neither the difficult economic circumstances nor the political violence, however, could bring Romani’s life to a full halt. He still had the mundane, if innate, desires that attracted him to the women sitting down the waterfront from us (that they were Muslim brought no sense of contradiction to his mind). His concerns were material. Perhaps he, like many young people, would eventually find work labouring in one of Beni Suef’s growing number of factories. Or maybe he would join the masses of independent vendors who made their way up and down the aisles of the country’s trains, hawking their stocks of foodstuff, gadgets and household items. I had also seen many other young people Romani’s age make their way to places like al-kursat, the lagna, or other courses and NGOs to find work and purpose. And though all these people, Romani included, faced difficult conditions and barriers, they also all demonstrated at least some ability to see and act practically within those conditions. ! ! Communal Violence ! Back in early 2011, my wife and I passed through the United States for our maiden trip to Egypt. I will never forget crossing the border into the United States from Canada. “Where are you going?” the Buffalo customs officer inquired. We replied that we were driving down to the Mennonite Development Organization’s (MDO) headquarters in Pennsylvania for a two-week orientation before moving to Egypt for three years. “Egypt?” the officer responded with startled surprise, before turning away from us to look at her computer monitor. After thirty seconds, she handed our passports back and said: “Okay, well be careful… they kill each other over there!” Our MDO orientation occurred mere weeks after Hosni Mubarak’s fall, and it seemed that half the English news stories I read online detailed instability, chaos and rising crime in Egypt. At times during our two weeks in Pennsylvania, I wondered if we were making a huge mistake in going to Egypt at all. After we moved to Beni Suef, family and friends asked

221 constantly about our safety. We could always answer happily, and without any reservation, that we felt completely safe.258 “People are everywhere,” we assured loved ones. The sense of community in Egypt was why we felt so secure, and on the rare occasions I did witness instances of conflict, it was always a communal event in the sense of the term I develop below. The term communal violence is frequently used in Western journalistic, political and popular discourses to describe violence between ethnic or religious groups in the postcolonial world. Egypt is no exception, and Western observers are quick to decry violence between Muslim and Christian Egyptians as communal (or inter-communal). On the one hand, there certainly are disturbing instances of inter-communal violence in Egypt (particularly in Upper Egyptian villages). Christian homes, shops or even churches, might be razed in these rare events. Historians have traced, on the other hand, how the term “communal violence” goes back to the British empire’s policing and manipulation of social divisions among their colonial subjects.259 The colonial past of the term is often readily apparent in its present use in Western journalism, where it sometimes seems the only political issue of note in Egypt is the well-being of its Christian “minority”. Discarding this conventional application of the term, I propose we conceptualize everyday violence in Egypt as communal in a very different way. This is because whenever altercations did unfold in Beni Suef, bystanders always enclosed upon combatants in order to minimize actual physical violence. An argument in the street? Every apartment window of surrounding buildings opened so Egyptian women and men could call down instructions, or, at the very least, bear witness to the events. Once, and only once, in Cairo I saw a young man pull a machete on another man, but it was clear by the way he wielded the blade that it was performance, and the weapon did not deter bystanders from playing peacemakers in the slightest. After combatants were separated, those at the heart of the conflict often yelled and gesticulated

258 Safe, with the exception of the violent unrest that took hold of Beni Suef for four days following the August 2013 Rāb‘a Massacre—a brief span marked by gun battles in the streets between security forces and armed opponents of the coup. On Saturday 17 August, the Egyptian army entered Beni Suef and reasserted the state’s control over the city.

259 Doyle, Mark. Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016.

222 dramatically to demonstrate their bravery, justification or willingness to fight. But actual physical fighting was exceedingly rare. In fact, the cleanest punch I ever saw thrown in my years living in Egypt was at Dayr Bayyaḍ during the mūsim. A number of shabāb (young men) had come together on the walkway above the Nile, with one of the teenagers clearly ready for a scrap. A right hook connected squarely on the cheek of another man, letting off a sharp smack. The recipient absorbed the punch admirably, though, and immediately let fly a barrage of his own. Before any more punches could land, however, the other youth as well as a large-bellied moustached bystander separated them and the fight resolved into dismissive cursing. The reactions of the men, women and children in the vicinity ranged from mild concern to knowing eye rolls and shakes of the head. A bunch of children laughed about the fight to each other while they played in front of a group of Muslim and Christians women. Oftentimes, I witnessed drivers of cars in Beni Suef stop to engage one another from their car windows. In Canada, interactions between drivers are almost exclusively hostile, with curses, angry honking, and cutting people off being the norm. While drivers sometimes cursed each other in Beni Suef, I most frequently saw motorists stop to chat in a relaxed manner; to explain their position, or to request (and receive) a cigarette. Frequently, these interactions were marked by smiles, laughter and humility—with the instinctive asking and granting of forgiveness or understanding. The tension so apparent on North American roads was mostly absent in Egypt, despite the highly congested traffic, and more relaxed communal interaction stood in its place. The communal nature of everyday violence in Egypt contrasts sharply with the way I have witnessed fights typically unfold in my Canadian homeland. Here bystanders to a fight are most likely to pull out their cell phones to film the violence—that is, if they do anything at all. As mentioned, therefore, the fact that violence is more communal is part of what makes Egyptian society (and arguably Arab and Muslim societies more broadly) so safe and peaceful. With this in mind, one might find at least a bit of irony in the fact that the American customs officer based in Buffalo (one of the United States’ more crime-ridden and racially segregated cities) was cautioning me about the violent nature of Egyptian society.

223 At the end of the day, violence in Egypt is almost always communal in the sense that conflict is routinely dealt with by society; by strangers, neighbours and bystanders who instinctively act to deescalate social tension. While religious difference occasionally exacerbates and escalates outbreaks of conflict in Egypt, such instances are incredibly rare. Muslim or Christian, young or old, Egyptians step in to “do the right thing” for reasons that can be best explained by the virtue theory outlined by Aristotle. According to Lambek, “Aristotelian virtues are never abstractions or categorical but always a matter of judging the right balance to fit the immediate circumstances.” The immediate interventions that come from Egyptians’ practical ethical judgement in instances of conflict makes plain an ethics of immediacy centred on honour, duty (wāgib) and the broader social cohesion that results.260 But what is it that informs the “urgency and immediacy yet ordinariness of the ethical?”261 As shown elsewhere in this dissertation, Egyptian society is marked by an array of heterogeneous traditions whose roots are complex and multifaceted. But it might be relevant to mention here that, in the provincial Egyptian context, theism is ubiquitous. Ordinary ethics, therefore, are undoubtedly at least partly a product of people’s acting under the influence of an immanent God. For instance, Amira Mittermaier illuminates an Islamic ethics of giving that is something quite apart from liberal compassion, neoliberal self-help, as well as the legalistic and abstract religiosity that has coloured the Islamic revival.262 Elsewhere, Mittermaier terms the “embodied practices that revolve around attending to those in front of us to be an ethics of immediacy.”263 Like the immediacy that marks the ethical practices in Mittermaier’s scholarship, the communal nature of conflict in Egypt hints at God’s presence in people’s highly presentist ordinary ethics. And, echoing Mittermaier, the ethics of immediacy in my picture of communal

260 Lambek 2010, pp. 19-20. One might even venture to say that Egyptians’ sense of communal well- being is so strong that they sometimes lean away from the golden mean of courage to foolhardiness in instances of danger.

261 Ibid. p. 4.

262 Mittermaier, Amira. Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.

263 Mittermaier, Amira. “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: The Egyptian Uprising and a Sufi Khidma,” in Cultural Anthropology, 29(1), 2014.

224 violence contrasts with the planned and long-term policies with which the state structures respond to violence. Granted, the ordinary and immediate ethics might not have been effective in preventing the large-scale political violence that rocked Egypt between 2016 and 2017 (peaking with the horrific slaughter of 311 Muslim worshippers at the al-Rawda mosque in North Sinai).264 What I hope to have shown in this chapter, however, is that this communal ethic of immediacy does have the potential to undo the violence’s divisive effects. The communal manner in which provincial Egyptian society often deals with conflict and violence, despite the difficult grand conditions of political repression, securitization, and growing sectarianism, ultimately speaks to the great reflexivity and flexibility inherent to the provincial art of living as a means of overcoming. As consistently strangers in the street voluntarily inserted themselves between two adversaries, it was not the result of codified ethics propagated by a text, the state or religious clergy on satellite television. Rather, it was the product of practical ethical judgement that operated widely in provincial Egyptian society, and despite the constraints of difficult political and economic conditions. ! ! Conclusion ! On the final morning of the 2018 festival, I packed my bags and returned my key to the retreat centre office next to the Virgin Mary shrine. There was a haze in the air—literal and figurative—from both the day’s relentless humidity as well as the physical remnants of the din that had rocked the night before. As I walked across the central square, past the sites of the tattoo parlour and main zalābiyya shop, I let out a deep sigh of relief. The fifteen days spent at the festival had been intense, and I was ready for some relative peace and quiet. I passed the main security detail, already a shadow of its former self, to find a sliver of shade under a roadside

264 The 24 November, 2017 attack on worshippers at al-Rawda mosque occurred against a backdrop of intense fighting between Sinai-based insurgents and Egyptian security forces. This ongoing Sinai Insurgency ramped up following the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt.

225 palm tree. Large clusters of dates—nearly ripe for harvest—hung heavily from its canopy. Within minutes, a taxi arrived to drop a family off at the centre and I hopped in to return to Beni Suef. In Egypt, it is true that some car interiors are more expressive than others. This taxi’s decor spoke loudly. There were no less than three pictures of Jesus, one photo each of Pope Kyrollis, Pope Shenouda and Pope Tawadros, and a photo of Beni Suef’s late Bishop Athanasius. It seemed stickers and hangings of crosses filled any free space that remained on the upholstery or glass. The driver of the taxi, whose name was Mena, was a middle-aged man with a round, friendly face. We exchanged pleasantries, with him responding to my presence as a foreigner in Beni Suef with typical delight and hospitality. Mena was particularly curious about where I was from, and, unlike some Egyptians I met, did not seem to know much about Canada. I told him, as I often did in short introductory conversations, about how cold and snowy Canada can get, how Canada is a relatively new country with lots of immigrants, and how Canada has an incredibly diverse mix of people from countries all over the world. —“Are there Egyptians there?” he asked me. —“Of course, lots,” I answered. —“There are Egyptians in every country in the world,” he mused, “We need work… here there is none.” Before I could offer any sort of reply, he then turned to me quickly and asked: inta mesīḥī (Are you Christian)?” —“Yes” I responded before chuckling, “and you?” —“Aw, ana mesīḥī,” (Yes, I am Christian) he said. —I motioned to the pictures of Jesus and the Coptic figures, and said “bayn (that’s clear)!” We both laughed. Genuinely curious, I then asked: “have you ever had a problem with Muslim customers, or sensed any tension with them… given all these photos?” —“La khāliṣ (no, not at all),” he responded, drawing out the latter word pointedly. After a short pause, he continued “if they have a problem, the door is there. But no, I have never had any issues because of this.” The complete lack of “security” in Mena’s taxi contrasted sharply with the soldiers and checkpoints stationed around the retreat centre during the mūsim. How was it that, at a time of church bombings and “worsening Muslim-Christian relations” generally, Mena was still so

226 secure? The answer, I believe, is in the concept of the everyday. A proponent of ordinary ethics, Michael Lambek argues that “the primary ethical situation is one of listening and judging when to speak or act and what to say,” and the fact that no passengers gave Mena the slightest difficulty suggests such practical ethical judgements guide Egyptian life. Mena had inevitably given rides to many Muslims over the years, some of whom would have had negative feelings towards Christians. Mena also surely gave rides to people who had submitted to a more rigid, codified version of Islam (such as Salafis), and it is also safe to say that this committed piety also played a role in the consistently respectful treatment Mena received. That is, for most Egyptians, piety, the social, and practical interests overlapped in a manner that facilitated the coexistence of multiple traditions, discourses, and affiliations in single places and persons. Like the ins and outs of Beni Suef’s taxis, the Muslim and Christian attendance of the mūsim was also dictated by a plethora of religious, social and even political imperatives. After the unprecedented attacks on Coptic sites between late 2016 and mid-2017, though, the state, quite understandably, could simply not allow the mūsim to unfold like Mena’s days of driving. The barrier that arose (consisting of checkpoints, car searches and the resultant long wait times to enter) ultimately represented a grand constraint on the everyday life that played out in Mena’s taxi and elsewhere. The intense securitization might have led one to wonder how anyone, and particularly Muslims, would brave the prolonged scrutiny by security forces. Despite all the new constraints, however, ordinary Egyptian continued to go to the mūsim in great numbers. Like the highly structured perimeter erected by the church and state, the Beni Suef mūsim revealed festival practices that were far more disciplined than what appears in anthropological accounts of mawlids in Egypt.265 Rather than snaking through the streets and allies of old city centres, as was the case in many Muslim mawlids, the Beni Suef mūsim unfolded under the firm jurisdiction of the centralized Coptic church. The church determined what could be sold and where. It controlled the dissemination of sermons and bible studies over the retreat centre’s loudspeakers. And, finally, it decided who could sleep where, in a manner which made social class and urban/rural differences salient.

265 Schielke, 2012.

227 I have also shown, however, how these constraints only went so far in dictating the practices of individual festival-goers, for whom the mūsim was variably a social and religious event. Visitors enjoyed the visceral feelings and flavours of the season, and ordinary life continued to play out inside the exceptional festival atmosphere. Some came for healing, worship and solace, while others were drawn by the allure of potential flirtation or courtship. The mūsim was often a family event—a time to be close to loved ones across generations—as well as a time for friends and neighbours, Muslim and Christian, to come together. The flexibility of society at the mūsim is perhaps best captured by the dockworker Muhammad, who, like so many of my interlocutors, did not express feelings of failure when contemplating the heterogenous and co- imbricated traditions that informed his life from without and within. For people in Beni Suef like Muhammad, multifaceted traditions and interests interacted and acted through the medium of practical ethical judgement. After Mena had dropped me off, and as I sat alone in my Beni Suef apartment reflecting about the past two weeks, the church bombings and checkpoints all seemed so distant to me. It was not that these political events and machinations had not had tremendous political and discursive power. They were highly significant—as evidenced by the unforgettable material constraints outside the retreat centre walls. It became clear to me that inside those walls, however, there had been a softening or even undermining of those grand constraints and conditions. The everyday ethics of immediacy, which existed inside Mena’s taxi, on Muhammad’s pier, and elsewhere, had made its way into the mūsim as well. And, as a result, everything inside became ‘ādī (normal). ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

228 Postscript ! ! In the late summer of 2018, I packed my bags to leave Beni Suef. I knew then that my dissertation research was done, and that I would likely not return for some time. Goodbyes with friends felt extra melancholic, as did my drive to the train station. I looked out the car window and watched the city I had come to know so well pass me by. The streets were much quieter than usual, as it was ‘īd al-ʾaḍḥā, and most Muslims were inside their homes celebrating the holiday with family. Outside the station, I bought some simsima (sesame seed cookies) from a small bakery before making my way to the platform. Minutes later, the train arrived on time and I hopped aboard. Unlike most trains coming down from the ṣaīd (Upper Egypt), this one was not overly full. I found my seat beside a middle-aged man and, for the next few minutes, proceeded to look out the window at the fleeting sight of Beni Suef’s apartment buildings, markets, university, and factories. Once outside the city, I turned away from the glass to find that the family sitting in the row in front had clearly taken an interest in me, the visible foreigner. “masā’ al-khayr (good evening),” I said to them. The amusement in their faces immediately increased tenfold, and an introductory conversation ensued. I learned that the group were part of an extended family from Assiut, on their way to visit kin in the Egyptian capital. There were two married couples: Amira and Peter (who was sitting next to me), and Michael and Mariam. Between the pairs, there were five children ranging in age from six to seventeen. Everything, from their names, to their crucifix necklaces, to the women’s uncovered hair, told me they were Christian—a fact their words soon confirmed. The day before the ‘īd (feast) was the best time for Christians to travel, Peter told me, as Muslims had already undertaken their commutes the day before. Indeed, looking around it struck me that every single party on the train appeared to be Christian. The conversation then turned to life in their home province of Assiut, which lies around 250 kilometres south of Beni Suef. Attempting to relate to them, I told them how much I liked the regional bread, ‘īsh il-shamsī (Sun Bread)—a round, light-coloured cake- like loaf popular in Upper Egypt (in contrast to the much flatter, pita-like ‘īsh baladī [country

229 bread] more prevalent elsewhere). As soon as I said it, Amira began untying one of the plastic bags at her feet, and I realized my mistake. Generosity is a major component of Arab culture, and many Egyptians will offer you the shirt off their backs, shoes on their feet, or sandwich in their hands, if you compliment them on it. I should have known better to express my fondness for ‘īsh il-shamsī. When Amira passed a bag of three large loaves over to me moments later, I laughed in humble gratitude and tried to fend off her advances. But it was no use. I would leave that train with the loaves of traditional bread in tow, and Amira would not have had it any other way. Later in the ride, Peter pulled up an Arabic film about Jesus Christ on his phone. Plugging headphones into the device, he then told me to take one of the earbuds. And so I sat, for the next thirty minutes, politely watching the video with my new acquaintance. Eventually pulling into Cairo’s Ramses Station, we said our goodbyes, and two days later I was on a flight out of Egypt. ! Back during my coursework at the University of Toronto, when I was exploring what to do my dissertation research on, my advisors warned me about the perils of writing on the topic of “Muslim-Christian relations” in Egypt. And for good reason. Western discourses on the subject have long been constructed and infused by colonial lenses and undertones. Having already lived for several years uniquely embedded in Muslim and Christian communities in Beni Suef, however, I felt that I could do justice to the concept. In my mind, this meant showing ethnographically and historically the many different sides of Muslim and Christian life in Egypt. This also meant illuminating both the moments religious identities dictated social and political interactions, and the times they did not. On that departing train, for instance, religion mattered in some ways. Indeed, the families I interacted with were travelling that day because they were Christian. Their religion was visible on their bodies, the videos they watched and the books they read. And their marriage and procreation would only have happened exclusively among Christians. On the other hand, I had many interactions with Muslim families during my years living in Egypt marked by identical geniality and generosity. So how and when did religion really “matter” on that train?

230 In this dissertation, I have shown how such questions are not straightforward. Whether or not a person, place or interaction is religious or not depends on a symbiotic relationship between subjective perspective and objective context. I hope to have balanced the two building blocks of representation sufficiently. What I have argued is that intersections of religion, politics and society in contemporary Egypt cannot simply be explained by the application of single concepts in isolation— be they secularism, separation, Islam, minoritarianism, extremism, colonialism or religious revivalism. Rather, I have shown how, depending on place and time, Egyptian society can variably be shaped by some combination of all these things, and much more. The main insight I discovered during my fieldwork on the Muslim attendance of Coptic spaces was that, though religion was almost always present in and on Egyptian bodies, identities and spaces, it was less consistently the determining factor in people’s interactions. I found that these sites of crossing were always shaped by other forces, such as economic interests and hardship, political aspiration and repression, social class, gender, sociality, engagement with saints and fun. Above all else, my interlocutors navigated these co-imbricated, competing and multifaceted cultural, economic and historical forces with phronetic, or practical, judgement. And in the end, I argue it was practical ethical judgement (which were often shaped by religion, among other traditions, institutions and discourses) that allowed different religious identities to sit confidently and comfortably amidst all the shifting circumstances and traditions that shaped my fieldsites. At many points in this dissertation, I have put forth the argument that Egypt’s political context influenced actions and interactions of peoples and states much more than religion (and secularism). The first chapter of this dissertation, for instance, shows the complex historical and political forces that led to the current state of “worsening Muslim-Christian relations” as well as the resilient and pervasive coexistence. Critiquing anthropologists who eschew nuance in the haste of making sweeping theoretical claims, I have provided a historical narrative that is, I believe, far more representative of how religion has intersected with politics and society in contemporary Egypt. Chapter 4 moves the focus from past politics to much more recent ones. I show how, though religion factored at times in people’s experiences of politics before, during and after the 2011 uprising, Muslims and Christians at the lagna and beyond mostly experienced

231 the state in very similar ways. And so, while religious difference has mattered in Egyptian history and civil society, I conclude that the Egyptian context is also profoundly shaped by the cold, calculating world of power politics. At many other points in this dissertation, I have downplayed the significance of religious difference in people’s interactions in favour of ordinary ethics. When Muslims and Christians visited Bishoy’s khidma in a confident and relaxed manner, they did so with the understanding that iḥna fil-hawa sawa (we are in the same air), and that all people deserve to be treated with dignity, compassion and respect. Muslim and Christian visitors to the khidma were united in their seeking rabbinā (our God) in attempt to deal with the pains, hardships and joys that marked their lives. In Chapters three and five, the phronetic dimensions of ordinary social interactions is even more apparent. At both al-kursat and the lagna, people related to one another much less as Muslims and Christians, than as friends, colleagues and acquaintances navigating the opportunities and constraints of life with a flexible art of living. Social class differences also manifested frequently at my fieldsites—backgrounding religious difference along the way. At the miracle khidma, for example, it was modernist and upper-class views on superstition and the supernatural that really divided Beni Suef residents on the khidma practices—not which religion they identified with. And at the mūsim, institutional divides and social class often factored heavily into how people experienced the festival. Economic forces also backgrounded religious difference in people’s lives throughout this dissertation. In Chapter 3, set at the adult language program run by the church, it was practical economic considerations that drove Muslim and Christian students’ attendance. The vast majority of students were young adults with an eye on their emerging careers in an ever- competitive job market. These adults felt little sense of contradiction or failure living out their cosmopolitan and economic aspirations in the church classroom. Economic adversity also came up frequently in my conversations with interlocutors at the miracle khidma, where material hardship was often apparent on the words and bodies of attendees. Finally, at the mūsim, young adults worried more about finding an appropriate spouse or job than they did about the recent conflagrations of purported “Muslim-Christian relations”.

232 Gender is another concept that frequently related to, and sometimes muted, the import of religious difference at my fieldsites. This was especially the case in my third chapter, where gender was always the most salient social line in the classroom. At al-kursat, gender division decided who sat and spoke with whom much more than religion. Moreover, it was debates around gender that brought religious difference to the fore and elicited religious-based claims. At the mūsim, meanwhile, gender, along with religion, social class, and a host of other factors, guided how young people related to the opposite sex. So often in these interactions, religious difference mattered, as it always did (a Muslim man would not have pursued a Christian woman). And yet, at the same time, it did not matter at all (a Muslim man was not thinking about religious difference in the first place). Just as I seek to downplay the significance of religious difference in social interactions, at many points in this dissertation I have also problematized the purported agency of political secularism in people’s lives. I argue that Western colonialism, neocolonialism, authoritarianism, the religious revivals, neoliberalism and the rising influence of the Gulf are all as much a part of the story as secularism. I propose that the controlling and regulating characteristics of the Egyptian state which anthropologists refer to are more illustrative of a centralized state than a secular one. In the third chapter, I use ethnography to elucidate a form of a secularism as it is lived in the vernacular. I show how program administrators tried to cultivate a secular ethos at the program, centred on equidistance, inclusion and a willingness to learn. Far from being a state force, I illustrate how this ethos actually emerged organically, from within Beni Suef society. ! At the end of the day, Egypt, and much of the Middle East more broadly, has a much better track record of managing religious difference than the so-called West. Many in Europe, of course, turned genocidal against their socioreligious others in the first half of the twentieth century—a ghastly history without parallel in the Arab world. Moreover, Western colonialism, so often infused with Christianity, demonstrated remarkable intolerance for religious difference among the colonized native populations it did not ethnically cleanse outright. So “what went right” in Egypt? I hope this dissertation answers this significant, and I would argue under- appreciated, question.

233 Ultimately, the Egypt of my 2011-2018 fieldwork was a place where religion was everywhere, and yet religious difference was rarely a “problem”. A final example of this is the language people used. Invocations of God are exceedingly common in Arab societies, and Egypt is no exception. ʾin shāʾallāh (God willing), mā shāʾallāh (God has willed it—usually used as an expression of joy), and al-ḥamdulillāh (thanks be to God) are three of the most popular words in the Egyptian lexicon for Christians, Muslims, believers and nonbelievers alike. I want to conclude this dissertation with a reflection on the latter expression. When people met in the street, a cafe or in a taxi during my fieldwork, they commonly asked each other “izzayak” or “kayf hālak" (how are you)? The standard reply to this question, whether one was in good or bad spirits, was “al-ḥamdulillāh (thanks be to God).” But what did people really mean by this expression? I found that Egyptians often said al-ḥamdulillāh with genuine feelings of happiness, excitement or gratitude. At other times it was said unthinkingly, with short indifference, or even hastily with an eye on getting to a task at hand. Sometimes a person’s tone or demeanour revealed the weight of the hardship, depression or hopelessness in their lives. “Al-ḥamdulillāh” could be but a thin whisper. Finally, al-ḥamdulillāh was at times employed in response to a person’s compliment, a manoeuvre towards humility and self- erasure.266 “That was a delicious meal,” I so often said to my gracious Egyptian hosts. “al- ḥamdulillāh,” they replied. Egyptians show quite clearly, therefore, that al-ḥamdulillāh is an expression that can make sense in times of revolution and counterrevolution, neocolonialism and neoliberalism, weddings and funerals, inflation and austerity, social upheaval and political repression, and amidst the constant blur of the religious and the secular. In fact, expressions like this are proof enough of how drawing rigid lines between different traditions (sacred, profane, modern, secular, religious, everyday) rarely makes sense in Egypt, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Moreover, al-ḥamdulillāh’s use by Muslims and Christians alike symbolizes how perilous it sometimes is to divide members of Egyptian society along religious lines. Al-ḥamdulillāh, then, truly is an expression for all people and all seasons in Egypt. And so, as I write now in the fall of

266 See Mittermaier, 2019. pp. 61-65.

234 2020, looking back on all I experienced, felt and learned during my years living in provincial Egypt, al-ḥamdulillāh is the expression that most comes to mind. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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