THE POLITICS OF (DIS)ENGAGEMENT:
COPTIC CHRISTIAN REVIVAL AND THE
PERFORMATIVE POLITICS OF SONG
by
CAROLYN M. RAMZY
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Music
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Carolyn Ramzy (2014) Abstract
The Performative Politics of (Dis)Engagment: Coptic Christian Revival and the Performative Politics of Song Carolyn M. Ramzy A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Music, University of Toronto 2014
This dissertation explores Coptic Orthodox political (dis)engagement through song, particularly as it is expressed through the colloquial Arabic genre of taratil. Through ethnographic and archival research, I assess the genre's recurring tropes of martyrdom, sacrifice, willful withdrawal, and death as emerging markers of community legitimacy and agency in Egypt's political landscape before and following the January 25th uprising in 2011.
Specifically, I explore how Copts actively perform as well as sing a pious and modern citizenry through negations of death and a heavenly afterlife. How do they navigate the convergences and contradictions of belonging to a nation as minority Christian citizens among a Muslim majority while feeling that they have little real civic agency?
Through a number of case studies, I trace the discursive logics of “modernizing” religion into easily tangible practices of belonging to possess a heavenly as well as an earthly nation. I begin with Sunday Schools in the predominately Christian and middle-class neighborhood of Shubra where educators made the poetry of the late Coptic Patriarch, Pope
Shenouda III, into taratil and drew on their potentials of death and withdrawal to reform a
Christian moral interiority and to teach a modern and pious Coptic citizenry. I also outline how one affluent choir from the comfortable neighborhood of Heliopolis, The Holy Family
Choir, undertook yearly taratil service trips to the peripheries of popular religious festivals to
ii make the interiority of their Christian citizenry more audible through public processions of taratil. Finally, I explore the ministry of one charismatic Orthodox singer, Maher Fayez, as part of a larger evangelical trend that advocates that a heavenly citizenship can be achieved right here on earth. Maher Fayez's revival contradicted Pope Shenouda's ascetic meditations and use of martyr motifs through counter-narratives of spiritual happiness, interdenominational worship, and the use of mediated taratil to effect visceral encounters with God. In the case studies presented throughout this study, I argue that Coptic
(dis)engagement is not a form of passive political engagement but rather, is a public negotiation of faith and Egyptian civic identity in forms of spiritual service, song, and audible practices of piety.
iii Acknowledgments
I remember my mother's first reaction to my research ambitions in Cairo: "We immigrated from Egypt so that you would go back?" she chided me pointedly. When she realized I was serious I watched with awe as she maneuvered between family and friends, informing them of my research trips. At the mention of her eldest heading to Cairo, advice and best kept secrets spilled into the room and directly into my notebook. Firstly, I must thank my mother. And I must thank all of these friends and family who became my first interlocutors. Secondly, I have to thank the countless others who helped me in Egypt and beyond. Like many who did not initially understand what I was searching for they nonetheless wanted to help, all the while scratching their heads. They dug out old names, phone numbers, and long forgotten favors to draw up an essential map of maʻarif, connections in and outside of Cairo. Without the generosity of their time, support, and extensive networks, this project would not have been possible. Undoubtedly, I will miss some of their names here, and for this I apologize.
I begin with my dissertation committee at the University of Toronto who helped me draft a different kind of maʻarif, a theoretical map that nuanced my ideas along the way. My advisor, James Kippen, always challenged me to look beyond the surface, and what initially began as a study of unaccompanied taratil performed as prayer transformed into a full- fledged encounter with one of the most popular and critical soundscapes to the January 25th uprising for Egypt's Christian citizens. Amira Mittermaier's handwritten notes on chapters
iv drafts were also hidden routes that led me to uncover more theoretical treasures, and inspired me to listen more carefully to the conversations around the songs. More importantly, she helped me to listen more deeply to my own voice in this story. Joshua Pilzer's thoughtful pauses during our meetings segued almost perfectly into the right questions to push me over new thresholds of thinking about the power of woundedness and the potential healing embedded in sound. Finally, I want to thank Jeff Packman at the Faculty of Music. While not officially on my committee, he always found the time to share and recommend the most fitting literature, lighting the way during seemingly dark passages of this process.
I am also grateful for other mentors outside of the University of Toronto: Benjamin
Koen, Ellen Koskoff, and Nelly Van-Doorn. Ben Koen and his family have accompanied the journey of this project from its beginnings as I grappled with questions of belonging during my Master's study of Coptic immigrants in Canada. Ellen Koskoff inspired me to dabble with ethnomusicology with the prophetic warning, “ethnomusicology will change you.” How so very right she was, in the most splendid kind of way, and how grateful I am to share my transformational milestones with her. Nelly Van-Doorn always extended a hand to encourage my professional growth, and set an inspiring example of how to balance life and research. I also owe a special thanks to Helene Moussa whose encouragement fortified me over the most delectable teas and lunches, from my very first day in Toronto to that final day as I packed my bags. Her patient conversations helped to smooth what, at times, was a jarring transition into fieldwork and then back to life as an graduate student. In Egypt, Dr Omran emerged as another mentor whose musings and home became a refuge to think and grow out loud.
Countless friends and colleagues greatly enriched me both as a person and as a
v scholar: Anthony Shenoda, Febe Armanios, Paul Sedra, Sinem Adar, Hakem Rustom, Joey
Youssef, and Daniel Gilman, whose encounters at conferences and during my time in Egypt sweetened the journey. At the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, I will not forget the comradery of Meghan Forsyth, Stephanie Conn, Francesca Inglese, Christina Hough, Gloria
Lipski, Lauren Sweetman, Graham Freeman, Jeremy Strachan, Charlies Hong, Vanessa
Thacker, Andy Hillhouse, and Chris Wilson as we huddled together over steaming bowls of pho. In Cairo and Shubra, I repeated this huddle over spicy bowls of khushari (noodles, rice, and lentils) and ful (fava bean dish), this time with Huda Blum Bakur, Denise Dias Barros,
Gaëtan Du Roy and his wife Natalia Duque. Reham, Nourhan, Mona, Alia, Minas, Salma,
Noriko, and Summar at the Higher Academy of Folk studies brought a particular joy to my time in Egypt and showed me the truest meanings of friendship.
During my research trip, as I nervously maneuvered a new cultural terrain and a shaky second language, my family emerged as my immediate and closest interlocutors. It was my uncle Fayek El-Rezeiky who became my first interlocutor-partner. He kindly drove me from Luxor to various small villages in Upper Egypt to visit singers whom I otherwise would have never met. He and his wife, Amal, generously invited me into their home and gave me a place to stay during my research. Lorees and Alber Ibrahim's home also became a critical refuge in Cairo, and I spent countless evenings singing with my grand-aunt Lorees while snapping green beans, picking leaves to make Jews Mallows soup, or watching over her grandchildren. One of seven sisters, she was the only one to get a college education and went on to manage Banks in Kuwait and Egypt. It was her example that promoted me to break with traditional expectations and to fight for a sense of independent mobility
vi throughout Egypt. It comes as no surprise that her son Ashraf and his wife Christine also challenged me to think beyond cultural expectations. They always asked provocative research questions that inspired me to go after the answers in the unlikeliest places. My uncles Fakher, Frank, and Vico, and their respective wives, Fayza, Bousy, and Magy, all assisted in one way or another, offering a kind hospitality that made my stay in Cairo a comfortable one. Finally, I need to thank my parents-in-law, Cecile and Michel who welcomed me into their lives and openly shared their histories of growing up and participating in the Sunday School Movement. I will not forget the seemingly endless nights spent indoors because of the revolution curfew, rotating our time between television coverage, sharing old photos, singing songs, and listening to homemade taratil cassettes.
Throughout my research, other interlocutors also shared their lives and time in a way that always humbled me: the Sunday School teachers at St. Anthony's Coptic Orthodox
Church in Shubra on El-Kargi Street. These khuddam (servants) graciously welcomed me into their classrooms, gifted me with recordings at their own expense, and tirelessly answered my questions. I am especially indebted to Sherry and Marian Maged who took me into their classrooms as well as Mary Faisal who took me to her service at St. Athanasius and
St. Mary in Nasser City.
This study would not be the same without the countless choir directors, volunteers, and musicians who generously gave me their time. This includes directors Diaʼ and Irene
Sabry, Saad Ibrahim, George Kyrillos, Magdy Latif, Arsani Nairouz, and Emad Nairouz who all shared the struggles and joys of founding their ensembles. Other musicians and singers deserve my deepest thanks: Faisal Fouad, Maher Fayez, and Mohamed Nuh all gave me a
vii sneak peak into their histories growing up in a changing Egypt and the soundscapes that accompanied such a transformation. I also want to remember Muʻallim Saif and Saad Mitri, who both passed before the completion of this study. Despite their ailing health as I interviewed them, they both laughed, sang, and recounted their lives with me.
I am especially indebted to Amir Rafla and to all members of the Holy Family Choir.
From the volunteer who picked me up at train station in Samalut to the choir members who looked out for my safety during processions throughout the mulid, I could not have written the fourth chapter of this work without their help. A particular thank you goes to Lola whose warm welcome eased my transition into the tight-knight group. More importantly, along with the generosity of Fady Phillip and Bahgat Sawfat, she introduced me to parts of Shubra that made the fifth chapter on Maher Fayez possible. I also want to remember the Samalut
Diocese khuddam and servants who fed us daily for the duration of our 10-days stay both years that the choir served in Samalut. I mention Madame Marcel, Madame Noora, Madame
Om Shrief, who gently corrected my Arabic (mis)pronunciations, and led me by the hand into the kitchen so that I may not forget to “taste my roots.” Finally, I want to thank the generosity of the people of Gabal al-Tayr who always opened their doors to the choir and withstood, what at many times was, a sonic intrusion into their lives.
There are also a number of interlocutor partners who requested to remain anonymous and whose names I can not mention here. I want to extend my sincerest thanks to each of them. They know who they are.
The following institutions offered generous grants that allowed me to complete this research: the government of Canada through their Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities
viii Research Council (SSHRC); the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE); the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies; the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. My writing was further supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) University of
Toronto Doctoral Award.
In Cairo, I want to remember the libraries and their gatekeepers who tirelessly worked to create quiet shelters of knowledge in the overwhelming and chaotic city that is
Cairo: the Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies, the Habib Girgis Museum, and St.
Mark's Public Library on the top floor of the Coptic Orthodox Cultural Center. I am especially indebted to the librarian in each of these: Methat, Father Antonious Elie, and
Father Bassilious Sobhi. Their help to locate materials, along with the rare spaces of quietude, made these libraries my little heaven on earth.
Just as I began here by thanking my mother, I must also thank the rest of my closest family. My father has been a bulwark of support, challenging me to go against the grain to pursue my interests. My cousin Helen and her son Patrick provided the sweetest escapes from the heaviness of the work, and always helped to keep things in perspective. In Toronto,
Lilian and Michael Ramzy became a lifeline to the logistics of graduate student life and the laughter we shared helped me to buoy some of the roughest waves. Heidi Melton's phone calls, squeezed in from backstage as she debuted her opera career all over the world, always reminded me to take courage and take my world by storm. My brothers, Mina and Mark, supported me through endless laughter and enriched this process by sharing their bountiful curiosity.
Finally, I close by thanking my best friend and collaborative partner in this project,
ix Marcus Michel Zacharia. He earned his nickname Zaki al-Samak after a favorite rest spot between our long days of interviews, participant observation, and discussion. It was under the 6th of October underpass, in the midst of the bustling Wikalit al-Balah market, that I experienced my greatest joy: to learn with a willing partner. It was his insights and challenges to my assumptions that embodied what I believe to be one of Saba Mahmood's most important lessons: that to truly engage others and honestly encounter their worldview, one had to embrace the possibilities of being remade (2005: 37). This project, and the people whom I have encountered through it, have marked and remade me in ways for which I am deeply grateful.
x Table of Contents
Abstract ...... 2
Acknowledgments ...... 4
List of Figures...... 14
Note on Transliterations and Translations ...... 15
Arabic Glossary...... 17
INTRODUCTION THE POLITICS OF (DIS)ENGAGEMENT: TARATIL, CITIZENSHIP, AND REVOLUTION...... 1 An Introduction: Contesting Soundscapes...... 1 The Discursive and Performative Politics of Song...... 8 Defining Taratil ...... 18 The Crosses in the Ceiling: Living and Researching in Shubra...... 23 Singing a Pious Modernity...... 27 Ethnographic Methodology...... 32 Chapter Outline...... 33
CHAPTER 1 CANONIZING LITURGICAL SOUNDSCAPES...... 48 Early Transcriptions and Negotiations of Modernity...... 55 On the Sovereignty of Sound: Early Coptic Music Transcriptions ...... 58 Singing and Reading an Evangelical Modernity ...... 64 Co-Opting Orientalism: Coptic Music Debates of Authenticity and Modernity ...... 68 Some Conclusions...... 77
CHAPTER 2 PEDAGOGIES OF PIETY: TARATIL AND THE EARLY SUNDAY SCHOOL MOVEMENT (1908-1951) ...... 79 Introduction...... 79 Habib Girgis: Saint of a Modern Religious Education ...... 86
xi The Beginning of the Sunday School Movement ...... 91 American Inspirations: Reinterpreting Protestant Evangelism into Orthodox Hymnbooks ...... 98 Modeling Protestant Hymnbooks...... 109 Spiritual Suffering, Service, and Shifting Pedagogies of Piety...... 112 Some Conclusions ...... 122
CHAPTER 3 PEDAGOGIES OF POLITICS: taratil AND COPTIC SUNDAY SCHOOLS TODAY...... 125 Introduction ...... 125 Crafting Contemporary Sainthood: Pope Shenouda's Early Service ...... 133 Release of the Spirit: Practical Pedagogies of Piety...... 139 Sunday School in Shubra Today ...... 144 Pedagogies of Politics: Miss Manal's Class ...... 151 Taratil after Sunday School...... 161 Some Conclusions...... 169
CHAPTER 4 TARATIL AND SPIRITUAL SERVICE AT COPTIC RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS ...... 171 Introduction...... 171 Mulids...... 175 Coptic Mulid Reforms...... 182 Modern Songs, Modern Service: The Holy Family Choir ...... 193 Song as Sermon; Visiting the Poor, Visiting Our Selves ...... 203 Singing Coptic Counterpublics: HFC "Serving in Heaven" as Modern-Day Martyrs ....212 Some Conclusions ...... 225
CHAPTER 5 "REPOSSESSING THE LAND:" NEGOTIATING MODERN COPTIC CITIZENRY THROUGH NEO-PENTACOSTAL PEDAGOGIES ...... 227 Introduction...... 227 Singing on the Margins: the Trials of Maher Fayez...... 235 A Call of Salvation to the Land: El-Karouz and Neo-Pentecostal Pedagogies ...... 241 A Counternarrative of Happiness: Hearing and Singing an Alternative Politics of (Dis)Engagement...... 248 Mediating Spirituality: taratil, Technology, and Sounding the Presence of God...... 256 Sonic Materiality of the Divine ...... 263 Repossessing the land, Repossessing Ourselves? Negotiating a Modern Coptic Citizenry
xii Through Neo-Pentecostal Pedagogies...... 272 Some Conclusions...... 281
CONCLUSION ...... 283
APPENDIX ARABIC taratil TEXTS...... 290
Barik Biladi / Bless our Country...... 290
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 299
ARABIC LITERATURE ...... 318
xiii List of Figures
0.1 A Muslim holding the the Qur'an and a Coptic Christian are carried
through Tahrir Square In Cairo, Egypt 3
1.1 Lieutenant Kamil Ibrahim Ghubriyal's transcription of the Trisagion
Hymn [Agioas] (1916:31) 72
1.2 Ernest Newlandsmith's transcription of the Trisagion Hymn [Agios]
(1929-1933, Vol. 1: 52) 74
4.1 A state-sponsored dhikr concert at Sidi Mursi Abu ʻAbbas mulid in
Alexandria, Egypt 187
4.2 HFC service tent in Gabal al-Tayr 189
5.1 A photograph of Maher Fayez from one of his numerous fan page on social
networking sites 235
xiv Note on Transliterations and Translations
In this project, I have transliterated Fusha or Classical Arabic following a simplified version of the system outlined in the International Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies (IJMES). I have mainly attended to the differentiation of the ʻayn and the hamza and used digraphs (kh, gh, etc.) in their usual ways while leaving out all underdots and macrons entirely. Also, I indicate Arabic plurals by adding an s to the end of Arabic nouns (such as mulids religious festivals rather than mawalid). Lastly, I did not transliterate words that interlocutors already spelled in English, such as Arabic satellite programs (for example,
Maher Fayez's ensemble Al-Karouz or show Estenara in Chapter 5).
Despite the abundance of translations appearing in taratil music videos as well as online, all the taratil translations in this dissertation are my own unless otherwise noted. I have tried to make note of the differences in the translations utilized by churches both in
Egypt and abroad, particularly when word choices would have rendered a vastly and perhaps, at times, strategically different meaning in English. I have tried to remain as close as possible to the original Arabic text while maintaining a compatible poetic resonance in English.
Readers will also find below, strategically placed before the main body of text, an Arabic
Glossary of the most frequently utilized Arabic terms in this study. The terms listed are connected to larger thematic threads that appear throughout this project; as Engelke
(2007:19) points out, religious language and discourse play a role in the definition of religious authority, and readers may wish to become familiar with key terms and concepts
xv before embarking on the dissertation.
Lastly, in order to protect my interlocutors' privacy, I only identify public figures such as well-known choir directors, prominent clergy, and those who wanted to be identified in my study by their full name. With their consent, I have maintained the first names of key interlocutors, not just as homage to the lessons they taught me while in Cairo but also to acknowledge their time, effort, and contributions to this project. For all others, I have depended on pseudonyms to maintain anonymity.
xvi Arabic Glossary
"Our Father" ابونا Abuna In the Coptic Orthodox community, Abuna refers to priests and clergy who have been consecrated by "the breath of the Holy Spirit" (Shenouda III 1999: 50) from one generation to the next. Traditionally, it is believe that this breath traces back to the one Jesus Christ breathed into the disciples (NIV John 20:20-23). As part of seven sacraments (the other six include baptism, confirmation, confession and repentance, Holy Communion, anointing of the sick, marriage), Coptic clergy officiate over Orthodox liturgical rites and "make visible the grace of the Holy Spirit" through tangible and visceral practices (Bishop Mettaous in Sacramental Rites in the Coptic Orthodox Church,undated). Coptic clerical hierarchy is also a complex and deeply patriarchal one, ranging broadly from epsaltus (male cantors whose job it is to memorize and sing Church liturgical hymns ), to archdeacons (the leader and teacher of a choir of cantors), Bishops, and finally up to Sayyidna al-Baba or the Patriarch at the top of Church institution. The late Coptic Orthodox Patriarch was referred to as Sayyidna al-Baba Shenouda, literally, "Our patriarch, the father, Shenouda." "Spiritual Father" الب الروحي Al-ʼab al-ruhi In her work, political theorist Dina el-Khawaga described that the clericalization of the Coptic laity is one of the most decisive traits of today's Coptic religious renewal. The overhaul came as a result of "direct vertical relationships between the laity and the leader of the clerical body,"
xvii (1997: 145). Al-ʼab al-ruhi or "spiritual fathers" are the Coptic Orthodox clergy who are the direct and critical conduits of the Church's reform. Today, they have become especially influential figures among the Church's youth. Through the liturgical sacrament of confession, they not only oversee their parishioners' spiritual growth and ethical restructuring though daily prayers and Bible readings but also have a heavy hand in their vocational and even spousal choices. They are most commonly known as abuna (see above). Alhan are a genre of church hymns performed in the الان alhan (sing. lahn) (sing. antiquated Coptic language during official services and liturgical rites. Unlike taratil, alhan are unaccompanied (لن monophonic melodies largely understood only by an exclusive few: the clergy (al-kahana) and a select number of deacons (shammamasa). While the congregation (al- sh‘ab) do perform alhan during their liturgical responses, only a small number of erudite aficionados understand what they are actually singing. Despite this, alhan have a particularly revered status in the community as the last link to an ancient Egyptian heritage; in this project's first chapter I explore the dialogical tensions they represent in relations to taratil as a "borrowed" missionary genre performed in the language of the dominant Other, Arabic. "Heavenly citizenship," "heavenly homeland" الوطن السماوي -Al-watan al samawi Framed within the biblical salvation narrative of eternal life after death on Earth, "al-watan al-samawi" can mean both a heavenly citizenship as well as a heavenly homeland. watan, the classical Arabic term for homeland, also implies nationalists who are indigenous. Hence, the Arabic term muwatin for citizenship is the direct object of watan as a noun. Literally a muwatin is a subject of the nation. In this
xviii study, I explore how Copts understand the convergence of nationhood and belonging as faithful citizens, to both to an earthly watan as well as a heavenly one. Archdeacon "Leader and teacher of a choir of male cantors" (See Abuna) "Celebration of the saints" اعياد القديسي Aʻyad al-qidisin (See ihtifal) "Grace, blessings" بركة Baraka A shared notion with Egyptian Muslim cutlure, Amira Mittermaier describes baraka as the spiritual power and sanctity associated with individuals, places, and certain objects whose grace can be transferred through contact or gaze (2011: 265). In Muslim popular religious festivity (mulid), Gilsenan adds that blessings emanate from the saint's shrine and form an aura of sanctity that allows for the blending of different spheres—the so called "sacred" and "profane"—of festivity, and more broadly, elements of life (2000: 175). In a case study of one Coptic mulid in chapter 4, I discuss baraka in depth in relation to popular devotional songs. Short for "Da‘wa al-Fida‘yyia li al-ʼArd" or "the Call of دعوة الرض Daʻwat al-ʼArd Salvation to the Land," "Daʻwat al-ʼArd" is popular cyber ministry by the famous muratil or taratil singer Maher Fayez. In four drawn-out lessons broadcast from his home office, Fayez urges his audiences to return to their faith. He uses the creationist story of the earth from the Biblical account of Genesis (1: 2–4) as a lens through which to talk about Christian selfhood and reformist citizenry. Maher Fayez and his ministry are the subjects of chapter 5. "The evangelist movement," "bearers of the good news" حركة الكاروز -Harakat El Karouz El-Karouz is an interdenominational musical ensemble under the tutelage of Maher Fayez. Rooting their style in
xix contemporary Egyptian music and colloquial language, their mission is a response to the overt institutionalization of Coptic liturgical piety the emphasis of the antiquated language. Like Maher Fayez, their movement is also the subject of chapter 5. "Sunday School Movement" حركة مدارس Harakat Madaris A religious revival beginning in the 1920s that actively الحد al-ʼAhad resisted American Protestant missionary efforts and challenged British colonial authority. Officially organized by archdeacon Habib Girgis in 1918, the religious education reform aimed to educate Orthodox youth about their religion, ancient language, as well as saint and martyr hagiographies using pedagogical devotional songs such as taratil. The reform ignited what would become the full- fledged Coptic renaissance that the community is still experiencing today. "Home visits" افتقاد Iftiqad Coming from the Arabic root [f-q-d] broadly meaning to lose, iftiqad means to search or to seek for that which is lost. Similar to the Muslim notion of daʻwa (literally an “invitation” or a “call” on Muslim congregants to come back to the faith), iftiqad also means to visit. During Shenouda's religious reforms, iftiqad took on the meaning of visiting "lost" parishioners who did not regularly attend church services and Sunday School. Anthropologist Elizabeth Oram describes iftiqad simply as "home visits" that carries with it connotations of "surveillance and "inspection" (2004: 159). As part of their regular services, priests began to increasingly call upon parishioners in their home to encourage them to come to church, educate them about their Coptic spiritual values, and to help them apply religious principles to their daily lives. This task was also
xx relegated to Sunday School khuddam or spiritual volunteers, to encourage their students to make it to their religious education classes and even personally bring them to and from their homes to class. See chapters 3 and 4. "Youth meeting" اجتماع الشباب Igtimaʻ al-shabab Beginning in the early 1950s, igtima‘ al-shabab or church youth meetings were a new phenomenon in the Orthodox Church. They first began as preparatory meetings for an emerging generation of Sunday School teachers known as igtima‘ al-khuddam. Historian Milad Hanna argues that it was these meetings that produced the Church's next generation of leaders, particularly coming out of the middle class neighborhood of Shubra where the largest meetings were held. Today, these meetings are critical spaces where Orthodox youth continue to learn and fashion their own religious subjectivity, socialize with the opposite sex, and sing taratil. See chapter 3. "Saint celebrations" احتفال Ihtifal Ihtifalat or "the celebration of the saints" is the official (احتفلت .pl. ihtifalat) (pl) Coptic Orthodox designation for popular religious festivity more colloquially known as mawalid (s. mulid). Originally named "a‘yad al-qidisin," the church settled on ihtifal during mulid spiritual reforms and the festival's degraded morals, dancing, and singing. Through spiritual lessons, religious cinema, liturgical services, and taratil performances, these reforms aim to transform popular Christian festivity solely into the celebration of the saint. See chapter 4. "The Lord's brothers and sisters" اخوة الرب Ikhwit al-rabb Ikhwit al-rabb largely designates the Christian poor who look to the Coptic Orthodox Church for social, medical, and financial assistance the the Egyptian government has
xxi failed to provide. The term is likely drawn from the Biblical verses in Matthew 25: 35–40 (NIV) when Jesus taught his disciples about serving the poor: "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…. Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me…." The Release of the Spirit انطلق الروح ʼIntilaq al-Ruh By far, Pope Shenouda III's most widely published work, ʼIntilaq al-Ruh initially began as a collection of his writings during his solitary contemplations as a hermit in the desert from 1956 to 1962. They would not only be transformed into a single bound moral manual as early as 1957, but the last 35 pages containing his qasaʼid (sing. qasida) or poetry would also be adapted into an impromptu taratil pamphlet. As of 2009, this book is in its 16th edition and has become a regular staple of many Orthodox bookstores, church libraries, and khuddam and youth meetings. See chapter 3. "Spiritual warfare" جهاد Jihad Though Western popular media have wrongly usurped jihad as meaning an Islamic "holy war," the term broadly denotes a spiritual effort or struggle in the name of God (Lukens-Bull 2005; Deeb 2006). Lukens-Bull clarifies that there are two forms of jihad, with the greater jihad as a spiritual struggles over one's sinfulness, while the other, lesser jihad involves public effort in the name of God (2005: 6). In chapter 2, the founder of the Sunday School Movement, Habib Girgis, urges his students and a new generation of Sunday School teachers to emphasize a
xxii spiritual jihad, firstly in terms of uplifting Coptic moral selves, and secondly, by calling for public spiritual volunteerism known as khidma. "Spiritual voluntary service" خدمة Khidma ruhiya A familiar term in Sufi mulids or religious festivals, khidma روحية pl. khadimat) ruhiya) (pl. generally denotes tents where devotional ceremonies take place and the volunteers offer up services to pilgrims in (خدمات روحية terms of tea, sweets, and other refreshments free of charge (Schielke 2006: 23). In Coptic contexts, particularly with the rise of Pope Shenouda III, khidma ruhiya takes on a different meaning. In his book and writings, the Pope described khidma as voluntary service that is undertaken with both love, spiritual zeal, (harara ruhiya) and "the burning will to create the kingdom of God on earth…." (1985: 22). Shenouda's ministry focused on the ethical refashioning of spiritual volunteers known as khuddam and how one could be remade through public expressions of piety and spiritual voluntary services or khidma ruhiya. (Holy Family Choir" (HFC" كورال العائلة -Kural al-ʻaila al An urban choir from the St. George Coptic Orthodox القدسة Muqaddasa Church of Heliopolis, an affluent neighborhood in Cairo; HFC and their service of song to Coptic religious festivals in rural Upper Egypt as well as other cultural and economic peripheries are the subject of chapter 4. "Arabic, Coptic, and Greek doxologies" مدائح Madaʼih Coming from the Arabic verb madh, meaning to extol or ( مديحة .sing. madiha) (pl) praise, madaʼih are Arabic, Coptic, and Greek doxologies praising various saints and martyrs in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Colloquially also known as tamgid, madaʼih are performed for patron saints during their commemoration as well as monasteries visits and religious pilgrimage. Scholars do not know exactly when the genre was first
xxiii introduced to the Coptic liturgical canon, but estimate that they became an integral part of extra-liturgical worship beginning in the thirteenth century when more and more Copts began to speak and worship in Arabic (Moftah et al. 1991: 1727). Also see Elizabeth Oram's study (2004: 207- 208) for an excellent discussion of tamgid and madaʼih during monastic revivals beginning in the late 1970s. "Popular religious festivals" مولد mulid mulids (pl. mawalid; pronounced mawlid in modern (موالد .pl. mawalid) (pl) standard Arabic) are popular religious festivals largely attended by Egypt's lower socioeconomic sector. While Muslims largely celebrate the birth of saints and family of the Prophet Muhammad, Coptic Christians generally commemorate the death or martyrdom of Orthodox saints, glorifying their "birth" into the afterlife. To differentiate their own religious festivals, the Coptic Church institution has renamed Christian mawalid ihtifals (sing. ihtifal) meaning the "celebration" of the saints. "Taranim singer," "taratil singer" مرن murannim In his sermon to the Holy Family Choir, one of the case (مرنيمة .f. murannima) (f) studies in this project, Abuna Moussa of Samalut defines a ( مرني .pl. murannimin) (pl) murannim as anyone who praises or sings in the name of the church (Personal Interview, 29 May 2011).The term denotes anyone whose profession is solely dedicated to مرتل muratil performing taratil and taranim and who does not perform (مرتلة .f. muratila) (f) anything outside of these devotional genres. While Fayruz (مرتلي .pl. muratilin) (pl) is know for performing a number of taratil, she is not known as a murannima as she also sings secular materials such as love songs and nationalist anthems. As I discuss in the last chapter, Maher Fayez only became recognized as a murannim when he gave up his career as a professional 'ud musician and devoted his time exclusively to taratil.
xxiv Ragheb Moftah The Ragheb Moftah Collection of Coptic Orthodox Collection Liturgical Chants and Hymns, a comprehensive resource on Coptic music housed at the U.S. Library of Congress. Ragheb Moftah (1898-2001), a prominent Egyptian scholar, had dedicated his 75-year career to the recording, transcription, and preservation of the complete Coptic liturgical hymnody, alhan. While he is hailed as the father of Coptic music studies and credited with its burgeoning scholarship, nowhere is his monumental study does he address taratil despite their growing prominence in Egypt when he started his project in 1926. See chapter 1. "Spiritual Retreat" رحلة خلوة Rihlat khilwa In her work on monastic revivals, Elizabeth Oram describes the rising phenomenon of spiritual pilgrimage to monastic sites beginning in the 1970s. As monasteries are largely located outside of urban centers and in the desert, she identifies these spiritual pilgrimage as "flights" from everyday life for Copts who relish in an exclusively Christian interior (2004: 182). Today, there are even specific retreat centers designated for Christian laity, such as Annoufra retreat center outside of Asyut, where church communities can retreat for several days in the Western desert. Urban khuddam also reinterpret their khidma in rural areas, specifically in Christian villages or during a Coptic mulid, as "spiritual retreats." See chapter 4. Sayyidna "Our Patriarch" (See Abuna) (Coptic, Greek, or Arabic doxologies" (See madaʼih" تجيد Tamgid Also known as taranim (sing. tarnima), Egyptian Christians ترتيل taratil (sing. tartila) (sing. Coptic community uses the terms taratil and taranim interchangeably to describe non-liturgical devotional songs ( ترتيلة that complement the official Coptic liturgical hymnody
xxv known as alhan. Thirteenth-century linguist Muhammad Ibn Mukarram Ibn Manzur (1232-1311) mentions ra-ta-la and ra-na-ma as the verb 'to sing' or to chant religious texts in his lexicon Lisan al-'Arab. He specifically mentions ra- ta-la as a genre resulting from the addition of melodies to Christian prayers by those of mixed Arab ancestry. While Copts do not claim to be of mixed Arabic ancestry, taratil are still a contested genre for their missionary history and their performances largely in Arabic, the language of the "Islamic Other." In this study, I will refer to the genre solely as taratil. (See taratil) ترنيم Taranim ( ترنيمة .sing. tarnima) (sing) "Praise" تسبيح Tasbih Coptic music culture is intimately tied to Coptic cosmological belief that that life on earth is a transient journey with the human spirit always longing to return to God. After death, one may rejoin God in heaven and spend eternity in a state of tasbih, the Arabic term for musical praise. Musically, then, Copts believe that the genres they perform during church services not only regulate a kind of cosmological rhythm regulating the church's liturgical calendar but that they also facilitate their connection to the saints. Most importantly however, tasbih also has the power to momentarily create a sense of heaven on earth and that musical worship and praise is integral to attaining a spiritual communion with God while still here on earth. Because of this, all major Coptic rites of passage from infant baptism to weddings and funerals are sung throughout.
xxvi DEDICATION
for Zaki al-Samak
xxvii "To become more the Christian, one must be the less successful citizen."
Edith and Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1978
xxviii INTRODUCTION
THE POLITICS OF (DIS)ENGAGEMENT: TARATIL,
CITIZENSHIP, AND REVOLUTION
This study is about taratil: an Egyptian Coptic devotional song genre expressive of a community's religious and sociopolitical identity within a predominantly Muslim state.
Central to this work is an enquiry into how Coptic selves have been and continue to be constituted through taratil, particularly since song is pivotal to all levels of Coptic experience.
An Introduction: Contesting Soundscapes
On Sunday, February 6, 2011, along with countless international news agencies, BBC
Arabic News broadcast what it thought was a Coptic Sunday mass in the heart of Egypt's ongoing revolution: Tahrir Square. Touting it as the epitome of Christian and Muslim unity, the camera closely followed a procession of young men carrying on their shoulders someone who looked to be a Muslim shaykh or cleric. He clutched the Qur'an in one hand, and with the other he held onto another person who looked to be a Coptic Christian ʼasis: a mustached priest in traditional black galabiyya or linen dress. That man held high a carved wooden cross. Behind them, someone waved a large Egyptian flag. It was the most perfect rebuttal to
1 the spike of sectarian tensions and violence leading up to and following the January 25th uprising.1 The group paused several times for photos: the priest and the shaykh's literal and victorious ʼid wahda or "unified hand" fitted neatly into the frame. When the camera pulled back, the soundscape became clearer and brought the image into greater focus: Muslims and
Christians in the Square were singing together Christian Arabic devotional songs: taratil.
Like other social markers, religious differences momentarily melted away in the utopia of
Tahrir and in the imaginings of a new Egypt without President Hosni Mubarak, a man who most felt had reigned unchecked for the past thirty years. On a nearby impromptu stage, an evangelical pastor named Fawzy Khalil held a copy of the Coptic Psalmody, al-agbiyya, and led the service accompanied by a full ensemble of musicians and two singers. The camera shifted its gaze and soon fixated on a veiled Muslim woman standing side by side with a
Christian woman wearing a large cross. Together, they pounded their fists passionately into the air, singing and celebrating a revived sense of al-wihda al-wataniya, or an Egyptian national unity.2
1 Beginning in January of 2010, a number of incidents made headline news: the Christmas Eve drive-by shooting of a Church in Nag Hammadi, leaving eight Copts and one Muslim dead; the attack on the Two Saints Church in Alexandria on New Year's Eve the following year resulted in 23 deaths and injured 97 others; and, only a number of days later on January 13, an off duty-police officer opened fire on a Cairo bound train killing one Coptic Christian and wounding five others. Along with the brutal police beating and death of Khaled Saeed, these incidents highlighted the State's unwillingness to protect its citizens and drove both Christians and Muslims in demonstrations and displays of a national unity" and protests of "National Police Day" on January 25, 2011. 2 For more on a Egyptian national unity, see Elizabth Oram's discussion of il wihda al-wataniya in Constructing Modern Copts: The Production of Coptic Christian Identity in Contemporary Egypt (Doctoral Dissertation, Princeton University, 2004): 75-79.
2 Figure 0.1 A Muslim holding the the Qur'an and a Coptic Christian are carried through Tahrir Square in Cairo (Photo by Dylan Martinez)3
Barik Biladi / Bless our Country 4
No matter [how bad it is], You can split the seas No matter how dark it is on earth, the heavens are full of light You are above all things, a Lord high in the heavens You listen to the cries of the oppressed
3 See “Muslim-Christian Unity at Tahrir Square,” by Jonathan Wright (7 February 2011).
3 Refrain Bless our country, Bless our country He who hears this prayer, in the heart of all people Bless our country, Bless our country Hear the calling of our hears, and send us the rain
From our hearts we call on you, our hearts call to you, one hand With one heart, we place our lives in your hands When the voice of justice mounts, fear and ignorance is disarmed Love in our country will reap bounty and peace
O God of life, listen to our collective prayer Make our country Egypt an Eden, restore the rights of the abused Lift fear, oppression, and cast out poverty and corruption Spread justice in our country and equality in the land
On our side of the television screen, my future mother-in-law tante Cecile5 and I sat in her living room in the middle-class, predominantly Christian neighborhood of Shubra watching the events unfold. I was curious to see whether she would sing along like she typically did with the taratil music videos on Coptic Orthodox satellite channels. But this time she did not. Even though we both recognized the tartila from the popular cassette
"Barik Biladi" (undated), she was both silent and skeptical. What was worse, she was pursing her lips tightly together in what I had quickly come to recognize as her way of being politely restrained when displeased. While the scene was a much-needed reprieve from the violence
5 Borrowed from the French, tante and oncle are typical ways to address Coptic elders in a middle class context, even if they were not directly related as kin. Like foreign words embedded in colloquial Arabic conversations, tante and oncle not only allude to a postcolonial Francophile culture, but also signify class. Among middle and upper class circles, people would typically forge the Arabic terms of hama [in- law], khal [maternal oncle], ʻAm [paternal uncle] that delineated kinship links for the more generic and "chic" French titles. For more on discussions of Egyptian identity and language registers, refer to Ziad Fahmy's "Colloquial Egyptian, Media Capitalism, and Nationalism," in his book Ordinary Egyptians:Creating the Modern Nation Popular Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011): 1-19.
4 in the Square just a few days earlier, it was immediately obvious to her that they had the story all wrong, or least, they had largely misunderstood or even misrepresented it.6 The words to the familiar song had been changed, stripped of their Christian markers.7 Even the
Coptic ʼasis turned out after all not to be a Coptic Orthodox priest; rather, his black galabiyya only resembled Coptic liturgical dress, and his mustache was in fact a mere imitation of the full beard clerics typically grew after ordainment. As the scene continued and the sounds of taratil brought Tahrir Square vividly into the living room, she eyed me wearily, curious if I, the prodigal Egyptian-American, would succumb to the screen's coaxing melodies and imaginary scene of unanimous harmony. I uncomfortably avoided her gaze, eyes fixed on the television. With no sound from me, she sighed heavily and then looked back to the screen.
This was not the first time the news had disappointed her that day. Just a couple of hours earlier, Egyptian State television had replayed one of the Coptic Patriarch's most controversial moments: on January 31, 2011, with the memory of the "Friday of Anger" and the brutality of pro- Mubarak stooges still fresh in people's minds, the head of the Coptic
Orthodox Church, the ailing Pope Shenouda III, threw his support behind the President on satellite television. Indeed, to further complicate matters, in one breath he had also thrown the support of the entire Coptic Orthodox community behind Hosni Mubarak! On the channel al-Haya 2, well-known media critic ʻAmr Adeeb questioned the Pope's recent
6 On February 2, 2011, in what became known as "The Battle of the Camels" pro-Mubarak supporters rode through Tahrir Square wielding swords and knives; they killed some 11 protestors and injured hundreds more. The following day, the violence escalated as protestors retaliated (David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim. "Mubarak's Allies and Foes Clash in Egypt," The New York Times, 2 February 2011). 7 For example, in the original texts of Barik Biladi, the last lines of the first verse read: "Just as Nehemiah came crying to you with tears / We are coming crying to you Jesus, lend your hand." In Tahrir Square, the texts had been changed to avoid specific Biblical and Christian references.
5 communication with the President, to which the Patriarch replied: "First, we wanted to check on him (nitamin ʻalay) and we wanted to tell him that we are with you (ihna maʻak)." When
Adeeb's co-anchor, Rola Kharsa pressed him, "That we [the Coptic Community] are behind you?" he replied, "Yes, I told him that we are behind you."8 On another channel, Egyptian
State Television also aired a similar phone interview that day in which the Pope declared:
We called the president to thank him and commend him, and to tell him that I as well as all of the congregation (shʻab) support him. May God give him power and watch over him so that he may direct in peace and order. May God protect Egypt, bless it, and always keep it as a source of power and blessings, and save it from those who want to create dissent and the troublemakers who disseminate news that frighten the masses and those who live in Egypt.9
This time, tante Cecile made an audible sound, a quick intake of breath as if someone took a sharp punch to her stomach. With a heavy and betrayed voice, she pleaded with the television screen. "laʼ, laʼ ya Sayyidna…lay? [No, No, oh Patriarch… Why?]."10 She listened to the rest of the interview in silence, her lips gripped tighter than ever before.
This was one of the rare occasions that I had ever witnessed tante Cecile so critical of the Patriarch: a man whom she and her husband revered so highly and whose picture hung in front of the house's substantial library that contained many of his spiritual and religious books. She and oncle Michel were Sunday School teachers and leading khuddam or spiritual volunteers in their own church, and Pope Shenouda was their first teacher when he was only
Bishop of Christian Education. Tante Cecile and oncle Michel had had a personal
8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUU93DIxRHk (accessed on 7 February 2013). 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4coWp2M61g (accessed on 7 February 2013). 10 Refer to the term "Abuna" or "our father" in the Arabic glossary at the beginning of this introduction for a more complete discussion of the term Sayidna.
6 relationship with him. That day, Shubra was buzzing with the words of the Patriarch; if he so openly supported the President, was it a direct order forbidding Coptic Orthodox youth from participating in demonstrations, some asked? Others argued that his hand had been forced, and that he had had to take this strategic stance in order to protect his flock. Others impressed upon their listeners that, like the Pope, they had better support Mubarak if they wanted to protect their own communities. If he fell, they maintained, Egypt would be transformed into an Islamist State with no place for them as a Christian minority. The conversations were endless and traveled from living rooms to dinner tables, pharmacy counters, markets…and they continued robustly online. Facebook friends quickly changed their profile pictures to that of the Coptic Patriarch, first to support his stance and secondly to declare their own allegiance and support. In the end, many concluded that the demonstrators were really hoodlums or "troublemakers" who wanted to create dissent, echoing both Shenouda's words and the practiced rhetoric of the State-controlled media. Even worse, Copts contended, these
Tahrir dissidents could be the very Salafi Islamists who wanted to overthrow the government and exert their own fundamentalist version of Islam, subjecting them to shariʻa law. Copts then should not help them by participating in the events of Tahrir Square; they should abstain from all demonstrations, even peaceful ones such as at the Sunday mass the following week.
Back in her living room, tante Cecile was restless. She flipped through the television channels much of the evening, hopping between State, satellite, and Coptic Christian channels. Finally, she settled on the semi-official Coptic Orthodox Church Television (CTV) to better discern the Church's position. The programming seemed eerily unchanged and unmoved by the rumblings of the outside world. The same taratil videos interrupted
7 coverage of liturgies and pedagogical religious sermons from Orthodox services all over
Cairo. Nothing shed further light on the Pope's public message, and the silence all too closely resembled the taciturn politics of the Presidential palace between Mubarak's speeches.
Disheartened, she walked away from the television, leaving it on for its usual background noise. As tante Cecile and I set the dinner table that evening, a familiar tartila accompanied us:
Al-ʻalam Iyybni w Yzraʻ / The World Builds and Plants11
The world builds and plants and is never satiated It concerns itself collecting wealth, and is far away from Jesus
Refrain But I am not from here, this world passing No money, or prestige, or wealth, I have another homeland
The Discursive and Performative Politics of Song
"لكن انا مش من هنا… انا لي وطن تانيا" ["I am not from here… I have another homeland"]
"ان مصر ليست وطن نعيش فيه لكنها وطن يعيش فينا" ["Egypt is not a nation that we live in, but rather a nation that lives inside of us"] Pope Shenouda III
Based on fourteen months of research, my ethnography investigates Coptic Orthodox political (dis)engagement through song, particularly as it is expressed through the colloquial
11 This song is well-known composition of Abuna Makri Yunan, a popular and charismatic priest in the downtown parish of Clot Bey.
8 Arabic genre of taratil, which is also sometimes referred to as taranim.12 I assess the genre's recurring tropes of martyrdom, sacrifice, willful withdrawal, and death as emerging markers of community legitimacy, indigeneity and agency in a precarious political landscape. More specifically, I explore how taratil are "pressed into action" within specific social contexts
(DeNora 2000:xi): how do they articulate both the community's ambivalence and conflicted desire to belong to a State they regard as increasingly Islamic without conceding their religious identities as Orthodox Christians? Minority status and discussion of citizenship have long been contested by Copts in Egypt. In 1994, the Coptic Patriarch made it abundantly clear when, along with various Christian and Muslim activists and intellectuals, he vehemently rejected that Copts be listed as a religious minority in the Ibn Kaldun Center for Developmental Studies' conference on Middle Eastern minorities.13 Yet, in his early days as bishop, Shenouda was known for his fiery sermons demanding equal citizenship rights for his Orthodox parishioners (Heikal 1983: 219). Though Shenouda's fervent rhetoric dramatically diminished during his career, there were many veiled allusions to the minority dynamics of his parishioners until his death in March of 2012.14 Additionally, his earliest
12 The Coptic community uses the terms taratil and taranim interchangeably to describe non-liturgical devotional songs that complement the official Coptic liturgical hymnody known as alhan. Thirteenth- century linguist Muhammad Ibn Mukarram Ibn Manzur (1232-1311) mentions ra-ta-la and ra-na-ma as the verb 'to sing' or to chant religious texts in his lexicon Lisan al-'Arab. He specifically mentions ra-ta- la as a genre resulting from the addition of melodies to Christian prayers by those of mixed Arab ancestry. While Copts do not claim to have mixed Arab ancestry, by the thirteenth century, their colloquial language began to change from Coptic to Arabic after the Arab conquest in the seventh century. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I will continue to refer to taratil and taranim solely as taratil (sing. tartila). 13 In 1923, Copts also rejected a certain allotment of seats in the Egyptian parliament as minority members, citing the same reasoning. For more on the Ibn Kaldun Center incident, see Peter Marakri's Conflict & Cooperations; Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007): 162-169. 14 During one of his weekly broadcast sermons following the 2008 attacks on a monastery in Upper Egypt,
9 sermons and poems were not only set to music as popular taratil but also his textual emphasis on spiritual estrangement, voluntary and involuntary social exclusion, and ascetic ideals became recurring motifs in new compositions. One of his most famous poems, "As a stranger I lived in the world…",15 provide the opening lines and title for the popular tartila by
Faisal Fouad, one of the famous taratil singers that I discuss in chapter 3.
While Copts have been pushed to the periphery of Egyptian civil domains from as early as Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s (cf. Ibrahim et al, 1996;
Nikolav, 2008), it is only in the past thirty years under President Mubarak that Copts have moved away from civil domains and discourse as Egyptian citizens, instead pursuing what the community calls "al-watan al-samawi" or "heavenly citizenship." Framed within a
Biblical salvation narrative of eternal life after death on Earth, an "al-watan al-samawi" emphasizes belonging to a heavenly homeland. Here, I want to emphasize that the Arabic watan means both nationhood and one's citizenship; the term is also synonymous with having civic and social agency, something that many Copts claim they do not have in the political arena.16 In its present form as an active participle (form III, ism faʻil), the Arabic
Pope Shenouda did not address the incident directly, but rather advised his audience that they "must place the problem before God, and leave it in His hands, and say to Him let Your will be done…. If You desire to solve this problem according to Your will, or if You desire for us to take the blessings of this cross we bear…" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lW5r3tT2fM, accessed 8 February 2013). The Patriarch's voice trailed off only for him to bend his head down and cry while cantor Ibrahim Ayad sang a traditional tartila, "In Unsa Min Um il hanun" [If a Compassionate Mother Forgets her Child (God will not Forget me)]. While security officials claimed the problem to be a land dispute between the monastery and their local neighbors, many refereed to the Pope's tears as a indirect admission of the sectarian tensions they experienced at one point or another. For more details of the Abu Fana incident, please see, "Abu Fana in Focus" by Reema Leila in Al-Ahram Weekly Online (24-30 July 2008, Issue No. 907). 15 "Gharib [A Stranger]" ʼIntilaq al-Ruh [Release of the Spirit],(Cairo: Magalit al Kiraza, 2009 16th edition): 134. 16 For a more details on Copts' lack of political participation and representation following the 1952 Revolution, see Boris Nikolov's study "Care of the Poor and Ecclesiastical Government: An
10 term muwatin or citizen is one who is actively doing the nation. In this study, I explore how
Copts actively perform the nation, and how they understand the convergence and contradictions of belonging to a nation as Christian citizens in a Muslim majority nation while feeling that they do not have any real civic agency.17 Furthermore, I ask what it means to belong as well as how one practices belonging, both to an earthly watan as well as a heavenly one.
Coupled with Pope Shenouda's famous saying "Egypt is not a nation in which we live, but rather a nation that lives inside of us," today's recent religious revival focuses on moral refashioning a Christian selfhood through piety, religious education, liturgical rites, and service so that Copts could be useful members of a "nation on the inside" and still achieve eternal salvation. Such an internal terrain is at once a space of saintly imagination
(Heo, 2011) as well as a refined political dimension operating according to an otherworldly ecclesiastical order. As I will argue, "al-watan al-samawi" is not a form of passive political engagement but rather, as a public manifestation of faith in forms of spiritual service and public practices of piety, it became a mode of what Judith Butler calls "discursive performativity" of political engagement and agency (1997: 14). As a popular Christian devotional genre, taratil are not only central to soundscapes, religious pedagogy, and
Ethnography of the Social Services of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Cairo, Egypt," (Ph.D. diss., John Hopkins University, 2008): 16-21. 17 It is important to note here that sentiments of a lack of civil agency were not only limited to Coptic Orthodox Christians. Rather, demonstrations in Tahrir Square erupted for myriad reasons. "Bread, Equality, and Social Justice" was not simply a cry against police brutality and a deteriorating State, but against a regime that ignored, swayed, and manipulated their civic polity as citizens. For four successive terms, Hosni Mubarak won reelection by a majority of votes despite poor voter turnout, intimidation at the polls, and the overt restraint and censorship of any opposition parties. When he hinted in the media that he would run for yet another term in spite of his age, or that his son Gamal Mubarak would be his successor, people took to the streets.
11 spiritual voluntary associations, but they have also been infused with a kind of political utility. This is not a new phenomenon. The second chapter of this work illustrates how taratil were also integral to the Sunday School Movement at the beginning of last century and have facilitated today's contemporary religious revival among the Orthodox community.
Butler writes that "[an] ambivalent structure at the heart of performativity implies that, within political discourse, the very terms of resistance and insurgency are spawned by the powers they oppose," and she argues that agency can be derived from the sites of injury
(1997: 40). In other words, by maintaining, performing and living their persecuted status,
Copts derive agency. In his study of South Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual enslavement, ethnomusicologist Joshua Pilzer argues that it was a "woundedness ideology" that helped survivors cultivate a kind of moral authority and cause others to acknowledge their suffering (2012: 27). Such recognition, concomitant with the act of negotiating post- traumatic memories in song, became moments and encounters of healing. Among Coptic
Christians, a similar woundedness discourse produces shared solidarity and relief from everyday pressures in an overwhelming political and social situation for all Egyptians alike.
Among Orthodox Copts, such a discourse also acknowledges the struggles that they face together as a Christian minority. In this project I pursue Foucault's question: "Why do we say that we are repressed?" (1978: 8-9), and I explore Coptic narratives of persecution, hagiographies and martyr motifs as they are found in song. This is therefore a study of what
Foucault calls the "discursive facts" of taratil, "to locate [their] forms of power, the channels
[they take], the discourses [they permeate] in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior…." (1978: 11).
12 Besides exploring the discourses around taratil, I not only examine their discursive agency as song but I also investigate their disciplinary potential as part of everyday soundscapes with a focus on Coptic subjectivity: how are Coptic selves constituted through song, particularly as song is so central to Coptic Sunday School pedagogy, worship, festivity, and experience? As Kondo writes, much in the same way individuals and their relationships are constituted, collective identities are "strategic assertions" within shifting fields of power and meanings that exert themselves in various ways within particular historical, political, economic and, I add here, religious contexts. In Egypt, where politics and religion are so closely intertwined, this project is the investigation of Coptic pedagogies of politics through song: when to retreat and when to engage. It is important to note that this project does not aim to be a comprehensive study of the Coptic Sunday School revival, nor is it an overall analysis of the trajectory of taratil from pedagogical songs into the most popular devotional phenomenon in Egypt.18 Rather, by investigating the discursive politics of taratil, particularly in conversation with the liturgical genre of alhan, I aim to investigate how devotional song genres are integral to what I call the pedagogies of politics among emerging Coptic Orthodox middle class. In other words, this is the study of one central motif as it threads its way through the genre of taratil and how one community learns about and uses martyr motifs and oppression narratives to assert value, legitimacy and, finally, political agency.
In her work about Egyptian women's mosque movement, Mahmood writes that its
18 For a more detailed timeline and monologue explicitly dedicated to the development of the Coptic Sunday Schools, please refer to Wolfram Reiss, Erneuerung in der Koptisch-Orthodoxen Kirche: Die Geschichte der koptisch-orthodoxen Sonntagsschulbewegung und die Aufnahme ihrer Reformansätze in den Erneurungsbewegungen der Koptische-Orthodoxen Kirche der Gegenwart (Hamburg: Lit, 1998). Also refer to Sinout Delwar Shenouda's article "Magalit Madaris il ʼAhad; Qisat al-Qarn al-ʽshrin" [The Story of the Sunday Movement in the Twentieth Century]. Magalit Madaris il ʼAhad (November and December 2001): 44-56.
13 agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms (her emphasis). She continues (2005: 15):
…the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibly and effectively. Viewed in this way, what may appear to be the case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressive point of view, may actually be a form of agency—but one that can be understood only from within the discourse and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment.
In their ubiquitousness, what kind of norms are taratil creating as they saturate Coptic devotional and popular soundscapes? Despite their seemingly passive messages of "living as strangers in the world," what forms of lived social and political agency are they facilitating?
This dissertation is also cultural study of a Coptic middle class, many of whom emerge from the tight-knit and predominately Christian neighborhood of Shubra. It is an ethnography of a community that is largely integrated in the Orthodox Church institution in one way or another: as liturgical cantors or deacons, known in Arabic as shamamsa, Sunday
School teachers (khuddam Madaris al-ʼAhad ), and principal volunteers of both Sunday
Schools (ʼumnaʼ al-khidma), and members of spiritual fraternities known as ʼusras. This also includes general volunteers who offer their service (khidma) in other ways, such as choir directors and leaders of youth meeting and Bible studies, with many even completely devoting themselves fully to the church.19 As mukarrasin (literally, those who have
19 In his study of Sufi mulids, Samuli Schielke offers another definition khidma. While still denoting "service," the term's meaning shifts from its use in Coptic contexts: to imply the foods or refreshment served to pilgrims free of charge, the physical unit of Sufi mulids, and the spaces where shrine visitors spend most of their time sleeping, praying, or undertaking devotions (2006: 23). As the Coptic religious revival centered on refashioning Coptic Orthodox spiritual interiority, khidma ruhiya takes a different meaning. In his writings, the Pope described khidma as voluntary service that is undertaken with both love, spiritual zeal (harara ruhiya), and "the burning will to create the kingdom of God on earth…" (1985:22). Shenouda's ministry focused on the ethical refashioning of spiritual volunteers known as khuddam, and how one can be remade through public expressions of piety and spiritual voluntary services, or khidma ruḥiya.
14 consecrated themselves), these individuals refuse to marry or undertake full-time vocations outside of their spiritual voluntary work and live very much as monks and nuns outside of traditional monastic settings (Van Doorn-Harder 1995). In her study, Dina el-Khawaga writes that the massive institutionalization of the clerical body and the clericalization of the laity was indisputably the most spectacular example of the Coptic renewal from the later 1960s and onwards (1997: 142). Drawing from the first university graduates of President Gamal
Abdel Nasser's public university programs (Hasan 2003: 82), these educated cadres came to replace the landed elites and Coptic bourgeoisie that Nasser's socialist efforts threw out.
While the Coptic aristocracy were traditionally active members of the church council (majlis al-mili) and participated in important financial and civic affairs of the Church—even directly contesting Patriarchal authority [Van Doorn-Harder and Guirguis 2012: 176])—Pope
Shenouda himself hand-picked these new members from among prominent Sunday School khuddam to minimize their pressure on his leadership (Tadros 2009). Unlike previous members, this new group had graduated from the very Sunday Schools that the Pope himself had helped to shape and reform into today's Coptic religious renaissance.
In his study of how cassette culture revolutionized popular music in North India,
Peter Manuel writes that "Insofar as music often constitutes a potent symbol of social identity, the competing tendencies toward homogeneity or diversity are often visible in parameters of musical styles and content, as well as in text content" (1993: 11). Beside investigating varying musical styles of the taratil genre, my ethnography investigates how these devotional songs and conversations about them have developed in and around ever- changing media technologies. Ziad Fahmy writes that, in Egypt, music and the recording
15 industry played a vital role in the formation of this new Egyptian middle-class culture
(2011:16), with colloquial songs becoming increasingly accessible at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just as popular colloquial Egyptian songs created a national anthology when they emerged onto the market by the 1910s, I illustrate how taratil cassettes and taratil's presence on Arabic Christian satellite television crafted a shared anthology of religious nationalism: from Habib Girgis' pedagogical pamphlets in the 1940s, to Shenouda's poems in the broadly circulating Sunday School Magazine, and finally as they emerged in cassettes beginning with Faisal Foud's orchestrations of Shenouda's poems as taratil in
1970s.
With the first installation of Coptic Orthodox Satellite television in 2005 there came another rapid media boom that transformed how people came into contact with the Church institution and models of Orthodox piety. With slogans such as Aghapy Television's "the church in your own home,"20 interlocutors joked that the only thing missing from "church on television" were the tactile elements of the service: the smell of the incense, the spray of holy water over the congregation that concluded the liturgy, and the taste of the Eucharist. Yet these elements came to be replaced by other things: the mundane smells of cooking and home life meshing with the formal sounds of liturgical worship as pooled together in the sensorium of the ear. With the added visual media of taratil music videos, satellite television and the explosion of devotional material became quickly contained and centralized by the
Church through its overt borrowing from Sunday School presentations and education. I will
20 Aghapy's slogan is also borrowed from St. Paul's epistle addressing Philomen of the New Testament and the community of Christians that gathered in his home: "To Philemon our dear friend and fellow worker —also to Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier—and to the church that meets in your home. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ," (NKJV 1:1-3).
16 discuss one particular case study in the last chapter of this work. Through such media capitalism, to borrow Fahmy's term (2011: 15), various outlets such as taratil cassettes and music videos came to echo, supplement, and contest one another about how best to learn about Egyptian everyday piety in and outside of the religious education classrooms.21
In the end, this is a study about belonging. It is about both the desire and ambivalence of belonging, not just about belonging to the nation and to the Coptic Orthodox Church but ultimately about who belongs to God and how we belong to one another. With a narrative portrait of foundational violence, as Heo eloquently puts it (2012: 377), first of the crucifixion of Christ on the cross and the gruesome beheading of the founding apostle Saint
Mark, the history of the Coptic Church is not a pretty one. With the stories of persecutions and violent death of martyr saints, collected in the Synaxarium and the saying of the
Church's forefathers in The Monks Paradise (Bustan al-Ruhban), the Coptic religious worldview is an inexhaustible meditation on the meaning of suffering, its efficacy, and the ultimate elusiveness of security (Gruber 2003: 94). In this unstable terrain, martyrs become the anchors and the "rock," retaining both the integrity of their faith and their identity to the death, or in Coptic terms, until they make it to heaven. In his work on pilgrimage and holy space in late antique Egypt, David Frankfurter (1998: 41-42) adds:
…it must be remembered, the martyr provided concrete 'places' of sanctity in a landscape denuded of the old religious centers. They anchored both heaven and earth and a mythical age of heroes and executions in a convenient stone rotunda. The martyr symbolized not only access to heaven but also the 'blessings' that everyone could bring home.
21 This phenomenon is not just exclusive to Egypt's Christians (cf. Moll 2010; Deeb 2006; Mahmood 2005).
17 In a precarious political and social landscape, Coptic hagiographies have come to life with a particular force: worshippers now no longer recount martyrdom stories during the liturgy but instead sing them as pedagogical songs in Sunday Schools, reenact their graphic histories in community "operettas," and watch them as music videos on Coptic and Christian satellite television. Heo argues that the Coptic church extends itself through the holy images and relics of the martyrs—a form of tactile piety (2012: 337). I may add that the Church also extends itself through the medium of song, more specifically, through the colloquial genre of taratil that increasingly fills everyday Coptic soundscapes. Through taratil, Coptic pious subjects are taught to strive to model their lives after the saints as modern-day martyrs who live in the liminal, in the midpoint between heaven and earth (Frankfurter 1998: 18).
Echoing Shenouda's famous maxim,"Egypt is not a nation in which we live, but rather a nation that lives inside of us," through singing, performing, and listening to taratil, parishioners are embedded further in discussions of “al-watan al-samawi” or a heavenly
Christian citizenship every time they sing. And the Orthodox Church is no longer something one simply attends, sees, hears, and smells during Church services, but something that is experienced inside the Coptic pious and singing/listening body.
Defining Taratil
In their work Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), Victor and Edith
Tuner do not concern themselves with the "individual question"—the specific nature of the drives, reasons, and needs of people's behavior at various pilgrimages. Rather, they set out to ask "institutional questions" concerning the values, norms, symbols, and relationships that
18 shape people's expressions in these liminal contexts (1978: xxv). Like the Turners, I am not concerned with the specificities or the musical variations within taratil's vast performance practice, with differences ranging from a cappella ditties performed as prayer to ringtones and media-savvy rock-concerts. Instead, in this project, I focus on how taratil are part of a larger negotiation between a Coptic Church institution and Egyptian Christian citizens maneuvering through a particular landscape at a specific moment in time. How do taratil and the Church's broader music culture shape and express Coptic Orthodox national identities up to, during, and right after the January 25 uprising? More importantly, how are Copts engaging these conversations outside of their community, namely in relation to their Muslims compatriots, about issues of citizenry and belonging, to a nation, to God, and finally, to one another?22
Initially, taratil began as songs on the periphery. In the thirteenth century, Arabic linguist Muhammad Ibn Mukarram Ibn Manzur (AD 1232-1311) identified them as Arabic devotional songs performed by Christians of mixed heritage in his hallmark lexicon Lisan al-
ʻArab. While Copts are not of mixed Arab background, it was by the thirteenth century that the Coptic language, the first language of Egypt's ethnic population, officially receded into the Christian liturgy and into pockets in Upper Egypt.23 Over a few centuries and many
22 At the first presidential election after the revolution that finally boiled down between two candidates: Ahmed Shafik, a figure from the old guard who billed himself as a "secular" option to an "Islamist" opponent, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Such strategic opposition was not lost on the public, and political commentators such as Yusri Fouda and Ibrahim ʽIssa framed the entire election as underhanded coercion by the SCAF, similar to Mubarak's rigged elections, of picking between two lesser evils. Within the Coptic community, Shafiq specifically ran commercial campaigns on the Coptic satellite television (CTV) whose slogan read "Egypt for Everyone," catering to fears of an alleged fundamentalist coup-d'état of a new government. 23 For more information on the Coptic language, please see Aziz S. Atiya, ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991), s.v. "Coptic Language(s)," by Rodolphe Kasser.
19 Muslim converts later, Arabic slowly replaced the indigenous language with that of the ruling elite who had first arrived in the seventh century. When the Coptic Patriarch, Pope Gabriel II
(r. 1131-45), mandated that Arabic be performed alongside Coptic in church services it officially marked both a social and political shift for Copts, a shift from being the country's majority inhabitants to that of a religious minority community. 24 By the eighteenth century, the colloquial genre still remained on the periphery, performed largely by newly minted
Catholic and Protestant converts who sang translated American Presbyterian hymns known as aghani ruhiya (literally spiritual songs).25 In turn, Coptic Catholics and Coptic Protestants
(ingliin, literally "of the Bible") emerged as a minority within a minority, stoking the greatest abhorrence of their Orthodox coreligionists as both religious and national traitors. As I discuss in my second chapter, taratil only moved into the mainstream of Orthodox religious expression during the Sunday School revival beginning in the 1920s, but the genre also mirrored Protestant missionary efforts to challenge and ward off their appeal.
Today, taratil are best defined as Arabic non-liturgical devotional songs. The genre is not only specific to Egypt, but to other Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East. 26 In
24 Hence, while the name Greek name aigyptios referred to all Egyptians under Greco-Roman occupation (323-30 BCE), under Umayyad Caliphs and subsequent administrations, the names increasing designated Egyptian Christians. As a Greek term, "Aigyptios" itself was based on the ancient Egyptian word ha-ka-ptah, meaning 'house of the spirit of Ptah,' the God who according to local theology, was the one who created the world and gave birth to all Egyptians. For more on early Coptic Christian history, see Otto F.A. Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Christianity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999). 25 In one of the earliest work on Coptic music culture, Nabila Erian writes that taratil might have arisen out of translated Coptic folk songs and may have their roots in rural and popular musics whose texts were Christianized. She also correctly speculates that they were borrowed from Protestant missionaries and evangelical meetings, namely Bible studies as organized by the United Presbyterian Church of North America and their branching Coptic evangelical institutions ("Coptic Music; An Egyptian Tradition," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1986): 314-17. 26 taratil are also quite popular in the the Levant where Jesuit missionaries were especially active in the
20 Egypt, taratil complement the Orthodox liturgical genre of alhan (singular lahn):27 church hymns performed in the antiquated Coptic languages during official services and liturgical rites. Unlike taratil, alhan are entirely unaccompanied monophonic melodies, with the exception of a small pair of hand cymbals known as al-daff or naqus and a metal triangle known as al-muthallath, or triantu, that keep everyone together and in rhythm.28 Only an exclusive few understand this liturgical genre: the clergy (al-kahana) and a select number of deacons (shamamsa). While the congregation (al-shʻab) does perform alhan during liturgical responses, only a small number of aficionados understand the Coptic texts. Regardless, alhan have a particularly revered status in the community as the last link to an ancient
Egyptian heritage. As all Coptic liturgical services are sung throughout, alhan dominate all
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lebanon has supplied Egypt with some of its most popular taratil stars (murannimin, see Arabic glossary) such as Majid il Rumi, Fairouz and, with the advent of interdenominational Christian satellite television, Ayaman Kafrouni. Additionally, it is interesting to note that many of the earliest taratil pamphlets I located in Egyptian missionary archives, such as the Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies, were actually from the Levant. For more on Arabic devotional songs, see Guilnard Jean Moufarrej's study "Maronite Music: History, Transmission, and Performance Practice," Review of Middle East Studies (Vol. 44. No.2, Winter 2010): 196-215. 27 The term alhan (sing. lahn) itself began to appear in Arabic literature as early as the thirteenth century, though with very different connotations and meanings from its contemporary use among today's Coptic Orthodox community. Arabic Christian intellectual, Shams al-Riʼasah Abu al-Barakat Ibn Kabar, writes that in AD 1320 the Arabic term lahn actually meant musical tone or scale with which each liturgical text would be performed according to its mood, season, or festivity (Louis Villecourt, "Louis Villecourt in "Les Observances liturgiques et la discipline du jeûne dans l'église copte." (Chapters XVI-XIX from Misbah al Zulmah by Abu al-Barakat ibn Kabar). Le Muséon: revue d'études orientales 36,1923, p. 264). He also adds that there are eight Coptic tones, akin to the notion of Arabic mode or maqam, or the Greek Orthodox liturgical tones. Other writers, such as twelfth-century Abu Ishaq Ishaq al-Muʼtaman Abu ibn al-ʻAssal began to demarcate alhan solely as church genre, different from other religious and devotional genres that Copts performed outside of church services, indicating the emerging variety and richness of early religious Coptic music (George Graf, "Der kirchliche Gesang nach Abu Ishaq Ishaq al-Mu`taman Abu ibn al-`Assal (fl.1230-60)," Extracts from The Foundation of Religion by Ibn al-ʻAssal in Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte 3,1946-47, p.166.). 28 For a glossary of Coptic liturgical terms, please see my presentation on the Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody; The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress under "Glossary of Terms": http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/coptic/coptic-glossary.html (accessed 11 February 2013).
21 church worship as the liturgical lingua franca, and they are only supplemented by a wide variety of madaʼih (singular, madiha): Arabic, Coptic, and Greek doxologies praising the
Church's saints and important Coptic figures known as tamgid.29 In all other non-official church contexts, however, taratil dominate Coptic soundscapes and everyday experience as a colloquial genre. In the first chapter, below, I explore the dialogical tensions between alhan and taratil as a "borrowed" missionary genre performed in the language of the dominant other, Arabic.
Finally, it is important to note the importance of Coptic devotional music to Coptic religious, social, and as I illustrate in this study, political life. In one way or another, song permeates all social and relational formations, personal encounters and, finally, encounters with God and the saints. Song and music-making almost never stop—that is because alhan, madaʼih and taratil all regulate a cosmological rhythm, reminding parishioners of important church feast days, fasts, and dates of saints' martyrdom. It also deeply nestled within Coptic
Orthodox eschatological worldview that life on earth is a transient journey with the human spirit always longing to return to God. After death, one may rejoin God in heaven and spend eternity in a state of tasbih, the Arabic term for musical praise, and one whose definition is directly drawn from the Bible.30 Musically then, Copts believe that the genres they perform during church services momentarily create a sense of heaven on earth and that musical worship and praise, tasbih, is integral to attaining a spiritual communion with God. Because
29 Definitions of Coptic music genres are listed in the Arabic glossary preceding this introduction. 30 Many parishioners, cantors, and Coptic scholars such as Ragheb Moftah cite Psalm 150 (NKJV) While this lahn mentions musical instruments and dance as tasbih, they are not currently a part of the Church's liturgical traditions today, as both are seen to detract from the text. For a detailed study of Coptic liturgical music and instruments see the entry of "Coptic Music" in the Coptic Encyclopedia (Ragheb Moftah et al., Vol 6, New York: Macmillan, 1991): 1715 – 1747.
22 of this, all major Coptic rites of passage, from infant baptism to weddings and funerals, are all sung throughout. In short, sound never ceases lest heaven disappear.
The Crosses in the Ceiling: Living and Researching in Shubra
The first time Marcus gave me a tour of a much older part of Shubra, I remember being particularly taken by the small cement crosses molded above some of the doorways to the buildings. On some streets, these crosses were surrounded by a larger crescent, and in wealthier areas, an ornate array of stars and seashells. Some plaques also included the year these homes were built, with one even dating as far back as 1855. Other crosses stood out all by themselves, and like the small green tattoos typically on the right wrists of Coptic
Christians, were plain but permanent etchings into the sandy cement flesh of the building.
Marcus, a young pharmacist from Shubra, informed me that these plaques historically identified who built and lived in these homes. It was my first year in the field, and I remember pausing to make studious notes and to take a few photographs, feeling proud of myself as a meticulous albeit sophomoric ethnographer. Little did I know at that time that, just two years later, I would marry Marcus, let alone live in one of these buildings. Later on, as my future father-in-law, oncle Michel, gave me a tour of his family complex, he delighted in drawing my attention to the ceiling in the large lobby. Embedded around the light fixtures were two enormous crosses emerging from the white finished cement and spanning the walls.
When I remarked that these crosses were no longer on the outside of doorways like they used to be in the older streets, he took me back outside. There, interwoven into the door's iron grates were a long line of large crosses, subtle but still visible to the knowing eye.
23 Between April 2009 and July 2011, I made three trips to Cairo, spending a total of 14 months ethnographically tracing the nuances of Coptic contemporary identity and devotional soundscapes. In the same way that these cement crosses have largely moved indoors, I investigate what happened behind closed doors and how, in private, these crosses grew in a way that would not have been possible in Shubra's public space, despite its status as a predominantly middle-class Christian residential area. At first, my extended family celebrated my research of Coptic taratil and alhan in Cairo as if it were the return of the prodigal Copt. And, unlike many accounts and traditional encounters with the field, I did not struggle to locate interlocutors, teachers, and social networks. Rather, many extended family and friends took it upon themselves to teach me about asli, "my roots," and the Coptic
Orthodox Church in Egypt, sighing with a sense of relief and that I had not lost myself to the alleged debauchery of the West; "Your parents raised you well. They raised you with a love for Egypt," I would frequently hear, and it was this phrase that first drew me to the complex intersections of nationhood, morality, and discursive performances of Coptic piety. One aunt even insisted on taking me to her church every Sunday, firstly to supervise my "spiritual life" and to report it dutifully back to my family in America. And secondly, she took my visits to church as an opportunity to proudly introduce me to her friends and local clergy, duly beaming over my research of "our Coptic heritage."
Despite such ease with interlocutors and family, ethnographic research became a
(re)culture shock of sorts. The colloquial Egyptian Arabic I thought I knew was a stewy and mishmashed mix between my father's Saʻidi, or Upper Egyptian dialect, the crumbs of
Kuwaiti elementary terms that I absorbed in the years following my birth there, and the
24 Fusha or Classical Arabic I had learned in universities in the United States and Canada.
Every time, I opened my mouth to sing or to speak, it was obvious: I was an Egyptian khawaga, a liminal and hyphenated Egyptian-foreigner.31 Furthermore, I did not visibly practice or articulate expected markers of piety as my family did; I did not fast. I did not regularly read the Bible. I did not have a cross etched into my right wrist. And it was clear, I was still learning how to respond to the litany of Christian sayings that peppered normal conversation like "saluli," (Keep me in your prayers), "rabbina mawjud" (The Lord is present), and "bi salawat al-qidisin" (With the prayers of the saints).
In her own work, Dorinne Kondo describes one pivotal moment that shifted the rest of her own ethnographic research in Japan. One day, as she was watching her host-family's grandchild and grocery shopping for dinner, she bumped into someone who looked oddly familiar; a typical young housewife clad in the usual sandals and "house wear." With a dizzying shock, she realized she was staring at her own reflection in the shiny metallic surface of the butcher's display case (1990: 16-17). For Kondo, it was this ultimate fear of collapsing her identities—researcher, student, daughter, Japanese, American, Japanese
American—and the conspiracy of being rewritten as exclusively Japanese that motivated her to extricate herself from living with her host family, instead choosing to remove herself from an exclusively Japanese environment. My own revelation came a bit later in my own work: as a newly married ʻarusa (bride), I found myself under my neighbors' intent gaze as I was hanging out our first batch of laundry. As an Egyptian-American bride, would I know the appropriate etiquette of hanging the intimates or would I scandalize my new family? With the
31 A number of scholars have written about their experiences of conducting research back "home," most notably Abu-Lughod (1986), Deeb (2006), Ghannam (2002), Kondo (1990), Mahmood (2005) and Mittermaier (2011) whose writings have influenced my own thinking here.
25 family business just 5 stories below our balcony, I found myself sweltering under their intense scrutiny, working ever so hard to accomplish a seemingly mundane task. What was worse was the panic that thickly gripped me with every mashbak (clothespin) that I nervously dropped below: would my new status as bride restrict me as a student, researcher, and ethnographer in the field? Or worse, would I be simply be relegated as married "wife" once I came home to North America? I continued to wrestle with these fears for a number of weeks until I happened on Mahmood's writings, jotting it down in my field notes and keeping it as a kind of talisman for the months to come (Mahmood 2005: 37):
Critique, I believe, is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another's worldview, that we might come to learn things that we did not already know…. This requires that we occasionally turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, to leave open the possibility that we may be remade through an encounter with the other…..
Rather than pulling away like Kondo, I decided to thrust myself deeper within, embracing the family and the in-laws to whom I was now intimately connected; and although
I was sometimes shocked and unsettled, I also anticipated and began to experience the change and growth involved in getting to know, respect, love and learn from people. In contrast to my own fears, getting married in the field not only forced me to face the "power- imbued attempts to recapture, recast, and rewrite" (1990:17) me as as a specifically Egyptian
ʻarusa, but also allowed me to better investigate my family, friends, and interlocutors' desires to write upon me an exclusively sonic and visible Coptic Orthodox Christian identity. I slowly, sometimes painfully, came to realize that these attempts actually spoke to larger conversations of power. I came to embrace these encounters and momentary discomforts as an integral locus to my ethnographic understanding of contemporary Coptic subjectivity that
26 actively sought to suppress differences and tensions, and whose contradictions only spoke to larger configurations of power between Church and State, Muslims and Christians, various
Christian denominations, and even within the Orthodox community itself. To conclude here,
I investigate the validity of Turner's argument, "To become more the Christian, one must be less the successful citizen" (1978: 15). What, then, does it mean to be a modern, pious, and engaged citizen today in such a moment when global politics seem to be increasingly shaped, guided and even dictated by heightened religious sensibilities? And finally, how are these debates of piety, power relations, identity and difference negotiated and articulated in song?
Singing a Pious Modernity
In her work among Lebanese Shi‘a Muslims, anthropologist Lara Deeb argues that there are two parallel notions of progress and modernity: a material one—a Western-centric ideal of secularization, technological advancement, late capitalism, and the prioritization of individualized subjectivities—and a spiritual one (Deeb 2006). Shi‘a Muslims view a pious modernity as one in which piety is made public through an "authenticated" Islam, in other words religious practices that are drawn from rigorous textual study and historical inquiry inspired by a Western "scientific" rationality. Such visceral and visible piety was not divorced from material progress, she argues, but rather, was largely dependent on it (2006:
18-23). As I specifically illustrate in chapters 2 and 3 of this study, a similar reasoning behind the "pious modern" duly inspired Coptic Sunday School revivals and the reinterpretation of
American missionary religious pedagogies expressed and learned through song. Other desires to authenticate faith along the lines of a more "scientific" rational also thread through chapters 4 and 5, as parishioners took religious reforms beyond the Church's classroom and
27 out into popular Christian festivities and interdenominational spiritual retreats in order to
"modernize" the Orthodox poor, or to convert the Muslim Other into a more progressive religious citizen.
Many studies have recently emerged about the intersections of religious reforms, modernity, and the discursive politics of progress and piety (Asad 1993; Mitchell 2000;
Keane 2007). In Egypt, these conversations of modernity and faith have been vastly shaped by colonial and postcolonial encounters in an increasingly globalized world, and are further complicated by current neo-evangelical trends inspired by digital and satellite media. In this study I investigate how these negotiations of "pious modern" citizenry have formed and shaped relational subjectivities and agencies for all Egyptians—Muslims and Christians alike. Drawing on what Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak call the performative politics of song (2007: 63), as well as Kevin O'Neill's notions of religious citizenry (2010), I am interested in how taratil have shaped, shifted, and merged new practices and expressions of religiosity and modern civility in Egypt. There is no doubt that Charles Hirsckind's investigation of Muslim cassette sermons and ethical soundscapes in Egypt is a central thread here (2006). Like him, I ask what happens after listening? And as these pious soundscapes increasingly permeate spaces outside of Coptic Church services, how do believers materialize their new specifically Christian ethics and civility into the doing, learning, listening, singing and living of day-to-day piety alongside their Muslim neighbors, friends and co-citizens in a rapidly-changing Egypt?
In his pivotal work, Charles Hirschkind emphasizes that it was processes of modernization and rationalization, propelled by anti-colonial and nationalist movements in
28 the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that introduced new sensory epistemologies that directly challenged and later harnessed the ear's ethical function (2006: 41). Such a task of creating a "modern national auditory"—an ear resonant with the tonalities of reason and progress—did not deafen its citizens' ears from the outmoded noises of religious authority, as
Egyptian reformists and nationalists intended. Instead, as citizens chafed against this new political order, they crafted new ways to articulate and practice their own interpretation of ethics, religion, and politics. While many Muslim activists repudiate the promulgation of ascetic attitudes of worldly rejection and view such a religious complacency as destructive of
Islamic industriousness and a national social responsibility (ibid. 42), Copts embrace them.
Indeed, many Copts believe that a spiritual (dis)engagement with the world illuminates an audibility in tune with the heavens and the sounds of a heavenly nation. Just as Muslims turn to cassette sermons and devotional soundscapes for a kind of ethical therapy that inclined them to act morally in the world, Copts too turn to taratil and alhan, not only to act in the world but also to repossess Egypt as a Christian kingdom of heaven here on this earth (see chapter 5 especially). As I explore Coptic ethical soundscapes in various contexts—such as a predominately Christian neighborhood, contemporary Sunday School classrooms, Christian public festivals, and charismatic worship contexts—I strive to complement the Muslim sound worlds which Hirschkind so astutely outlines in his work.
I am also indebted to Saba Mahmood's work on the Politics of Piety that explores how feminist subjectivities have been deeply shaped and formed by Islamic revivals and the bodily acts of spiritual volunteerism and prayer in Egypt (2005). In her work, Mahmood reminds us that suffering, sacrifice and withdrawal have constitutive and agentival capacities.
29 I use this notion to investigate how martyr motifs are integral to Coptic performative agency and how they articulate the convergences and contradictions of two modes of belonging: to an Egyptian nation as well as to al-watan al-samawi, a heavenly homeland. By drawing on death and the afterlife in Christian eschatology, Copts are paradoxically sounding a mode of lived belonging here in this world and, more specifically, as a religious minority in a Muslim majority nation. Additionally, singing becomes another bodily act of piety, joining fasting, prayer and listening to sermons so prevalent in Egypt and elsewhere in order to enact a virtuous and pious self.
Yet, despite the growing anthropological and historical literature on contemporary
Egyptian life (Abu-Lughod 2005; Armburst 1996; Fahmy 2011; Ghannam 2002; Kraidy
2010; Mahmood 2005; Marcus 2007; Mittermaier 2011; Racy 2003; Starrett 2006; Winegar;
2006), Copts have been rendered nearly inaudible and invisible in these conversations. With few noted exceptions (van Doorn-Harder 1995; van Doorn-Harder and Vogt 1997; Sedra
2011), a predilection in academic scholarship for ancient Egypt, particularly in the fields of archeology and Egyptology, has painted Copts as the "modern sons of the pharaohs"32, sparking larger questions of power, Orientalism, identity politics, and the grapplings of a postcolonial legacy. In turn, my first chapter outlines how the early Coptic music scholarship grappled with similar Orientalist tensions in the study of alhan, particularly as the the largest collection of Coptic music manuscripts in Western music notation and recordings made their debut at the United States Library of Congress in October of 2009. It is important to note
32 S.H. Leeder, Modern Songs of the Pharaohs: A Study of the Manners and Customs of the Copts of Egypt (London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918). Recently, a number of notable Coptic ethnographic studies have emerged or are forthcoming (Armanios, forthcoming; Heo 2012; Gabry 2013; du Roy, forthcoming; Shenouda 2010).
30 early on, that as curator of this project, I am distinctly aware that I am a part of this discourse: a source of tension I discuss more fully in the first chapter.
By imitating a Western-inspired notion of modernity, Mitchell argues that local articulations produce a simulacrum of an assumed universal narrative of "progress." But, as he writes, "every performance of the modern is the production of this difference, and each difference represents the possibility of some shift, displacement, or contʼamination," (2000: xiv). Building on a growing number of studies that investigate the discrepancy of interpretation (Asad 1986; Spivak 1991; Chatterjee 1995 & 2000), I investigate the critical roles that Coptic music performance and discourse play in modern Egyptian civility and the institutional and national narratives of religious difference. I argue that just as taratil are integral to a Coptic pedagogy of politics, music teaches Copts how to engage with power and authority and how to be (in)audible: in other words, exactly when to engage and speak up, when to (dis)engage as seemingly passive listeners, and perhaps, when not to listen at all.
Yet, just as music has the propensity to negotiate and subvert authority, it also has the potential to subjugate and discipline these listeners to the very same authority. Foucault calls this the paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement), "the very process and conditions that secure a subject's subordination [that] are also means by which she becomes self-conscious identity and agent," (Butler 1993, 1997c; Foucault 1980, 1983). In other words, as song subjugates, it also creates the very agent to resist.
It is my hope that my contributions here allow us to think more deeply about sound, power, difference, and authority. In a discipline built around sound, agency may not always emerge in ways we readily recognize or hear. As ethnomusicologists, we must turn our ears
31 to sounds of withdrawal, to silences, and to sonic (dis)engagements. Given that Coptic devotional and liturgical music culture does not directly engage contemporary politics in its themes, sounds or texts, Coptic music culture presents itself as an ideal lens through which we can learn about the performative agency of withdrawal that emerges in, around, and in the absence of sound.
Ethnographic Methodology
In many ways, this project is based on conventional ethnographic methods in a
Malinowskian sense: participant observation, extensive notes from the field and, most importantly here, recordings of the practices, performances and conversations around taratil. taratil's early history as Orthodox counter-strategic affirmations to American evangelism in
Egypt have greatly influenced how practicing pious Copts talk about, perform and utilize the genre. For example, in a steadfast desire not to appear "Protestant," many interlocutors are mindful of the simplest musical markers—from comments about rhythm and tempo, to singing styles, to long theological debates about the virtues and vices of clapping and moving during worship. Others were quick to point out the "dangers" of losing control over one's self in the music as they did, firstly authenticating their critiques of the perceived emotionality of
Protestant and neo-Pentecostal worship, and secondly affirming Orientalist interest in alhan in early Western research into Coptic music scholarship as strategic narratives of legitimacy.
When I arrived in Cairo, I quickly found myself mired in these conversations, firstly as a
"specialist" from a North American institution and secondly as an assumed insider and would-be-spokesperson to a Euro-centric "world."
32 Chapter Outline
In his analysis of how post-colonial nations emerged from and continue to negotiate their imperialist encounter with the West, Edward Said writes, "Past and present inform each other, each implies the other…and each co-exists with the other" (1983: 4). By framing his study within a historical framework, Said outlines the movements of cultural negotiations in close and intimate dialogue with their colonial histories and post-colonial lived realities. And, as much as the past feeds into the retelling and reshaping of the present, and vice-versa, so do cultural (dis)engagements depend on and work in tandem with a variety of oppositions.
Using a similar lens, this dissertation is split into two parts and, following models of historical ethnomusicology (Abu-Lughod 2005; Idelsohn 1929; Kippen 2006;
Shelemay1998), is broadly organized along a teleological trajectory. Part One is mainly conceived around archival materials such as manuscripts dealing with European encounters with alhan, early transcriptions in Western music notation, as well as writings by the founders of the Sunday School Movement. In the first chapter, I begin with transcription and archival materials as they lent alhan and taratil a sense of materiality of sound that Copts depended on as sonic evidence of legitimacy, history and modernity: sources that are frequently evoked and politicized in conversation. In chapter two, I turn to the first Sunday
School pedagogical taratil tracts to illustrate how this discourse emerged in more colloquial contexts, such as mass religious education. Part Two is based exclusively on ethnographic field research, and involves taratil in three different contemporary contexts: in a Sunday
School in a local parish in Shubra (Chapter 3), in popular religious festivals know as mulids in Upper Egypt (Chapter 4), and finally an interdenominational spiritual retreat with popular
33 taratil singer Maher Fayez as it was filmed for Coptic satellite programing on the interdenominational SAT-7 TV (Chapter 5).
In chapter 1, I trace how Coptic music transcriptions are palpable in how people constitute the creative presentation of their individual selves to a collective public—what, in his study of cultural and social intimacy, Charles Herzfeld calls people's social poetics
(2005). While parishioners may not be familiar with the manuscripts themselves, these documents have become integral to the way people describe relationally and perform their social realities. I start here to "probe behind facades of national unanimity" and explore the possibilities and limits of "creative dissent" (2005: 1): in other words, how and why do people desire to present, narrate, and repress elements of their cultural heritage and past as they do? In this case, how do transcriptions of Coptic alhan emerge as material evidence for a sound heritage, and what elements of a sound heritage do they silence? What parts of contemporary Coptic Christian identity do they (dis)engage? In his pivotal work on the archeology of knowledge, Foucault also adds "…history is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, buildings, institutions… etc.)… history is that which transforms documents into monuments" (1972:7). As monuments to an imagined past, these
Coptic music transcriptions and early recordings have become deeply imprinted and felt in the contemporary Coptic singing body, dictating the way people sing, improvise and use their voices. While these recordings have emerged as new archetypes of "correct" singing and worship, with historical instructions by an English transcriber to minimize improvisation and clean the "debris of Arabic ornamentation," singers and Coptic satellite channels continue to emulate a similar homogeneous, noticeably nasal, and less-melismatic singing style.
34 By analyzing the discourses around Coptic music, particularly the marginalization of taratil as an Arabic popular genre and the canonization of alhan in the antiquated Coptic language, I investigate how Copts have co-opted an Orientalist representation to strategically reinterpret their past, articulate a political identity and, finally, achieve a kind of modern presence. Presence, Matthew Engelke writes, is the visceral sense of God and a higher spiritual realm as they are mediated through language, actions, objects (2007:16) and, as I argue, through song. Like Engelke, I ask what (sound) bridges heaven and earth? How does
God, the saints, and their evocative power become present in song? More broadly however, problems of presence, as Engelke's book is titled, is a problem of representation and authority (2007: 11). As this project illustrates, Copts not only heavily depend on devotional songs (taratil) and liturgical music (alhan) as a bridge to the divine but also as a way of mediating Western academic interest in their community as makers of their own legitimacy and belonging to a Western linear history of modernity. Many interlocutors, with the help of these Orientalist studies, frame this progress to be interrupted by the rising Islamization of contemporary Egyptian politics and culture.
When I was curator of the Ragheb Moftah Collection at the U.S. Library of Congress, it was the lack of taratil recordings that first made me aware of the discrepancy between
Coptic music scholarship and lived expressive culture. Despite their raging popularity, prominent Egyptian scholar Ragheb Moftah (1898-2001) neglected to make one mention of taratil in his scholarship. Rather, taratil only emerged when a donor heard about a scholar taking interest in the Moftah Collection and made a gift of a handful of unprocessed and untitled recordings to the Library, alerting me to the dearth of non-liturgical genres in
35 archival holdings. Even more revealing was the presence of a vibrant Arabic choir in
Washington D.C.'s bustling Coptic community, who not only taught me songs in Egyptian
Arabic but also further connected them to a larger heritage of Egyptian popular and folk music. I will never forget sitting in front of the altar of the church with the choir's director and a number of members; there, in the church's holiest center, we sang a tartila based on one of Dawud Husni's popular classical songs, the famous Jewish composer who composed for powerhouses such as Umm Kulthum and Asmahan.33
In chapter 2, I set out to find this particular intersection of taratil within a broader context in Egypt and the "lived" negotiation of piety and identity politics in everyday life. I begin with the early Sunday School Movement (1908-51) where taratil initially emerged as part of an early pedagogy of piety, a tangled discourse of modernity by the shʻab, and a growing nationalism in the face of British colonial administration. In Church-wide efforts to ward off American Presbyterian appeal, religious education was slowly transferred from private and local neighborhood schools known as kuttabs into more formal and centralized
Coptic Orthodox Sunday Schools institutionalized by the Church. Again, depending on archival resources—this time missionary repositories and the growing official literature from the Orthodox Church—I trace the various discursive logics of "modernizing" religion into easily tangible cultural and religious practices. In line with Foucault's notion of the
"technologies of the self" (1988:18), I examine taratil as embedded within Coptic pedagogical contexts and look at how they became integral to a Coptic "knowing of the self" that reinterpreted and emphasized saint hagiographies, metaphors of martyrdom, and self-
33 I discuss early taratil and their intersections with popular music in my article "taratil as Popular Music and the Transformation of a Folk Genre." Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies (Vol. 1, 2010): 121-132.
36 renunciation as strategic discursive negotiations within the Orthodox Church institution.
Song was no longer just part of the pedagogy of piety but rather it quickly became central to a pedagogy of politics as well.
It is the Part Two of my dissertation—chapters 3, 4 and 5—that is based on collaborative and experiential ethnographic research. In his book, The Chicago Guide to
Collaborative Ethnography, Luke Lassiter (2005: 16) writes that
…ethnography is, by definition, collaborative… [it is] an approach that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process… from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and especially, through the writing process….
In the fourteen months that I lived in Cairo, I quickly learned that access to sites of social intimacy (Herzfeld 2005) depended on strategic assertions of "self" as they were formed in the "power fraught negations between "Selves" and "Others" (Kondo 1990: 24). As
I learned about these "strategic assertions" of collective and individual selves, I myself practiced and experienced these shifting identity boundaries, maneuvering with other interlocutors through various fields of power and meaning in different contexts in Cairo, in a small Upper Egyptian village, and between inter-religious and interdenominational mulid festivals. Kondo writes that the more she adjusted to her role as Japanese daughter with her host family, the more she was forced (her italics) to abandon the position of outsider (2005:
16). But rather than struggling with the sense of self-fragmentation that she describes, I quickly learned how to mimic my interlocutors, negotiating my multifaceted but connected identities. I watched with awe as friends and family transformed themselves from kin to interlocutors, translators and fellow researchers and even, at times, used my presence to pose
37 as uninitiated tourists to otherwise inaccessible sites and contexts.34
Over time, I forged a team of key figures and interlocutors that became central voices in my ethnographic encounters in Egypt and who coached me on how better to gain access to particular sites and how to set others at ease—when to assert myself in fluent Arabic, when to strategically betray my "khawaga" or prodigal status and, finally, when to withdraw to silence (for my protection and theirs). As key characters that thread throughout the case studies of the last three chapters, I want to take a moment to introduce tante Cecile, Amir,
Lola, and Marcus whose presences is woven throughout the last three chapters. With their permission I have chosen not to give them pseudonyms but rather to recognize them here not only in homage to the life lessons they taught me while in Egypt but also to acknowledge and credit their collaborative efforts, from our many thoughtful conversations through to my own writing back home.
I am particularly indebted to my mother-in-law tante Cecile who first introduced me to the complex and sprawling network of Sunday School khuddam in Shubra that I explore in chapter 3. Known as Miss Cecile among her peers, she stood just a few inches shorter than her six-foot son and was reputable as the quiet ironclad who, despite threats, went up to the
Coptic Patriarch himself to report a corrupt priest in her parish. It was our conversations and daily activities together, such as buying produce at a local market, preparing dinner, and instructions on how to politely hang laundry (with the intimates hidden from view), that taught me the nuances of living and believing in Shubra. I would often find her reading the
34 It is important to note that I was not always regarded as a foreigner or a khawaga and in turn, had to depend on European scholars to forge openings or land interviews. For example, it was the presence of a Belgian anthropologist, Gaétan du Roy, that facilitated my interview with Maher Fayez whom I cite in the last chapter here.
38 latest Orthodox publications, or watching Christian and news satellite television, freely sharing her musings and astute critiques over a cup of tea. More often than not, as her daughter-in-law, I would have to diplomatically and sometimes uncomfortably answer as to why I did not regularly attend Coptic liturgy, read the Bible, or partake in Church fasts. Our frequent conversations about faith and difference became among the most challenging and enriching encounters I experienced throughout and beyond this project.
Previously an amitnat khidma or principal Sunday School volunteer who oversaw religious education at all age levels, tante Cecile had dedicated all of her time to oversee the girls' services in St. Dimyana church of Baba Dublu. In her twenty-five years of service, she invested a great deal of energy and time before retiring to take care of her family. It was tante Cecile who took me by the hand to St. Anthony's Coptic Church, the focal point of the
Sunday School revival and the ethnographic site of chapter 3, and introduced me to the clergy and other Sunday School teachers there. There, I explore taratil as part of a vibrant religious revival (nahda ruhiya) under Pope Shenouda III as shaped by his reformist efforts in the Church Upbringing movement. Specifically, I investigate the recurring song motifs of sacrifice, suffering, and death that echo throughout revived saint hagiographies and permeate contemporary religious education in Coptic Sunday Schools. Tante Cecile not only helped me gain access to the archives of the historical Sunday School House, but also instructed me on who and how to address various khuddam, priests, and ʼaminat khidma. Although she only accompanied me for the first couple of trips to St. Anthony's Church, her wasiyya or instructions to her colleagues to "take care of her daughter" assured others of our kinship connections and disarmed fears about a new and foreign face in the sea of students. I often
39 came home to share my observations with her, to which she responded graciously by relaying her past experiences and struggles as a Sunday School teacher and leader of khidma. Back home in North America, Skype video calls have replaced our cups of tea, and Egyptian mail replaced our regular exchange of books.
When I first met Amir Rafla, director of the Kural al-‘aila il-Muqaddasa or the Holy
Family Choir (HFC) performing taratil services in mulids, I knew nothing about taratil in popular religious contexts. Rather, my naivete resembled that of the many urban upper and middle class Copts with whom I worked. Chapter 4 is about this particular encounter with taratil and the genre's central role in urban reformist narratives to transform popular festivals from sites of assumed moral debauchery to "modern" and utilitarian grounds of Orthodox ethical refashioning. It is important to clarify that this chapter is more an ethnography of taratil among an urban choir and not of Coptic popular and folk culture, which is already beginning to garner attention among scholars. Instead, I focus on the migration of urban spiritual volunteers, such as the Holy Family Choir who not only aimed to remake their audiences into pious festival attendees but also who, in sermonizing and teaching about saint hagiographies in make-shift Sunday Schools, were themselves remade and refashioned in the process. The Holy Family Choir (HFC) was also unique among other community choirs for rejecting the Church's traditional genres of alhan in their services, instead openly borrowing from "deviant" and "Protestant" musicians such as Maher Fayez whose Orthodox piety modeled an alternative but "modern" pious Christian identity. Through their focus on spiritual victory, illumination, and salvation, HFC musically and discursively challenged the
Church's definition of watan il-samawi or heavenly citizenship, transforming their
40 encounters of the mulid as an encounter of "heaven" on earth.
In his early forties, Amir had been in the choir since the group's earliest days. A short and stout man, his passionate resolution to sidestep Church-sanctioned taratil and institutionalization inspired his tireless trips to Upper Egypt. I was always confounded by his relentless drive and, leaving two successful businesses and a family behind for weeks at a time, his desire to serve through song. Additionally, I was awed by his bravery and insistence on publicly handing out Church pamphlets in busy and predominantly Muslim mulid markets, or in the roughest neighborhoods of the festival. Through his guidance, I became acquainted with a whole new side of taratil, as well as devotional elements of Coptic religious festivity, and was introduced to a different perspective from that of the more affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis. Despite his busy schedule and limited time with family, he always found time to invite me to his home, introduce me to choir members, and speak to me candidly of his critical, alternative stance. His communications over email and Facebook have further contributed to my understanding and writing of this chapter, and to fitting taratil into broader conversations of class in Egypt.
Finally, I am happy to introduce Lola: nothing can best describe this woman's youthful energy and mirth more than the lightness of her nickname and her short hair dyed to a feverish bright red. The one time I tried to address her appropriately for her age as tante, and she reproached me seriously, her bright green eyes scrunched together in a look of dismay for my having aged her beyond her years. I only made that mistake once. I first met
Lola as a Holy Family Choir member in Upper Egypt where she admitted to chafing against traditional practices of Orthodox piety such as fasting and liturgical prayer. "Where was the
41 happiness with God?" she would always ask me. This was the reason that prompted her to serve and participate with her two daughters in HFC's unconventional choir. It was also what led her to devotional contexts outside of conventional Orthodox services. Originally from
Shubra but now living in the affluent district of Heliopolis, her frequent visits back introduced me to another aspect of taratil in the neighborhood: popular and frequently overpacked interdenominational worship sessions revolving around the figure of Maher
Fayez. In chapter 5, I study Orthodox crossovers outside of traditional liturgical services and especially in their encounter with taratil in Protestant and charismatic circles. Again, it is important to note that this is not an ethnography of Coptic Protestant worship, nor is it of rural mulid audiences,35 but rather it is about the Orthodox discourse of relational differences: first of socioeconomic class and finally of interdenominational difference.
Also in chapter 5, I pursue another thread of relational discourse and encounters of difference in the counter-narratives of happiness, the politicizing of religious love, and finally the reclaimation Egypt as a much more ecumenical yet steadfastly Christian nation.
Lola and I attended Maher Fayez's spiritual retreat entitled Daʻwat al-ʼArd or "A Call of
Salvation to the Land" that became the focus of a case-study in this last chapter. For three days, in a campsite out in the Nitrean desert, a mixed congregation of Orthodox Copts and
Protestants sang Fayez's compositions for hours at a time. Along with these extended and impassioned musical worship sessions, Fayez invited three Ghanaian and Nigerian guests speakers from the Global Apostolic and Prophetic Network, an organization "dedicated to
35 Studies on Coptic evangelical Christians are still in their nascent stage. Scholars Otto Meinardus (2006) and Heather Sharkey (2008) have produced introductory historical references. I am grateful for the many conversation I had with historian Febe Armanios during her own ethnographic research for her forthcoming project "Coptic Charismatic Renewals in Egypt" funded by the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
42 raising leaders in Africa and establishing the presence of God in every sphere of society."36
Their sermons not only drew on Fayez's original themes, but also called on Egypt's
Christians to rise and "repossess the land" specifically in the name of Jesus.
Coming on the heels of the January 25 uprising and a spike in violence between
Egypt's Christians and Muslims, I investigate how these sermons and worship sessions have transformed songs from what Peter Manuel calls "ideological ambiguous entities" (1993: 17) to songs that are conditioned by ideological subtexts (Hall 1973) embedded in their sounds, texts and imagery. I focus on Maher Fayez's compositions because, as a contested figure who is largely marginalized by Orthodox Church clergy, his songs provide a rich lens through which to address issues of belonging: to a Church institution, to a nation during a pivotal moment of transition, and finally, to oneself as a modern but pious Egyptian Christian citizen. Fayez roots his taratil in canonical liturgical texts and fiercely defends his own
Orthodox identity. Yet, his focus on spiritual victory, happiness, and salvation is a counter- narrative to contemporary Orthodox pedagogies of piety that focus on saint hagiographies, martyr paradigms, sacrifice, and renewed life in a metaphorical death also reflects his encounters with an emerging neo-Pentecostal movement in Egypt. In his songs and sermons,
Fayez hopes to revive a different spiritual paradigm, one that is increasingly framed within global charismatic encounters, new auditory technologies, and reformist lessons of engaged citizenry.
Finally, I would like to introduce Marcus with whom I worked the most closely and whose involvement practiced, contested, and challenged the notions of a collaborative ethnography in the most acute sense. His narratives and insights thread throughout all
36
43 chapters of this project. We first met at the International Association for Coptic Studies
Conference in 2008 where I presented a paper on taratil in diasporic contexts. As an active cantor in Shubra and later as a student at the Higher Academy of Folk Studies in Giza,
Marcus first joined this project to investigate his own studies about Coptic alhan.37 Besides connecting me to important taratil figures in Shubra, he too sought connections for his own work; and so we began to strategically approach ethnographic interviews together, shifting and emphasizing our myriad and overlapping interests, identities, gender, and affiliations to our advantage, as well as setting our interlocutors at ease. At times, I led our encounters as the Western researcher whose imperfect Arabic afforded us and our interlocutors a certain kind of candidness without cultural consequences. At others times, I was the prodigal daughter whose perceived need for (re)enculturation provided a rich opportunity for pedagogical discourse.
On his end, Marcus deftly trod the delicate line between translator, guide and researcher. More importantly, he legitimized my presence, first as a potentially trustworthy
"outsider" to a community in a tight-knit neighborhood, and finally as an honorable "insider," both of us aware of the nuances that our genders, shifting martial status, and religious identities played in various contexts. In return, my own status allowed Marcus access to individuals and sites that were otherwise inaccessible to him because of biases and suspicions against Egyptian scholars.38 Additionally, my affiliations with a Western academy
37 Charles Hirschkind writes of his own collaborative partnership with Muhammad Subhi, a khatib or preacher for the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Subhi had ambitions of writing a manual for preachers, while Hirschkind sought to analyze sermon rhetoric. Together, they also arranged to listen to recorded sermons together and exchanged materials (2006:12-13). 38 This became exceedingly clear during our first visit to the Coptic Patriarchy in May of 2009 for Pope Shenouda's weekly sermon lessons. At the Cathedral's doors, security did not allow Marcus to sit up front with the "foreigners" until I argued that, despite the Church's services of translation, I still needed
44 legitimized his own study of alhan and Coptic liturgical practice, highlighting the politics of representation and authenticity that I investigate in my first chapter. At the end of each extended stay in Cairo, we exchanged copies of archival materials, video recordings, and photographs with the understanding that they belonged equally to both of our projects.
Lassiter writes of collaborative ethnography as "cocitizenships and coactivisims built on the counderstandings emergent in collaborative research partnerships between and among anthropologists and local publics" (Lassiter 2008: 71). While our partnership facilitated mobility, accessibility and networking, there were other challenges worthy of note here. In the first few months, I initially struggled with sharing ethnographic authority but came to understand the limitation of my interpretation when, after a particularly trying appointment,
Marcus picked up my video camera and insisted on a reverse interview. As he began to do this regularly, I grappled with this altered power axis, both embarrassed and exasperated for my earlier clumsy command of colloquial Arabic, and at many times, just how much I may have misunderstood as a liminal visitor to Egypt. I soon realized just how much my project would be tinged and shaped by own subjectivity: no matter what my proximity was as an
Egyptian-American, I did not grow up and live in Egypt and, more specifically, I was not brought up in the vibrant beehives of service: khidma, and Sunday Schools of Shubra.
Moreover, no matter how hard I tried to distance myself as a Western researcher, even in the many moments I refused to sing, I too was a part of this story. In his work on meaning of social dramas and metaphors, Victor Turner focused on individuals not just as receptors but also as conscious shapers of culture in relationship to one another (1974: 17). "Put another
his assistance in translation. When we finally made it to sit in the first few pews, Marcus whispered to me, "I've never sat this close to the front before."
45 way," Lassiter writes about Turner's methods, "the conceptualization of interlocutors as actors in their own cultural systems [and] set the stage for them to take a more active role in the construction of ethnographies about them" (2008: 64, Lassiter's italics). But here, the ethnography is not just about them, it is about us—tante Cecile, Amir, Lola, Marcus, the mulid community, Maher Fayez, among many, many others—and our encounters with one another. It is an encounter of taratil and the people who silence, sing, and listen to them.
In the final event, this project is an account that focuses on the process of human grappling with difference and sameness, to borrow Lassiter's insightful phrasing (2008: 62).
Perhaps it is more accurately described as a narrative ethnography, one that relates a story of encounter and experience between and among ethnographer and interlocutors that engenders dialogue and co-understandings. In her work on Zuni Indians, anthropologist Barbara
Tedlock makes no claims to objectively represent the world of the Zuni but promises to take the readers along on an experiential journey that is deeply couched in a particular encounter with particular people during a particular time (1991). In a similar way, I invite readers to follow my (re)encounters with Coptic Orthodox music culture, people, and experience.
Vignettes at the beginning of the chapters, pulled from my field notebooks, are my own grapplings with contexts that left a distinct impression on me, on my understanding of taratil, and on the people who sing and live by them. At times, I have adopted a number of narrative strategies that are messy and thick with detail to reflect an increasingly layered and complicated situation embedded in a deeply colonial history and emerging in the tangled events of the January 25 uprising. These impressions did not stop as soon as I came home in
July 2011 but rather they continued to pour in during the writing of this project as I traversed
46 the digital imaginary of a watan samawi on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a growing number of religious satellite channels and Coptic web ministries.
47 CHAPTER 1
CANONIZING LITURGICAL SOUNDSCAPES
"As the modern unravels, it becomes about comparison, boundaries between groups, relations of power, identity, similitude, and differences," (Lara Deeb 2006: 16)
When the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C. officially launched the Coptic
Orthodox Liturgical Chant and Hymnody web presentation on October 23, 2009, excitement rippled through many circles of dedicated Coptic Orthodox cantors, alhan enthusiasts, and advocates for Coptic culture. On community social networks such as tasbeha.org, coptichymns.net, and copticheritage.org, activists and singers were abuzz with the imminently forthcoming website featured on the Library's digital Performing Arts
Encyclopedia. The website presented the largest repository of early Coptic music recordings and transcriptions in Western notations held in the Ragheb Moftah Collection. Moftah (1898-
2001), an amateur Egyptian collector, had spent 75 years of his very long life documenting and recording the entire Coptic liturgical hymnody called alhan; he had earned the moniker
"father of Coptic music studies."39 On this day in 2009, Moftah had finally, if posthumously, fulfilled his last wish: to make all of these audio and transcription materials public and
39 Ragheb Moftah's 100th Birthday Party [video recording] (1999), Video Recording Gallery, "Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody; The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress" Performing Arts Encyclopedia; Explore Music, Theatre, and Dance at the Library of Congress.
48 accessible to Copts all over the world so that they might help maintain and perpetuate their heritage as a living tradition.40
Despite not being able to read it, many cantors and clerics agreed that Western music notation adequately safeguarded their liturgical hymnody and the remnants of an ancient
Egypt heritage they believed were embedded in alhan's melodies. In their conversations, they reflected upon and reiterated Moftah's concerns for keeping the Coptic music heritage "pure" and "intact," and were grateful for his efforts to "save" alhan not just for the Coptic Orthodox
Church but also for Egypt and, ultimately, for the whole world. Pope Shenouda III praised
Moftah's efforts for undertaking this work in a "sound and scientific way:" the "science" referred to the hiring of an English violinist, Ernest Newlandsmith, who worked with Moftah from 1927 to 1936 and applied his knowledge of Western musical notation. Later, he hired
Hungarian musicologist Margit Tóth to transcribe alhan into staff notation. Despite the current revivals of the genre inside and outside of Egypt, and the burgeoning number of online alhan archives by Coptic youth, the Patriarch still voiced his concerns about the genre's disappearance. In October, he officially sent a delegation of two bishops to
Washington to oversee the Ragheb Moftah Collection's hallmark inauguration into the
Library's digital archives.
I curated the presentation of the collection in Washington, and as curator I could understand why most people revered Moftah's early recordings. In the crackling hum of digitized discs dating from the 1930s, the voice of the great Coptic teacher Muʻallim Mikhail
40 It is important to note that many of these historical recordings are already available in online in archives as well as a number of audio records, including the Heritage of the Coptic Orthodox Church (HCOC) based in Mississauga, Canada.
49 Girgis al-Batanuni emerged loud and clear.41 In these recordings, the presence of one of the most highly regarded teachers was reincarnated, tangible and echoing in the ear. One could also recognize the familiar melodies that cantors continue to perform in the Church today, reinforcing the direct link to his teaching lineage. The only differences between these historic recordings and contemporary performances, though, were Batanuni's comparatively unembellished melodies. I was perplexed: how was it that, only a relatively short number of years later, Batanuni's student Sadek Attalah recorded the same alhan with the now familiar embellishments that Batanuni himself had left out?42 Nonetheless, Moftah had commissioned the transcription of over 70-hours' worth of recordings, and Batanuni, even at his advanced age, had provided all of the genre's seasonal and holiday variations according to the Coptic
Orthodox calendar.
I was also baffled by the number of Orthodox cantors who so highly venerated the early Coptic music transcriptions, particularly as most could not read Western notation, and in any case they did not depend on it to learn the genre. Furthermore, many of these early
Coptic music transcriptions were neither accurate nor even flattering. In one of the most popular pieces of the presentation, French scientist Guillaume-André Villoteau published a
41 For a more detailed biography of Muʻallim Mikhail Girgis al-Batanuni and blind Coptic cantors, please refer to the essay "A Musical Inheritance: Coptic Cantors and an Orally Transmitted Tradition" (2009), Essay Gallery, "Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody; The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress" Performing Arts Encyclopedia; Explore Music, Theatre, and Dance at the Library of Congress.
50 severe critique in Napoleon Bonaparte's famous colonial scientific enterprise, Description de
L'Égypte. He cited only a brief and sparse transcription explaining that long exposures to alhan "lacerated his ears" and spread a "nauseating poison" to his heart and soul. In that transcription, I again noted a similar absence of alhan's traditional ornamentation. In his own work, English composer Ernest Newlandsmith explained his numerous transcription drafts as a part of his ambition to uncover ancient Egyptian melodies that he believed were "buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation."43 It suddenly dawned on me: did
Newlandsmith simply ignore what he himself judged to be embellishments, or did he instruct
Batanuni to leave out his ornate embellishments?
A number of months later, I exchanged the Library's quiet hum of printers and clicking staplers for a vastly different soundscape as I began fieldwork in Cairo. During one of my first ethnographic interviews, I sat in on a studio recording session for the most popular Christian satellite television station among Copts: the Coptic Orthodox Church
Channel (CTV). In the tight studio space, four men were rehearsing a madiha, an Arabic liturgical doxology reserved for the saints. They rehearsed only short segments at a time while a sound engineer fiddled on a soundboard in the other room. Like Moftah's early recordings, the typical ornate melismas I heard in liturgies all over Cairo had been tamed into one closely synchronized voice. Any time the sound engineer heard an extra embellishment, he stopped the singers and they began recording all over again. They continued, in a relentless loop, stopping and starting again to achieve a seamless uniformity that the channel
43 Newlandsmith mentions this a few times, such as in his lecture at the Oxford University Church entitled, "The Ancient Music of the Coptic Church," on May 21, 1931. Also see his three-part article, "Music of the Orient: Recent Discoveries in Egypt," in The Musical Standard 37(May, June, and July 1932): 146; 161-162; 184-185.
51 music director, Emad Nairouz, deemed fit for satellite television. This went on, almost painfully, all night.
When I ask Emad why he and his singers strived for unisons of such monochromatic uniformity that they did not traditionally perform outside of the studio, he evoked Moftah's anxiety to preserve the hymns. Emad, a professionally-trained ʻud player, confided in me that he had also tried to teach his own students using his own alhan transcriptions in Western music notation, but the experiment failed miserably. Disheartened, he joined CTV in hopes of preserving the hymns, and he turned to the sensitive ears of a sound engineer who could monitor the choir's deviations from a homophonous sound. These recordings, he explained, achieved what he could not without the use of sound technologies. They correctly documented the hymns for future generations as they were recorded and aired on satellite television. More importantly, he explained, as the choir left out the heterophony of traditional melismas, they reflected what he felt was a more professional, progressive, and modern sound.
* * * * *
In this first chapter, I investigate negotiations of modernity through documents containing early Coptic music transcriptions and the consequent canonizing of Coptic liturgical soundscapes as the most authentic representation of Coptic identity. I start here, because almost always after introducing my project about taratil to Coptic interlocutors I was urged not waste my time on a genre that had foreign missionary roots, a genre that "is not ours." Instead, people advised me to turn my attention to preserving and notating alhan,
"our true music" and a direct link "to our ancient Egyptian heritage." For a dissertation that
52 focuses on the popular genre of taratil, it may seem like an undue burden to begin with an historical chapter that focuses on Western music transcriptions of alhan and manuscripts of early scholarly and missionary encounters. Yet one cannot truly understand the discursive role of Coptic music in everyday life and in the discussions that shape identity and civic participation without understanding the veneration of alhan as a more "authentic" Coptic genre than taratil; moreover, one cannot understand Coptic music culture without first situating early Coptic music studies within a colonial context. To decipher the ideologies invested in alhan music transcriptions will direct us to a better understanding of early Sunday
School taratil pamphlets (Chapter 2), taratil music videos (Chapter 3), pedagogical taratil cassettes (Chapter 4) and, finally, the use of new electronic technologies (Chapter 5). How are all of these sonic objects critical to cultivating a Coptic moral self as well as a sense of ethnic (and religious) exceptionalism? More importantly, what kinds of effects do they have on contemporary Coptic-Muslim relations?
Here, I explore how early scholarly and later evangelical encounters have entangled
Coptic music discourses in a Western-centered teleology of modernity and progress. In emulating the West, early sonic objects such as alhan transcriptions and early recordings infused Coptic scholarship with Orientalist critiques that equated traditional heterophony and embellishments to "Arab debris" that was a marker of backwardness. This is a notion that still reverberates today, and it is made especially evident in Moftah's and Nairouz's efforts to produce uniform and "modern" sounds without the genre's ornamentation and embellishments in colloquial performances and quotidian worship. More importantly, their criticisms and concerns also reflect an embedded and strategically co-opted European
53 Orientalism that fixes a Coptic heritage as both authentic and unchanged from an ancient
Egyptian heritage. Any changes or additions to a Coptic liturgical canon, such as taratil's innovative potentials, are today regarded as Muslim, missionary, or Western deviances imported from "the outside." How do these discussions of alhan transcriptions and ornamentation articulate larger relational critiques of Egyptian Muslims and speak to contemporary negotiations (and negations) of political presence, representation, power, and modernity in Egypt today? As the rest of this project illustrates, Coptic music discourses reflect how the community strategically (dis)engages with today's Muslim-majority country
—from omitting orally transmitted "Arabic-sounding" melismas in archival recordings to marginalizing the more widely-performed Arabic devotional genre taratil outside of the
Coptic music canon—to negotiate two modes of belonging: as Egyptian Christian citizens on this Earth, and as pious citizens of a heavenly nation in the afterlife.
As curator of the Ragheb Moftah Collection, I also investigated the silence of taratil in the Library of Congress Coptic music collection: I found it curious and telling that there is not a single example or mention of the most ubiquitous Arabic colloquial genre performed by
Egypt's Copts.44 How does taratil's lack of presence in official archives as well as the Coptic
Church canon point to cultural and political ambivalences of sharing, echoing, and building on a Muslim inflected Egyptian/Coptic heritage? Lara Deeb writes of the moment "the modern" unravels, when relational boundaries, "authenticated" historic canons, and assessments of modern-ness threaten to collapse, revealing tensions of power, identity similitudes, and differences (2006:16). What happens when they do collapse? As taratil
44 The Institute of Coptic studies in the Coptic patriarchy and the National Egyptian archives at the Cairo Opera also houses copies of Moftah's work on alhan. Like the Library of Congress, both these archives have no copies of contemporary taratil recordings in their holdings.
54 surpass alhan in their popularity and become leading pedagogies of a contemporary Coptic political identity, they draw on a shared Egyptian folk heritage, sound, and the use of the colloquial Arabic language. When confronted with borrowed and interpolated melodies,
Copts deny outright these similarities, regularly falling back on arguments of "they took it from us." On numerous occasions, interlocutors detailed stories of how famous figures such as Mohammed Abdel-Wahab and Farid al-Atrash came to attend Coptic liturgical services for inspiration and "took notes" to use in their own compositions. How are negotiations of
"pious" and "modern" citizenry shaped by early Coptic music transcriptions, scholarship, and discourse? And finally, how do these conversations of heritage shape modern Egyptian
Christian civility and institutional pedagogies of religious difference? The questions presented here thread through the rest of this project.
Early Transcriptions and Negotiations of Modernity
Before exploring early Coptic music transcriptions it is important to understand how, in the burgeoning discipline of comparative musicology, music transcriptions and related scholarship regularly articulated early Western imperial ambitions. In many of their writings, explorers, scholars, and missionaries also revealed their intentions of bringing "modernity" and "progress," namely through Christian proselytization and colonization.45 In his edited work Questions of Modernity, Timothy Mitchell (2000: xi) problematizes modernity's
45 In his work From Mission to Modernity; Evangelical Reforms and Education in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2011), historian Paul Sedra outlines Protestant missionary ambitions to transform Egyptian society through a kind of cultural conversion using modern forms of eduction.
55 assumed singular history. He writes:
One of the characteristics of modernity has always been its autocentric picture of itself as the expression of a universal certainty, whether the certainty of human reason freed from particular traditions, or of a technological power freed from the constraints of the natural world.
While I do not offer a singular history of transcriptions here, I want to highlight their historical role as part of a larger effort to make colonized subalterns legible and, in turn, their lingering effects in post-colonial archives as documents of authenticity and scientific authority.46 Like early exhibitions that transformed newly-discovered civilizations into tangible objects that visitors could view and subsequently touch, transcriptions made colonial subjects into something they could hear. In other words, transcriptions came to be numbered among the material evidences of Europe's imperial age, from the organization of panoramas to the display of merchandise, lectures, and guidebooks. This entire machinery of representation, Mitchell describes, "is made up of everything collected and arranged to stand for something, to represent progress and history, human industry and empire…the whole set- up evoking somehow some larger truth" (1988: 6). He concludes that early explorers and scholars through this colonizing project ordered Egypt into something object-like, legible, readable, and like a book (1988:33).
Europeans were not the only ones to invest transcription with the power to create the appearances of object-ness and to discipline the order of things: two centuries later, Copts too have invested transcription documents and their accompanying recordings with a similar
46 For more on the early history of transcription in comparative musicology, see Terr Ellingson's "Transcription" and "Notation" in Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. Ed. Helen Myers. Vol. 1 (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1992):110-152, 153-163.
56 tangibility and material authority. By canonizing Coptic liturgical soundscapes, namely those recorded and transcribed by Western scholars and missionaries, clerics and activists have rendered alhan as sound objects with which to negotiate power, authority, and authenticity as the sole and "modern sons of the pharaohs."47 In his famous work, Archeology of Knowledge,
Michel Foucault writes that "history is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, buildings, institutions…etc.)…. History is that which transforms documents into monuments" (1972: 7). In an Egyptian landscape dotted with the Great Pyramids of
Giza, the Sphinx, and the Valley of the Kings, monuments are evoked daily and strategically reinterpreted within an ongoing negotiation of identity politics. This is especially the case among Egyptian Coptic Christians who claim the most direct and purist link to a pharaonic lineage since it is they who refused conversion following the Arab conquest in the sixth century.48 As I illustrate here, early Coptic music transcriptions largely penned by European scholars have been strategically reinterpreted as undisputed monuments of Coptic music history, and have shaped the way that Copts talk, think, and perform their own church music.
I argue that these transcriptions have not only contributed to the canonization of Coptic liturgical soundscapes, but also served to propel taratil further into the popular and colloquial realm. In the case studies I present in the following chapters, members of the Coptic nationalist and religious elite such as Habib Girgis (chapter 2), Pope Shenouda III (chapter
3), the Holy Family Choir (chapter 4), and taratil singer Maher Fayez (chapter 5) continue to
47 S.H. Leeder, Modern Songs of the Pharaohs: A Study of the Manners and Customs of the Copts of Egypt (London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918). 48 For example, at the Fifth International Symposium entitled "History of Christianity and Monasticism in Aswan and Nubia," which took place in Aswan, Upper Egypt (February 2010), Sunday School children and youth welcomed academic scholars and researchers with a rendition of the Egyptian national anthem in the Coptic language as well as a brief panorama of Coptic history clad in Pharaonic costumes and recreating Pharaonic scenes.
57 assimilate Orientalist Coptic music discourses to, in Homi Bhabha's terms, "re-present" their community (1994:125) as more spiritually and ethnically authentic than their Muslims counterparts. In their discussions and performances of alhan and taratil, they reveal a broader political commentary about minority identity, religious authenticity, and national belonging.
On the Sovereignty of Sound: Early Coptic Music Transcriptions
When Europeans began regularly arriving in Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many visitors found themselves confused to be standing on the other side of the
Oriental exhibitions they had viewed back home. In their diaries and letters, they regularly described their new worlds with a sense of visual turmoil, overwhelmed by the colors and twists of Cairo streets and citing the need to step back to grasp the "real thing" as a picture. 49
Edward Lane's famous Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
(1835) initially began as a series of camera lucida drawings—prototypes of early anthropological writings that captured Egypt through the lens of the eye. In the same way, music scholars and missionaries who traveled to the country grappled with the new array of sounds they encountered upon arrival. Like pictures, transcriptions reflected the experiences of their new sonic realities through the ear. But unlike Daguerreotypes, transcriptions came without the same chemically-etched accuracy. Instead, these documents disclosed what Franz
49 The cover of Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt (University of California Press, 1988) depicts a number of bedouins and locals who were hired to hoist these Europeans visitors up the pyramids on their shoulders to get a panoptic gaze of the towns. These visitors also scrambled up minarets and military towers to regain the familiar perspective of the panoramas, Daguerreotypes, and pictures that earlier explores had sent back.
58 Boas famously called a kind of "sound blindness,"50 a mishearing of sorts. Drawing from the field of philology, Boas argued that music transcribers could not easily distinguish different sounds that did not come from their native scale index, just as linguists could not hear phonetics beyond their own native tongue. In other words, early music scholars had yet to hear, never mind transcribe difference on paper.
The earliest Coptic liturgical music transcriptions located in the Library of Congress archives date back to the seventeenth century Europe and the Oriental exhibitions attended by Coptic religious representatives as part of a broader theological and cultural exchange
(Hamilton 2006: 2). Notated by Athanasius Kircher (c.1602-80), a German Jesuit priest and the forefather and earliest pioneer of Egyptology, the brief transcription was a surprise discovery in the Library's Rare Books and Special Collections Division.51 In one of his more significant Coptic language lexicons, Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (The Egyptian Language
Restored, 1643), Kircher had written down what he claimed to be "the solemn intonation of the Mass with the music notes just as he was able to extract it from the mouth of my Coptic scribe" (Kircher 1643: 527). The scribes he encountered were part of the regular delegations that began arriving in Rome in 1439 as part of the Vatican's determination to persuade Copts
50 Alternating sounds is the phenomenon that describes the recognition of one phonetic sound as another, simply because the listeners have not previously run across it and are referencing it to the next most familiar sound in their knowledge index. They perceive this sound, or any other stimuli, whatever the case may be, within the context of what they already know. Boas, Franz. "On Alternate Sounds" American Anthropologist, Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1889): 47-54. 51 For a long time, many scholars cited Villoteau's nineteenth-century transcription in the Description de l'Égypte to be the earliest documentation of Coptic music in Western music notation. Here, I would like to mention Jan Lancaster, a multi-media specialist at the Library of Congress who helped me to located Kircher's transcription. Thanks to her tireless efforts, we located several of Kircher's lexicons in the Library's Rare Books and Special Collections Division and were pleasantly surprised to find this transcription as we rummaged through the lexicon's yellowing pages. Another special thanks also goes to Jan Lauridsen for helping me to transcribe an excerpt from seventeenth-century notation to something I could take back and hum to interlocutors in Toronto and Washington D.C.
59 to submit to the Catholic papacy (Hamilton 2006: 2). Moreover, as "real life" exhibits, they were integrated into Europe's emerging interest with the Orient as a key link to its own primordial past.
In his study The Church and the West: The European Discovery of the Egyptian
Church, historian Alastair Hamilton (2006) outlines the prisms through which early missionary and theology scholars viewed and consequently heard the Coptic Orthodox
Church. Early interest in Egypt provoked scholars of religion to explore it as part of Europe's own imagined past and key to a pristine religion believed to be embedded in ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphs (2006: 1). Scholars identified Copts not as living heirs to a romantic past but rather as de facto inheritors of Coptic language preserved in their liturgical rites; as such they were designated as integral predecessors of Western religious development and later material progress. In other words, the Coptic Orthodox Church was thought to legitimize the Catholic Church's development along a teleological line towards a progressive religious modernity.
Such spiritual fascination foreshadowed later commercial interests. Napoleon
Bonaparte's brief conquest of Egypt marked a pivotal moment for Orientalist scholarship and the advent of a Western discourse of modernity in the Arab world (Hourani 1983; Yapp
1987). Edward Said (1979: 42-43) adds:
The keynote of the relationship was set for the Near East and Europe by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, an invasion which was in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another, apparently stronger one…. The Description de l'Égypte, provide a scene or setting for Orientalism, since Egypt and subsequently the other Islamic lands were viewed as the live province, the theater of effective Western knowledge about the Orient.
Indeed, Egypt emerged onto the European stage not only for its potential assets as a
60 colony but also as a mythical and tantalizing mirage in the Western imagination for its own past. In his book, Negotiating for the Past; Archeology, Nationalism, and Diplomacy in the
Middle East, James Good writes that the Description de l'Égypte, published from 1809 to
1828, fueled a considerable Egyptomania that sent treasure seekers to unearth Egyptian antiquities, destroying and creating a black market for them in the process (2007: 69). For those who could not come to Egypt, Egypt simply came to them. From the written word to live exhibitions and museums in France and in England, "Egypt was to be ordered up as something object-like. In other words it was made picture-like and legible, rendered available to political and economic calculation" (Mitchell 1988: 33). Among the sketches and reports offered in the Description de l'Égypte's oversized volumes, Villoteau brought Coptic alhan to a wider audience for the first time, though not without the imperialist discourse that organized a new order of knowledge, lent authority to written texts, and imposed what
Mitchell calls the process of "enframing" European self-conceptions (Mitchell 1988: 14).
In his own monumental study Colonizing Egypt (1988), Timothy Mitchell investigates how colonial power and authority were imprinted on the Egyptian masses through the disciplinary formation of a new army, the establishment of organized schooling, and the restructuring of village and town layouts beginning in the 1830s. He defines
"enframing" as a method of "dividing up and containing" (1988: 44-45): the restructuring of spaces and the life activities that take place within them that infuses these new conceptualization with new meaning and authority (1988: 15). In other words, imperialist scientists and scholars contained and divided oral knowledge into written texts suffused with a new kind of distinction and notion of "modernity" and production. Mitchell writes, "Such
61 legibility, which is the mark of the world-as-exhibition, had a larger importance. The
European experts were anxious to organize the production of statistical knowledge" (1988:
46). Enframing, then, offered a kind of standardization that easily identified and produced visible social and spatial hierarchies of the conceived chaos of the Egyptian encounter; just as enframing made Egyptians easier to read, music transcriptions made them easier to hear, though not necessarily more audible.
Despite their scholarly prowess, Kircher and Villoteau both seemed plagued by Boas'
"soundblindness." After I had transposed and hummed both of the notated melodies back to a number of seasoned cantors in the Toronto and Washington D.C. areas, I found that none recognized the transcribed melodies. One even called them transcriptions of "Western church-hymns" and "mish bitaʻitna," literally "not ours."52 But the accuracy of his transcription, or any of the transcriptions I discuss in this chapter, is beyond the point.53 In the spirit of Edward Said, I am more interested in the style, figures of speech, settings, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, and not the correctness of the representations nor their fidelity to some great original (1978: 21l). Rather, I focus on these documents in order to highlight an emerging Orientalist scholarship, discourse, and later political ideologies that shaped the way European scholars encountered Egypt as part of the Orient and, in turn, the way Egyptians debated modes of authenticity, modernity and piety through these literary, visual and, as I argue here, music corpus. While Edward Said famously identified such Orientalist discourses as Europe's way of coming to terms and constructing
52 Personal interview, 26 August 2008. 53 Kircher's expertise of the Coptic language soon came into question. For more on this see Paul Findlen's Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004).
62 itself by framing, inventing, and shaping the Orient as its cultural context and most recurring image of the Other (1978: 1), Copts co-opted such a lens to constitute their own strategic modern subjectivities. Said (1978: 21)writes:
Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet, or scholar makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation.
Jonathan Shannon reminds us that like Orientalism, "modernity" is a co-produced representation of "East" and "West," one that is an enacted modernity through specific policies and practices, and which responds to Europe's [and the Orient's] own cultural needs
(Shannon 2006: 62). In his work here, Kircher made the Orient sing as a legitimatizing voice of the Roman Catholic Church. His transcriptions of Coptic chant emerged as material evidence of the Catholic Church's historical legitimacy as a linked pristine religion in face of
Protestant rivalry. Villoteau's own work classified and narrated a social hierarchy that justified Napoleon Bonaparte's colonial enterprise. In turn, as I illustrate later in this chapter,
Copts themselves also depend on Orientalist essentialisms to strategically negotiate their own local politics, debates of modernity, and practices of ethnic and spiritual authenticity.
By the eighteenth century, the enlightenment discourse that emerged was not only imperialist but also colored by what Alastair Hamilton called a kind of "intellectual violence"
(Hamilton 2006). By the time Villoteau arrived as a savant and a scientist of music, Europe's imperial age was at its height. Villoteau, among others, brought with him the positivist scholarship that would resurface in Newlandsmith's embattled drafts to minimize chromatic melismas, and later, Emad Nariouz's relentless desire to "correctly" record alhan without
63 their messy heterophonies, improvisations and idiosyncratic melismas for Orthodox satellite television (CTV). These Orientalist and positivist ideologies were further complicated by
Christian reformist enterprises brought to Egypt by European Roman Catholic and, later,
American Presbyterian missionaries who sought to bring progress, modernity, and their own brands of Christianity. These missionaries emphasized literacy and legibility embedded in
Coptic music discourse as a the "route to enlightenment" (Sedra 2006: 34), and turned to music transcription literacy as key to an Egyptian evangelical modernity. Before I turn to how Copts strategically utilized these music materials in broader negotiations of authenticity and modernity, I focus on the role of two French Jesuit monks who looked to Western music notation as part of a missionary effort to reform and modernize Copts through an education in music literacy.
Singing and Reading an Evangelical Modernity
With a growing French, Ottoman, and British colonial presence beginning in the eighteenth century, Italian and French Jesuits, British Anglicans, and American Presbyterians poured into Egypt. As part of their proselytizing missions, they initiated agricultural and development programs, built schools, hospitals, and libraries. This included French Jesuit evangelicals who actively established their own schools and publishing houses as early as the seventeenth century.54 While their numbers were smaller than the American Presbyterians who arrived two centuries later, they were quite prominent because of their work among
54 For a more detailed insight to Catholic missionary work in Egypt, refer to Alastair Hamilton's The Copts and the West, 1439-1822; The European Discovery in Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 49-83.
64 Uniate Copts: a substantial population of Coptic Catholic converts who lived in Cairo and
Alexandria.55 According to the edict by Pope Pius IX in 1846, these converts could maintain their traditional worship rites and liturgies as long as their new loyalties rested with the Papal authority in Rome (2008: 31). In 1879, the Pope established a Catholic seminary called the
Collège de la Sainte Famille to train Coptic Catholic clergy to minister to their new congregants.56 These priests not only learned Catholic catechisms, but were also trained to chant Coptic liturgical alhan by using Western music transcriptions by two Jesuit missionaries: Father Jules Blin's Chants liturgiques des Coptes. Notés et mis en ordre par le
Père Jules Blin de la Compagnie de Jésus missionnaire en Égypte. Partie chantée par le peuple et le diacre (1888), and Father Louis Badet 's Chants Liturgiques des Coptes, notés et mis en ordre par Le Père Louis Badet, S.J. [Première] Partie Office de la Sainte Messe,
Chants du Peuple et du Diacre (1899).
At Collège de la Sainte Famille, Father Blin taught Coptic grammar to seminary students and translated liturgical books,57 while Father Badet served as the choir director and later, as the assistant director of the seminary from 1898 to 1899.58 Besides their teaching responsibilities, both men dedicated their careers to the preservation of Coptic alhan. They
55 Heather Sharkey reports that their population grew from 5000 in 1894 to 39,000 in 1937 alone. By the beginning of the 21st century, she numbers 200,000 Catholic Copts in Egypt (2008: 32) according to David Barrett, George Kurian, and Todd Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia; A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd ed. 2 Vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): Vol. 1, 250. 56 Standing in the Faggalla district, Cairo's largest book publishing center, Collège de la Sainte Famille is still one of the most affluent missionaries schools in Egypt today. A sprawling system of preparatory schools, high school, theater, churches, and libraries with campuses in other affluent neighborhoods, 57 J-B Pilot, S.J., Les Missions Catholiques Françaises au XIXe Siècle. Vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1901): 417. 58 Henri Jalabert, S.J. Jésuites au Proche-Orient (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq sarl, 1987): 405.
65 believed that, as Coptic music was exclusively an oral tradition, it would certainly vanish under the influence of Arabic popular music if it was not written down, standardized, and taught to future generations and clergy. In the preface to his transcription of the liturgy of St.
Basil, Father Badet summarizes the driving force behind his work:
We have tangible proof of this: Arabic music, after the Muslim invasion, became the popular music of Egypt; however, in spite of a contained contact of several centuries with a music system that uses the ordinary chromatic genre, the Coptic religious music has remained completely diatonic. Will it always be so? It is easy for us to believe that it won't, because after Arabic music, European music then invaded Egypt, emphasizing through harmony the mixture of chromaticism and diatonicism, and comfortably rendering to the ear alterations and cadences; the strength of one added to the other could very well replace a system that had lasted for centuries.
This would prove to be a deplorable defeat, first from the point of view of the originality of the Coptic rite, which is so venerable because of its antiquity, as well as from the point of view of science, because so many precious remainders of ancient music would be lost.59
Both Father Blin's and Father Badet's transcriptions carried an overt preservationist slant similar to the salvage paradigm motivating late nineteenth-century comparative musicology and later motivating Coptic reformist efforts. Blin's and Badet's work was significant for something else, however. In their transcriptions and pedagogical materials they articulated and notated the earliest argument emphasizing the importance of Coptic liturgical music and its role in safeguarding the community's national character. Father Blin wrote that "in short, Coptic liturgical chants, like all religious chants, in general, have preserved a national trait; they do not seem to have, contrary to non-religious songs, foreign
59 Father Louis Badet, Chants Liturgiques des Coptes, notés et mis en ordre par Le Père Louis Badet, S.J. [Première] Partie Office de la Sainte Messe, Chants du Peuple et du Diacre (Collège de la Sainte- Famille, Petit Séminaire Copte, [1899]. Reprint. Rome: La Filografica, 1936): pp. 10-18. Maryvonne Mavroukaksis provides a complete translation of Father Badet's introduction on the Library of Congress Coptic music web presentation at
66 influences."60 While this statement is not easily disseminated in the Orthodox community for its French language, a similar ideology of authenticity, imperviousness to change, and musical "purity" began to circulate among the religious elite in the Coptic Orthodox community, including Ragheb Moftah who started his own transcription project only twenty years later.
According to Fathers Blin and Badet, it was an unbroken continuity to an ancient
Egyptian past that particularly defined a Coptic national trait. Despite centuries of Arab musical influences that use chromaticism, Father Badet wrote that alhan had remained entirely diatonic scales closer to European modes.61 Besides being easier to transcribe in
Western music notation without too many additions or alterations, Badet's argument echoed
Kircher's notion that Coptic music resembled Catholic plainchant. In turn, Father Blin also insisted that alhan did not contain any of the "raw character of Arabic melody"—likely implying the complex and ornate embellishments that do not easily fit in the diatonic frame of Western music notation. Their statements prefigured Ernest Newlandsmith's disdain for what he considered to be "backward" Arab-sounding ornamentation that plagued his rough
60 Father Jules Blin, Chants liturgiques des Coptes. Notés et mis en ordre par le Père Jules Blin de la Compagnie de Jésus missionnaire en Égypte. 1 Partie chantée par le peuple et le diacre (Imprimerie nationale, 1888): 11-13. Maryvonne Mavroukaksis provides a complete translation of Father Badet's introduction on the Library of Congress Coptic music web presentation at
67 drafts when working just a few years later to transcribe alhan for Ragheb Moftah.
As part of his revisions of Father Blin's work, Father Badet undertook the public performance of his own transcription in a Coptic Church by students of his Catholic seminary. Their audience included a Coptic Orthodox bishop, church cantors, and congregants who judged the accuracy of these hymns to "conform completely to the traditional songs of the Coptic nation."62 These Jesuit priests not only contributed to a national self-awareness among the Coptic community but also looked to legitimize a new, fledgling convert community whose ethnic and spiritual authenticity were questioned by their Orthodox counterparts. The Jesuit priests spent considerable time teaching newly converted Catholics to read Western music notation. Both dedicated a number of pages of their transcriptions as pedagogical texts in the hopes that, equipped with these new skills,
Coptic Catholics could read, preserve, and perform their liturgical and "national" heritage while at the same time converting to their new faith.
Co-Opting Orientalism: Coptic Music Debates of Authenticity and
Modernity
In his work on Syrian classical music, Jonathan Shannon writes that modernity is a process of self-composition that is improvisational, and one that takes place in specific
62 Father Louis Badet, "Preface" in Chants Liturgiques des Coptes, notés et mis en ordre par Le Père Louis Badet, S.J. [Première] Partie Office de la Sainte Messe, Chants du Peuple et du Diacre (1899). For a translation see "Preface from the Liturgical Chant of the Copts. Notated and placed in Order by Father Louis Badet, S.J./Louis Badet) in the Transcription Gallery, "Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody; The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress" Performing Arts Encyclopedia; Explore Music, Theatre, and Dance at the Library of Congress.
68 historical moments and spaces (2006: 67). He finds the improvisation metaphor of modernity and subjectivity useful because it suggests that, rather than an assumed central ur-modern
Europe that other examples follow, all varieties and experiences of modernity echo, mimic, and improvise each other on a related set of principles, representational practices, and political economic processes (including colonialism and late neo-capitalism). In other words, despite Europe's historically differential power, one can hear elements of other nations' modern experiences in European improvisations of its modern self. "Orientalism in European literature for example," Shannon writes, "is one result of this echoing" (2006: 68). In this section, I explore how Coptic co-opting of European Orientalism is an echo of this echo. In what follows, I outline two Egyptian figures who reinterpreted alhan transcriptions to negotiate historically situated debates of Coptic authenticity and an Orthodox modernity in a pre-independent Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, the following outline is not meant to suggest a complete and linear history of Coptic music scholarship; rather, it highlights early reformist convictions that a modern [Coptic] nation could only be attained if its citizens pursued a pious self through devotional music. And, almost always in these conversations, songs emerged as a central vehicles in achieving a sense of belonging both to a progressive post-colonial nation while cultivating a sense of a heavenly citizenship (al- watan al-samawi).
By 1916, the first Egyptian reformist to produce Coptic music transcriptions in
Western music notation was a Coptic Orthodox lieutenant in the Egyptian army. That year,
Lieutenant Kamil Ibrahim Ghubriyal published Al-Tawqiʻat al-Musiqiyah li-Maradat al-
Kanisa al-Murqusiyya [The Musical Notation of the Responses of the Church of Saint Mark]
69 to explain Church rites, practiced by an elite few, in colloquial Arabic. 63 He also hoped to produce a liturgical pedagogical book for middle and upper classes who could read Western music notation and play the piano, thanks to affluent missionary schools like Collège de la
Sainte Famille in which Blin and Badet worked.
In his introduction, Ghubriyal (1916: 1) unabashedly highlights what he describes as
Coptic moral decay and loss of a [religious] self in the face of Western cultural imports and missionary education:
…we noticed that this honorable religious sentiment has weakened in the last era, to the point that it has almost disappeared from the heart due to the shameful habits that have become widely known as part of a trendy and modern-day living.
By combining "religious traditions with modern tastes," Ghubriyal proposed to restore such a loss by replacing love songs and inappropriate tunes on musical instruments with spiritual taratil (taratil ruhiya) and "holy doxologies" (madaʼih muqadasa) that Copts could perform in their homes and at more communal events such as weddings and funerals. In a sense, his work evokes an Aristotelian model of ethical pedagogy in which performative behavior becomes a vehicle for inward change (Mahmood 2006: 135). This perspective foreshadows
Habib Girgis' pedagogies of piety and the use of taratil in contemporary Sunday Schools that
I discuss more fully in chapters 2 and 3. It is also interesting to note here, that by 1916,
Ghubriyal did not differentiate between Arabic taratil and colloquial doxologies from Coptic liturgical alhan, but instead declared that Coptic liturgical responses and spiritual songs are an indistinguishable part of a Coptic national and morally sound identity. In other words, the more Coptic Orthodox Christians sang their liturgical songs, he believed, the more religious,
63 In the next chapter, I will outline similar effort to make Coptic liturgical worship more accessible to the public by the founder of the Sunday School Movement, Habib Girgis.
70 loyal, and rooted they were in an ethnic identity—even possibly reviving their own antiquated language.
Like Fathers Blin and Badet, Ghubriyal's intention to preserve a Coptic heritage are clear. In the face of rapid modernization, British and American missionary schooling, and increased contact with the West, he feared a Coptic loss of self. Throughout his work, he not only urged Copts to return to their indigenous (and largely monophonic) traditions to repossess themselves but he also specifically addressed his wider audience as part of a
"Coptic nation," one distinct for "its keeping of ancient customs and traditional church rites…from olden times…" (1916: 1). Finally, he warned his readers of the dangers of losing their sense of "Copticity" and advocated for a return to the Church as a means of preserving the asil or "authenticity" of their own identity. Modeling his work after missionary education,
Ghubriyal proposed modernizing Coptic music and liturgical services by adding an organ to all the churches in Cairo, mixing and matching "traditional" hymns with the "modern tastes."
He even proposed personally to help finance such an endeavor, a suggestion that met with outright rejection by the religious elite, including a rising figure named Ragheb Moftah.
It is interesting to note that similar to Girgis' Sunday School movement, Ghubriyal also targeted Coptic youth for his indigeneity efforts, though he specifically focused on girls and young women in Coptic schools. To compete with other secular music, such as the imported piano parlor songs accompanying the arrival of pianos in middle class Egyptian homes, Ghubriyāl was determined to make Coptic chants more attractive by adding rhythmic accompaniment played at the octave. Though he does not include any other harmony, he altered some notes and traditional rhythms to accommodate his newly introduced duple
71 meter.
Figure 1.1 Lieutenant Kamil Ibrahim Ghubriyal's transcription of the Trisagion Hymn [Agioas] (1916:31). The image here is courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress. The fully scanned book is located here:
While Copts acknowledge European scholars for their contribution to Coptic studies, few are aware either of Kamil Ibrahim Ghubriyal's efforts or his publications. Instead, it is
Ragheb Moftah whom they venerate as the first indigenous scholar to sacrifice his life, as a consecrated and celibate khadim (servant), who "saved" Coptic music culture. Long before
Moftah's materials were presented at the Library of Congress, Copts already recognized his role in recording Coptic liturgical song and preserving it from "outside" influence as well as the improvisational temptations of modernity. During Moftah's centennial birthday party and the publication of his long awaited Coptic Orthodox Liturgy of St. Basil with Complete
Musical Transcription (AUC 1998), the late Coptic Patriarch, Pope Shenouda publicly
72 praised his transcription efforts:
In my depths, from time to time, I dealt with this particular question: What would happen to the Coptic Orthodox hymns if God had not created Ragheb Moftah and guided him to this path? There have been many who chant the Coptic alhan, each with their own way. Many of these cantors are prone to tagwid [improvisation]…. They elongate, take their time, and parade in a section…and he leaves the text behind. Ustaz Ragheb Moftah has come to yizbit [to fix/ to fasten/to anchor] the alhan in the church in a scientific, sound way.64
In his effort to emulate European scholarship and to mirror the "scientific" ordering of sound, Moftah worked for over 75 years to transcribe and publish the entire Orthodox liturgical hymnody. As he could not transcribe alhan himself, he commissioned between
1927 and 1936 an English violinist and composer by the name of Ernest Newlandsmith. In turn, Newlandsmith produced sixteen volumes of transcriptions, fourteen of which are a part of the Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress. It was in these volumes, however, that Moftah and Newlandsmith clearly struggled. Unsure what to do with alhan's uneasy fit with the Western diatonic music scale, Newlandsmith provided simple, prescriptive descriptions of the genre in an easy but stratified duple meter. Scribbled draft after draft, however, reveal Newlandsmith's preoccupation to unearth a true ancient Egyptian sounds under an "appalling debris of Arabic ornamentation" as he worked to transcribe what the great cantor, muʻallim Mikhail Girgis al-Batanuni, sang.65 Convinced that alhan held the key to the roots of Western classical music, Newlandsmith toured throughout Europe
64 Ragheb Moftah's 100th Birthday Party [video recording] (1999), Video Recording Gallery, "Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody; The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress" Performing Arts Encyclopedia; Explore Music, Theatre, and Dance at the Library of Congress
73 presenting his findings in provocative lectures. In one Oxford lecture, he plainly declared:
"After a careful study of these simple themes, we cannot but feel that much of the Western civilization must have its source in the orient."66 Like Kircher before him, Newlandsmith echoed early Orientalist interests in Egyptological studies to unearth European imagined origins and roots.
Figure 1.2 Ernest Newlandsmith's transcription of the Trisagion Hymn [Agios] (1929-1933, Vol. 1: 52). The image here is courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress. More of his transcriptions can be located located here:
After his relationship with Newlandsmith ended, Moftah began to record Coptic alhan on reel-to-reel tape. Between 1940 and 1957, he recoded the entire hymnody as sung by muʻallim Mikhail Girgis al-Batanuni. And, as director of the music at the Institute of
Coptic Studies, he continued these recordings with the department choir beginning in 1954.
In the 1970s, Moftah also commissioned another scholar to transcribe the Orthodox liturgy of
St. Basil once again, Hungarian musicologist Margit Tóth. In her work, Tóth transcribed alhan's minute and intricate melismas in contemporary performance, marking the earliest mention of the genre's performed embellishments. But due to the extreme complexity of her
66 Ernest Newlandsmith, "The Ancient Music of the Coptic Church," Pamphlet of lecture delivered at the Oxford University Church, May 21, 1931: 9.
74 transcriptional style, however, and the fact that most Copts could not read Western music notation, her work published in Moftah's 1998 Coptic Orthodox Liturgy of St. Basil is not the pedagogical tool that Moftah intended. Instead, it is primarily a reference for a mainly foreign scholarly audience, and one to which many interlocutors directed me. Today, it is
Ragheb Moftah's audio recordings that are considered to be the most important and highly used materials by the Coptic Orthodox community, both for pedagogical as well as scholarly purposes.
In 2001, at the end of his impressive career in dedicated to the transcription and recording of Coptic alhan, Moftah instituted the genre as the official Coptic music canon and a central "authentic musical narrative of Coptic identity". Emerging from within a post- colonial context, his "scientific" study emerged as a nuanced dialogue of performative politics as Copts tried to negotiate their place in an emerging post-independent national narrative that continued to exclude them.67 As the launch of the Ragheb Moftah Collection in the chapter's opening vignette illustrates, Moftah's recordings of liturgical alhan are still a centerpiece for conversations of Coptic identity, heritage, and sense of belonging to Egypt.
Yet, as Talal Asad reminds us, in projects of translation from one site to another, one agents to another, and here, one sound to another, versions of power and subjection are reproduced
67 Coptic elites were active proponents of the Pharaonic movement that shaped Egyptian nationalism in the early 1920s and 1930s, seizing it as a moment to include themselves in the emerging nation's narrative as an independent state. The likes of Salama Musa, Mukram Ebeid, and Wasif Ghali were prominent politicians who emphasized a secular political discourse and celebrated elements of Pharaonism, since it minimized religious differences between Christians and Muslims. As this interest dwindled in Nasser's Arab nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, then gave way to the religious discourse under Sadat in the 1970s, Coptic political elites and clergy conveniently co-opted and reinterpreted their Pharaonic past for their own religious discourse. For more on the Pharaonic movement, please see S. Hasan's Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt; The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (Oxford Press, 2003), 40-42.
75 (1993: 13). In his work to translate Coptic alhan into Western music notation and to archival monuments of heritage, Moftah not only created what Foucault called hierarchies of authenticity and "true knowledge" (Foucault's Lectures in Gordon 1980: 83) but, in turn, he also crafted hierarchies of "true sound" in Coptic music culture.
Despite the rising popularity of taratil during Moftah's career in the Institute of
Coptic Studies in downtown Cairo, among the Coptic patriarchy, and in the buzz of Sunday
School reforms just one neighborhood away in Shubra, Moftah neglected to mention any taratil and Arabic colloquial genres as part of an Orthodox canon. Rather, his silences relegated these contemporary devotional genres to the peripheries of liturgical worship and, consequently, he marginalized their importance in the discourse on Coptic identity. In his resoluteness to preserve alhan as a direct, traditional, and pure link to an ancient Egyptian heritage, Moftah likely rejected taratil for a number of reasons not too different from his criticisms of Ghubriyal's use of the organ in Coptic liturgical worship. First, Moftah's attention to the homogeneity of alhan and the desire to synchronize their embellishments spoke to a large fear of loss. As cantors improvised on the genre's basic melodies, their possible evocations of a shared Muslim heritage, such as maqam, threatened the genre's assumed unchanged character from ancient Egyptian times, specifically the first six centuries
A.D. when Copts reigned as a religious majority. Additionally, taratil's Arabic language too closely resembled and echoed the language of the religious Other, the Egyptian Muslim, that gradually became the Egyptian first language beginning in the twelfth century. And finally, the popular genre did not warrant the same European scholarly attention as alhan. In other words, they did not have the same academic value of alhan nor the same currency in political
76 negotiations of Coptic authenticity, modernity, and belonging. Yet, despite and perhaps even because of their peripheral status in official church worship, taratil eventually blossomed outside of the Church liturgical canon to become the most prevalent and innovative popular genre that Copts sing, listen to, and perform today.
Some Conclusions
In Syria, Jonathan Shannon writes that a classical music heritage and notions of authentic culture transmitted across generations are really processes of framing and authorizing interpretation of the self, community, and nation (2006: 79). In many regards, he continues, it is also a privileged discourse that lies at the intersection of aesthetic practices, state ideologies, and a sense of national identity. In a similar way, early Coptic music scholarship and discourses of a sonic heritage are not only a kind cultural commentary of national and heavenly belonging during Egypt's struggle for independence; rather, as the following chapters illustrate, Coptic music discourses also create and teach strategic conditions of belonging. By emphasizing an antiquated Coptic genre as the most authentic marker of Coptic identity, religious elite reforms have turned to Western music transcriptions to negotiate a specifically Christian "modern" citizenry that is separate and untouched by
Arabic and Muslim inflection and supposed “backwardness.” Yet, by striving for a Western- modeled modernity and by eradicating “debris of Arab ornamentation,” heterophony, improvisation, and the melismas of oral tradition, it has become harder and harder for Copts to negotiate other kinds of pluralities—of sounds, of religion, of a shared and echoing Egypt
—as the case studies in the following chapters will show.
As I have illustrated in this chapter, the Coptic transcription document is not merely
77 evidence of erudite scholarship. Rather, it has become the primary site of a cultural contest for Coptic identity, debates of authenticity, and modernity from as early as the late nineteenth century. As Coptic elites searched for yet gradually lost their voice in Egypt's post- independent political terrain, they turned more and more towards religious music as a way to articulate a rising nationalist discourse for change and reform from within their own community. While Moftah's work diligently continued this reformist trend among Coptic clergy and cantors, another Church reform was also brewing, this time among the Coptic middle class and laity that would soon emerge as the next generation of leaders, clergy, and even Patriarch of their church. In 1918, archdeacon and dean of the Coptic Clerical College
Habib Girgis (1876-1951) officially started the Sunday School Movement, the largest grassroots education effort that the Church has ever witnessed. This movement took off not to the sounds of alhan but rather accompanied by the crescendoing sounds of taratīl.
78 CHAPTER 2
PEDAGOGIES OF PIETY: TARATIL AND THE
EARLY SUNDAY SCHOOL MOVEMENT (1908-1951)
Introduction
In his book Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt, Gregory Starrett (1998: 6) writes that Egypt's contemporary religious resurgence is a result of changes in public education beginning in the 1970s;
The expansion and transfer of religious socialization from private to newly created public sector institutions over the last century has led to a comprehensive revision of the way Egyptians treat Islam as a religious tradition, and consequently of Islam's role in Egyptian society.
Starrett argues that programs of mass education were part of larger modern reforms that were shaped by imperial, missionary and, later, state administrations. Such programs not only worked to provoke the increasing hegemony of religious discourse in Egyptian public life, but also inculcated what Max Weber calls the "Protestant Ethic," (1958) that emphasized industry, discipline and order. Political scientist Ellis Goldberg adds that Egyptian Sunni radicalism emerged as a response to the increasing centralization of a post-colonial state that
"modernized" religious education as modeled on Protestant education ethics (1991), while
Paul Sedra's study on nineteenth century missionary educationalists in Egypt revealed the use
79 of the British-inspired "monitorial schools" aimed at inculcating students both into the disciplined body of the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches as well as into being docile subjects of the colonized state (2011). Missionary education reform, Goldberg argues, produced communities of "self-policing students and believers" who not only insisted on individual readings and interpretations of the Qur'an as well as the Bible but who also emphasized the same notion of community activism and social service that British and
American Presbyterian missionaries taught in their schools (1991: 34). Besides resisting
British colonial authority, Muslim and Christian religious activism was further transformed by the educational opportunities that President Gamal Abdel Nasser's socialism extended to working class Egyptians after independence in 1952 (ibid.).
Starrett's work is extremely important for its exʼamination of how educational reform and the introduction of religious discourse in the public sector changed how Egyptian
Muslims experienced and came to know Islam.68 Religion and public piety, he argues, were slowly transformed into useful political instruments through two interrelated processes: firstly, through the objectification of religion, that is the transformation of Islam into a synoptic set of beliefs easily articulated as those set down in textbook presentations (1998:
9);69 and secondly, through the functionalization of this newly systematized and applied form of Islam, "intellectual objects from one discourse came to serve the strategic or utilitarian ends of another discourse" (1998: 10). In other words, functionalization allows for the
68 In line with Talal Asad's "The Idea of the Anthropology of Islam" (1986), I investigate religion in Egypt as a discursive tradition serving various social, political, and economic ends. 69 See Deeb's argument for why authentication is a better term than objectification (2006: 21) and why or why not one chooses to use this term/concept. I use objectification because it denotes a sense of a physical, tangible object, which lends itself nicely to my study of sound.
80 reinterpretation of religious scripture as it applies to modern, secular, and political discourses of public policy...and piety. He writes (ibid.):
On a philosophical level, ancient rituals and beliefs as well as the facts of history are reinterpreted to underscore political legitimacy, or are brought to bear on social concerns like public health, economic productivity, and crime. In all of these processes, existing discursive logics are altered and control is shifted to a central authority or entrusted to groups other than those who traditionally set the terms of religious discourse.
In this chapter, I outline the early Sunday School Movement (1908-51) when taratil initially emerged as part of tangled discourses of modernity, religious education reform, and growing questions of Coptic national belonging at the turn of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, in Church-wide efforts to ward off American Presbyterian appeal, Orthodox lay volunteers (khuddam) transformed Christian religious education from private and local neighborhood schools known as kuttabs into more formal, institutionalized and centralized
Coptic Orthodox Sunday Schools administered by the Church. Drawing on missionary archival resources as well as early writings of Orthodox volunteers, I trace the various discursive logics of "modernizing" religion into easily tangible cultural and religious practices in order to belong both to a heavenly national one (al-watan al-samawi) as well as an earthly one in Egypt. In line with Foucault's notion of the "technologies of the self" (1988:
18), I examine taratil as embedded within Coptic pedagogical contexts. How did they became integral to a Coptic "knowing of the self" that reinterpreted and emphasized saint hagiographies, metaphors of martyrdom, and self-renunciation as strategic discursive negotiations within the Orthodox Church institution and an emerging post-colonial state? I argue that Habib Girgis, the Sunday School Movement's leading figure, centralized taratil
81 and their synoptic descriptions of religious practices and spiritual suffering as critical to
Orthodox pedagogies of piety. And as I discuss in the next chapter, taratil and their growing themes of withdrawal, sacrifice, and martyr motifs quickly became central to a pedagogy of politics under Girgis' most prominent disciple, the late Pope Shenouda III.
How did early Sunday School reform, as it fashioned what Paul Sedra calls a "modern
Coptic subjectivity" (2011: 112), both objectify religious education and consolidate various discursive logics and authority within the Coptic clerical institution? More specifically, how did this movement depend on taratil as pedagogies of piety to "modernize" religion into easily tangible, rational, and moralizing parables to be memorized and applied to daily living and practices of piety? By analyzing what Talal Asad calls the "shifting patterns of institutional relations and conditions" such as those of the Sunday School Movement and the
Coptic religious renaissance that followed, this study broadly traces the various discursive traditions that "connect variously with the formation of moral selves, the manipulation of populations (or resistance to it), and the production of appropriate knowledges" (Asad 1986:
7). While many scholars, including Dina el-Khawaga, frame a Coptic religious resurgence with the inauguration of Shenouda's weekly lessons as Bishop of Christian Education beginning in the early 1960s (Hasan 2003; Foda 2010; Ibrahim 2011), I argue that this institutional restructuring actually began much earlier, with figures such as the Dean of the
Coptic Clerical College, Habib Girgis.
Recently canonized by the Orthodox Church as a modern-day saint, Girgis offered
Christian religious education in public education settings and filled the vacuum of Christian religious classes where Islamic religious lessons predominated.70 He initiated the Sunday
70 Michael Collins Dunn, "Coptic Church's Synod Recognizes Two Modern Saints." Middle East Institute
82 School Movement in the 1920s as integral to negotiating a transformative educational reform within Egypt, especially among the Orthodox Christian middle classes. While Coptic elites such as Ragheb Moftah looked to the Coptic liturgical hymnody of alhan to indigenize, preserve, and articulate a Coptic past (see chapter 1), a growing educated middle class initially looked to colloquial taratil to protect Copts from American missionaries and to negotiate wider political debates about Copts' place in an ever-changing Egyptian political landscape. Today, taratil continue to be central to contemporary Sunday School education
(see chapter 3). They have also emerged as the most popular musical genre among Coptic
Christians, with live ensembles, music choirs and, very often, ecstatic concerts (see chapter
5). And finally, spiritual volunteers continue to disseminate taratil as forms of service
(khidma) to the poor in popular religious festivals (mawalid) and significantly contribute to the complex and nuanced negotiations of a modern piety, national belonging, as well as a contemporary Egyptian Christian political identity in contemporary Egypt (see chapter 4).
Like Egyptian public education, Girgis' reform was closely modeled after American
Presbyterian religious education and early Sunday School classes, paving the way for a "new ideological community of activists" (Goldberg 1991: 12). Known in the church as khuddam
(sing. khadim), these spiritual volunteers donated their time, services, and personal finances in the service of their community and church as teachers, choir directors and Sunday School leaders. In her study, Oram (2004: 161) notes that the contemporary Coptic Orthodox Church revival hinged on laity as agents of reform that broke down the world two new categories: those that serve (al-khuddam) the Church and those needing to be served (al-makhdumin).
Editors Blog (June 20, 2013).
83 This project is an ethnographic study of the figures who were largely integrated in the
Orthodox Church institution in one way or another as khuddam: liturgical cantors or deacons known in Arabic as khuddam shamamsa, Sunday School teachers (khuddam Madaris al-
ʼAhad ), and principal volunteers of both Sunday Schools (ʼumnaʼ al-khidma) and leaders of spiritual fraternities known as ʼusar (see Arabic glossary).
Early Sunday School reforms produced various institutions of education as well as religious markers and practices that induct Copts as Copts. Even Girgis' taratil hymnbooks, modeled after missionary tracts, emerged as critical to Orthodox knowing one's self and refashioning one's self through bodily practices of piety (i.e., fasting, prayers and, as I argue throughout, through singing taratil. For more on bodily practices see chapter 3). Students who emerged from local Orthodox Sunday Schools soon infiltrated Orthodox Church hierarchy by becoming monks and clergy beginning in the 1970s. Girgis' closest apprentice,
Nazir Gayed, first went on to become the Bishop of Christian Education and Dean of the
Theological Seminary in 1962, and in 1971 he subsequently became Pope Shenouda III,
Patriarch of the Coptic Church, until his death in 2012. The Patriarch led one of the most vibrant religious revivals in the Church. Officially renaming Sunday Schools as al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya or Church Upbringing, the Pope further embedded the Church religious education as a central nexus of Coptic ethos, experience and everyday life (chapter 3).
Like his mentor, Shenouda emphasized virtues of community service, or khidma, as the ultimate sacrifice of one's time and one's life for the service of others, and he encouraged his congregants to better know themselves and their spiritual lives by dedicating themselves to serving their local community. According to Dina al-Khawaga, Girgis' education reform
84 initiated a "massive institutionalization of Coptic clerical bodies" (1997: 142); whether as clergy, consecrated community leaders, or simply volunteers, many of these khuddam or
"servants" went on to form a generation of leaders, as monks, bishops, and finally as
Patriarch.71 Under Shenouda's leadership, Coptic modern subjectivity and religious memory was further transformed, reframing Copts as modern-day martyrs who give up their lives, livelihood, and service for the church. Foucault argues that it was models of martyrdom, death and torture that shaped notions of the self-revelation and salvation of early Christianity and monasticism (1988: 43). Shenouda's poems and pedagogical writings about self-sacrifice and "the release of the spirit" 72 have now become staple taratil at community concerts and
Sunday School classes, and have been reinterpreted as music videos in the burgeoning wave of Coptic Orthodox satellite channels beginning in 2005.
And so, in this chapter and in the next, I focus on Habib Girgis and Pope Shenouda
III as complementing pairs who initiated two interlocking cycles of Church reforms: Harkit
Madaris al-ʼAhad [The Sunday School Movement] and Harkit al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya
[The Church Upbringing Movement]. While Girgis modernized religious education by making taratil central to knowing Coptic Orthodoxy as a "coherent system of practices and beliefs," Shenouda further centralized Coptic education and religious upbringing by institutionalizing what Starrett calls "strategic" and "utilitarian ends" of the modern and
71 In Christians Versus Muslims in Modern Egypt; The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (Oxford University Press, 2003), Sana Hasan also details this rising institutionalization of the clergy. Interestingly, she astutely points out the transformation of Coptic music culture as revivalists "modernized" Church services with "lively hymns" and "popular forms of worship": 77-80. 72 ʼIntilaq al-Ruh, translated literally "The Release of the Spirit" is a famous collection of the Pope's writings that first began as articles, and later poetry, in the Sunday School magazine as early as 1951. Now in its 16th edition, this book is still widely sold in church bookstores throughout Egypt, with English translations also being sold in Church communities all over Canada, Australia, and the United States.
85 secular discourse of public piety. By objectifying religion as a set of beliefs set down in textbook presentations, Sunday School pictures, and martyr motifs embedded within taratil,
Girgis paved the way for Shenouda's functional approach to religion that placed the Coptic
Orthodox Church, clergy and its leaders right at the nexus of Coptic community, identity, experience, and sonic soundscape.
Habib Girgis: Saint of a Modern Religious Education
The opening scene of the 2006 popular film The Archdeacon Habib Girgis, released by St. George and St. Abraham Church of Heliopolis, is quite telling. Girgis effendi, Habib
Girgis' father, has just lost his job after 15 years as a civil servant in Khedive Ismail's crumbling government bureaucracy. Distraught, he walks home, clutching brand-new shoes he had just purchased for his youngest son and wondering how he will continue to support his family. On his way he encounters two staggering English soldiers. It is barely noon and they are already drunk, and the audience can hear Girgis effendi thoughts: "How can Egypt, the same country in which the Lord Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary lived, be under authority of some drunken English soldiers?" Soon, the soldiers harass two Egyptian women passing in the street. With a flask in one hand, with the other they disrobe the ladies of their malayyat, black sheets that peasants traditionally wore in public, and the women scramble to cover themselves. To the famous march of Sayed Darwish's nationalist "Umi Ya Masri!" or
"Egypt Arise!" Girgis effendi bravely rushes to their rescue, only to be beaten and his son's shoes torn.73 The soldiers stagger off, and the effendi is last seen bleeding on the ground, the
73 Sayed Darwish (1892-1923), popularly known as the Father of Modern Arab Music or Father of
86 sound of Darwish's proud anthem diminishing to silence. He slowly gets up, gathers what remains of his son's shoes and walks home, his face grimacing in humiliation.
The scene shifts quickly. The audience is now in Girgis effendi's home where a young
Habib sits behind an enormously large book. His mother is instructing him in the Bible and they are mediating over a verse in the book of St. Luke. The pages ruffle loudly, and the camera zooms in on the calligraphy of the Arabic script so that the audience can read it together, as if this is also part of his lesson: "Then He [Jesus] spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart…"74 "Always?" the little Habib asks his mother.
She replies, "We must pray day and night, asking God for all things that we need…." "So, if I pray day and night, my father will bring me new shoes?" His mother smiles and gently ruffles his hair "Of course...." But before she can finish, there is a knock at the door and the effendi stumbles in. He avoids his son's gaze and after a brief pause, quietly hands him a box.
He mumbles a quick greeting and then exists the room, leaving Habib to discover the shoes torn in one sole. Disappointed, the young boy stand ups and does as his mother instructed: he turns to the camera and, effectively to his student-audience, crosses himself and prays.
That evening, Girgis effendi wakes Habib from sleep for one last heartfelt lesson.
Breathing heavily, he begs his son to never forget to pray, and that as Christians "we have nothing left [to us] but prayer in this world." Before he leaves, he returns for one final message "Do you know of Ahmed Orabi?" he asks with a sudden excitement in his voice, and the sound of Darwish's military march returns. The effendi tells his son of how the
Egyptian Popular Music, was a famous singer and composer. He composed the music for the Egyptian national anthem. 74 James 18:1
87 nationalist general attempted to stand up to European domination by starting a revolt against
Tewfik Pasha in 1879, but stops just short of recounting Orabi's surrender and exile at the hands of the British army in 1882. Remembering the morning's events, he sinks down behind the bedposts and the camera zooms in, framing his face as if he were imprisoned behind bars,
"There is nothing like being colonized," he tells his son in defeat.
To be colonized is to have your destiny controlled by someone else. The worst thing in the world is to feel like a stranger in your own land, Egypt, to be humiliated, to have your rights revoked in your country, Egypt. I know you may not understand my words now, but you must one day understand. (My italics)
Little Habib turns away from the camera, confused, and his father stumbles out of the room.
Seconds later, his mother screams off camera; Habib's father passes away that night.
Thus begins Habib Girgis' hagiography in Coptic cinema. While the film continues to recount his life as a living martyr—he refuses to marry, consecrates himself as a deacon in the Church and, later, gives up much of his wealth to provide for his Clerical school and students—he was indeed the most influential champion of Coptic Orthodox religious education in the early twentieth century.75 While his efforts initially began with reforms to resist American Protestant missionary education, they slowly transformed into one of the most widely successful movements to textualize Coptic religious heritage into synoptic pedagogical books and, as I will argue, synoptic and pedagogical taratil.
I recounted the opening montage at length here because it is filled with a number of recurring tropes that frame many of the taratil themes I explore throughout this study. Firstly, it is Girgis' perceived heroic role in shaping a growing Coptic indigeneity movement that
75 For a more detailed outline of his life, see Bishop Suriel's study "Habib Girgis, A Coptic Orthodox Educator: A Light in the Darkness" (forthcoming Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, New York).
88 sought to "repossess" the Egyptian land from British colonizers. As the following chapters illustrate, "repossessing the land" and reclaiming Egypt as a faithful [and Christian] nation returns again and again (see chapter 5 in particular). Such a discourse reveals convergent and contradictory Coptic desires and ambivalences to belong to a nation as Christian citizens in a
Muslim majority nation where many feel they do not have any real civic agency. Even the late Patriarch, Pope Shenouda himself, had written a number of poems echoing Girgis effendi's disenchantment as a marginalized national subject, though framed in spiritual terms.
Today, congregants continue to perform these poems titled "Stranger" and "Stranger in the
World" as taratil anthems, particularly after the Pope's death in March 2012 (see chapter 3).
Furthermore, while Girgis effendi openly articulated a desire to defend and repossess
Egyptian land (here symbolized by the Egyptian peasant women) from the debauchery of colonial control (the drunk British soldiers), Girgis sought a different kind of repossession.76
Instead, he sought a spiritual and pious reawakening. Throughout the film and the oral hagiographies I've heard throughout the community, interlocutors emphasize Girgis' mission to refashion his community's moral interior through spiritual service, education, and public practices of piety.77 Hence the film's emphasis on the moment Girgis turns to the camera to pray. In this act, he practiced his mother's lesson and his father's dying words that Christians
76 This kind of symbolic interplay between the Egyptian peasant woman and the British soldiers reflect women and women's bodies as discursive representations of Egypt as a post-colonial nation. See Beth Baron's book Egypt as Woman; Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005; Afsaneh Najmbadi's "Veiled Discourse—Unveiled Bodies," Feminist Studies 19 (1993), 3, p. 487-518; and Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East edited by Lila Abu- Lughod (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 77 One of the most prevalent books in Arabic on Habib Girgis is a collection of articles by various authors and clerical figures celebrating fifty years of his passing: Al-Archidiacun habib Girgis; Baʻh al-Nahda al-Kanasiyya [The Archdeacon Habib Girgis: [who] Ignited the Church Renissance] (Cairo, Sunday School Magazine, 2001).
89 have nothing left in this world but prayer. Through his educational reforms, Girgis taught his new practicing students that prayer and accompanying acts of piety such as singing taratil would help them locate a rightful place in a heavenly nation (al-watan al-samawi) as well as a place in this earthly one.
Finally, I want to draw attention to the way in which Habib Girgis is praised for harnessing a modern religious education that is both pious and progressive, namely in his
Orthodox pedagogical songs and religious textbooks. By openly contesting, borrowing, and reinterpreting missionary evangelical methods, he transforms faith into the public singing, listening, and performing of religious rites. Paul Sedra points out that with the
"technologization" of textbooks and authority now invested in print rather than oral culture, there is always a human mediator, an agent of interpretation that sets a given technology of power into motion (Sedra 2011: 3-4).78 From his first appearance in the film, Girgis is drawn as this exemplary mediator. He is almost always surrounded by books, sitting at a desk piled high with manuscripts, or walking slowly in the Clerical College library bookshelves where he was Dean. The film's soundscape is subtle but even more powerful, with sung chorus after chorus of his old taratil compositions girding the most important and poignant scenes. All the more, outside of the reality of film, the Habib Girgis Museum located in the Coptic
Patriarchy is a shrine of his books and publications. taratil pamphlets and his personal writings are all laid open for viewing in locked glass cases (vitrinas) as if they were relics of
78 Paul Sedra draws on Walter Ong's notion of technologization in his Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982) 80-2. Despite the book's problem, religion scholar Leigh Eric Schmidt cautions the readers to read Ong not as a historian or a literary critic, but rather as an author who "needs to be listened to as a Christian contemplative who has tuned his ear for a revelatory exchange of presence, a particular encounter with God." See Leigh Eric Schmidt's Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000): 31.
90 his consecrated body.
The Beginning of the Sunday School Movement
It is important to note that Habib Girgis was part of an already growing movement of elite Coptic laymen who were not only galvanized against intruding Western influences but who also contested traditional Coptic Church authority. Traditionally, Coptic clergy, bishops and monks have always been drawn from the lower-class, uneducated sectors of Coptic society, often with priesthood passing from father to son as a hereditary vocation.79 Many of them semi-literate, these clerical figures confined their services to administering the
Orthodox liturgy as well as superstitious practices to complement their meager Church salaries (Hasan 2003: 74-75). In his eloquently written study, Paul Sedra traces how a movement of elite laymen emerged to reform the Coptic Church as a "rational," and
"functional" institution and looked to rid their community of "backward" and "superstitious" customs practiced by some of these priests. Additionally, many of the Western-educated elites shared the same political and financial goals as the British occupiers. Indeed, explains
Sedra, their rhetoric of "modernizing" the Church and anti-clerical confrontations was not only aimed at overriding clerical authority among the masses but was also in fact about controlling the vast tract of yet "unexploited" Church property (2011: 165). Such tensions continued throughout most of the nineteenth and the twentieth century and largely emerged in conversations about reforming Christian religious education.
79 There is a substantial literature about the tensions between Coptic elite laity and the Orthodox Church hierarchy. Please see Seikaly (1970), Sedra (1999; 2011), Hasan (2003), Mariz Tadros (2009), Guirguis and Van Doorn-Harder (2011), among many others.
91 It was not until the 1970s that more educated elites joined the ranks of the clergy, due to Girgis and elite efforts to reform Church education.80 Hoping to steer what Sedra calls the
"lower orders" of their community from backward and superstitious practices to "progress and advancement" (Sedra 2011: 161; Hasan 2006: 58), a number of members of the Coptic elite turned to the mechanisms of their missionary educators and, for some, from their education experiences abroad. Figures such as Ragheb Moftah worked to preserve and institute the antiquated Coptic hymnody from the mistaken transmission of uneducated clergy, transcribing the entire hymnody into Western music notation (Chapter 1); Murqus
Simaika Pasha collected and established a Coptic Museum in Old Cairo along European models, not unlike the collectors of ancient Egyptian antiquity before him; Yaʻqub Nakhla
Rufila wrote one of the first historiographies of modern Coptic history, Tarikh al-Umma al-
Qibtiyya (1897), though not without a similar embedded Orientalist "awakening narrative". 81
While Coptic elites never managed to wrestle the reins from the Church hierarchy, they managed something else that was in the end perhaps more profitable and convenient: to supplement Church structure and to produce a morality education for the masses (Sedra
2011: 166).
80 In their work, Magdi Guiguis and Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, outline Pope Cyril (Kyrillos) VI's role in a Church renaissance during his papacy (1959-71). As the Patriarch directly prior to Pope Shenouda's reign, he played a substantial role in the contemporary Church renaissance. I do not outline this here because his efforts did not directly depend on the use of taratil, as Pope Shenouda's own writings and ministry clearly did. For a more detailed description of his reign, see Guirguis and Van Doorn-Harder's The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 2011): 127- 54. 81 For more a critical discussion of Coptic "awakening narrative" see Paul Sedra, "John Lider and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethnos at Work Among Nineteenth-Century Copts." The Journal of Religious History. Vol. 28, No. 3 (Oct., 2004): 219-239. For more on Coptic elite activities, see Mina Badiʻ ʻAbdel Malak's Shakhsiyat Qibtiyya min Ruwad al-Qarn al-ʻShrin ["Coptic Pioneer Figures from the Twentieth Century"], Sunday School Magazine (November and December 2001): 102-119.
92 Unlike his contemporaries however, Habib Girgis was never educated in Western missionary schools. Instead, he emerged as an intermediate figure that was never fully ordained as a priest but who also managed to become educated in the Orthodox Church's competing elementary schools. He was born to a lower-middle class family in 1876 and attended one of the first Coptic elementary schools established in the late nineteenth century by Pope Cyril IV (1854-61). Known as Abu al-Islah, Cyril is lauded for his earliest reforms in Coptic education and for establishing the Great Coptic School (Madrasat al-Aqbat al-
Kubra) as a response to the burgeoning success of American and British missionaries in
Upper Egypt.82 Beginning in 1855 Pope Cyril also established a primary patriarchal school for boys—where Girgis was schooled—as an alternative to Protestant education in the downtown Azbakiyyah district (Nasim 1991: 932).
Cyril was not shy about his distaste for the foreigners and missionaries who swept through his congregants. Indeed, he was quite known for launching public tirades targeting
American missionaries.83 Cyril's Coptic institutions also included the first primary schools for girls in Egypt, and these slowly began to replace traditional Coptic kuttab or neighborhood elementary schools. These schools displaced indigenous local ʻʻarifs or religious elites with
82 In his work on Habib Girgis in The Coptic Encyclopedia, historian Sulyman Nasim specifically mentions the success of missionaries at the Assiyut College in Upper Egypt. This is interesting to note for two reasons. Firstly, this town has been historically marred by sectarian tensions between Christians and Muslims. Secondly, it was the home to three seminal figures who would substantially shape an Egyptian post-colonial national narrative; future president Gamal Abdel Nasser, future Coptic Patriarch Nazir Gayed, and the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Sayyid Qutb. These three figures would lead substantial reforms in their own circles that would intersect, interweave, and many times, directly contest one another. See Sulayman Nasim, "Habib Jirgis. The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991). 83 American Presbyterian missionary, Charles Watson describes a "storm of Coptic persecution" when the American Mission opened a post in Asyut in his memories In the Valley of the Nile (New York 1908): 146-58.
93 imported teachers; they placed fresh emphasis on the textuality of the Bible and advocated literacy as a "route to salvation" (Sharkey 2006: 34). Cyril co-opted these methods. He not only organized church libraries but also imported the second printing press into Egypt after the Khedive government press of Buluq. When it arrived to Egypt, he had taken in procession back to the Coptic Patriarchate to the accompaniment of liturgical chant and alhan (Sedra 2011: 112). On this press, he printed the first edition of The Service of the
Deacon and Hymns in 1859, institutionalizing alhan into text and canonizing these liturgical songs as the Church's official liturgical hymnody. However, Cyril's textualizing efforts did not have the success he was hoping for, at least not with the majority of the laity. Copts began avoiding his schools and instead preferred the more prestigious missionary schools.
Others were frightened off by the rumors that a "modern" education would corrupt their impressionable youth and draw them far from their Orthodox religion. To impress upon
Coptic parents that their children could have both a modern education as well as maintain the integrity of their faith, Cyril resorted to the Orthodox Coptic hymnody, recruiting a priest and forming a choir to sing liturgical alhan, drawing on the genre's legitimacy and invested
"authentication" (see chapter 1). While these alhan efforts may have failed to initiate the widespread reform he was looking for, Cyril's efforts inspired Girgis' reforms with the colloquial genre of taratil, but with a more compelling outcome.
Girgis was in the first class to graduate from the Great Coptic School in 1892, later enrolling in the Coptic Clerical College and graduating from there in 1898. That very same year, Egyptian scholar Sinout Delwar Shenouda wrote that Girgis began to gather small groups of children in St. Mary's Church in the working class district of Fagalla every
94 Thursday to teach religious classes (2001: 45).84 His textualizing efforts would begin in earnest in 1904 when he established and began to publish al-Karma magazine (literally translated The Vineyard], one the earliest religious periodicals to be published weekly comprising of spiritual lessons, sermons, and Church news.85 In 1918 when Girgis become the Dean of the Coptic Clerical College, he officially launched the Sunday School Movement by forming a committee dubbed Ingil al-ʼʼAhad li al-Madaris or the "Sunday Bible
[Readings] for Schools." Perhaps, along with inspiration from Protestant religious education models, this committee's title was the inspiration for the name of al-Madaris al-ʼʼAhad, as
Sunday Schools largely took place on days other than Sunday. The ministry began publishing weekly lessons explaining the Bible readings sung during the Sunday liturgy to be taught in
Girgis' growing Sunday School classes. Historian Sawsan Hasan points out that 1918 was a particularly contentious year, with intense anti-British agitation culminating in the 1919 revolution and the 1922 declaration of independence (2003: 75).
Drawing on a growing nationalist discourse, Girgis published an official Sunday
School syllabus the very same year that Egypt gained nominal independence from Britain.
This was still well in use after he died in 1951: al-Madaris al-ʼʼAhad al-Qibbtiyya al-
84 For a more detailed study of the development of the Coptic Sunday Schools, please refer to Wolfram Reiss, Erneuerung in der Koptisch-Orthodoxen Kirche: Die Geschichte der koptisch-orthodoxen Sonntagsschulbewegung und die Aufnahme ihrer Reformansätze in den Erneurungsbewegungen der Koptische-Orthodoxen Kirche der Gegenwart (Hamburg: Lit, 1998). Also refer to Sinout Delwar Shenouda's article "Madaris al-ʼAhad; Qisat al-Qarn al-'Ishrin" [The Story of the Sunday Movement in the Twentieth Century]. Magalit Madaris il ʼAhad (November and December 2001): 44-56. 85 The magazine calligraphic logo reads "Magala Diniya w Adabiyya w Tarikhiya" ["a religious, literary, and historic magazine"] while its name al-karma directly draws upon a familiar Biblical trope, meaning "the vineyard." Just like taratil, al-karma and other religious literature relayed and functionalized certain Biblical troupes for pedagogical purposes. Here the grapes in the vineyard are raised, fashioned, and pruned to ultimately become the wine in the Christian catechism, representing Christ's blood, the greatest sacrifices in the Christian story. In the same way, Sunday School students are fashioned and pruned by their spiritual training in the larger frame of the Church for this ultimate lived sacrifice.
95 ʼUrthuduksiyya [The Coptic Orthodox Sunday Schools, 1922]. Together with his newly- formed General Committee for Sunday School, the syllabus outlined the goals for his reform: to initiate regular attendance of Coptic liturgical services by all Sunday School students; to teach cleanliness and hygiene; and finally to instill a "nationalist and revolutionary spirit" in order to commit students to their nation. The committee agreed to achieve these goals by disseminating Sunday School publications among students and, with the close supervision of teachers, promote attendance of official worship services such as the Coptic liturgy. Besides organizing recreational and spiritual gifts, teachers were also to stress a voluntary community service, khidma, in the forms of paying their tithes to benevolent societies and visiting the sick and the poor.86
Girgis' efforts to introduce Christian religious education in Khedive Schools become another significant scene heroically depicted in his film hagiography. The Coptic Patriarch,
Pope Cyril V, notices Girgis' astounding efforts in establishing a broader network of Coptic
Sunday Schools. He enlists Murqus Simaika Pasha as a fellow khadim and asks him to approach the then prime minster Saad Zaghlul to introduce Christian instruction in primary and secondary state schools. He agrees to do so. After the formalities of their greetings, they both take a moment to bemoan Douglas "Dunlop Pasha" and his British-inspired education which failed in its attempt to "tatwir, tathqif, tagdid, wa tanwir"—modernize, intellectualize, renew, and enlighten—the Egyptian public, only to produce low-level employees for the colonial government apparatus. To highlight the matter's importance, Zaghlul immediately
86 This list is translated from Sinout Shenouda's article "Madaris al- ʼAhad; Qisat al-Qarn al-ʻIshrin" [The Story of the Sunday Movement in the Twentieth Century]. The Sunday School Magazine (November and December 2001): 44-56.
96 produces an edict, hands it to Simaika, and the next scene shifts to a beaming Habib Girgis framed in front of a classroom in the Coptic Clerical College. Books are piled high on his desk. As the state provided al-Azhar University graduates to teach religion in Khedive schools, Girgis and elites such as Hany Takla, the highest-ranking Copt in the Ministry of education, would organize Coptic Clerical graduates to teach Christian instruction (B.L.
Carter 1986: 223). These graduates relied on Girgis' synoptic pedagogical books such as
Khulasat al-Usul al-Imaniyya fi al-Kanisa al-Qibtiyya al-Urthuduksiyya [Summary of
Dogmatic Principals of the Coptic Church] (Shenouda 2001: 45) and the Girgis' taratil in his early pedagogical tracts. Because the Egyptian weekend falls on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer and rest, students in Khedive School would receive instruction on Fridays while students in Coptic schools would meet on Sundays.
Until the very end of his career, Girgis inspired his students to a have different reading and as I will argue here, a different singing of their faith that was functional and more directly applied towards daily life. Furthermore, he instilled a deep loyalty among his students to a rising nation-state and an Orthodox institution growing more powerful among its congregants and, later, an important player in state politics. Habib Girgis and his followers not only textualized Coptic religion heritage into what Starrett called a "coherent system of practices" (1998: 9), he also heavily relied on song and religious national anthems to transform this coherent system of practices into bodily acts of piety. He taught students not only how to read and recite their faith in particular, but also to sing it well. While he started out with a handful of children as early as 1898, by 1942 fully 42,000 students were using his common religious curriculum throughout the entire country (Hasan 2003: 76). Though
97 Sunday School syllabi became more varied after his death in 1951, this number had reached one million students by 1963 (Sedra 2009: 1058). Today, virtually all Coptic children, even those raised outside of Egypt, encounter Sunday School in one form or another. And, almost all of them can sing and perform their Sunday School lessons in song (see chapter 3).87
American Inspirations: Reinterpreting Protestant Evangelism into
Orthodox Hymnbooks
During one particularly hot and sticky day, I remember sitting in the air-conditioned refuge of the Franciscan Center for Oriental Studies library wide-eyed and awestruck. It was not the fact that this small Catholic institution seemed so utterly out of place in what has today become one of Cairo's busiest and most condensed neighborhoods, the muski textile district. Nor was it the wild traffic trapeze it took me to get there—between the winding and outlandish worlds of local wedding invitations vying with bonbonnières imported directly from China. I was staring at one of Girgis' yellowing hymn tracts published later in his career: Taranim wa Anashid Ruhiya [Taranim and Spiritual Anthems, 1941]. The tract's title bore a striking resemblance to Isaac Watt's famous hymnbook Hymns and Spiritual Songs, one of the famous hymnals that would undergird the Second Great Awakening sweeping through Europe and a post-revolutionary America between 1790 and 1830. As I thumbed through the pages of Girgis' other taratil tracts and writings, the similarities and differences
87 While there is no accurate consensus of their size in Egypt, numerous accounts place them between 8 to 12 percent of Egypt's rapidly growing current population of about 80 million. According to the 2008 census undertaken by the Egyptian State Information service, as of May 1, 2008, Egypt's population has reached 78.7 million. Copts however, have been routinely discounted in these national surveys and the Coptic Orthodox Church has traditionally contested the numbers projected by the Egyptian State.
98 in taratil titles and themes became exceedingly clear. Like the neighborhood through which I had just delicately maneuvered, Girgis was negotiating a fierce and layered market. I recall thinking that he was competing. In doing so, Girgis was conversing, mimicking, borrowing, and reinventing Protestant idioms to suit a specifically Orthodox ethos in an increasingly competitive religious context, all coming together in the most mundane artifact: the Coptic devotional hymnbook known in Arabic as kitab al-taratil (literally the Book of taratil).
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, American Presbyterian missionaries, the largest and most influential enterprise in Egypt, were at their peak, unleashing the most aggressive proselytization efforts to convert Coptic Orthodox Christians (Burke 200; Sharkey 2008;
Sedra 2011). Moreover as Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, they were armed with a fresh evangelical zeal from their own religious revivals as well as translated Bibles and Arabic hymnals.
In his work The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch writes that it was Christian hymnody that formed a vital bulk of mass religious culture following the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening (1989: 34). Some scholars argue that somewhere between the Second Great Awakening and the emerging nationalism of a post- revolutionary country, American Sunday Schools emerged as civil institutions to foster a shared Protestant identity and prompt a national cohesiveness just as the new country began to grapple with its own self-governance (Boylan 1988: 8). With their beginnings as literacy classes for young illiterate workers and street children to their slow development into sprawling voluntary institutions, these factory schools offer an enticing parallel with the rise of the Coptic Sunday School Movement beginning in Cairo following Egypt's new
99 independence from British control. Initially, American Sunday Schools not only provided
"literacy training" for the lower order of a growing nation but also furnished "the religious knowledge that potential citizens of the new republic needed" (Boylan 1988: 6), a notion
Habib Girgis would echo in his writings. In his publication of Al-Madaris al- ʼAhad al-
Qibbtiyya al-Urthuduksiyya [Coptic Orthodox Sunday Schools, 1922], he made it clear that
Sunday Schools would not only make Copts better Christians but also more "useful members of their nation."88 A number of year later, his leading disciple, Pope Shenouda, would echo this in his own own mantra for eduction reform: "Egypt is not a land in which we live, but rather a land that lives inside of us." Like Girgis, Shenouda looked to produce pious citizens productive for Egypt on the inside (chapter 3).
To understand early Sunday School history in Egypt and the role of taratil in their reforms, I provide a brief outline of the American system that so deeply inflected the Coptic
Orthodox reformist movement. By 1807, the American Sunday School reform became a specifically Presbyterian phenomenon with the establishment of the Evangelical Society in
Philadelphia, home of the same American Presbyterian missionaries who first arrived in
Cairo in 1854.89 Like earlier models, the Evangelical Society aimed to inculcate habits of self-control, Sabbath observation, hygiene, good citizenship, and finally, respect for authority
(Boylan 1988), something that Girgis listed in his own syllabus and, as Sedra's study of
88 Notes form the first General Committee for Sunday Schools in 1922 in Sinout Delware Shenouda's "Madaris al-ʼʼAhad; Qisat al-Qarn al-ʻIshrin" [The Story of the Sunday Movement in the Twentieth Century]. Magalit Madaris al-ʼAhad [Sunday School Magazine] (November and December 2001): 47. 89 The American Reformed Presbyterian Church first arrived in 1854, joined five years later by the United Presbyterian Church of North America. Historian Jeffery Burke cites that by 1859, their joint efforts reached a total of 408 ministers, 634 congregations, and 55, 547 members that were committed to these missions in Egypt in one way or another (2000: 79). For more on the background of American Presbyterian missionaries in Egypt, please see Jeffrey Burke's "The Establishment of the American Presbyterian Mission in Egypt, 1854-1940, An Overview." Ph.D. Dissertation, McGill University, 2000.
100 missionary monitorial schools illustrates, missionaries would instill in their own students and converts. Additionally, the society supported informal religious meetings of Bible readings, catechetical instruction and occasional sermons by ministers and volunteers, all of which began and ended with the singing of hymns and spiritual songs (1988: 13). According to historian Anne Boylan, American Sunday Schools were not only important building blocks in an emerging republic in a strident age of industrial expansion and post-revolutionary independence; they would also forge what would become today's "modern America." Besides the triumph of literacy and the establishment of good reading habits, Sunday Schools were also significant agents of cultural transmission in the U.S. after the Civil War because, as
Boylan writes (1988: 169):
…by capturing the republican values of the Revolutionary era and dressing them in evangelical garb, they cemented the connection between the church and the nation…. In this process, evangelical institutions such as the Sunday School became both symbols and agents of nationalism. It is hardly surprising then, that when American missionaries in the late nineteenth century headed for foreign lands, they took the Sunday School with them. If the central symbols of British effort to bring their brand of enlightenment and civilization to the world were the army officer and the bureaucrat, American 'civilizers' were more likely to be missionaries bearing Bibles and Sunday School books.
Just seventy years after the arrival of Presbyterians in Egypt, Girgis' writing began to reflect his encounter with his competitors and it also echoed their productive ethos. His reforms also mirrored evangelical pedagogies of piety with their heightened personal encounters with God, personal activism, and a Scripture focus that was latent with a similar productive nationalism for a rising post-colonial Egyptian state. 90 In his Al-taratil al-Ruhiya
90 Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds, Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1900 (New York: Oxford Press, 1994), 6.
101 fi al-Kanisa al-Qibtiyya [Spiritual Songs in the Coptic Church, 1926] he writes, "And through this [taratil and spiritual worship], the self will be strengthened to shake off the fog of laziness and indulgence from itself" and in turn be filled "with a new spirituality where taratil will kindle the desire for a heavenly life" (1926: 4). His call is similar to the words of one Presbyterian Sunday School teacher "to impart that religious knowledge, those religious impressions, and the formation of those habits in the minds of children, which shall be crowned with the salvation of their immortal souls" (Boylan 1988: 10, citing the minutes of the McKendrean Female Sabbath School Society, Nov. 3, 1821).
While hymn writers composing for American audiences worked to avoid distinctive ecclesiology to sidestep problems of contested and overlapping evangelical identities and appeal to a broader market, Girgis' reforms looked to achieve exactly the opposite.91 Rather, he particularly focused his pedagogical publications and his own songbooks on ecclesiastical specificity. One of his most famous pedagogical publications, ʼAsrar al-Kanisa al-Sabaʻa
[The Seven Sacraments of the Church, 1949] initially appeared as a tartila in his popular pamphlet Anashid al-Urthuduksiyya wa Taranīm ʻAqidiyya. [Orthodox Anthems and
Theological Spiritual Songs, 1941]. At a precisely anti-liturgical moment in American hymnody, Girgis favored and pushed for an increasingly pro-liturgical movement in Coptic
Sunday Schools and centralized authority in one denomination: the Coptic Orthodox Church and its clerics who could administer liturgical sacraments and, through these rites, become closer intermediaries to the divine. taratil with these themes abound in his 1926 pamphlet:
"Love for Going to Church," "Worship in God's House," "Residing in God's House," "A
Plead for the Success of the Church," and "the Victory of the Church," to name but a few. In
91 See Marini 2002: 282.
102 his song "The Seven Sacraments of the Church," Girgis synoptically outlines them in seven verses:
Asrar al-Kanisa al-Sabaʻa /The Seven Sacraments of the Church92
The Savior has constituted for us seven sacraments for salvation, Pillars for our Lord's house and upholders of hope
Baptism, which renewed for us [our] birth And the oil of confirmation as markers of our [spiritual] struggle
The sacraments of repentance protects our souls from doubt, And Eucharist is the holiest sacrament that protects the mystery of unity
The sacrament of the unction of the sick, together with the essence of prayer Heals the patient, thanking Jesus the spring of life
Matrimony is a holy union blessed by the Lord God Priesthood [is] the sacrament that distributes the blessing of life
All of these sacraments are the gifts of the Kind one, established in the Savior's place [the church] as a blessed spring
These sacraments are administered by His priests (servants) We thank our holy God for His reigning grace
From their earliest appearance in his work, taratil took on a utilitarian function to educate the masses in this particular kind of Coptic Orthodox "knowing." Girgis' earliest taratil appears in his pedagogical pamphlet Salawat al-Shʻab Athnaʼ al-Quddas
[Congregational Prayers During the Liturgy] printed in 1922. Dedicated to the Coptic
Orthodox Women's Society, the book aimed to facilitate lay participation (ishtirak) in a
92 In an undated children's taratil book, "Taranim Marhalat al-Tufula" published by the St. Mark's Library of the Beni Seuf Diocese, is another song titled "Saba' Asrar Ruhiya"/ "The Seven Sacraments" with the texts decidedly simplified for a younger audience. While the composer remains anonymous, this tartila's strong resemblance to Girgis' adult version certainly points to him as its author. This excerpt is from Habib Girgis' Anashid 'Orthodoxiya wa Taranim 'aqi'diya [Orthodox Anthems and Theological Spiritual Songs] (Cairo,The Sunday School General Committee, 19): 37). I translate the first six verses.
103 liturgical church service that was largely not in their first language, the antiquated Coptic.
Girgis provides a full transcription of the Coptic liturgy as well as a simplified transliteration into Arabic script to prompt congregants to sing their assigned responses. Additionally, he hoped to familiarize his audience not just with Coptic as their indigenous language but also with the proper Church etiquette when attending church and deference to both clerical and divine authority; these are listed in the synoptic textbook presentations that Starrett describes.
Interjected with Biblical scripture, attendees had to be mindful of sixteen instructions ranging from individual prayers before the service to a more collective propriety before and after prayer; for example when to cross oneself upon entering the church, when and where to seat, and even how to greet other parishioners.93 The list goes on to address other prohibitions that particularly address the church-attending body, such as sitting, standing, seeing, hearing, speaking and, finally, singing.
Evoking Foucault's argument of "subtle coercions" on how primary student, military men, monk and patients are disciplined as "docile bodies" fit for their various institutions
(1977:136-40), Girgis' 1922 pamphlet is arguably the first modern lesson on how to be pious, how to attend, worship, and sing in a Coptic Orthodox Church for the general non-ascetic public in colloquial terms.94 His emphasis on communal singing and participation in the
93 (6) Do not greet anyone in the church. And do not give him a salute. But if you must do this, it is enough for you to place your hand upon your breast and to bend your head forward," (1922: 9-10). This tradition still lingers today. In the middle-class neighborhood of Shubra, many Copts would first greet me with a handshake, and then automatically bring their hands to their chest while nodding their heads gently forward. One interlocutor went as far as calling this "the Coptic handshake." 94 It is important to emphasize here that with such a high illiteracy rate in Egypt in the early twentieth century—according to Annuaire statique de l'Égypte, in 1917 (1918: 15; see Fahmy 2011:17, footnote 66), only 6.8% of Egyptians could read—many of Girgis works initially attracted more affluent and educated sectors of the Coptic community, such as the Coptic Orthodox Women's Society. However, it was these benevolent and philanthropic societies, made up of largely educated elite who claimed that it was their duty to provide al-khidmat al-diniya and to and teach the "lower orders" in the name of
104 Coptic liturgy culminates in an unexpected crescendo, the singing of a non-liturgical Arabic devotional tartila as a colloquial extension of a specifically liturgical service. In other words, taratil become a vernacular addition and transitional link for what was first reserved for the religious elite. In his work on early Anglican reform, Leigh Eric Schmidt (2000: 74) highlights how the "reverent postures" inculcate subordination, both to God and to their clerical representatives:
A politics of hearing was always the paired complement to the politics of speaking in these churchly settings: being a good hearer (by Anglican and Reformed standards) involved the whole body in a series of 'reverent postures' of humility that signified deference to God and, necessarily, to his ministers as well.
Girgis' reform to train the ear, and by extension the body, were largely unprecedented at the time. Traditionally, services end with two liturgical alhan, Psalm 150 and a Coptic hymn outlining the practices of the Eucharist translated as "The Bread of Life." 95 In a pedagogical style, Girgis' own tartila, "Inna Fadina Daʻana" or "Our Savior Calls Us," details in colloquial Arabic the most sacral moment of the mass: the sharing of the Eucharist.
The text directly borrows from the more scriptural descriptions in the liturgy and translates it both vernacularly and melodically. I translate the first the first three verses here.
Our Savior calls us to live by Him, Giving us a new era in the rite of his love
He took bread and He gave thanks, "Eat of my body," He said and broke [it]
Holding the cup, He said, "This is the new covenant of life,"
modernity. In this 1922 publication, the Coptic Orthodox Women's Society not only sponsored Girgis' publication but also ensure its free dissemination to churches all over Egypt (1922:1). 95 The Service of the Deacon and Hymns (1859).
105 "This is my blood, shed for you and for the forgiveness of your sins."96
In his classic study Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison (1977), Michel
Foucault writes, "discipline is a political anatomy of detail" and that (1977: 140):
[A]ll minutiae of Christian education, of scholastic or military pedagogy, all forms of 'training' found their place easily enough. For the disciplined man, as for the true believer, no detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it.
Foucault himself goes on to quote the Christian devotional hymn "Little Things," a tartila in its own right, by Jean Baptiste de La Salle. Jean Baptise de le Salle is not only a patron saint of teachers in the Roman Catholic Church but today is regarded as the father of modern-day
Catholic schools.97 In stressing the immensity of details in the eyes of God, "Little Things" illustrates the power and potential for what Foucault called the "utilitarian rationalization of detail in moral accountability and political control" (1977: 139). Similarly here, Girgis' song both emphasizes ecclesiastical specificity and extends this utilitarian rationalization to Coptic congregations as they learn to become active actors and participants in the Coptic liturgy.
Now, it was not just the clergy and male deacons who sing the most pivotal moments of the mass in the intricate melismas of Coptic alhan; like the democratization of religion, lay members also sing the unfolding of the Eucharist one detailed event after another in a simpler, strophic, and more colloquial form of Arabic taratil. After recounting the tangible
96 As with the Coptic liturgical text, this tartila directly draws from Biblical scripture; Matthew 26: 26-28 (NKJV); "And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, 'Take, eat; this is my body.' Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, "Drink form it, all of you. For this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for the remission of sins." 97 Foucault quotes from Jean Baptiste de la Salle's Traité sur les obligations des frères des Écoles chrétiennes (impr. de Vve L. Dumesnil, 1783): 238-9.
106 actions of communion, the tartila also interprets larger theological concepts—the consecration of bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ—and defines the mystical into recognizable, everyday, local, and popular terms. The tenth verse of this tartila reads
"Drink of the Beloved's secret / for me it is like the a doctor's bounty / For it is the medicine of my soul / and with it any anguish will disappear" (1922: 82) echos the third verse translated above. Besides achieving precise church-going etiquette and educating parishioners in the smallest details of Orthodox rites, the last verse of the song educates parishioners: through Orthodox liturgical sacraments such as communion, one is also engulfed in a kind of spiritual and even social victory.
It is precisely at a social victory where Girgis' taratil compositions take another detour from his missionary counterparts. Whereas Presbyterian evangelicals pushed for a regenerative encounter with God—that is the personal salvation through encounters with the
Holy Spirit and consequent conversion and witness of faith through service (Boylan 1988;
Marini 2002)—Girgis and his followers emphasized that it was the correct performance of
Orthodox rites performed as a community—attending liturgical services, fasting, prayer, reading the Bible, and singing together—that were the locus of a palpable and most personal encounter with God. It is important to point out that all Coptic liturgical services are sung throughout and have slowly become a shared hymnody between clerics, cantors, and congregation evokes Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivaks' notion of a collective performative politics. To sing together, they both write about national anthems, to perform such [political] rites together is "a plural act, an articulation of plurality" that articulates both modes of belonging and claims to rights of possession, whatever they may be (Butler and Spivak
107 2007:59). In a Coptic context, singing together is both about belonging to one another as a community and, through the singing of Coptic alhan, an indigenous connection to an ancient and Christian Egypt as it once was, a discourse of authenticity and legitimacy I explore in the previous chapter.
Such a liturgical emphasis also speaks to the widely held adage among Copts that it salvation is achieved by both faith and action, differing from the highly contested
"Protestant" notion of salvation through conversion alone.98 Nonetheless, this did not prevent a new wave of theologically dense taratil whose texts promoted a spiritual transcendence that spoke of a direct, visceral, and tangible encounter with the Spirit through through the ear. Pedagogical taratil about the Holy Spirit ballooned under Pope Shenouda's reign and many resembled evangelical and charismatic strains (see chapter 3 and 5 particularly). By
1941, when Girgis published his three famous taratil tracts, Taranim wa Anashid Ruhiya
[Spiritual songs and Anthems], Anashid al-Urthuduksiyya wa Taranim ʻAqidiyya. [Orthodox
Anthems and Theological Spiritual Songs], and In ʻAsh al-Damir fi Taranim al-Saghir
[Reviving the Spirit in Children's Spiritual Songs], two of them began with a short list of
Trinitarian songs and dedications to the power of the Holy Spirit. The very first song in the children's taratil pamphlet, "Praise for the Holy Trinity" is especially striking. The second verse is almost directly lifting from Coptic liturgical text of the Trisagion hymn merging taratil into alhan and vice versa. I translate Girgis here:
98 In his book City of God; Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (2010), Kevin O'Neill discusses the confessional nature of Guatemalan Pentecostal Christians that made self and community policing projects the cellular foundation of a shared Christian citizenship. While Copts are highly critical of Protestant conversion narratives, many popular taratil singers and influential khuddam frame their own religious awakening and their first interest in service as song using "prodigal-son" or daughter rhetoric's that closely resembles charismatic salvation narratives. This includes Maher Fayez autobiography, a famous murannim for the group, El-Karouz whom I explore in chapter 5.
108 We began in the name of the Lord, and the son, and the Holy Spirit Who made us innocent, saved us, and enlivens [our] spirits.
Holy might Father, holy begotten Son, Holy Spirit that is bright, the holy heavenly Trinity99
With this new emphasis on power and the affect of the Holy Spirit, Girgis slowly laid the foundation for future charismatic leaning that would color contemporary taratil and which would become highly contested in Orthodox settings. I investigate these notions in today's
Sunday Schools (chapter 3), religious festivals known as mawalid (chapter 4), and among a growing charismatic movement of taratil worship and performance (chapter 5).
Modeling Protestant Hymnbooks
Besides theological and pedagogical borrowings, Girgis' early compositions modeled other elements from Presbyterian missionaries: the organization of translated Presbyterian devotional hymnbooks. I concentrate on Girgis' kutub al-taratil (literally, taratil books) and pamphlets here because he was the first person to attempt a wide circulation and publication of Arabic devotionals, and many individuals and philanthropic societies modeled their own use of Arabic hymnals after the reformer's early pamphlets. Though there were many
Catholic models that initially arrived in Cairo, Girgis himself seems to have been moved by one model in particular, the Presbyterian Bahgat al-Damir fi Nazm al-Mazamir that still circulates and is still in use among Egypt's Presbyterian converts today. Loosely translated as
"The Joys of the Spirit in the Psalter," American missionaries published their first edition in
99 Habib, Girgis, ʻash al-Dhamir fi Taranim al-Saghir [Reviving the Spirit in Children's Spiritual Songs]. (Cairo: The Sunday School General Committee, 1941): 7.
109 Egypt as early as 1877. Known more simply as Nazm al-Mazamir, or the Psalter, it was initially a direct Arabic translation of Isaac Watts's Psalters as it was revised for the American
Presbyterian Church in the United States.100 In turn, by 1917 the Presbyterian American
Mission revised and published a more suitable edition for their new Egyptian converts just one year before Girgis officially launched his Sunday School Movement in 1918. In their introduction they are at great pains to describe "the men of great poetry, Biblical scholars, theologians, Arabic language specialists, and musicians…[as well] as a number of American missionaries," assigned by the Nile Synod to work on incorporating contemporary melodies
"to revive spiritual life and to enliven community worship" among new parishioners (1917:
2). Not only were Presbyterians still experiencing their own spiritual revival but they themselves were also competing with Catholic missionaries over prospective Orthodox converts (Burke 2000). While Catholic Jesuits allowed Coptic converts to maintain their broader liturgical frame and antiquated hymnody (Blin 1888; Badet 1899; and see chapter 1),
Presbyterians praised their reformist intentions to bring the most progressive and modern music to the converts' worship, in this case new musical materials from home.
To appeal to their audiences who mostly could not read Western classical notation, the Presbyterian Holy Synod committee relied on familiar Arabic awzan (singular wazn) and the equivalent of Western musical scales in order to craft an oral and mnemonic music
100 [An Imitation of the Psalms of David; carefully suited to the Christian worship: being an improvement of the former Psalms; Allowed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States, to be used in churches and private families.] Albany: Printed by Charles R. and George Webster, and sold at their bookstore, corner of State and Pearl-street, 1800. In her work, The Language of the Pslams in Worship; American Revisions of Watt's Psalter, Rochelle Stackhouse argues that as an English hymn writer, Watts originally published his first edition of Hymns and Spiritual Songs as early as 1707 with the hope of improving singing in English churches and to develop an 'evangelical hymnody' to supplement liturgical rites of worship not originally found in the Psalms (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 35.
110 system. Unlike the traditional meaning of wazn, which implies a cycling rhythmic pattern in
Arabic classical contexts—literally the "measurement" of a metric pulse—these specialists used the term in a more vernacular sense to indicate a cycling melodic pattern.101 With the
Psalms now divided into 433 aghani ruhiya or smaller "spiritual songs," the Psalter offered
240 songs, ranging from translated Presbyterian hymns, transcribed Egyptian folk melodies, familiar Arabic maqams, British anthems, and even the earliest rousing of American popular ballads. Each spiritual song was listed with a mnemonic device to remind singers of the melodic pattern, its wazn. And, like a classical Western score, a few words above the prose served to instruct the mood in which each song was to be performed. Others lent themselves as pedagogical proverbs for the songs' embedded spiritual lessons.
In his own publication, Muftah al-‘Angham; Al-Taranim al-Urthuduksiyya [Melody
Key: The Orthodox Taranim, undated] Girgis reinterpreted these opening evangelical proverbs with a particularly indigenous twist. Furthermore, he composed some of his earliest taratil based on familiar Egyptian folk songs, popular songs, Coptic liturgical hymns and congregational responses for nationalist and devotional ends. Initially, he even imitated similar Presbyterian mnemonic devices to awzan. But while these awzan adoptions remained the most fleeting, with his taratil pamphlets dropping them in the 1940s, his use of religious nationalist rousing and devout military marches did not. Additionally, Girgis' taratil emphasized themes of martyrdom, sacrifice, and spiritual warfare. As some translated
Protestant aghani ruhiya focused on themes of atonement, invitation to conversion, salvation, and witnessing to God (Marini 2002), taratil in Girgis' pamphlets expanded on these themes
101 Awzan are known as iqaʻat (iqaʻ, singular). See Habib Hassan Touma, The Music of the Arabs (Amadeus Press, 1996): 48. Also see Ali Jihad Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: the Culture and Artistry of Tarab (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 113.
111 yet with clearly nationalist, even autochthonic slants reminiscent of Moftah's arguments regarding the legitimacy of alhan. Titles such as "Lord, Bless Our Egypt," "He who Sows with Tears," "We are Children of the Martyrs," "The Spiritual Jihad and the War with the
World," and finally, the official Sunday School anthem, "We are Soldiers for Christ," peppered many taratil hymnbooks. In their various titles, they reveal Girgis' shifting pedagogies of piety. Spiritual suffering became integral to a Coptic "knowing of the self" that reinterpreted and emphasized saint hagiographies, metaphors of martyrdom, and self- renunciation to strategically negotiate an emerging Coptic post-colonial national identity.
Nahnu nasl al-Shuhadaʼ/ We are Descendants of the Martyrs102
Egypt was, in the olden ages, the glorious mother In the blood of Egypt's Copts flows the blood of their ancient ancestors
Refrain We are descendants of the martyrs, from honorable forefathers Our history is that of the forefathers, we will defend it with our blood
We look towards the glorious path, looking towards heaven Remembering the ages of covenant of death with our faithful hearts
Our desire is to praise Egypt, our love for it fills our hearts Its glory reaches far back into the ages, reaching far above the glory of all mankind
Spiritual Suffering, Service, and Shifting Pedagogies of Piety
Paul Sedra describes nineteenth century Egypt in the grips of aggressive colonial penetration and negotiating new mechanisms of power in missionary education as a scene of
102 Habib Girgis, Anashid ʼUrthuduksiyya wa Taranim ʻAqiddiya [Orthodox Anthems and Theological Spiritual Songs] (Cairo,The Sunday School General Committee, 1941): 59. Here, I quote the first three of the tartila's ten verses.
112 epistemological warfare, a battle between written and spoken forms of knowledge (2011:
10). It was certainly epistemological warfare, what with the diminishing status of neighborhood kuttab schools and the disappearance of traditional blind cantors known as
ʻʻarifs who taught not just simple arithmetic but also implemented a moral and ethical training to their students through the memorization (hifz) and recitations (qiraʼa) of religious texts.103 In his own writings, Habib Girgis clearly mourns their loss, aiming his biting criticisms at missionary educators for crippling these indigenous schools and undermining
Coptic self-knowing in the loss of their own language, history, traditions, and rites (1943: 7).
It was through his Sunday Schools that he hoped to revive a different sort of kuttab that transformed students into knowledgeable "Soldiers for Christ" and also into "more useful members for the nation." For he wrote, "the life of the nations stood upon both religious and social intentions and feelings." He continued that it is these very religious sentiments and intentions that could allow the "Coptic nation" to reach its fullest potential and take its rightful place among the rest of the nations and denominations (1943: 2). Yet, at the heart of these revived institutions were no longer blind ʻarifs but rather lay members who arose as khuddam, literally "servants" and volunteers who would lay out the basic tenets of Orthodox religious education and craft self-policing activists.
Armed with new, easily accessible and even singable religious materials, Coptic khuddam formed a kind of “collective scrutiny to create high levels of individual compliance
103 In his impressive classic monograph, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (1968), J. Heyworth-Dunne provides a comprehensive overview of the early kuttab system in eighteenth century Egypt. He also mentions that in some Coptic communities, Copts also had a "somewhat different type" of kuttab school. According to early writings by a Coptic writer named Abu Dhakin, the children were not only taught "religion, good manners, to read and write Arabic and Coptic," but they also memorized the Psaltery and St. Paul's Epistles (p. 85; also translated both in Edwin Sadlier's The History of the Copts in 1963 and in Edith Butcher's The Story of the Church of Egypt, Vol. IV, p.280-2).
113 with religious norms” (Goldberg 1991: 9), a notion that would resonate well beyond Girgis' years and into Pope Shenouda's religious reforms. In Girgis' use of taratil as pedagogical tools, he transformed written pedagogies of religion into shared oral, performed and lived lessons, and achieved what his mother taught him as portrayed in his hagiographical film,
"praying day and night." And as Sunday Schools slowly transformed Coptic civil identities into increasingly religious ones, they altered what Saba Mahmood called "ethical practices"
(2005: 35). In other words, Coptic bodily acts of prayer and song became laden with politically efficacious bodily gestures that permeated Coptic pedagogies and expressions of piety (see chapter 3). In other words, Girgis slowly armored Coptic religious education against Western notions of modernity as it slowly encroached upon the Coptic community in the guise of missionary education reform. In the words of Egyptian scholar Talʻat Zikry
Mina, Girgis was not only preoccupied his student's moral upbringing, but also with children's political upbringing: "al-tarbiyya al-siyasiyya li al-atfal".104
In one of his most unusual publications, Al-Wasaʼil al-ʻAmliya li al-Islahat al-Qibtya;
Amal wa Ahlam li-Imkan Tahqiqha fi ʻAsharat ʻAwam [Practical Means for Coptic Reforms;
Hopes and Dreams that Could be Achieved in 10 Years, 1943], Girgis described a vision of a
"Coptic nation" that came to him in a dream. In an almost out-of-body experience, he traveled to all reaches of the Coptic Orthodox Church, from Alexandria to the southern most borders of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and listened to various khuddam's desire for reform.
He evoked one conversation in particular, between a young zealous servant, a more seasoned khadim,and finally, an old and wise figure, a shaykh. Concerned by a growing Coptic
104 In Talʻat Zikry Mina's habib Girgis w Turath al-Ta'limi [Habib Girgis and his Educational Heritage] (Cairo: Sunday School Publishing House, 1993): 54.
114 religious apathy, missionary proselytization, and a rising secular elite, the three discuss how modern missionary education had became divisive in form, promoting a nationalist apathy and secular leanings. Worse, such education even promoted conversion to other denominations. The only solution for reform, the old man advised his two other disciples, was to redeem clerics to their esteemed posts through education and to emphasize indigenous schooling and to modernize Coptic kuttabs "just as the Sunday Schools are presently doing now" (Girgis 1943: 9).
Almost in a self-evaluating mode, Girgis highlighted his own past pedagogical intentions as a zealous youth beginning his career through his successes as Dean of the
Clerical College and founder of the growing Coptic Sunday Schools. But in this particular work and in the taratil pamphlets that followed, Girgis revealed a shift in his reforms. In the last ten years of his ministry, his denominational exclusivity became more pronounced. On the back of a taratil pamphlet published in 1941, he cited the approval of the Clerical
Committee and urges all Copts to learn and perform only the taratil in these approved pamphlets during their gatherings and in their own schools.105 In other words, they had to refrain from performing missionary aghani ruhiya (spiritual songs) owing to the danger that they might compromise Orthodox beliefs and invite conversion. Beyond his familiar pedagogical revival, there also arose a more heightened call of action, akin to the same industrious voluntarism and networks that shaped his missionary competitors. In his vision,
105 The very back page of Anashid 'Orthodoxiya wa Taranim 'aqi'diya. [Orthodox Anthems and Theological Spiritual Songs] (Cairo: The Sunday School General Committee, 1941) reads: "The Religious Publishing Committee, and the Clerical Committee, under the reign of His Holiness and exultation of our great Patriarch, in Paoni 18, 1657 [of the Coptic year], that is the June 25, 1941, that these taratil fill the gap that our church needs in these days. They also oversee that [these taratil] will be made popular and used without others in Coptic meetings and schools, and forbid the use of others than those therein."
115 young and old Copts all worked "with all seriousness and loyalty for the betterment of the congregation" forming organizations that worked "for wider social ends, serving the poor, while others disseminated the sciences and knowledge, others tending to the schooling and upbringing of poor children, educating young girls, and others disseminating sermons and the truth of religion" (1943: 2). Girgis' articulation of his plans as unfolding in a dream also underscores his rising sense of subjectivity as he toured throughout the Coptic "umma" or nation. His desire to repossess and restore the Coptic nation to its rightful place among other nations and denominations, and his emphasis on Coptic participation as citizens in their
Egyptian "watan" or motherland, drives the point home further. In her study of contemporary dreaming in Egypt, Amira Mittermaier investigates the performative, discursive, ethical, political relevance of dreaming and "the realities that dreams bring into being (2011: 28). She writes (2011: 4-5):
Dream discourses, like certain Sufi practices, are … in continuous if ambivalent dialogue with reformism and constitute a vibrant aspect of the Islamic revival…. By calling into question conventional parameters of the 'real,' they invite a more radical rethinking of community and subjectivity. They exceed the logic of self-cultivation by allowing spaces for the prophetic, alterity, and elements of rupture.
In his rendition of dreams and hopes, Girgis reveals only through religious education that
Egyptians, more specifically, Coptic Orthodox Egyptians, could repossess their country and their "selves" from Western colonizers and missionaries. By launching khidma or service as the nexus of a spiritual struggle or jihad, Girgis imagined a powerful Coptic community that could reinterpret an imposed "modernity," through his pedagogical songs. The official
Sunday School anthem, otherwise known as "We are Soldiers for Christ" highlights the emerging role of martyr motifs in a discourse of national belonging:
116 Nashid li Madaris al-ʼʼAhad / Anthem for Sunday School106
We are soldiers for Christ in Sunday School We have grown up during in righteousness and we follow the everlasting God
Refrain Oh comrades, come on! Follow this path! Come with us towards the eternal glory
We are soldiers for salvation, together with the faithful We grow in the spirit while our bodies are pure
From the book of God we see the spirit from the spring of life Which gives our spirits peace in His protection
In the holy places of the Almighty, we spend our Sunday For it is a blessed Sabbath, symbolizing the eternal rest
The houses of God fill our hearts with love Its glory is the glory of Christ, and it is the anchor of worship
While we are young we serve (nikhdim) God in the right path We spend the youth of our age in the pleasure of paradise
In his study of local Indonesian Islamic schools, Ronald Lukens-Bull investigates how notions of jihad became pivotal to negotiating and reinventing modernity in pesantren schools, Javanese institutions that teach local Islamic practice of beliefs (2005: 48). Though
Western popular media have usurped jihad as meaning solely Islamic "holy war," the term broadly denotes a spiritual effort or struggle in the name of God (Lukens-Bull 2005; Deeb
2006). Lukens-Bull clarifies that there are two forms of jihad, with the greater jihad implying spiritual struggles over one's own sinfulness, while the other, lesser jihad involves public effort and pious practice in the name of God (2005: 6). Fazlur Rahman (1982: 8) adds that
106 Girgis, Habib. Anashid 'Orthodoxiya wa Taranim 'aqi'diya. [Orthodox Anthems and Theological Spiritual Songs] (Cairo, The Sunday School General Committee, 1941): 56. I quote the first six verses here.
117 there are also forms of intellectual jihad, technically ijtihad, in which believers labored in order to
...understand the meaning of a relevant text or precedent in the past, containing a rule, and to alter that rule by extending or restricting or otherwise modifying it in such a manner that a new situation can be subsumed under it by a new solution.
In other words, ijtihad is the hermeneutical study of religious texts. Pesantren schools combined all these elements of jihad: firstly, by inculcating in their students Islamic morals and values of Islamic brotherhood and selflessness, and aiming to instill personal yet public piety and commitment to the five pillars of Islam; secondly, by positioning acts of preaching, community developments, and education as critical to reinventing modernity so that it was both indigenously Indonesian and Islamic. In the end, Lukens-Bull argues, the mosque, where pesantren are initially located, became the ideal institution of learning.
I use this example here as pesantren schools bear a strong resemblance to Girgis' early Sunday Schools and his ultimate goal of cultivating the house of God as a religious school. In his official Sunday School anthem, Girgis reinterprets spiritual struggle (jihad) as public practices of piety with a focus on the internal moral subject, with increased church attendance among Coptic children, and with the consecration and purification of Coptic bodies to the extent of celibacy well into adulthood and even into official asceticism as consecrated servants, monks, and nuns. Girgis also advocated for an intellectual jihad through the close and analytical study of Biblical and religious scriptures as they applied to everyday contexts. In other words, it was through public practices and struggles of piety that
Copts learned to achieve a place in a heavenly nation (watan al-samawi) as well as in their earthly one.
118 In his last publication of taratil, Girgis overtly called for a public witness of faith and a more visible piety in community services.107 All of these teachings are threaded throughout the texts of the tartila all the while using an evangelical terminology of Coptic eschatology: that to serve and to die for one's faith will achieve an eternal life in heaven (see my introduction). Echoing one of Isaac Watts's militant and historically most widely performed hymn in the United States, "Am I a Solider of the Cross?" (Marini 2002: 280), Girgis wedded a most familiar Coptic trope with a novel idea: the khadim as a serving martyr and witness.
In the next chapter I will be investigating the images of the serving martyr as the locus with which today's Coptic Patriarch shapes contemporary Coptic Church upbringing or al tarbiyya al-kanasiyya. Though Watts' title questions whether believers are ready to wage the same relentless fight as a solider at war, Girgis' version, "We are soldiers for Christ in Sunday
School," reframes the question into a resolute declaration, an anthem not only for Sunday
School but also for life.
Martyr tropes are not a new phenomenon in Coptic contexts; their images have been strategically interpreted into Coptic identity discourses for centuries. Moreover, many early martyr stories revolved around soldiers and generals in armies, with their images in Coptic iconographies depicted in full warrior garb, allowing them to be a convenient interpolation into Sunday School pedagogies of politics.108 As early as the seventh and eighth centuries, the
107 Public piety and volunteerism as a discourse enmeshed in a larger conversation about education, authenticity, and moral action have garnered scholarly attention in the last few years beginning with Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety; The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005). In her own study of public piety in Shi‘a Lebanon, Lara Deeb illustrates that as Shi‘a women wedded spiritual education with progress and modernity, notions of authenticity, organization, education, cleanliness, hygiene, social consciousness, and community volunteerism all became latent with a growing nationalism aimed specifically at the Lebanese Resistance against Israeli occupation (2006: 19). 108 Febe Armanious, "Championing a Communal Ethos," Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (New York, Oxford University Press 2011): 41-61.
119 Coptic Orthodox Church had witnessed a huge surge in the production of martyrological and persecution narratives. In the face of first Chalcedonian domination followed by the Arab conquest, tropes of martyrdom, sacrifice, and the death of Church saints became markers of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and power. Such martyr images and hagiographies only multiplied, firstly to legitimatize the Church's new found status as mediator between local
Christians and governing Muslims, and secondly and as a founding body of texts to connect a quickly changing community to its glorious Egyptian past (Papaconstantinou 2006: 68). It is important to remember that only a few hundred years after the Arab conquest, all Copts ceased to speak their own Coptic language, and Coptic was relegated to Church liturgical services alone; this explains the subsequent rigid canonization of alhan. Saphinaz-Amal
Naguib adds that in early Christianity martyrs were "champions of a new body of knowledge, a charismatic person who, by offering his life for faith, subdued chaos and introduced a different order" (1994: 225). Hagiographic texts functioned precisely to serve as witnesses to an imagined past with martyrs as intermediaries of community memory. Note the double interplay of the Arabic term shahid, sh-ha-da, to both mean "witness" and "martyr."
By their nature as dissidents and through their literal death, martyrs were excluded strangers "who were there, but not in" (ibid., 224). In his "technologies of the self" Foucault's notion of the ruptures of self first begins with social exclusion followed by a voluntary marginalization of the self. Foucault argues that it was the model of martyrdom, death, and torture that shaped notions of self-revelation and salvation of early Christianity and monasticism, whose beginning actually date back to Egypt in the 4th century (1988: 43).
"Self-revelation," Foucault writes, "is at the same time self-destructive," in other words,
120 knowing one's self is a rupture with the self, the past, and the world, a process of withdrawal through which Girgis' Sunday School reforms and the rising sectarian tensions that followed has become progressively "symbolic, ritualistic and theatrical," to use Foucault's terms.
Critical to knowing one's self was to model martyrdom, to pray, to fast, to learn, to intercede, and even to sing as martyrs. All these acts, including the singing of taratil, become real and palpable performances of spiritual warfare, and martyr tropes became "integral part[s] of the battle to protect communal boundaries and maintain a coherent identity" (Armanious 2011:
42).
Coptic martyrologies easily lent themselves to Girgis' pedagogical ends because, according to historian Febe Armanious, these stories were already part of a growing genre of colloquial moralizing sermons. In the Ottoman era, they not only aimed to discourage Coptic conversion to Islam, but also to resist unification to another Christian denomination already at work since the seventeenth and eighteenth century: the Roman Catholic Church. Martyr stories were even written in such hyperbole and sensational language as to attract listeners in public story settings outside of the Church and elicit a response to their pedagogical leanings
(Armanious 2011: 55), much in the same way taratil's colloquial language characterizes them as an extra-Church devotional genre. Coptic martyr hagiographies themselves were also formulaic and their narratives provided useful key motifs that Girgis used routinely in his late taratil. More importantly, they modeled that kind of emphasis on saint hagiographies, sacrifice, and death that the next generation of reforms would strategically echo, though in vastly changing political contexts.
121 Some Conclusions
Habib Girgis died on August 21, 1951, but not before his reforms substantially altered
Coptic Orthodox pedagogies of piety and promoted taratil as integral to Coptic identity politics and discourse. Consequently, his Sunday School classes initiated a new generation of students who would go on to graduate and become the next khuddam of their local churches, with many rising through the clerical ranks to become the next priests, monks, bishops, and even the Patriarch himself.109 In his film hagiography, Girgis foretells his most promising student, Nazir Gayed, of a great future ahead and the scene is dramatically framed as the transmission of tradition from a master to his disciple. As a recent Clerical College graduate and a Sunday School khadim, an ailing and frail Girgis confides to the future patriarch, "there may no longer be grades here on earth, but there are still grades in heaven." A young Pope
Shenouda, then named Nazir Gayed, makes studious, almost frantic notes, capturing Girgis' every word, and agrees that Coptic religious education is the "first line of defense" for the
Orthodox Church and its congregations against missionary efforts that were now resulting in the building of churches all over Egypt. Girgis is reassured, and his final scene follows the
109 S.S. Hasan specifically details many of the influential figures that arose from the Sunday School Movement first as lay volunteers, monks, and finally, as bishops overlooking their own bishoprics. This includes Bishop Samuel who pioneered social service and ecumenical relations and established the Bishopic for Public, Ecumenical, and Social Services; Bishop Athanasios of Beni Suef whose diocese would be a model diocese for its dissemination of Sunday School materials as well as integrating social services with religious education; and, Father Matthew the Poor, St. Macarios monastery abbot who developed innovative agricultural enterprises and pushed the monks under his care to pursue research and scholarship (2003: 57-99). Christine Chaillot also devotes a chapter to this topic, "Sunday Schools and the Youth Movement" in her book The Coptic Orthodox Church; A Brief Introduction to its Life and Spirituality (Paris: Inter-Orthodox Dialogue, 2005): 62-74. In this project, I concentrate on Pope Shenouda III, as it was primarily his writings that became transformed as taratil and whose initial post as General Bishop of Christian education furthered institutionalized the Sunday School Movement. Additionally, Habib Girgis' popular film hagiography reflects the widely accepted notion that Shenouda was Girgis' direct and chosen successor, framing him as the most competent candidate to lead the Coptic Orthodox Church as patriarch into an uncertain age of sectarian conflict and competing religious waves.
122 typical formula of martyr hagiographies in Coptic religious films. On his deathbed, in a humility that is almost self-deprecating, he begs God for forgiveness for not serving or sacrificing enough for his community. His passing is enshrined in a light that implies his immediate transition into sainthood, and the credits roll over the images of his writings and pamphlets as they are laid out in the glass cases of the Habib Girgis Museum.
While Girgis' film hagiography paints the Coptic Sunday School reforms as a heroic and proactive counter-missionary movement, it reveals very little behind the scenes of these terse negotiations within Orthodox factions between clerics, an emerging class of Coptic laity and urbanites with competing views of modernity, nationalism, and the rising question of participatory Coptic citizenship in a post-sovereign Egypt. It also largely negates Coptic struggles with a State apparatus that slowly marginalized their political agency after its official independence just one year after Girgis' death in 1952. Perhaps the film's only and most subtle clue is in the figure Nazir Gayed himself, whose is presented wearing a Western style suit and a red felt tarbush. As a remnant of Ottoman aristocracy, the tarbush was a fez first worn by Egyptian elites who worked closely with their colonial administrations, and modeled their own administrations on them, before they were passed on to an aspiring and now more mobile middle class. Coupled with the tarbush, the young Pope Shenouda's colloquial and upper Egyptian mannerisms reveal the power of a growing Coptic middle- class that rose to prominence beginning in the 1950s. He was among the first generation not only to be educated in the new Coptic Sunday Schools, but also in Nasser's educational reforms that extended college education to working class Egyptians.
Ultimately it was these rising khuddam that become a discursive locus in which
123 newly educated servants and volunteers could assert their own dominance over the Egyptian masses below, improving their morals and ridding them of their "backward" and "offensive" customs through education (Sedra 2011: 14). More importantly, they revived genealogies of martyrs as part of Coptic survivalist narratives in the wake of increasingly sectarian politics, and they fully integrated them as subjects into the Church when the State would not have them. Girgis' efforts facilitated the massive institutionalization of Church education and the centralization of the Coptic clerical body that would take place under Pope Shenouda's reign.
Also, it was taratil's initial pedagogical use in the early Sunday Schools that made them all the more integral to the utility of collective emotion and the tight knit community ethos that
Shenouda's charismatic leadership would evoke. In the next chapter, I investigate the transformation harkit Madaris al-ʼʼAhad [Sunday School Movement] into the expansive
Church renaissance today known as al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya [Church Upbringing], and the conversion of a pedagogy of piety into a Orthodox pedagogy of politics.
124 CHAPTER 3
PEDAGOGIES OF POLITICS: taratil AND
COPTIC SUNDAY SCHOOLS TODAY
Introduction
The day Pope Shenouda died on March 17, 2012, I was already back in the United
States. As soon as I heard the news I called tante Cecile to check in on her, remembering her fondness for the Patriarch, and thanks to a Skype video chat I was quickly sucked back into her living room. It was the very beginning of a warm spring in Cairo, but to my surprise this tall and dignified woman sat bundled up and crumpled in a black sweater and scarf, tearful in front of her computer screen.110 Behind her I could see the large framed photo of a young and smiling Pope hanging next to the home's substantial library containing rows and rows of his authored books and spiritual manuals. I could also make out her salt and pepper mane gathered in a messy bun, an unusual change from her neatly coiffed hairdos. As I floundered my way through traditional condolences in Arabic—Al-baʼyyia fi hayatik, ya tante … something that approximately meant "May his blessings fill the rest of your life"—she said in disbelief: "‘Ana ʻashirtu [literally, I lived with him]! I knew him. I attended his meetings 110 It is important to note here that black is the color of mourning in Egypt and it is usually women who mark death through their changed clothing. At formal middle-class funerals, men may wear black simple ties. The day the Patriarch passed, many women in Shubra and throughout Egypt changed into black, leading up to the Patriarch's dramatic and televised funeral three days later on March 20, 2012.
125 every week, taking notes." She pointed to a lower shelf in the library filled with her handwritten notebooks. "He taught us so much..." she trailed off as her voice was caught up with emotion.
Despite his advanced age of 89, rumors of illness, and his increasingly frail disposition during weekly sermons, Shenouda's death still came to tante Cecile and much of the broader Coptic community as a surprise.111 And though she had been critical of him in the past few months, especially when he openly supported President Hosni Mubarak during the
January 25th uprising (seee my introduction), tante Cecile quietly but openly wept: "He was such a good man, such a good man…. And he suffered so much—hurub min al-balad, wa hurub min al-nas ʼilli hawali [literally, "wars" from the country's political arena and from the people around him]." Like the great saints, she told me, the Pope suffered. He suffered for
God, for his faith, and as Copts endured increasing social and political marginalization in
Egypt, for his people too. For some time, she spoke to me about the hardships of his early life, a narrative I had heard a number of times in Shubra's Sunday Schools even when he was still alive: he was orphaned when his mother died at birth, leaving his older brother to raise him between the cities of Assiyut, Alexandria and, finally, the neighborhood of Shubra in
Cairo. And from his earliest days, he wrote about his feelings of social and spiritual alienation in his most well-known religious poem, "Ghariban fi al-Dunya" ["A Stranger in the World"], now sung as a popular tartila:
111 Many Orthodox Copts expressed their shock and grief over Facebook, with many changing their profile pictures or posting messages on their timelines. Others posted their own personal photos with the Patriarch, with one status reading "I feel exactly the same as if my real father passed away : ( " (accessed March 17, 2012).
126 Ghariban fi al-Dunya/ A Stranger in the World112
A stranger I lived in the world, a guest like my forefathers A stranger in my etiquette, my thoughts, and my desires A stranger, no ear for me in which to empty thoughts People get lost in the contours of my being, unaware of my essence People are adrift in chaos, clamor, and uproar And I stand here awestruck and alone, my heart far and consigned A stranger, I do not find a home or a corner as a refuge
As a young man, Shenouda was also known to lose himself in his spiritual service
(khidma) and Sunday School teaching, even missing a whole year of his own education.113 All of his personal suffering, tante Cecile pressed on, seemed to foretell a life of spiritual struggle and sacrifice: first as a Coptic monk, then a bishop, and finally as head of a burgeoning Coptic religious revival (nahda ruhiya) shaped by his educational reforms known as al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya [literally, the Church Upbringing]. As she continued to recite his life, pausing to remember the smallest details, miracles, and spiritual victories, I listened quietly to a hagiography in the making, one that the Coptic community would soon perform as taratil and madaʼih following his death.
* * * * *
In this chapter, I discuss taratil as part of a vibrant religious revival (nahda ruhiya) under Pope Shenouda III shaped by his reformist efforts in the Church Upbringing movement. Specifically, I investigate the recurring song motifs of sacrifice, suffering, and
112 Pope Shenouda, ‘ʼIntilaq al-Ruh [Release the Spirit], 16th edition (Cairo, Magalat al-Kiraza, 2009): 134- 35. There is also brief footnote at the beginning of this poem which read: "Most of these verses were written in 1946 and have not been completed yet. The writer would have liked to publish it when it was completed, but I leave it to you, dear reader, to complete it yourself, but the grace of God." 113 Pope Shenouda recorded an oral autobiography in an 5-CD set known as Dhikriyat al-Baba Shinuda [Baba Shenouda's Memories] (produced by St. Mary's Hanging Church, Old Cairo, 1997).
127 death that echo throughout revived saint hagiographies and permeate contemporary religious education in Coptic Sunday Schools. Beginning with his ordination as Bishop of Christian
Education in 1962, Shenouda was a central figure in the massive institutionalization of the clerical body (El-Khawaga 1997: 142) as well as the standardization of Coptic religious education, liturgical practices, and the circulation of Orthodox saint and martyr hagiographies (Shenouda 2010: 91). While a broader Islamic revival in Egypt emerged to foreground the afterlife in projects of ethical cultivation and pious sensibilities (Hirschkind
2006), Pope Shenouda's most famous moral guide, ʼʼIntilaq al-Ruh [Release of the Spirit], turned to the potentials of death, sacrifice, and withdrawal to reform a Christian moral interiority and to delineate a modern and pious Coptic citizenry. As a collection of his writings from his early days as a hermit monk (1956 to 1962), the Coptic community not only transformed Release of the Spirit into a single, bound, moral manual but also adapted the last 35 pages of the Pope's poetry (qasaʼid, sing. qasida) into an impromptu pamphlet of pedagogical taratil.114
As a young monk, the Pope described "releasing his spirit" from the fetters of the body and withdrawing from the world in order to know himself and to know God (2004, 3rd edition: 19). Shenouda's ministry strongly advocated for the inner reworkings of the
Christian soul so that believers could "know themselves," and in turn, their lives could reflect
Coptic saintly models. Building on Habib Girgis' Sunday School reforms and revived martyr genealogies in song (chapter 2), I argue that Shenouda's influential ministry and public persona greatly infuse Coptic devotional soundscapes and martyr motifs with a new kind of
114 As of 2009, ‘ʼIntilaq al-Ruh was in its 16th edition. Furthermore, following Pope Shenouda's death in 2012, all of his writings, including the ‘ʼIntilaq al-Ruh, were placed in glass showcases in the Pope Shenouda III Museum at the Coptic Orthodox Cultural Center located in the Coptic Patriarchy.
128 political utility. After his death in 2012 and the events following the January 25th uprising, these martyr motifs have not only intensified, but have directly moved into the public realm.115 While Girgis' taratil initiatives modernized religious education by formulating new ways of knowing Coptic identity by learning about Orthodox liturgical rites synoptically through song, Shenouda centralized Coptic religious upbringing by making saint hagiographies and martyr themes practically useful in every day social and political negotiations of a lived Coptic citizenry.
More specifically, in this chapter I explore how the convergences and contradictions of two modes of belonging, both to an Egyptian nation as well as a watan al-samawi, a heavenly homeland, shifted under Pope Shenouda's reign. During his 40-year career, the patriarch taught his flock: "Egypt is not a land in which we live, but rather a land that lives inside of us." The Pope borrowed the phrase from Makram Obeid's speeches, a nationalist political activist who responded to his own exile by the British administration; "For when they parted us from [our] country, the country came to live inside of ourselves …."116 During
Shenouda's tenure, the phrase took on a new meaning as a post-colonial Egyptian state increasingly marginalized Copts from civic, social, and political participation. In turn, Copts have turned inward to pursue what the community calls a "heavenly citizenship." Framed within a Biblical salvation narrative of eternal life after death, a heavenly citizenship
115 As protestors arrived to Tahrir Square wearing stickers reading “a martyr is available here” highlighting their willingness to die for the revolution in Egypt, many Coptic Christians arrived to their own demonstrations wearing the same sticker. Their large crosses, religious banners, and songs mixed with a handful of Egyptian flags, and signaled that their readiness to die not only for their nation, but also for their faith. See Carolyn Ramzy, “To Die is Gain: Singing a Heavenly Citizenship Among Egypt's Coptic Christians” in Ethnos, forthcoming in 2014. 116 This article can be found in Mona Mukram Obeid's Muckram Obeid 1889 – 1989: Kalimat wa Mawaqif [Muckram Obeid 1889 – 1989: Writings and Perspectives] (Cairo, 1990): 420.
129 emphasizes belonging to a heavenly homeland (see introduction; Arabic glossary).
Coupled with Pope Shenouda's saying, today's religious revival focuses on the moral refashioning of a Christian selfhood through acts of piety, religious education, liturgical rites, and suffering so that Copts may be useful members of a "nation on the inside" and still achieve eternal salvation in a heavenly nation. How did martyr motifs and the afterlife emerge to shape, articulate, and continue to negotiate a Coptic Christian civic
(dis)engagement in this life? Framing my discussions within Judith Butler's notions of the constitutive and formative possibilities of injurious speech (1997) and Michel Foucault's technologies of self (1988), I investigate how the growing number of taratil with themes of transience, exodus, and metaphorical death (many of which started out as the Pope's poetry), reflect the contradictory ambivalences and desires to belong to Egypt as publicly pious and audible Christian citizens.117 It is in the seemingly passive process of withdrawal and
(dis)engagement that Copts politically engage, illustrating Foucault's paradox of subjectivation. Mahmood explains subjectivation as the very processes and conditions that secure a subject's subordination as well as the very means by which they become self- conscious and constituted agents (Mahmood 2005; Butler 1993, 1997c; Foucault 1980,
1983).
Finally, following Egypt's changing political landscapes under Presidents Anwar
Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, the Pope's image also underwent a slow transformation. As a charismatic defendant of Coptic citizenship rights at the beginning of his career, his disciples and congregants framed his image into a qidis muʻasir, a contemporary saint and a modern-
117 See chapter 4 for a discussion about the risks of public Christian audibility in Egypt's Christian religious festivals known as mawalid (sing. mulid).
130 day martyr who, in Saphinaz-Amal Naguib's terms, championed a new body of knowledge and offered his life for his community (1994). Later, as he shifted to a contemplative stance and withdrew from public negotiations of Coptic citizenry, the community celebrated his endurance to "die to the world."118 While martyrs are traditionally marked by their experiences of indescribable torture at the hands of their unbelieving accusers, monks and nuns must contend with the hardships of a voluntary ascetic life. Shenouda's story, as he, his followers, and taratil composers shaped it in their autobiographical and biographical writings and hagiographies, reflect the hardships he endured as an ascetic Patriarch forced to "live the world." As a political leader, Shenouda's examples transformed suffering into a "discursive fact": channels of power that permeate and control the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior (Foucault 1978: 11). In his writings, as he shared the intimacy of his spiritual struggles, he extended an invitation to his flock to imitate the saints and metaphorically follow him into the desert where monks generally live (Shenouda 2009: 30):
Your spirit, my beloved brother, wants to be set free, to fly like a bird which flies from one branch to another. It wants to be like the angels who are always singing praise to God without any bonds or restrictions.
For those who could not join him, Shenouda provided his poems, now taratil, about how to live as everyday monks and martyrs, caged songbirds in the city.
118 When laymen are consecrated as monks or nuns, they are initiated through a funeral prayer known in Arabic as Salat al-Mawt or "the Prayer of the Dead" and are symbolically buried under a large curtain to signify their literal detachment from societal relations and obligations. Besides their new black dress, many these new monks change their names and take on new ones as they rise up though the ranks of church hierarchy (nuns do not change as they cannot rise beyond being abbesses of a convent). See Joseph Youssef, "Coptic Monastic Initiation Rituals: To 'Die' and Live in Christ." Canadian Society for Coptic Studies (January 2012, Vol. 3-4, No. 1); Pieternella van Doorn-Harder, Contemporary Coptic Nuns (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Mark Gruber, Sacrifice in the Desert: A Study of an Egyptian Minority Through the Prism of Coptic Monasticism (Landham, M.D.: University Press of America, 2003).
131 Since the Christian Upbringing Movement, Sunday School education, and community taratil choirs initially flourished in the predominantly Christian neighborhood of
Shubra, I have focused my ethnographic research in this neighborhood. More specifically, I concentrate my efforts on Kanisat Amba Antonious bi Shubra, St. Anthony's Coptic
Orthodox Church in Shubra on El-Kargi Street. This is where Pope Shenouda first began his career of spiritual service as a Sunday School teacher. Every Friday for six months I attended the church's complete Sunday School programs starting with elementary right through to high school age. It was in this same church building where the Pope, then named Nazir
Gayed, pressed his students with the importance of integrating one's spiritual church life with their everyday personal one (Anonymous: 1985: 8).119 It was also the place where, as a rising khadim, he spearheaded one of the most popular youth meetings in all of Cairo, modeling what would later become his weekly overflowing Bible Studies in the Coptic Patriarchy. My discussions in this chapter will culminate in an ethnographic vignette of one Sunday School lesson—Miss Manal's class on the Good Friday before Easter—as a case-study of the recurring song motifs of sacrifice, suffering, and death in saint hagiographies. As Good
Friday is the day the Orthodox Church marks the death of Christ on the cross, she and her student-teachers taught taratil, sang them, and showed taratil videos to elementary schoolgirls in preparation for Easter, the largest feast of the Coptic year and an important element on which Christian eschatology hinges.
119 Many church pamphlets in local churches are not signed as anonymity is seen as another maker of spiritual sacrifice. Volunteers believe that when they donate their time without acknowledgment (monetary and otherwise), God, as the knower of their hard work, humility and modesty, will better blesses the author, particularly. In her work, Saba Mahmood also discusses modesty among the women's mosque movement in Egypt as another practice of piety (Princeton University Press, 2005: 156).
132 Crafting Contemporary Sainthood: Pope Shenouda's Early Service
Before I turn to contemporary Sunday Schools in Shubra, it is important to trace Pope
Shenouda's early service and his emerging "pastoral power" as a critical element which propelled the vibrant Church Upbringing reforms forward. In his work on Christian pastorship and political reason, Foucault writes that pastoral modalities of power depend on direct contact between the shepherd and the flock through individualized acts of kindness, constant contact, even playing music to keep the group together (in Carrette 1999: 140). And, in matters of danger and war, a part of a shepherd's duty is to valiantly give up his life, offset by the exchange of something extremely precious: immortality (138). Here, I argue that during Pope Shenouda's long career, the Patriarch not only emerged as an ultimate shepherd figure and a folk hero of the Coptic community but also as a contemporary saint who gave up the peace of his ascetic life to "live in the world." As a political actor, many interlocutors viewed his role as sacrificial and full of suffering in Egypt's contemporary political landscape.120 His direct contact with the community, through weekly Bible sermons, satellite broadcasts, and the dissemination of his cassette sermons and poems as taratil, gradually changed his public image. Additionally, his regular publications in the Sunday School
Magazine, the biweekly church magazine called al-Kiraza (literally, evangelism), and spiritual manuals also forged a deep and personalized connection with the wider Coptic
120 Mariz Tadros details Pope Shenouda's career and political encounters with Presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in "Vicissitudes in the Entente Between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the State in Egypt (1952-2007)." International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol. 41, No. 2 (2009): 269-87. Despite many criticisms of the Pope's entente with the State, specifically with Hosni Mubarak's regime, many interlocutors explained to me that the his “hands were tied” as he was doing his best to protect the community from greater dangers, such as the threat of Islamists and the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood.
133 public, resonating with tante Cecile's comment that she both knew and lived closely with the
Pope and his teaching. More important here, I conclude that his intimate poetry, sung as taratil and evoked as prayer, embedded motifs of martyrdom, self-mortification, and withdrawal resonated with what Saba Mahmood calls an agentival capacity, acts that resist structures of subordination while enacting what may appear to be deplorable passivity and docility (2005: 15).
Shortly after his death, a string of new taratil and saint doxologies (madaʼih) emerged praising the Pope, joining his life story to a long and sung genealogy of saint and martyr hagiographies that resembled tante Cecil's narrative to me over Skype. Additionally, the Coptic Cathedral's lead deacon and the Patriarch's personal cantor, Ibrahim Ayad, joined a growing league of guests on Coptic Christian satellite television, retelling the Pope's story as a hagiography, including his performance of miracles following his death. In almost all of these commemorations, Sunday School teachers, satellite TV commentators, and individual khuddam like my mother in-law praised Shenouda's life. They compared his struggles to the passions of the martyrs and ascetics in the desert and, more recently, to contemporary Copts who daily negotiated religious differences, tension, and marginalization as pious Christians in a Muslim majority nation. Various aspects of this argument become more clear in the section below where I address performative politics of the martyr motifs in Miss Manal's lessons to her young students.
In the cyber realm, Facebook memes and Youtube clips of Shenouda's old interviews surfaced with his famous motto (shiʻar): "Egypt is not a nation that we live in, but rather a nation that lives inside of us," the first line of his famous poem from ʼIntilaq al-Ruh, "I want
134 nothing of the world for I am not of the world." It was accompanied by his most popular saying "Rabbina Mawjud," roughly translating "the Lord is present" or "the Lord will take care of it." Today, the Pope's words (and his voice) are the signature logo of the Coptic
Church's semi-official satellite channel, CTV (Coptic Orthodox Christian Television). 121 His popular qasaʼid also looped on these channels as familiar taratil with titles such as: "Lost in a Foreign Land," "A Stranger I Lived in this World," and finally "Heroes." Many Copts were especially distraught by his death and signaled the fear of their own community scattering, highlighting Foucault's argument about the shepherd's immediate presence as the locus of the flock's existence (137).122 Others managed to find some comfort; he did not die, they argued, but like the otherworldly qasaʼid he penned and his taratil videos on CTV, he finally joined the lineage of immortal saints in the heavens.
Besides his prominent role as political mediator for the Copts (Tadros 2009),
Shenouda is also remembered most for formally institutionalizing Sunday School education.
Under his guidance, Sunday Schools became integral sites for cultivating Copts as moral and refined subjects that looked to themes of negation, silence, and withdrawal as practical tactics to lived personal struggles and a direct encounter with God. During the course of his career, while Nasser and Sadat pressed religious education into national service (Starrett
121 In his dissertation, “Cultivating Mystery: Miracles and a Coptic Moral Imaginary” (Harvard, 2010), Anthony Shenoda meditates on how “Rabbina Mawjud,” has been transformed into a motto that can also signify Coptic experiences of otherworldly agency and presence (2010: 186). He identifies the Coptic religious renaissance of the 1970s as al-nahda al-qibtiyya al-kanisiyya and provides a brief account of Pope Shenouda's ascent to the Patriarchal Seat: 81-86. 122 Many of Shenouda's followers were so distraught that during his wake a number were trampled to death during the rush for a final viewing and taking of the blessings (baraka). The wake was then subsequently closed and then aired CTV. A few days later, a further number of people died during another stampede in Shenouda's new burial place and mazar (shrine) in St. Bishoy Monastery, which was then also closed for a short time.
135 1998), Shenouda's ministry also emerged out of these educational efforts to make Christian piety practically useful. While public education in Egypt hoped to imprint a modernist perspective in its citizens by emphasizing arithmetic, writing, and an Islam that was a tangible and measurable object (1998: 231), Shenouda's ministry emphasized saint hagiographies, spiritual service, and habituated piety as a tangible reform to a Christian ethical refashioning. In his visceral poetry, he instructs his followers on how to achieve God's direct presence though fervent, even tearful prayer, as well as a deep detachment from one's lived experience:
Do you want your soul to be released into a place where there are no bonds nor restrictions? Then, first of all, you have to rid yourself of everything, of every desire, knowledge, and feeling which the world may have implanted in you. You have to deny yourself, and to stand before God as nothing…know your real self. Who are you?… You are even less than dust. You are nothing.123
Much of the Pope's poetry reiterated themes of self-mortification as key to God's presence and a spiritual victory. In other words, in a believer's non-constitution, God is constituted. As a person (dis)engaged, God emerged to engage in that person's place, resonating with another frequently evoked Biblical verse in Shubra: "…God chose the weak things in the world to shame the strong" (NIV Corinthians 1:27). As a technology of self,
Foucault (in Carrette 1999: 143) reminds us that mortification and rupture is a critical element of political and social power:
Mortification is not death, of course, but it is a renunciation of this world and of oneself: a kind of everyday death. A death which is supposed to provide life in another world. This is not the first time we see the shepherd theme associated with death; but here it is other than in the Greek idea of political power. It is not a sacrifice for the city; Christian mortification is a kind of relation from oneself to oneself. It is a
123 “Know Yourself.” Release of the Spirit [English], translated by Wedad Abbas, (Cairo, Egyptian Printing Co., 2004): 47.
136 part, a constitutive part of the Christian self-identity.
Shenouda's earliest poetic confessions and meditations modeled a kind of spiritual and political (dis)engagement that the Coptic community soon followed as choir directors transformed his texts into taratil and the songs grew popular among Sunday School choirs, popular singers, and audiences of Coptic satellite television. To the end of his career, his spiritual reforms almost always drew on these ascetic themes, as is evident in some of his book titles: Spiritual Warfares, The Spiritual Means, The Fruit of the Spirit, The Holy Spirit and His Work Within Us, The Release of the Spirit, Return to God, Life of Faith. Throughout his career, Shenouda authored some 141 books, moral manuals, as well as articles in the
Church's Sunday School magazine (Van Doorn-Harder and Guirguis 2011: 157).
From as early as his days as the editor-in-chief of the Sunday School's burgeoning magazine, Magalat Madaris ʼAhad [literally the Sunday School Magazine], the then named
Nazir Gayed made his intentions and mission of religious eduction clear to produce contemporary Christians saints, soldiers for God, and loyal servants to the wider public.
These hopes closely mirrored Habib Girgis' early reforms to negotiate that state's reforms and what Deeb eloquently identified as a pious modernity (2006). In the magazine's first entry, the board wrote in an extended introduction:
It is our intent to bring a new message to the Coptic community…. It is our hope that the Sunday School Magazine echoes the God's resonant voice for the individuals reform, the family, and the society…so that all may find subsistence of a spiritual, social, literate, scientific and healthful kind....
In order for us to succeed and for all of our activities to be useful, we must bring God into all things, so that God may be all things, in the world, in society, in etiquette, in health, in the schools, in marriage, in children, in the family, in capital, in business… in men of religion and their selection to leadership positions. For God is the source of
137 all things, for nothing succeeds if it is separated from God….
For the source of ignorance is separation between religion and the world. What use is it that religion is separate from our personal and public life? It is necessary for us to pick Church leaders in the same way that Jesus laid out in the Bible, and it is necessary for the Church to regain its power over all work and all individuals…. It is necessary for us to have our own Christian schools, graduating Christian saints who will be fit to be soldiers of God and khuddam for the wider society…. (Sunday School Magazine, April 1947, Vol. 1: 1-2)
When tensions struck between the Church's laity, clergy, and the Patriarch before him, a young Shenouda turned to the power of his own poetry and published his first spiritual poem "Abwab al-Jahim" ["Doors of the Inferno"] in the Sunday School magazine.124 In an overt use of the martyr motifs, he wrote a scathing critique of the Church's old guard, comparing the resistance that the young activists and reformers faced from within their own
Church to the persecution and crucifixion of Christ. Even before his time as an ascetic monk,
Shenouda was already transforming saint hagiographies and motifs of death into productive strategies to negotiate Church politics. During his days as Patriarch, his flock would extend these tactics into the public and civic sphere; following the drive by 2010 Christmas Eve shooting that killed 6 Coptic youths and one Muslims police officer, protestors in Egypt and abroad infused the same texts, now a tartila set by the famous Diaʼ Sabry, with another kind of performative politics. And in turn, they too reframed the [Christian] fallen as victorious martyrs who died for their faith.125
124 Pope Shenouda, “Abwab al-Jahim” [“Doors of the Inferno”] ʼIntilaq al-Ruh,16th edition (Cairo, Magalit al-Kiraza, 2009); 114-115. 125 For more on this song, orchestrated by the popular murannim Dia‘ Sabry, and its use as a religious national anthem in the protests following the Nag Hammadi killings, see my chapter “Singing Strategic Multiculturalism: The Discursive Politics in Coptic-Canadian Protests” in Coptic Future: challenges and Dynamics edited by Nelly van Doorn-Harder (University of South Carolina Press, 2013).
138 Abwab al-Jahim / Doors of the Inferno (1947)
How often has injustice befallen you? How repeatedly death desired you? How many persecutions hit you with torture and affliction? How much you were injured like Jesus with nails and thorns? They tortured you and your children, expelled and banished you Amazing! How did you stand firm against infidelity and paganism? A sound continually echoes in your ear Igniting a strength inside of your when God says to you The doors of the inferno will prevail over you
139 Release of the Spirit: Practical Pedagogies of Piety
In his study, Gregory Starrett observed that Egyptian public schools became children's initial institutional encounters with state-approved Islam beginning in the 1980s.
Before the mosque, primary schools became the "first house of God" with basic religious training in the knowing and doing of Islam: how to fast for Ramadan, how to pray, how to pay tithes, and how to read, chant, and analyze the Qur'an (1998: 104). This shift mirrored what was already happening in Coptic Sunday Schools under Habib Girgis' tutelage where students learned about practices of faith through song (chapter 2). Starrett argues that after
1952, post-revolutionary education also had an overt functional purpose of mobilizing the masses to identify with the revolution in a kind of ritualized appreciation, with major emphasis on public celebrations, the singing out loud of nationalist texts and slogans, and "a renewed commitment to Islamic symbols [as] part of government policy," (1998: 80). Islamic curricula in primary schools, Timonthy Mitchell adds, were part of the State's modernist reforms against indigenous superstitions and "backward" folk traditions, and they also aimed to protect youngsters' susceptibilities to "political Islam" or tatarruf: extremism that varied outside of state-approved religious expression (Mitchell 1988: 132).
Following Habib Girgis' death in 1952, Girgis' closest apprentice Bishop Shenouda renamed the Sunday School Movement [Harakat Madaris al-ʼAhad] as the Church
Upbringing movement [al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya] in a similar effort to emphasize the movement's usefulness in raising pious and loyal Christians from their youth (Sinout 2001:
47). As the Bishop of Christian Education, Bishop Shenouda renewed Girgis' call for an ethical restructuring that emphasized "the priority of an individual's spiritual life,"
140 culminating in his most widely published work The Release of the Spirit (Anonymous 1985:
8). What first began as a series of short meditative articles and poems by a hermit monk for the Sunday School Magazine transformed into a single volume anthology which Shenouda published in 1957. While the Egyptian state transformed the school into a house of God by infusing primary education with Islamic symbolism, Pope Shenouda's ministry and reforms transformed Churches, Christian houses of God, into thriving and bustling centers of Sunday
Schools. Besides religious education, church volunteers also offered field trips, organized computer labs, directed community choirs, and offered other social services. They also conducted taratil choir rehearsals in the church pews and later in adjacent buildings known as Mabana Khadimat, the Church Service Building. In all of these services, students learned how to fast, pray, and sing their Orthodox faith using Pope Shenouda's materials and the
Sunday School syllabi approved by him. Like Egypt's public school pupils, they too learned how to be pious and practicing believers, though without the fragmentation and underlying political opposition that afflicted the "secular" government (Starrett 1998: 15).
It was in Shubra's St. Anthony Church that Shenouda continued the work that Girgis started. Whereas Girgis objectified and textualized faith into textbook and taratil pamphlets,
Shenouda functionalized the pedagogies of piety into the actual doing, living, witnessing of the taratil his students sang. Shenouda's writings were so transformative that they were even reinterpreted into new anthems that community choirs performed, Sunday School students memorized, and spiritual cells called ʼusar used to pray during their meetings.126 Songs like
126 It is interesting to note that when Hasan Banna first established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, he also called religious cells families, or ‘usar. For more on the early developments of the group please see Barbara Zollner's The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (New York, Routledge, 2009).
141 “‘Aghlaq al-Bab wa hagig" ["Shut the Door, and Sojourn"], taught students how to pray, retreating to the inward intimacy of their homes, and essentially into themselves, to find God through inward spiritual struggle:
ʼAghlaq al-Bab wa hagig / Shut the Door and Sojourn
Close the door and sojourn into the dusk of the night Fill the night with prayer, struggle, and tears
As the government hoped to curtail religious tatarruf, Sunday School khuddam's goals were also preemptive, hoping to steer their youth far from Western notions of secular modernity.
Additionally, Orthodox Copts had to contend with another competitor: encroaching
Protestant missionary influences. In the words of Hasan (2003: 68), Sunday School leaders hoped to socialize Coptic youth...
…so that their criteria of achievement would no longer be western-style conspicuous consumption but the emulation of Egyptian saint fathers such as St. Anthony…. Such ancient Saints were to be held up as models of frugality, discipline, and perseverance, and that would turn them not only into good churchmen, but also good citizens.
Situated within the most densely packed Christian neighborhoods in Cairo, St.
Antony's Church rose to prominence for hosting the largest youth meeting in Cairo, led by
Bishop Shenouda himself. Known as ʼIgtimaʻ al-Shabab (literally, Youth Meeting), future
Sunday School teachers learned more than just Biblical stories, Church theology, and
Orthodox dogma. Rather, they learned how to apply their teachings to daily living. Topics extended beyond the classroom from proper dating etiquette, marriage, and the raising of children. Advice on philanthropy and class relations also intermingled with Biblical proverbs and stories.127 As Starrett describes, just as the al-Azhar religious primary, preparatory, and
127 As Bishop, Shenouda's meetings moved to the Coptic patriarchy to accommodate the growing numbers 142 secondary schools flourishing during Hosni Mubarak's presidency produced a growing number of mosque imams (Starrett 1998: 105), St. Anthony's Sunday Schools also graduated students who never left the Church institution. Like the Pope, many returned to the Sunday
School service as teachers, consecrated khuddam who dedicated their lives to service, monks, nuns, priests, and many bishops. These meetings were so popular that when I first asked my mother-in-law, tante Cecile, about her encounter as a khadima or a Sunday School teacher in
Shubra, she pointed me to a whole shelf of her handwritten notebooks from these meetings.
Filled from cover to cover, they were her notes taken during these sermons thirty years prior when she was preparing to become a Sunday School teacher, and it was clear that she continues to refer to this resource until this day. After these preparatory meetings, tante
Cecile herself went on to become an ʼaminat-khidma, literally the director of the entire
Sunday School service for girls in her local church, Kanisat al-Sit Dimyyana Baba Dublu in
Shubra. Her husband, Michel, another graduate of these meetings, also went on to become a prominent service director, organizing and leading weekly meetings, outings, and spiritual activities for local artisans in their church. Finally, their eldest daughter, who followed her mother as a prominent Sunday School teacher, went on to become an Orthodox nun.
While Egypt's ruling elites have seen their modernist educational reforms fail, with the accompanying fragmentation of religious authority and the proliferation of largely religious groups challenging the State's authority, Coptic Orthodox institutions have on the whole been more successful.128 Under Pope Shenouda III's reign, the Coptic Church
in his audience. 128 It is important to note that there were a number of figures who contested the Church's religious authority including a former seminary figure George Habib Bibawi whom the Pope excommunicated for criticizing his lack of early church history. Nelly van Doorn-Harner and Magdi Guirguis briefly outline a
143 witnessed a massive institutionalization of the clerical body from the 1960s onward, a move that unified the community and prompted a "clericalized" laity to act as "full-time partners in the project of institutional reform." Also, many spiritual volunteers had direct and vertical communications with the church hierarchy (el-Khawaga 1997: 145). Like the individualizing power of a pastoral technology (Foucault, in Carrette 1999: 138), even access to the Patriarch became easier. This was facilitated by his weekly Bible studies in the Patriarchy and the broadcasts of his sermons into the intimacy of people's living rooms through Coptic Christian satellite television. Such closeness between the Patriarch, church laity, and clergy fostered a community cohesion that became furthered heightened by the visceral and sung experiences of singing his lessons and "releasing the spirit." When the Pope's meetings first began in the late 1960s, one deacon accompanied by the ʻud led the congregation in a brief collective singing of taratil before his arrival, in preparation for his sermon.129 Local church choirs traveled all over Egypt, and between the clapping, ululation, and heightened fervor among the audience from seeing the aging Patriarch in the flesh, performed his devotional poetry as taratil in his honor. Towards the end of his life, as Shenouda's health worsened, these taratil performances (and the effusive clapping, cheering, and ululations) largely outlasted the
Patriarch's sermon itself. Hasan asserts that such cultivation of collective emotion and—I add here—the physical viscerality of song, vibrating in the body as it is performed collectively by a group, allowed for "a new impersonal discipline, one that demanded self-restraint, sustained commitment to the cause, and systematic activity" (Hasan 2003: 64). It was this
number of these cases in The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (American University in Cairo, 2011): 186-88. 129 In the next chapter, I highlight taratil's presence before pedagogical sermons.
144 kind of productive ethos, I argue, that transformed Sunday School's pedagogies of piety and crafted sainthood into a contemporary pedagogies of politics.
Sunday School in Shubra Today
Walking through Shubra today, it is hard to imagine that this neighborhood, whose name in Coptic means "farmland," was once a khedive paradise. Where Khedive Mehmet Ali built a tree-lined street as a picturesque escape to his countryside getaway, donkey carts now compete fiercely with cars that, in turn, wind in and out of pedestrians walking tentatively on jutting sidewalks overtaken by vendors, merchandise, or rubble.130 Shubra's congested traffic is both unceasing and relentless, unfolding under a thick constellation of sounds: a chorus of horns honking over a messy counterpoint of people yelling, selling, and buying things.131 Like its saturated soundscape, Shubra is one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in all of
Cairo, where a diminishing middle class, once the teachers and lawyers who participated in the 1919 revolution against British occupation, now struggle to hack out a decent living.
Historically, it was also one of the most diverse and thriving neighborhoods in the city, teeming with Syrian merchants, Eastern Europeans looking for work, Greek and Italian expatriates, and Egyptian migrants from the Delta city of Munfiyya.132
In his work Cairo: Streets and Stories (2008), Egyptian urban historian Hamdi Abu-
Galil neglects to mention one important story: that this neighborhood is also the most
130 Today, this long path that was built first paved in 1847 and intended to be the widest street built of its time is one of Shubra's main arteries, Shubra Street (Tarabili 2003: 192). 131 Osama Fawzy's film ʼAna Bahib al-Sima [I love Cinema] (2004) is an excellent showcase of Shubra's layered and cacophonous soundscape. 132 Interlocutors frequently introduced Shubra to me with an exuberant saying,"Shubra walada!" [roughly 145 predominantly Christian one in all of Cairo and, in the last century, hosted the largest missionary presences in the city (Ibrahim 2003: 26).133 Such a historical omission stands in sharp contrast to how native Shabrawiyyin (those who are from Shubra) frame their neighborhood. One day, when I was buying two kilos of tangerines, a Christian neighborhood fruit vendor proudly reminded me that it was a Copt, one Youssef Effendi, who first introduced the fruit to Egypt and planted it right here in Shubra. Mehmet Ali was so impressed by the fruit that he even named it after him, yusteffendi.
Others are quick to point out streets like Sharʻ al-Biʻtha or Missionary Street; standing on opposing corners, two competing Orthodox and Protestant evangelical bookstores pose a striking gateway to a looming Catholic Cathedral and a whole medley of
Protestant and Orthodox churches and schools, each with its own merchandise blinking, winking, and singing out onto the street. Many Egyptian writers and social scientists fail to mention the slew of Christian philanthropy organizations that dot prominent storefronts and which are central to people's lives today because they offer the social services that the State
meaning Shubra has given birth to greatness, with an eye to their neighborhood's history. The vibrant enclave is the birthplace of popular Italian-Egyptian singer, Dalida, prominent writer Milad Hanna, cultural critic Ghali Shokry, musician Simon, and the famous Naguib Mahfouz (Hamdi Abu-Galil 2008: 436). Additionally, the neighborhood is also home to a large influx of migrants from the Delta city of Munfiyya because of the bus station in Shubra. Nicknamed “Matar Munfiyya” [the Munfiyya airport], the bus stop is the first stop for incoming immigrant and the primary means of getting to other cities in the Delta (438). 133 Abu-Galil is not the only one to marginalize a Coptic presence in Shubra. ʻIrfat ʻAbd-ʻAli also negates them completely in his work Al-Qahira fi ʻasr ʼismaʻil [Cairo During the Ismaili Era] (Cairo, Lebanese Egyptian Publishing House, 1998)). ʻAbbas Tarabili only mentions one Catholic school and church, and one Orthodox Church in his ʼahyaʼ al-Qahira al-Mahrusa: Khitat al-tarabili [The Neighborhoods of a Protected Cairo: Tarabili's Writings] (Cairo: Egyptian Lebanese Publishing House, 2003), presenting a sharp contrast to the reality of Shubra today. Finally, Heather Sharkey's work neglects to mention the vibrant missionary activity in Shubra despite her emphasis on their work in the adjacent neighborhood of downtown Cairo in American Evangelicals in Egypt; Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire. (Princeton University Press, 2008).
146 fails to provide. Large media libraries selling taratil cassettes and DVDs of saint hagiographies also mark prominent streets such as Shariʻal-Tirʻa, and largest Orthodox bookstore, Maktabat al-Mahaba, literally "the Bookstore of Love" on Shubra street takes up a whole store plaza and goes up two flights of a large apartment building. Like many neighboring Muslim businesses, Christian stores also market their own religious identities with images of Christ and the Virgin or other local saint favorites replacing the familiar plaques of "Allahu Akbar" ["God is Great"] or "Mashaʼ Allah" ["God willed it"].
It was here that the bulk of my ethnographic research unfolded. While cars and donkey carts on Shubra Street maneuvered through the treacherous traffic dominated by those who could literally honk the loudest, a simple walk through Shubra on a Friday morning reveals a quieter, albeit similarly entangled and competing soundscape. Orthodox
Church bells signify the beginning of a Coptic liturgy alongside Coptic Protestants singing snippets of the American Presbyterian taratil pamphlet, Nazm al-Mazamir. Livelier taratil loudly accompanied by a band bounced out of the windows of an Apostolic Pentecostal
Kanisat Allah [the Church of God], while muted Catholic masses in Arabic regularly waft outside of the cracked church gates. All these genres come together under the blanket of the
Friday sermons resonating from the loudspeakers attached to the minarets of the surrounding local mosques. These were the sounds that accompanied my walk from my apartment to St.
Anthony's church on El-Kargi Street.
I also knew I was in the vicinity of the church when the tiny roads suddenly emptied of cars, replaced instead by cement bollards jutting out of the ground, preventing anyone from parking too closely. Uniformed police officers sat on plastic white chairs in front of the
147 church doors, chatting, sipping tea, and shooing away flies. Interlocutors informed me that when a car bomb failed to detonate in front of St. Anthony's church a few years back, it ignited such heightened security measures, like traffic blockades and police checks. But many were skeptical. Weary of these efforts, they confessed it only made it harder to get to the church as there were already fewer parking spots in the overflowing streets. Rumors also had it that the more "spiritually active" and "visible" a church in its socio-cultural significance, the more officers sat in the makeshift security gazebo to monitor these events. 134
St. Anthony's Church always had more than four, and one of them was even a zabit, an officer of rank.
Of all the churches in Shubra, I focused my efforts on St. Anthony's in Shubra, not only for its significance as the place where Pope Shenouda first served as a Sunday School teacher but also for its pivotal role in today's broader church education renaissance and distinguished reputation for "nahda ruhiya" or spiritual revival. Hasan notes that St.
Anthony's was known for digging for its spiritual roots and looking backwards toward its own heritage: she writes that St. Anthony's spiritual volunteers were principally interested in the resurrection of the Coptic language, in unearthing the century-old church hymns and dirges that were no longer chanted, and in exhuming the stories of Egypt's saints and martyrs
(Hasan 2003: 77). While she addresses the revived liturgical genre of alhan, she left out pedagogical taratil that became the locus of extra-liturgical activities and the focus of the volunteers' personal practices of piety. Again, she mentioned that due to St. Anthony's
134 In her study “The Church Made Visible: Intercessory Images of Church Territory in Church,” Angie Heo articulates a similar anxiety about church visibility and reminds us that these accusations of church bombings are not baseless. Former minister of interior, Habib al-ʻAdly is under investigation for the 2011 New Year's Eve bombing of the Two Saints Church in Alexandria (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2012, 54/2): 374 ft.17.
148 religious spiritual training, integrating one's spiritual life into all aspects of life, the church produced a prolific number of mukrrasin, individuals who dedicated their lives to service, neither marrying nor taking vocations outside of the church. In other words, mukrrasin closely resembled the contemplative monks and nuns who lived and served "in the world" beyond the secluded contemplation of the convent or monastery.135
St. Anthony's also inspired its thirty neighboring Orthodox churches in Shubra to pursue similar rigorous spiritual training, with many of their khuddam moving or marrying into other church communities in Shubra and beyond (Anonymous, St. Anthony's Church of
Shubra 1985: 8). It is also critical to note that many of today's prominent choir directors and taratil composers also come from or served in Shubra in one way or another and, like the
Pope, first began their services in this neighborhood: Dia‘ and Irene Sabry who started Fariʼ al-Tasbih al-Qibti [The Choir of Coptic Praise], George Kyrillos who started the international David Ensemble, Magdy Latif who started Kural Shabbab al-Amba Ruis [St.
Reuaiss Youth Choir], and Arsani Nairouz who started Kural al-Katiʻ al-Saghir [The Little
Flock] and released one of the most popular cassette of children's taratil, "ʼIhki ya Tarikh!"
[Tell us, Oh History!"]. I interviewed many of these directors, and almost always they fondly remembered their times in St. Anthony's, recalling their choir rehearsals as children and their first efforts to record taratil cassettes in the Church's recording studios located in the Service
Building.
135 St. Anthony's Church of Shubra is so proud of the number of its Sunday School graduates that have gone on to become mukrrasin or devoted and ascetic servants that they devote the last few pages of their anonymously authored pamphlet to list their names; Anonymous. Dhikrayat; Bimunasabat al-ubil al- Dhahabi li Bunaʼ Kanisat al-ʼAnba ʼAntunyus bi Shubra [Memories: For the Golden Jubilee Anniversary of Building St. Anthony's Church of Shubra] (Cairo, St. Anthony's Church of Shubra, 1985): 103. Additionally, religion scholar, Nelly van Doorn-Harder explores mukarrasat or consecrated women in her work Contemporary Coptic Nuns (University of South Carolina, 1995): 38-39.
149 Founded in 1935, St. Anthony's stood out in the residential neighborhood as if it was a gated compound, with the Egyptian police, cordoned streets, and a kushk or a snack bar for the Sunday School students at its gates. Besides the Church, which contained a media library, a computer room, clergy offices, and a bookstore, there was a large Mabna al-Khadamat or the towering Church Services Building just across the small street. There, the building hosted other Sunday School classrooms, another media library, a theater, and the Church's recording studio. St. Anthony's service schedule began from Thursday evening with rehearsals for
Anthony Team, a junior and high school choir who practiced and recorded seasonal taratil every year. Services would continue all of the next day with the morning liturgies followed by lessons taking place both in the empty church and in the service building. Classes began at 11:00am and ended around 6:30p.m. when the khuddam meeting ended. Afterwards, students, teachers, parents, and volunteers largely socialized in the church's courtyard, singing together, talking, snacking, exchanging lessons, and passing out of trinkets like
Sunday School pictures for a job well done. I spent many long Fridays in St. Anthony's
Sunday School classes and service building, attending many of the church's khuddam meetings, choir rehearsals, liturgies, concerts, and devotional meetings scheduled throughout the week.
I admit that despite the scene's usual warmth, I dragged myself to these weekly lessons, looking a little more like the elementary and junior highs students who were begrudgingly gathered in front of the kushk snack bar than the older khuddam closer to my age. Other teachers picked up the younger students from their homes in the surrounding
150 apartment buildings. The female khuddam themselves were fairly easy to pick out.136 At all times of their service, the women's hair was covered under a white halo of a lace escharpe, as if they had never left liturgy contexts where women typically cover their hair with a white veil.137 Students were grouped by their school ages, and in every hour different aged groups filed into the church to begin their program.138 As a large group, everyone prayed the canonical hours together, reviewing last week's verses from the lessons, and alternated between singing alhan and taratil depending on the week.139
Though a young student-volunteer handed everyone a taratil pamphlet, taratil and alhan texts were shown in PowerPoint, with accompanying religious pictures. Miss Magda, the Church's Sunday School principal director (ʼaminat al-Khidma), led these meetings with the help of two younger assistant teachers-in-training who prepared the presentations, led
136 It is also important here for me to clarify that Sunday School classes are generally segregated, with male khuddam teaching the boys while women taught young girls. Even servant preparation meetings were largely separated. While I did get to observe a few boys' classes, I simply drew far less attention attending women's class, and set many more people at ease following this strategy. That is why my discussions here focus on women's classes. 137 During Orthodox liturgical services, women largely cover their hair with a shawl or veil. I have heard a number of reasons for this. The Coptic diocese of the Southern United States cites the veil as a maker of tradition and instruction in Biblical scripture (1 Corinthians 11:1-15); http://www.suscopts.org/q&a/index.php?qid=1324&catid=626 (accessed 22 July 2013). Other interlocutors remark that they do not want to provoke or attract a male gaze, giving them some privacy during prayer and protecting other members of their community from desire. Like the Muslim hijab, the veil is considered a physical marker of piety, and is central to many discussions of how “authenticating” the faith (hence the Souther Diocese' discussion board). 138 The Services schedule at St. Anthony's Church is as follows: from 11:00am to 12:30pm, 3rd and 4th graders met together for lessons; from 12:30-1:30 Kindergartners, 1st and 2nd grade met together; from 3:30 to 4:30 High School students; and finally student teachers and other volunteers gathered in the church for their service meeting from 4:30 to 6:30. 139 Gruber discusses the importance of the Agbeya, where at each hour, the prayers commemorate the critical events leading up to Christ's crucifixion. Writing about the Coptic monks, he argues "the praying of the Agbeya incorporates each day of the monk's life into the timeless mystery of Christ's passion, further uniting the monks to his sacrificial role" (2003: 148).
151 prayer, and monitored the equipment. After our major prayer together, the large group usually broke off into smaller classes of approximately 10-15 girls who followed the younger teachers into various corners of the church for their individual lessons. From a bird's eye view, all the khuddam held the same notebook with the uniform images of St. Anthony, the
Church's patron saint. Sitting from the balcony, as I did during my first few visits, I could see
St. Anthony's image looking up and winking up at me. This was the routine every week, and slowly I moved downstairs to visit many smaller groups for a few weeks until Miss Sherry volunteered to take me into her group as a stray sheep. As the children prepared for their lessons by singing taratil, other volunteers walked around selling the Church's junior magazine, Baraʼm ‘Antunus [loosely translated as the Anthony's Sprouting Buds]. Another volunteer sold religious stickers, followed by yet another who signed up students for future trips and outings and collecting fees. For as little as half an Egyptian Pound, students could also buy a study guide for the Church wide Bible study tournaments, al-Mahragan.
Pedagogies of Politics: Miss Manal's Class
In this section, I focus on one Sunday School lesson in particular as a case-study of the recurring song motifs of martyrdom and death in taratil. More specifically, I explore their role in crafting alternative modalities of agency and in habituating Coptic ethical norms of suffering through the bodily acts of listening to and singing these songs. Drawing on Saba
Mahmood's study of the Muslim woman's piety movement in Egypt and on suffering's constitutive and agentival capacities (2005), I investigate how martyr motifs are integral to
Coptic performative agency of withdrawal and how they articulate the convergences and
152 contradictions of two modes of belonging: to an Egyptian nation as well as a watan al- samawi, a heavenly homeland. By drawing on death and the afterlife in Christian eschatology, Copts are paradoxically sounding a mode of lived belonging here in this world, and more specifically, as a religious minority in a Muslim majority nation.
Saba Mahmood (2005: 162) and Judith Butler (1993: 234) also remind us of the role that bodily performatives play in the constitution of a subject. Singing and watching taratil and saint hagiographies are not only critical to formative pedagogies of piety and the coordination of outward, social behaviors but also, as I argue here, are essential to a pedagogies of politics. By learning about, acting, and singing martyr deaths, Sunday School teachers and their students have imbued acts of piety with agency by learning to claim a higher moral ground and enact a moral superiority as necessary elements of belonging to heaven. While fasting, prayer, and suffering are largely silent acts of piety, singing and listening to taratil are audible performances of faith that extend into the civic and public sphere; moreover, as I illustrate in the next chapter, they are part of a larger Coptic discourse to exteriorize an "Egypt on the inside" as part of a larger Christian territory.
* * * * *
Miss Manal, a short petite woman, looks no more than a decade older than her own assistant student teachers. As an ʼaminat al-ʼusra (literally, the fraternity director), she supervises 6 younger student teachers who each teach a class of elementary school girls, named ʼUsrat al-Qidisin, literally the Family of the Saints. Every Friday, she and her student teachers teach in the Social Services building adjacent to the Church. Despite her small frame, she had a commanding presence and, like tante Cecile, devoted all of her free time to
153 the Church. I had heard about her class from one of her own student teachers, Miss Mariam, who half-jokingly complained of the extensive preparation needed to participate in this service. Working on the third draft of her Sunday School lesson and PowerPoint presentation,
Mariam praised Miss Manal's praised her meticulousness and attention to detail. During the course of the week, the director spent considerable time with the younger teachers, going over PowerPoint slides, lesson plans, and organizing the weekly handouts.
I joined Miss Manal's Sunday School class on the Friday before Passion Week of the upcoming Easter festivities, since Easter is the most significant and holiest feast day of the year. The group did not split to various corners of the room as they usually did during non- feast days. Instead, they stayed together, singing taratil from the subtitled videos that the student-teachers prepared and projected onto a screen. As the girls buzzed with anticipation for the lesson, Miss Manal swiftly got control of the room with a single and most boisterous
"Ahem! Ahem!" and the room quickly fell silent. She reminded the girls how important it was to pay attention during this Easter lesson, and also did not neglect to remind them that there would be a wonderful surprise waiting at the end of the lesson. When she sent two young student teachers to fetch the surprise, it was not lost on the girls that their prizes may include goodies and treats from the snack kiosk at the church's entrance.
To the backdrop of paschal alhan echoing from the next room, the first student teacher, Miss Christine, came to the front of the room and began to teach a lesson the same way most children's taratil cassettes started; likely from an older recording, she played the spoken introduction, a voice speaking over a synthesized keyboards that introduced the song's and lesson's upcoming themes. As the class would be reviewing all the events leading
154 up to Christ's death and resurrection here, the young man's recorded voice spoke over a mournful and languid melody. In the self-mortification that resembled Pope Shenouda's poetry, he articulated a personal struggle and a desire to suffer Christ's passion in order to emerge victorious over death:
When I sit and meditate about what You [Christ] did for me and how you left glory behind for me…. And with your precious blood you purchased my cheap self. You rescued me and took me from the hands of devil. You released me from the eternal prison [a squeaky sound of a heavy iron cast door opens] and trampled all the locks. You allowed me to taste freedom after I lived in this prison. I as myself, how could you do all of this of me? I could not find a response for this, except for you Oh Lord. Your love for me allowed you to carry your cross—I mean my cross! Yes, my cross [the sounds of the heavy iron door grates shut]…. Your passions should have been my torture, but you agreed to death for your beloved, so that you may come for the salvation of your beloved….
Like the children's taratil cassettes, this recorded introduction preceded the first tartila that everyone would listen to together: "Fuʼ al-Salib," or "[Hanging] on the Cross."
First, however, Miss Christine reviewed the first moments of Christ's crucifixion to the backdrop of a video behind her. After her brief lesson, we watched as Christ began the laborious ascent up Golgotha hill from the 1977 Anglo-Italian television mini series, Jesus
Christ of Nazareth. After a sweeping orchestral crescendo over these images, evangelical murannim Ayman Zafrouni sang: "As I see You mounted on the cross/ I realized how much
You loved me/ And I understood You as my Lord/ With Your death, You gave me life." With every repeating refrain, the images cycled to match the sorrowful and repentant text; "For me/ they punctured Your hands/ For me, they spit on You." At this most heightened part of the refrain, the girls watched closely as a Roman guard nailed Christ's bloodied hands onto the cross. In an almost unforgiving manner, we returned to this excruciating moment again
155 and again. Some girls flinched to the images of the hammer baring down. Others stared at the screen unblinking, their mouth partly open and frozen. There were no subtitles for this particular video, as it seemed that the girls were meant to watch rather than sing along. At the end of the seven-minute video, some of the young girls seemed visibly shaken, with which
Miss Manal chided, "Laʼ matikta‘ ibush—lissa al-yum tawil!" "Don't get depressed yet—We have a long day ahead of us!" I shifted uneasily in my seat.
After this first video, Miss Christine directed the girls' attention to another
PowerPoint presentation where the girls reviewed the liturgical rites of Maundy Thursday in bullet form. Known in Arabic as Laʼan, this service reenacted the moment Christ washed his disciples' feet during the paschal week. In class, Miss Manal interrupted Miss Christine and reminded the girls that, in the same way Christ humbled himself to wash his disciples' feet,
"we must wash our selves from all sins, and confess them before communion." Confession, she emphasized, was one of the seven liturgical sacraments of the church, a necessary requisite to taking part of the Eucharist and essential too to becoming one in the Body of
Christ and serving the larger Orthodox community. After a brief pause, the lessons continued and the girls repeated Biblical verses and named important events from the PowerPoint, evoking Girgis' borrowed catechism style from American Presbyterian missionaries (see chapter 2).
For the next two hours, the six student teachers rotated in this same sequence, beginning their little lessons with taratil videos. Stock footage from Mel Gibson's The
Passion of the Christ (2004) and the Jesus of Nazareth TV series (1977), superimposed with taratil and subtitles, first illustrated the lesson while PowerPoints highlighted important
156 details in bullet form. As one young teacher spoke, another would assist by organizing the technology, or would simply sit and wait their turn at the front of the room. At the end of the lesson, all the student teachers handed out a cross-shaped pamphlet that they had cut out and made together for the students to take home. Tied together with a black ribbon, the color of mourning, the pamphlet summarized the lessons and synoptically listed the paschal week's history, its important dates, and biblical readings.
Throughout our time together, Miss Manal stood at the front of the room, interjecting from time to time in order to reinforce the lesson's broader themes and in particular, during these Easter lessons, its martyr themes with broader and more practical applicability.
Occasionally, she explicitly tied these motifs to children's etiquette and morality training in public and domestic spheres, such as at their schools or their actions at home. In one particular moment, as Miss Carina reviewed Christ's demeanor when Pontius Pilot sentenced him to death, Miss Manal interrupted her to emphasize Christ's "huduʼ, tawadʻ, wa hikma;" just as he faced his accusers with "quietude, humility, and wisdom," she encouraged the girls to model that and "nikun khuddam li al-kul"—"be servants for all." Like Miss Sherry's lessons, the conversation broadened to include obedience to one's parents, kindness to one's siblings, and forgiveness to one's enemies. As the older khadima spoke, one keen girl hunched over a small notebook taking studious notes, only pausing to push back the braid that fell over her curved shoulders. When Miss Manal asked questions to make sure the students were listening, this little girl raised her hand most eagerly and answered correctly. In a most public display of victory, Miss Manal awarded her a coveted bag of chispy, which was tossed from the front of the room over a sea of envious eyes. There was some consolation
157 though; at the end of the lesson, every student was awarded a goodie from the box at the front of the room. Miss Manal even gave me a packet of biscuits for being such a nice guest.
* * * * *
When Michel Foucault opened his pivotal work Discipline and Punishment: The
Birth of the Prison (1977), his gory descriptions of an eighteenth century public execution in
France is not too far from the gruesome images that these young Sunday School students watched in class. Rather, Foucault's emphasis on the grisly only underlined the significant transformations of the observers from within: that as people witnessed the public quartering of alleged criminals, they too became embedded in larger penal machineries of power and authority. As open spectacles of torture slowly disappeared from common view, Foucault argues that European and later North American disciplinary institutions have shifted their attention from the prisoners' bodies to their souls, hoping to supervise and neutralize the dangerous state of their minds and rehabilitate their assumed criminal tenancies. In a way, such embodied surveillance came to extend well beyond the initial sentence (1977: 18).
With the recurring images of Christ's scarred and naked body performed to the soundscapes of pedagogical and descriptive taratil, Sunday Schools also shift their attention to refining Coptic ethical selves as written inside the body and imprinted on the voice. As these young students sang along to these Passion week taratil music videos, Christ's body becomes a locum for their own bodies and by extension, their souls. When Miss Manal instructed her students to model Christ's humility, wisdom, and quietude, she drew on an
Aristotelian model of ethical pedagogy in which the externally performed acts like prayer, fasting (Mahmood 2005: 135-6) and, I add here, singing are understood to create
158 corresponding inward pious dispositions such as their thoughts, emotional states and intentions. Singing and listening to taratil then, are pedagogical bodily acts. Their prominence in Sunday School contexts (and in Pope Shenouda's sermon contexts) testifies to their critical role in moral cultivation and in producing Coptic ethical subjects. 140 Mahmood draws her notion of habitus from Aristotle and identifies it as the pedagogical process by which moral virtues are acquired and developed through a coordination of outward behaviors and inward dispositions (2001: 215). Her perspectives differs from Pierre Bourdieu's famous ideas that it is not only socioeonomic class that determines one's structured disposition
(1977). Instead, Mahmood focuses on the pedagogical processes by which the body learns social structure and enacts a self with particular capacities through which the subject comes to "enact the world" (2001: 139). In Miss Manal's class and in Sunday Schools all over
Egypt, singing and hearing martyr motifs in taratil enacts two worlds, the here and the thereafter, a heavenly homeland on an earthly one.
It is important to highlight the fact that Miss Manal noted Christ's humility and quietude at the moment Pontius Pilot sentenced him to death. taratil's texts throughout the lesson continually praised and exalted Christ's seemingly docile sacrifice in the service of others. Additionally, they emphasized his martyr image in the ultimate loss, torture, and suffering of the body en route to a victory over death. Mahmood points out that it is the body that becomes an optimum site of moral training (ibid.). Texts throughout Miss Manal's lessons were literal transcriptions of the images of submission, sacrifice, and death that the girls watched and sang along to in the lesson's taratil music videos; these not only described the gritty scenes but also ascribed and amplified a visceral response as embodied on the skin.
140 In chapter 4, I also talk about taratil's pedagogical influence in mulids.
159 In one tartila that the girls sang during the lesson, "Huzn, Girah, Sirakh wa Dimu‘,"
"sadness, wounds, screaming, and tears," the words describe felt reactions to seeing Christ on the cross. Mel Gibson's exceptionally gruesome film, frequently recycled in these videos, only added to the taratil's effect.
Huzn, Girah, Sirakh, wa Dimuʻ / Sadness [and] Wounds and Tears
Sadness, wounds, screaming, and tears A spear, thorns, and a raised cross Sinners calling for innocent blood And a mother's tears weeps for Christ
Christ passed through all the pains and opened the doors of paradise he carried our sins and died, But he was victorious over death
Judith Butler writes, "Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible" (1997: 5). In singing the words containing these images of a beaten, martyred Christ, the girls internalized martyr motifs in their daily lives to become "servants for all." Yet, just as speech enacts domination as part of the performative utterance, Butler argues, it can also embolden its listeners with a with a kind of discursive power (1997: 18). In the same way that Miss Manal taught her student's obedience and quietude, she asked them to think and act like Christ before any interrogators they may face in their lives. While she never explicitly mentioned Muslims by name, other lessons of "forgiveness" and "loving" one's enemies offers an ambiguity that often emboldens
silences with a kind of moral superiority. In other words, by learning how to embody the
160 agentival capacities of quietude and sacrifice as the martyrs did, the students' could achieve the same spiritual victory of the saint after whom their class was named. In short, in order to successfully belong to heaven and to belong also to this world as pious, practicing Christians, one had to suffer, even metaphorically (and for some quite literally) die.
Finally, it is important to note that not all taratil overtly reflect martyr motifs like the selections in Miss Manal's class. Rather, I focus on these paschal themed songs because they best exemplify taratil's potential to endow and constitute the self through their melodies and their texts. Put simply, as we sing, we are made. For the women in Mahmood's study, bodily behavior was not so much a sign of a refashioned interiority as much as it was the means of acquiring specific pedagogies of piety and constituting one's self (2001: 147). Here, I want to highlight the fact that the growing discourse of martyr motifs and the themes of metaphorical death and withdrawal in everyday conversation and colloquial song have the kind of potentiality that could produce what Mahmood called "unanticipated effects in the prevailing social field" (2001: 152). As the mosque women's acts of piety—wearing the hijab, undertaking da‘wa, and becoming more overtly pious—garnered the attention of the
Egyptian state, Islamists, and secular-liberal Muslims, Shenouda's educational reforms in the
Church Upbringing movement (al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya) and the rise of accompanying pedagogical taratil significantly shaped the Coptic community's cultural and religious topography during this forty-year reign. As Sunday School students graduated to become student teachers during their college years, service directors (ʼaminat khidma), and even members of the Church hierarchy as priests, monks, and nuns, their services shifted Coptic participation in a civic and political arena. While Copts have emerged from this movement as
161 seemingly more docile and (dis)engaged with the world, I suggest that this may not always be the case. Rather, in one way or a another, Copts have surfaced as adamantly audible, singing, sounding, and publicly practicing their faith as lived Egyptian Christian citizens.
Taratil after Sunday School
In his work with Guatemalan Pentecostals, Kevin O'Neill reminds us that ethical formation for the nation depends on constant vigilance and the monitoring of one's practice.
Rather, community policing only works "if you let me watch you, and if you watch me while
I watch my self" (2011: 72). In other words, individuals learned to forge panoptic social relationships in Church-organized cells, allowing themselves to spiritually police and be policed. He also describes how such fraternities heavily relied on cassette recordings and their own performance of popular Christian songs to heighten emotions and forge intimate links between participants in order to engage each other and their postwar nation (2011: 73).
From a very young age in Egypt, Coptic Orthodox students learn to disrobe themselves to the formative gaze of the Church and the older khuddam in order to become better and more useful Christians for an "Egypt on the inside," as inspired by Pope Shenouda's popular saying: "Egypt is not a land in which we live, but rather a land that lives inside of us." In turn, younger teachers also forge intimate relationships with the ʼʼaminat al-ʼusra (fraternity director), here Miss Manal, who in turn answered to the ʼaminat al-kidma (Sunday School director). In St. Anthony's Church in Shubra, this person was Miss Magda. Sitting at the top of this particular hierarchy, these principal volunteers worked closely with clerics in their local communities, the priests and pastors to whom they practiced the rite of confessions.
162 This chain of command reaches even higher to the Bishops and Patriarchal secretaries, until finally and most singularly it reaches the Pope. All the links of such a chain are bound together through service and song.141
In what follows, I trace taratil's participation and performances after students graduate from their Sunday School education, typically in their last year of high school.
Following their attendance at preparation meetings for servants (ʼigtimaʻ al-khuddam), like the one Pope Shenouda spearheaded in Shubra, they usually move on to serve in a number of ways ranging from Sunday School teachers, choir directors, and even as part of the Church's hierarchy as service directors, monks, nuns, priests, and bishops. Following what Dina al-
Khawaga describes as the massive institutionalization of both the laity and the clerical body
(1997), I outline the growth of Christian collegiate fraternities on university campuses known as ʼusar (sing. ʼusra) and focus on their use of Christian technologies such as public piety, self-monitoring, and spiritual service (khidma) to audibly engage with a nation that marginalizes and relegates them to inaudibility. By integrating pedagogical taratil as a critical part of institutional service in Sunday Schools, collegiate fraternities, and a newly- established Youth Bishopric (ʼUskufiyyat al-Shabab), Coptic spiritual volunteerism sounded a public piety that looked to transform the moral interior of their community and to negotiate a Christian civic (dis)engagement with the Egyptian modern state. Furthermore, such
141 In his lectures entitled “Pastoral Power and Political Reason,” (in Carrette 1999), Foucault describes such intimate disclosure and confessions as integral to the power technologies of Christian pastorship. He writes, "Christian pastorship implies a peculiar type of knowledge between the pastor and each of his sheep...the shepherd must be informed as to the material needs of each member of the flock and provide for them when necessary. He must know what is going on, what each of them does—his public sins. Last and not least, he must know what goes on in the soul of each, that is, his secret sins, his progress on the road to sainthood" (1999: 142-43). While Orthodox priests officially administer the rites of confession as fathers of confession (al-ab al-ruhi), many lay khuddam have taken over other pastoral responsibilities and have also become spiritual mentors.
163 spiritual activism is also critical in refashioning a better Egypt on the inside though service and community participation. From their graduation from Sunday School, Copts largely serve, sing, and engage with each other and within their own religious communities. In my ethnographic vignette here, one ʼusra had a very prominent role in transforming Pope
Shenouda's poetry (qasaʼid) into taratil, and promoting taratil cassettes as a medium of both ethical self-fashioning, life-long service, and Christian oppositional discourse to the State's modernizing and silencing acts.142
In his living room, Dr Faisal Fouad settled cozily into his favorite chair to tell Marcus and I how, as part of a Christian college fraternity, he accidentally started a taratil cassette movement. A pharmacist by day, today he is one of the most popular murannimin in the
Orthodox community and one of the first involved in orchestrating, recording and disseminating the Pope's poetry as taratil. Locked in his quiet composure, Dr Faisal seemed to gaze into the far distance behind me, as if he could see the scene. He described the early days when he and three friends —one on a flute (nay), another on the electronic keyboard
(org), with himself as vocalist—gathered in St. Antony Church's simple recording studio:
We would all have to squeeze into the same place, with the person making the recording literally in our midst—no other room, no headphones, or any of that stuff…. There were two mics that we had to share between the vocalist and the instrumentalists. If one of us made a mistake, we would have to repeat it all from the beginning. There was no such thing as tracks—if we forgot a verse, we would have to repeat. If our papers ruffled too loudly, repeat. If someone knocked, repeat. If the cucumber seller yelled too loudly from the street, we would have to repeat. Finally, we resorted to stuffing pillows against the windows and the doors.143
142 Hirschkind also writes about Islamic oppositional discourse to Egyptian modernizing efforts that censored Islamic piety (2006: 55). 143 Personal communication, June 30, 2009. The other half of Faisal Fouad's powerful duo is Gamal Zikry, who has since been ordained as Father Antonious Zikry, serving in the small city of St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada. 164 As pharmacy majors, Dr Faisal and his friends all belonged to the same Christian college fraternity for pharmacy students, ʼUsrat Augustinus. The ʼusra met regularly on campus for sermons by a guest cleric, Bible studies, collective prayer, and taratil singing. As part of Choral Augustinus, the ʼusra's fledgling choir, Dr Faisal and his friends labored tirelessly to record what they hoped to be pedagogical taratil cassettes for their meetings.
They suffered from a lack of "modern" and instrumentally-accompanied taratil, Dr Faisal confided, and instead relied on a small handful of a cappella songs that people remembered from their days as young Sunday School students. Others brought a small taratil pamphlet that the largest Orthodox Bookstore, Maktabit al-Mahaba [Bookstore of Love], published as
Kitab al-Mahaba [literally, the Book of Love].
Over the years, as their choir and the ʼusra grew, the group began to make reel-to-reel recordings in St. Anthony's Church sound studio. After completing the master copy, he remembered, the group worked tirelessly to copy this recording on a home player, patiently making one cassette copy at a time and distributing it among their friends. With no funding except their own personal allowances as students, Dr Faisal and his friends used to sit silently around a humming cassette player with more pillows stuffed against the windows to block out the street noises. As they included more musical instruments like the piano and a violin in their recordings, they found that they slowly became more and more popular among their peers. Other volunteers transcribed taratil texts by hand and took them to the printer to make a few booklets to accompany the cassettes so that choir members could practice the taratil before their meetings.
As their taratil cassette operation gained momentum, the ʼusra no longer used what
165 came to be known as sharayyit Faisal (literally, Faisal's tapes) just for pedagogical purposes.
Instead, in the late 1970s they sold their tapes and pamphlets in St. Anthony's bookstore so that other fraternities could use them in their own meetings. "People say we launched a movement, but we did not plan it," Dr Faisal shrugged, smiling warmly. Soon afterwards, students in other college faculties formed other large fraternities: back in 1956, Dr Faisal remembers that student volunteers started an ʼusra for medical students in ʼAin-Shams
University, while others organized one for engineering students. Besides meeting regularly on campus, many students also served as Sunday School teachers in their own respective churches. The day became so full, Dr Faisal joked, that it was considered almost haram
(forbidden) to study on Friday.
Many of these Christian collegiate fraternities remained largely active on university campuses until President Sadat's famous crackdown on the Muslim student association gamʻiyyat islamiyya on September 3, 1981 (Heikal 1983: 231). Mass arrests of over three thousands activists and students highlighted the presence of Coptic student associations, and in fear of a similar reprisal many ʼusar moved off campuses and into church spaces. Unlike
Muslim student associations, however, mass arrests of Christian activists and volunteers never came.144 Dr Faisal assured me that this was because their meetings were not as overtly political as those of their Muslim counterparts.145 And without such large numbers, their ʼusar
144 Among the detainees were eight bishops, 24 priests, and a handful of other Copts (Guirguis and van Doorn-Harder 2011: 164). 145 Despite Dr Faisal's and the wider community's beliefs, there were growing political movements within the Coptic community at this time. Mohamed Heikal details how one youth, Ibrahim Hillal started an armed group called Al-‘Umma al-Qibbtiyya [The Coptic Nation] in 1954. Unhappy with the direction of the Church's leadership, he and his followers kidnapped the Coptic Patriarch, then Pope Yusab II, and at gunpoint forced him to abdicate his seat. The government intervened, arrested the kidnappers, and reinstated the Coptic Patriarch. See Mohamed Heikal, Autumn of Fury (New York, Random House, 1983): 156. 166 did not represent any real threat to the government. To be safe however, his own collegiate fraternity, ʼusrat Augustinus, initially moved their meeting to a neighboring Greek Orthodox
Church so that the group could "have our freedom." Eventually, they began meeting in various Orthodox Churches, merging various professional ʼusar into one large youth meeting
(igtimaʻ al-shabab) at the Coptic Cathedral, like the one that Pope Shenouda first led in St.
Anthony's of Shubra as a Sunday School khadim.
As ʼusar moved into Orthodox Church settings, their activities—taratil—increasingly became entangled in church hierarchy and embedded with the notions of khidma and prayer.
Along with a growing central authority under ʼamin al-ʼusra, the principal khadim presiding over the associations activities, ʼusar helped to facilitate the standardizations of beliefs and praxis among collegiate youth (shabab )(Oram 2004: 143). Fraternity members also borrowed the notion of iftiqad from church clergy. Oram best describes iftiqad as the regular home visits to parishioners and students who did not regularly attend liturgy services and church activities in order to ensure their return to regular church attendance (2004: 159).
Besides the extended sort of surveillance between ʼamin al-ʼusra and hosting clergy, iftiqad home-visitations brought everyone into a shared understanding of morality, social propriety, and Christian ethics, a notion I explore more closely in the next chapter.
Kevin O'Neill writes that the monitoring and mapping of virtue have been Christian technologies of selfhood for centuries, drawing on an Aristotelian and Platonic emphasis on moral education (2010: 61). Whereas in Guatemala, neo-Pentecostal Christians framed these self-improvement efforts of prayer, classroom activities, and the reading of moral manuals as directly tethered to the progress and fate of their postwar nation, Coptic ʼusar did not concern
167 themselves with the fate of an earthly Egypt. Rather, ʼusar members avoided overt politics all together, something in which Dr Faisal derived great pride; instead, they sought to sing moral manuals in an effort to refashion an interior citizenship fit for a heavenly nation, a watan al-samawi. As Egypt's political landscape became increasingly precarious and Sadat's political discourse became coded with exclusive Islamic rhetoric, ʼusar participants looked to
Shenouda's emphasis on the afterlife as critical in refashioning one's interior. Dr Faisal described how he and his close friend Gamal turned to the richness of Release of the Spirit
[ʼIntilaq al-Ruh] as a moral manual. Together, they set the Pope's famous poem, "Hamsat
Hub" [A Whisper of love] into the popular tartila known today as "Qalbi al-Khafaqu" [My
Beating Heart]:
168 Qalbi al-Khafaqu / My Beating Heart146
Oh my beating heart, I hide you in the crevice of my chest I left the world in its chaos and I abandoned all to live with you I have no thoughts, opinion, or other desires than to follow you Now I know my Father Jacob's secret, how he fought you Creator of hearts, I have seen nothing higher and sweeter than you O strong one, carrying a whip in your palm, your tears bleed love As the universe can not contain you, than how can a heart fit you in?
O'Neill (2010: 86) writes that "the kind of cultural work prompted within the cellular context promotes a unique construction of an interiority that is constantly exteriorized…."
Besides forging strong and intimate networks through shared prayer and service, ʼusar activities exteriorized an Christian "Egypt on the inside" outside into the world. Fraternity members' time, soundscapes, and social lives became saturated with ʼusar meetings, iftiqad visitations, Sunday School services, and heightened personal practices of piety. When I lived in Shubra, it was easy to get engulfed in myriad church-related activities, only encountering a
"real" Egypt when the azan sounded or when I reached out to religiously-mixed networks beyond the Orthodox Church. In all of these service settings, taratil were at the center of these gatherings. Just as Sunday School students listened to and performed taratil at the beginning of their lessons, ʼusar sang throughout their meetings as prayer, as entertainment, but most importantly, as a pedagogical guideline for a way to live. When Dr Faisal kindly let me tag along to his regularly ʼusar meeting (well beyond their graduation 50 years ago) in
Nile City's posh floating restaurants, the ʼusra openly sang and performed taratil in the boat's
TGIFridays. In the restaurant's outdoor patio overlooking the Nile, taratil like "Qalbi al-
Khafaqu" mingled with the clinking of silverware and the shaʻbi popular music of weddings
146 Pope Shenouda, ʼʼIntilaq al-Ruh [Release the Spirit], 16th edition (Cairo, Magalat al-Kiraza, 2009): 139. This poem was originally written in his hermit cave in 1961.
169 receptions on smaller boats below.
Some Conclusions
While Habib Girgis is one of the first contemporary reformist figures to revitalize martyr hagiographies and embed them in pedagogical taratil as part of a modern religious education, it was the late Pope Shenouda III who taught his congregations how to "release the spirit" in order to know themselves and to know God. Shenouda's followers throughout his life and mourners upon his death quickly identified him as a contemporary saint [qidis mu‘asir], and they transformed his life and example into a living hagiography through song.
In turn, in his writings, ministry, and Church Upbringing reforms, Shenouda frequently invited his followers to live "as strangers in this world" and as as modern-day martyrs in the city. Additionally, his qasaʼid and sermons emphasized tropes of martyrdom, and an urban asceticism continues to shape congregational life today and offer models of how to civically
(dis)engage as pious Egyptian Christian citizens.
In his study of Egyptian monasticism, Mark Gruber argues that spiritual suffering is a
Coptic wellspring of inexhaustible meditation on their own sense of the elusiveness of security in this world (2003: 94). Saint hagiographies of voluntary suffering, lives of asceticism, and even death reconcile this insecurity, and promise many believers both life and belonging in a heavenly nation. In other words, a discourse of suffering for one's community and sacrifice—of one's time, wealth, and even life—is critical to political dis(engagement) that negotiates belonging both to this world and to the next. Through bodily acts of singing and listening to taratil, Coptic Sunday School students and their teachers
170 learn alternative modalities of agency and how to constitute suffering for politically productive ends. In turn, martyr motifs emerged to negotiate the seemingly contradictory ambivalences and desires to belong to Egypt as publicly pious and audible Christian citizens.
In the seemingly passive process of withdrawal and (dis)engagement, Copts exteriorize an
"Egypt on this inside" into the world. And, as they graduate from their religious education classes, they join spiritual fraternities (ʼusar), Youth Bishoprics, and other buzzing networks of spiritual activism to sound audible effects in the social fields around them. In the next chapter, I explore taratil beyond the Sunday School classroom and the effects of Coptic audibility in popular religious festivals known as mulids.
171 CHAPTER 4
TARATIL AND SPIRITUAL SERVICE AT
COPTIC RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS
Introduction
One of the only ways to get to mulid al-ʻAdra, a religious festival celebrating the
Virgin Mary in Gabal al-Tayr outside of the Upper Egyptian town of Samalut is to climb a really long staircase up the mountain. According to folklore, this was the place that the Virgin
Mary and Joseph the Carpenter took refuge from King Herod when he sought to kill the baby
Jesus.147 In a miraculous tale, the birds helped to etch a cave into the mountain to protect the
Holy Family from the King's revenge, hence the name of the small Christian village, Gabal al-Tayr, literally the Bird Mountain.
Today, this cave is nestled deep within a historic church and constitutes a major pilgrimage site for Egyptians wanting to take the baraka or blessings of the saints, particularly the Virgin.148 Thousand of Christian and Muslim pilgrims predominately from
147 The Holy Family's escape from King Herod and flight into Egypt is described in the Gospel of Matthew 2:16. 148 Legend has it that St. Helene, who followed Christ's route from the Holy City through Egypt, build the original church as homage in the fourth century (AD 328). For more information, see Elizabeth Oram's discussion in her dissertation, “Constructing Modern Copts: The Production of Coptic Christian Identity in Contemporary Egypt,” (Princeton University, 2004): 215. It is important to note that this sight is also significant for the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, trying to attract visitors from the growing industry of religious tourism. This became especially apparent when, at the hotel where Marcus, my friend and colleague Huda, and I stayed, we had to convince and bribe the tourist police that we did not need
172 lower socioeconomic classes travel from all of the country just to walk around the church's barren walls. In a long line, they all stand and wait patiently to sneak a peek behind a thick plexiglass screen at the small space where the frightened mother once huddled with her child.
Like her, they know what it is like to be poor and to travel far to take refuge, even for just the ten days of the mulid. They touch the walls and icons and bring the baraka back to their bodies, light candles, and sing mada'ih and taratil long into the night.149 And, to the chagrin of the State's antiquity department, some even draw red henna crosses on the walls of the church hoping that the Virgin will remember them in her intercessions, heal the sick, and perhaps provide the devotees with a miraculous apparition.150 Their red stained hands stand as proof, or at least as reminders, of that promise.
In May 2010, with a few days' worth of clothing, bed sheets, and a heavy bag on my back, I lugged myself heaving and puffing up the winding steps, humbled when peasant women twice my age sailed by me gracefully. They were juggling more than a week's worth of life, children, and food piled in shiyyal or loads neatly stacked on their heads. I was later to learn that many had come from their homes on foot, offering the strenuous pilgrimage and the fatigue of their bodies as nadr, sacrifice to the Virgin in exchange for the miraculous or
personal accompaniment up the mountain. 149 In his introduction, David Frankfurter (1998) gives more details of what pilgrims might do to receive baraka, such as collecting dust from the stones or the oil lamps near the shrine, sleep near sites to receive their power or dream of the presence of the saints, listen and even sing their hagiography in song. He adds that, if they are able to, people also write down requests that are slipped into the shrine. The cave of the Holy Family was covered with these little written hand notes, while names had been etched into the walls and plexiglass over the site. For a more complete definition of baraka, see the Arabic glossary at the beginning of this study. 150 Like discussions and performances of taratil, Marian apparition narratives also have political dimensions. See Angie Heo's work “The Virgin Made Visible: Intercessory Images of Church Territory in Egypt” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2012): 361-91.
173 simply for her intercessions to God on their behalf.151 Behind me, Huda, a Brazilian-Syrian anthropologist, treaded lightly avoiding puddles of sewage that trickled down the mountain.
We grimaced to each other as we battled against the heat and the sun. In front of us, Marcus walked briskly forward, his lanky height leading the way.
As soon we arrived at the edge of the mulid at the top of the staircase, we were sucked into another world. Peanut vendors, mountains of dried chickpeas, and plastic blue- robed statues of the Virgin all twinkled under a tent made out of old rice and flour sacks stitched together into a makeshift canopy.152 Swarms of people shifted languidly from kiosk to kiosk; sellers called out to buyers, mothers to their children, and from various loudspeakers, I could hear different taratil layered up and over so many other sounds. A recorded electronic org (electric keyboard) blared out synthesized tabla beats, claps, and high zagharit (women's ululations) while a raspy popular singer carried a simple and repetitive melody over the sounds of an accordion. A few steps farther forward and I heard more aghani shaʻbiyya, or contemporary popular songs, pulse together with taratil shaʻbiyya, contemporary popular taratil. All of these songs blended and reverberated, and were almost indistinguishable from the loud jingle of festival rides, live folk entertainment, and the rest of the mulid chaos.
Standing at the edge of the mulid market, Marcus, Huda, and I had entered from the festival's cacophonous periphery, what people considered to be the more profane parts of the
151 In their work, Edith and Victor Turner describe a something very similar to “nadr” (1978: 7), kinds of exchange that pilgrims offer in hopes of a miracle or for a miracle received. 152 Samuli Schielke devotes a section to the significance of chickpeas in their role in symbolizing baraka and the suspension of boundaries at mulids. See “Snacks and Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety, and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Amsterdam, 2006): 89-96.
174 mulid and where pilgrims pitched their tents in campgrounds, venders organized major markets, and popular singers performed on impromptu stages for entertainment. We had yet to cross into what Marcus and other interlocutors called al-gamb al-ruhi ["the spiritual side"], the religious festival's sacral center that housed the historic church, the Coptic
Orthodox Bishopric, and the immense baptismal fonts where thousands of children were baptized as Christians every year.153 Clinging to our bags, we all stumbled forward slowly through the market, bewildered, nervous, and a bit overwhelmed. As we got closer to the
Coptic Orthodox Bishopric near the Marian shrine, we soon discovered an outdoor cafeteria that the local church diocese had organized. Standing at the doorstep of the gated cafeteria, we could sense that we were in between two realms: the market madness that twinkled and echoed loudly and the slightly more organized though still chaotic rows of plastic tables and chairs on the Bishopric's grounds.
After we paid a modest entrance fee at the door, church khuddam or volunteers greeted us over the din in matching Bishopric shirts—"Hamdilah ʻal salama" ["Thank God for your safe arrival"]. Almost every one sported a small green cross tattooed on their right
153 Scholars have long outlined the geography of religious pilgrimages using Mircea Eliad's notion of “center” and “periphery” (Albera and Couroucli 2012; Eliade 1963; Schielke 2006; Bohlman 1996). While such a conceptual pair may seen problematic, Phillip Bohlman argues that it accurately describes the geography of many local and popular religious celebrations around the world where a single shrine possessed the centripetalizing power of a sacral center (Bohlman 1996: 381). Baraka or a saint's charismatic power, is not only attributed to have miraculous potential but is also believed to conflate a festival's center with its periphery, blurring and blending the festival's topographies. As I explore in this chapter, Gabal al-Tayr's sacral geography was not only drawn by spatial relations to the Marian shrine in the church, but a sonic map also traced, blurred, and carried baraka across separations that marked hallowed grounds. As sound travels beyond church walls and other barriers, aghani shaʻbiyya (popular songs) and taratil shaʻbiyya mixed, competed with, and at times overcame the liturgical alhan at church services and the Arabic saint doxologies (madaʼih) coming from the shrine. This was also the case the other way around, when services were broadcast into the festival's campgrounds, conflating the mulid's peripheries into a place that was at once full of the profound ambivalences, ambiguities, chaos, and blessings that baraka conveyed.
175 wrist, and crosses and saint pictures adorned each cash register and cafeteria window.
Beyond the cafeteria's visible difference, we could also hear a discernible shift overhead. The voice of the well-known church murannim, Boulous Malak, rang exceedingly clear from a loudspeaker wedged against the Bishopric walls, pushing back at the market sounds outside the cafeteria's tall gates. After a brief tartila, the cantor recited a long passage from the Old
Testament: the story of the Prodigal Son in which a young man asks his affluent father for his inheritance of the estate.154 The son squanders it on temptations in a foreign land, and later returns repentant to the father who celebrates his return and grants him his previous affluent status. Like the son, Malak's intonations urged pilgrims to repent from the profanities of the world in the hopes of returning and reclaiming their rightful place as the sons of God.
Outside the cafeteria gates, crowds and crowds of pilgrims arrived at a relentless pace. Soon after our meals, Huda, Marcus and I packed our bags and went back out, in search of the
Holy Family Choir (HFC).155 The choir was an affluent group from Heliopolis, Cairo, that annually volunteered taratil and other spiritual services in the mulid's peripheries outside the
Bishopric grounds.
Mulids
In this chapter, I investigate Coptic devotional soundscapes beyond the Sunday
School classroom. More specifically, I explore taratil's disciplinary agency outside of Church contexts in the popular saint celebrations known as mulids, with a particular focus on how
154 Luke 15:11-32. 155 Huda only remained with us for this first day, and had to shortly return to Cairo. Marcus and I spent the remainder of our time at the mulid largely with the Holy Family Choir.
176 Coptic modern subjectivity is crafted as part of religious festivity. Like the proverb of the prodigal son, mulid reforms hoped to bring pilgrims "back to God" and infused taratil performances and recordings with a kind of pedagogical utility comparable to Habib Girgis and Pope Shenouda's Sunday School education revivals (see chapters 2 and 3). Beginning in the late 1960s when Shenouda was first ordained as a bishop, one of his first initiatives was to transform mulid's "tagamuʻat shaʻbiyya" or popular festivity, with their assumed degraded morals, dancing, and singing into the sole celebration of the saints.156 Hence the official name change from mawalid, a colloquial designation shared by Egyptian Muslims and Christians, into the more specifically Orthodox "aʻyad al-qidisin," literally "the feast of the saints
"(Shenouda 1999: 9). Today, the more commonly used term by the Orthodox clergy is
"ihtifalat," another word for celebration in Arabic so as not to mix it up with a saint's canonical feast days in the Church (also known as aʻyad al-qidisin). More importantly, however, the name change also marked an implicit rejection of Islam and any shared connotations with Muslim popular saint-celebrations also known as mulids.157
Through what Shenouda called dirus ruhiya or "spiritual lessons" similar to his sermons back in Cairo, the Pope enlisted various bishops to reconfigure popular mulids from
156 In his work, “Policing Ambiguity; Muslim Saint-day Festival and the Moral Geography of Public Space in Egypt,” (American Anthropologist, Vol. 24, No. 4: 539-52), anthropologist Samuli Schielke investigates the state's disciplinary action in Sufi mulid contexts. Though the term mulid (pl. mawalid), literally means the “birthday” or “birthplace” of a saint, the precise meaning of mulid festivals is a bit ambiguous because precise birthdays and deaths of the saints are not always known. The concept is largely metaphorical. For more saint festivals, both Coptic and Muslim, see Valerie Hoffman's Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt (University of South Carolina, 1995). 157 While many Muslim mulid (pl. mawalid) festivals celebrate the birthday and deaths of various saints and Prophet Mohamed, Coptic mawalid are almost exclusively organized around their death, instead celebrating a saint's “birthday” into their afterlife as martyrs. For more on the inter-confessional tensions, see Catherine Mayer-Jaouen, “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., Dionigi Albera and Maria Coucoucli, eds., (Indiana University Press, 2012): 148-73.
177 "ʼamakan kharb" or places of debauchery into " ʼamakan ʻamr" (ibid.): productive ground for moral and spiritual refashioning. Besides the renovation of historic churches and shrines, as well as the building of new clinics, hospitals, and baptismal fonts, these bishops also worked to reconfigure pilgrims' moral interiors and transform them into modern, pious, and practicing believers. Reformers hoped to achieve this through the use of "spiritual programs" that increased liturgical services, iftiqad (clerical home visitation), spiritual lessons, and taratil performances throughout mulid grounds.
In addition to these changes, the attendance and service of more affluent Cairene- based khuddam or spiritual volunteers in the mulid peripheries have substantially altered the festival's soundscapes and spiritual infrastructure. As participants in various choirs from the city, they not only arrived to offer taratil as service but also came as part of their own
"spiritual retreats" known as rihlat khilwa.158 Oram describes these spiritual retreats as
"flight" from every life for Copts who relish in the exclusively Christian interior of monasteries and convents (2004: 182; also see the Arabic glossary). She adds that rihlat have the characteristics both of ritual and tourism, a bricolage of ancient religious practices
(chanting, visiting saint graves, and attending masses) with modern ones (touring and learning about monasteries as well as visiting with monks). Such pilgrimages from one holy site to another create a new sacred map of Egypt in the modern religious imagination (2004:
180).
In addition to spiritual tourism, I argue that urban Copts also take refuge in their services of rural areas to periodically (dis)engage from the daily stresses and feelings of
158 Besides the Holy Family Choir which I discuss in depth here, other groups such as the Kasr al-Dobara, the largest evangelical church in Egypt, also serve in the mulid.
178 social and sonic marginality in the city. In turn, they momentarily enjoy a transformed status as a religious majority at Christian mulid, and strive to make the interiority of their Christian faith public in both visible and audible ways, both for themselves and the Muslim attendees of Christian mulids. As Lara Deeb writes of Shiʻa iltizam or "religious commitment" in
Beirut, Lebanon, the visibility of public piety is crucial to establish a volunteer's personal membership in the pious modern through civic engagement, such as service to the poor and the collections of donations for political, humanitarian, or religious reasons (Deeb 2006: 36).
Besides visibility, I add that the audibility of Coptic piety and service in taratil khidma (lit.
"song services") in Egypt's rural and most impoverished areas establish the volunteer's membership in a modern reform of Coptic mulids and assert a public and Christian claim to aural spaces that are otherwise muted and private in the city.
In his work on Anakalangese representational practices in eastern Indonesia, anthropologist Webb Keane writes about the hazards of social interactions in public speech rituals where slippages of words in formal exchanges highlight tensions of power, authority, and identity relations (Keane 1997). In failed instances, rituals of exchange (such as the negotiation of marriage payments) may even lead to violence. These social hazards are productive, Keane argues, because it is their risks that allow parties to perform concrete action, assert their value, and directly engage with one another. In such "scenes of encounter"—events in which groups confront and speak to each other and trade objects— participants publicly and interactively define themselves and each other (1997: 7, Keane's italics). While many rituals are successful, the consequences of "unsuccessful performances" operate to question assumptions of agency and social status which may be taken for granted
179 (ibid. 143). In other words, these encounters allow involved parties to question a given order of status and to disrupt, reconfigure, even reorder power relations.
As I illustrated in the previous chapters, figures such as Habib Girgis and Pope
Shenouda and their subsequent religious revivals have negotiated Coptic silences in Egypt's political, civic, and social life. One only has to recount Shubra's overtly loud Christian soundscapes on Sunday mornings, partly to compete with the regular sounds of the Friday sermons and regular calls to prayer (azan), but also to establish a momentary dominant presence in the neighborhood (see chapter 3). While anthropologist Anthony Shenoda explores the hazards of Coptic visibility following the January 25th uprising, in this chapter I am interested in the hazards and risks of audibility at Coptic mulids.159 As the Holy Family
Choir offered taratil service on the festival's peripheries and public song processions through the market, how do such scenes of encounter between largely poorer pilgrims and visiting urban and affluent khuddam contest, reinscribe, or complement the Coptic Church's efforts to modernize mulids into grounds of Christian ethical engagement? Moreover, what happens when these encounter fail, as they did when the choir brazenly stopped at a busy market to sing taratil and pass out song cassettes and Christian pamphlets to the largely Muslims vendors?
Here I investigate HFC's various scenes of encounter throughout Gabal al-Tayr, ranging from their large taratil concerts, iftiqad or home visitations, spiritual lessons through sermons, and finally culminating in one taratil procession that ended in a skirmish between the choir and the largely Muslim market vendors. During such a public display, disgruntled
159 Anthony Shenoda, “Confessing the Faith: Coptic Christian Witnessing to Christ in an Islamic Public Sphere,” American Anthropological Association, Montreal, Canada, 2011.
180 onlookers clashed with the choir who came under a hail of pebbles and carobs during the
May 2011 service trip. One male member had a cigarette stubbed out on his back. A female member was sexually assaulted. Despite the procession's hazards, HFC insisted on a undertaking another procession the very next day, prompting me to wrestle with these questions: why does HFC insist on undertaking these processions despite their obvious dangers? How do they help the choir claim the mulid's markets, populated by largely Muslim vendors, as part of Christian territory? Finally, as middle-class urbanities carrying electronic instruments, loudspeakers, and taratil songbooks, how did the choir's struggles and failures, broken bodies, and hoarse voices, help them to assert an aural authority as pious and modern
Christian citizens in the mulid, as well as when they make it back home to Cairo?
In May 2010 and May 2011, I made two service trips with the choir and observed their spiritual services. There, the HFC spent considerable time serving in highly visible and audible capacities in the village: home visitation, children's Sunday School, and evangelical concerts in an effort to bring pilgrims back to God. Both years I attended, I could barely keep up with the choir's strenuous schedule that included over 16 hours of continuous singing, sermonizing, and prayer every night. This did not include the layla al-kabira, or the final
"big night" of the mulid on the eve of the Coptic liturgical Feast of the Ascension, the day that Christians believe Christ overcame death and ascended into heaven following his resurrection. That evening, HFC's final taratil concert went well past four in the morning, and included a large procession to the bus outside of the mulid's space. Struggling with less than four hours of sleep a night, as well as the heat, dust and crowds of the festival, I was surprised to overhear a interlocutor's description of the mulid as "heaven on earth." Rather,
181 this reference was so ubiquitous that, following the 2010 service trip, many members titled their Facebook retreat pictures and related status' as "in the heaven land" or "I am going to heaven." For the period leading up to their service the May 2011, many listed their profile pictures as an image of a bright light illuminating the sky with the brief phrase, "Li yakun nur," translated "so that there may be light." Finally, their Facebook group pages summed up their mission of ethical refashioning in its title: "God's Army."
Festival sites and sacred shrines have long been believed to be imbued with a special power and their status perceived as a midpoint between heaven and earth (Frankfurter1998:
19). Peter Brown adds that the shrines, tombs, or even physical objects of third century
European saints were "privileged places, where the contrasted poles of Heaven and Earth met," (1981: 3). The notion of the mulid as "heaven on earth" was particularly cogent during my second trip in May of 2011 after the January 25th uprising. With rising concerns over security, the choir's director repeatedly framed the trip as openly defiant in the face of political instability and embraced such risks as inherent elements but also potential for reclaiming an earthly paradise. In Webb Keane's terms (1997: 175):
But overcoming the perceived threat is not simply a functional requirement in the face of some sort of Hobbesian state of nature. It appears to be part of how the scene of encounter constructs an imaginable alternative, and thus contributes to the value of implicit negotiated relations.
As HFC's taratil service breached the festival's spiritual domain and openly led taratil processions through the market brazenly proselytizing to Muslims attendees, discussions and experiences of the mulid as heavenly space only increased, becoming more and more inextricably tied to pursuing "al-watan al-samawi," a Coptic "heavenly citizenship." In the
182 conversations and taratil I explore in the next sections of this chapter, the choir aims to reconfigure the festival's grounds as a living "heaven on earth" through their service. Also, through self-mortification—from physical exhaustion, lack of sleep, pains from over-playing and over-singing, risks of contamination from the village's poor sanitation, even assault during one taratil procession—HFC choir members directly engaged the hazards of audibility as productive sites to "reclaim the mulid" as part of Christian aural and physical territory. This notion is not unlike Fayez's neo-Pentecostal efforts to "reclaim the [Egyptian] land" that I will explore in the chapter 5.
Coptic Mulid Reforms
Inspired by an overarching discourse of modernity that emerged in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Egypt, Christian efforts to reform popular religious festivals mirrored larger State and urban middle class projects to purge mulids of their assumed debauchery and backwardness.160 State and municipal actors looked to "civilize mulids": by taming their popular piety, policing the festival's ambiguities, and imposing a universalist order of urban space that looked to instill a kind of productive civic habitus (Schielke 2008:
540). Drawing on its Aristotelian origins, Saba Mahmood defines habitus as the pedagogical process by which moral virtues are acquired and developed through a coordination of outward behaviors and inward dispositions (Mahmood 2001: 215). In other words, faith and
160 Mulid reforms were not only confined to Egypt, but rather took place all around the world. See Olivia Harris's work for one case study on the contested pilgrimages of the Bolivian Highlands. There, hymns also emerged as markers of modernity, progress, and Protestant and Roman Catholic conversion; “The Eternal Return of Conversion: Christianity as Contested Domain in Highland Bolivia” in The Anthropology of Christianity, Fenella Cannell ed., (Duke University Press, 2007): 51-76.
183 religious knowledge can be inwardly inscribed through outward habituated acts of piety
(fasting, praying and, as I illustrate, singing and listening to taratil; see also chapter 3).
Reformers argued that mulid festivities should not be occasions to suspend or break the religious boundaries that guide everyday behavior, but they should, in turn, become another opportunity to learn and enact proper morals and authoritative knowledge through the public and embodied practice of religious ritual (ibid., 540).
In his work on Muslim saint celebrations, Samuli Schielke writes that Egyptian modernity is also intrinsically connected to nationalism, as the State strongly propagated a
Western-inflected ideal of secularization, enlightenment, technological industry, and development as key qualities to a flourishing nation (2006: 79). Such discourses of modernity soon shaped religion as a functional part of a secular nationalist project (2006:
106), a phenomenon I argue that the Orthodox Church echoed in its revival of a utilitarian religious education (see chapters 2 and 3). Because of their chaotic and ambiguous nature, mulids become the focal point for both Muslim and Christian social activists. Many of the middle class and elite reformers, what anthropologist Walter Armbrust calls the focal point of modernist and nationalist ideology in Egypt (1996: 9), regarded these festivals and their largely poor attendees with great ambivalence; they claimed that their practices not only threatened the order of religion and society, but could also destabilize the nation (2006: 78).
In Muslim conservative circles, these festivals were also denounced as bidʻa or un-Islamic innovations that thinly bordered on the blasphemous (2006 :81), echoing Pope Shenouda's critique of Christian mulids as ʼamakan kharab, places of debauchery that threatened a
Christian moral order. In changing the mulid's physical and sonic topographies to resemble
184 the orderliness and coordinated soundscapes of urban cities (and in Coptic cases, the soundscapes of urban churches), both Christian and Muslim reformers hoped to craft pilgrims into modern and pious subjects.
I begin briefly with some of the shifts that altered Egypt's largest Muslim festivals and their devotional soundscapes into disciplined and utilitarian spaces, and which likely became the model for changes Pope Shenouda III made in his own reforms as bishop and
Patriarch starting in the 1960s.161 Though reform efforts were never fully effective, the state began by physically restructuring Muslim festival centers along lines of exclusion, transforming their most sacral spaces and mosques into what Schielke called "spectacles of state presence" (2006: ix). Beginning in the 1980s, state-controlled religious establishments and public administrations banned Sufi khiyam khidma or "service tents" from the mulid center and instead replaced them with road blocks and police presence as visible evidence of state order (2008: 540).162 Furthermore, they swept all other ambivalent elements—the mulid's markets, its chickpeas and entertainments vendors—into fragmented stalls along side streets. This shift rendered the most tactile and tangible experience of the mulid invisible in their new locations beyond the festival's sacral center and muted the festival's typically cacophonous and layered soundscapes.163 These infrastructural changes also segregated and
161 For a more detailed description of Muslim mulid reforms, please see Samuli Schielke's “Snacks and Saints.” 162 While Sufi orders (turuq) and HFC share some similarities in their notion of khidma, that is in offering service to God, Schielke outlines some differences in Sufi khidma. Besides service, khidma also denotes the main physical unit where Sufi pilgrims eat, sleep, visit friends, and share food and refreshments offered by a particular denominational order, and take part in religious gatherings (2006: 23). In HFC's service tents, the choir only offered Christian pilgrims taratil, sermon, and evening prayer. Christian pilgrims did not spend the majority of their time in these tents as other social events took place in people's personal tents on the camps grounds and in homes around Gabal al-Tayr. 163 For more on the ambiguous and ambivalent habitus—the active capacity of forming one's self through
185 disrupted the mulid's natural flow of people between holy realms, spaces, and sacral sounds, physically and sonically encoding a dominant relation between the state and its subjects.
In his study of Nigerian radio and film during the age of British colonialism, Larkin
(2008) writes that political domination had to be legitimated by the promises of "progress" in infrastructural change, such as the laying down of telegraph networks, the buildings of public cinemas, and the diffusion of radio cables. While such technological organization ordered society it also politically subjugated Nigerian citizens as part of the British empire (2008: 47) and brought about aural transformations that reflected the State's standardization, rationalization, and bureaucracy (2008: 59). In other words, sounds of public radio, cinema, and industry (such as cars, trains, and construction work) constituted differing levels of political identity and aimed to produce categories of listeners who were both modern and loyal to the colonial state. Hirschkind adds that media technologies also enabled an extension of an authoritative religious discourse aimed at promoting a uniform model of moral behavior (2006: 105). In Egypt, modern and moral reforms went hand in hand in the hopes of producing both pious and progressive citizens of the State. Furthermore, the first space in which these transformations took place was almost always sound.
In an effort to order Muslims festival's ambiguities, aural transformations aimed to shape many saint celebrations into a productive "moral geography" (Schielke 2008) beginning in the 1980s. This included one dhikr ceremony that I attended in Alexandria at the
Sidi Mursi Abu ʻAbbas mulid in July 2010. Dhikr, literally the "remembrance" of God, are usually solitary or communal [musical] practices in which participants draw closer to God
bodily practice—of Egyptian mulids, also see Samuli Schielke's "Policing Ambiguity: Muslim Saints- Day Festivals and the Moral Geography of Public Space in Egypt." American Ethnologists, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2008): 539-52.
186 through a collective movement and rhythmic chant of God's name. In local dhikr performances, singers known as munshidin typically sing a devotional and colloquial genre of inshad along with instrumental accompaniment to gradually build up and guide attendee's ecstatic movement and emotional level (Frishkopf 2001). In the state-sponsored concerts, professional suit-wearing musicians replaced the rapturous and mostly amateur munshidin and took to the stage in pantsuits, dress shirts and ties. Additionally, they also used sheet music, played on expensive electronic instruments, and funneled their electronicized sounds through massive loudspeakers that lined the rearranged service tents. Whereas men and women usually prayed, sang, and moved together in largely empty spaces during informal
Sufi dhikrs, a long fence separated them at the state concert and a police presence tamed any ecstatic expressions and movements of faith. Like Western music concerts, audiences sat in chairs organized in rows in front of a high stage, and people remained far away and disengaged from the musicians who performed a more subdued inshad. Though the singer's voices reverberated through amplifiers beyond the tent, their concerts remained empty throughout the festival, unlike the more informal celebrations tucked away in the mulid's side streets.
187 Figure 4.1 A state-sponsored dhikr concert at Sidi Mursi Abu ʻAbbas mulid in Alexandria, Egypt (Photo by Carolyn Ramzy, July 2010)
While Copts have largely escaped such direct state interventions to formalize concerts and reorganize mulid spaces, Church institutions and middle-class urban khuddam introduced their own internal reforms that have increasingly shifted first the physical topographies then the aural soundscape of Christian festivals. Under the auspices of local
Bishops Aghathun and later, Bishop Pavnutius, the shrine to the Holy Family was first renovated in 1983 with the construction of large church domes and tall bell towers.
Baptismal fonts, a cafeteria, and a major diocese center were also added. Father Matta, a priest serving in Gabal al-Tayr since 1973, recalled how the bishop's efforts started small: first organizing and parcelling mulid grounds for rent to Muslim and Christian vendors and pilgrims to pitch their tents.164 Soon, Pavnutius amassed enough diocese volunteers from the small city of Samalut across the Nile and from village shabab in order to form an
164 Father Matta estimated that the mulid al-ʻAdra's attendance reachs an average of 2 million visitors daily (11 May 2010, personal communication). Due to the lack of studies on mulids, accurate attendance numbers are especially difficult to cite.
188 administrative committee known as Lagnat al-Nizam, literally a "Committee for Order" to better organize vendors and to secure diocese space.165 Wearing brightly colored badges and special t-shirts, these khuddam administered the church's services by serving as ushers and moral police at liturgical events throughout the festival.
Besides construction, the local diocese also initiated another kind of reordering: reconfiguring Christian mulid soundscapes through the installation of externally mounted loudspeakers on newly built church towers whose sounds extended beyond the mulid's sacral center (Abdel Masih 1990: 216). Now taratil, Orthodox liturgical services, and Arabic saint doxologies (madaʼih) can be heard in the festival's sprawling markets, campsites, and the fairgrounds where the entertainments and rides for children as well as popular music concerts for the adults are largely located. By extending a sacral soundscape and domesticating taratil performances from their popular and folk influences (i.e. "profane elements"), the Church aimed to discipline Coptic festivity into increasingly liturgical and modern events with solely pedagogical ends, efforts not unlike the state's initiatives to reform local dhikr concerts.
When HFC arrived in 2005, the choir helped to oversee the pilgrimage's spiritual renewal by providing taratil concerts beyond Bishopric grounds and organized their khidma tents in the mulid's peripheries. Unlike the state's empty tents however, their concerts, sermons, and taratil drew audiences in by the thousands.
165 Dina Khawaga write about clericalization of the whole community in “The Laity at the Heart of the Coptic Clerical Reform” in Between Desert and City: The Coptic Orthodox Church Today, Pieternella van Doorn-Harder and Kari Vogt, eds., (Oslo, Norway: The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, 1997): 143-167. Also see chapter 3 for a more thorough discussion of the clericalization of Sunday School teachers in today's Coptic religious revival known as al-Nahda al-Qibtiyya (literally, the Coptic Renaissance).
189 Figure 4.2 HFC service tent in Gabal al-Tayr (Photograph by Randa Victor, used with permission)
In her study on Coptic religious identity, Elizabeth Oram writes that most monastic revivals begin with construction renovations. Before working on historic buildings however,
Churches first construct or rebuild walls and large barricades around the land as a means of announcing, surrounding, and protecting an expanding sacral space (2006: 220), instances which can even turn into violent land disputes.166 Oram adds that during pilgrimages to newly renovated monasteries, visitors "reach out" and "grab" aural spaces through the language they use at monasteries to describe miraculous events and exorcisms. Even singing around saint relics, she wrote, becomes a mode of symbolic affirmation of existence.
Like the protective fences around monastery land, loudspeakers and public
166 In 2008, clashes erupted when monks at the upper Egyptian monastery of Abu Fana tried to extend a wall over contested land, leaving one Muslim dead and four Christians woundedSee "Abu Fana in Focus" by Reema Leila in Al-Ahram Weekly Online (24-30 July 2008, Issue No. 907), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/907/eg2.htm (accessed accessed on May 13, 2013).
190 announcement systems looked to claim the mulid's surrounding aural spaces as part of a sacral and exclusively Christian territory. As anthropologist Matthew Engelke writes, the
"language of relations" is crucial to how people define themselves and how they project distance from elements of their identities they consider antithetical to their Christianity
(2007: 37). Sounds marked audible signs of difference through the taratil and liturgical services broadcast by these newly erected PA systems; they also provoked and accompanied newly habituated acts of piety, such as attending the Coptic liturgical services that the diocese now offered, or pausing to sing a Marian doxology along with the HFC in the saint's shrine. When, HFC went to the historic church to perform one last time before heading back to Cairo, they sang a popular and well-known doxology in the site's narrow space, and
Christian onlookers sang along. A handful of visiting Muslim pilgrims listened quietly. As
Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen noted, when liturgical services and psalms rang out over loudspeakers and steeped the fairgrounds in a specifically Christian religiosity, there was no longer any room for Muslim pilgrims (2012: 170). Such a sonic marginality however, only seemed to echo a reverse exclusion in Egypt's broader soundscape and architectural landscape.
It is also important to note here, that unlike the monastery's cement walls, the diocese's sacral broadcasts were not entirely soundproofed from the mulid's cacophony.
Instead, the market's bustle, popular songs, and ride jingles all pushed back with the ambiguities, tensions, and ambivalences of popular festivity and created a dense and layered soundscape throughout the festival. Father Matta recalled one story of fierce competition between one popular singer, Mohamed Taha, and the diocese's Bishop Pavnutius, one which
191 the Bishop eventually won. When Pavnutius, began to reorder mulid il-ʻAdra in the 1980s, he not only hoped to banish all boisterous cabarets, bars, and hashish corners from the fairgrounds but he also set his sight on filtering shaʻbi musicians and folk dancers out of the festival. This included Taha's troupe that had been performing at this mulid for years and whose livelihood depended on these annual festivals. Father Matta recalled how, when
Pavnutius approached the musician to leave, Taha attempted to negotiate private concerts of his songs with the bishop as proof of their wholesomeness, emphasizing shared themes and nationalist sentiments with Christians.167 But the Bishop would not have it. Rather, he gave him a fraction of his normal earning at the festival, forced him to sign a contract never to return, and sent him promptly on his way. Soon afterwards, tahtib folk troupes known for their famous "stick dance" left, followed by Sufi tannura dancers whose bright whirling skirts had been a regular mainstay of Egyptian mulids for generations.
Despite these efforts to subdue the fairground's popular music, Father Matter told
Marcus and me in an interview, that shaʻbi taratil performers whose music resembled Taha's folk and popular style soon emerged to take his place. A notable example of this is the musician Mina Ezzat whose music can easily be mistaken for aghani shaʻbi except for his dedication to the mulid saints and the diocese's reigning bishops. Even HFC's taratil khidma, in their use of popular and folk idioms, was full of "hissa wa hagat gharbiyya kitir," literally
"many raucous and Western-sounding things." As he was telling us this during our interview,
Father Matta looked at Marcus and me apologetically, thinking we were part of the choir:
"Ma tizʻalush mini "—"Please don't be offended." I will return to his criticism of "Western-
167 Mohamed Taha is famous for his nationalist and rural themes such as his popular song titled, “ʼAna asli Falah,” translated “I Come from Peasant Roots.”
192 sounding things" in the next section.
Father Matta remembered that it was the arrival of urban khuddam whose performances and services signaled a dramatic shift in the mulid's order. Besides the regular church worship that the diocese now offered and broadcast throughout the day, groups such as the Holy Family Choir organized Sunday Schools for children in the morning and taratil concerts throughout the night. Furthermore, they pitched their service tents throughout the festival grounds and even went out beyond the mulid's usual boundaries to pass out taratil cassettes and religious pamphlets to pilgrims and curious onlookers.168 In the words of what has recently become one of the most popular mulid anthems, thanks to HFC, the kingdom of
God no longer had any limits, not even on the mulid's campground that were known for their cabarets and impromptu popular concerts. Even these forgotten corners would be transformed into a little piece of heaven.
168 When Marcus and I first found HFC, they were out in the mountains well beyond the village's boundaries. They were singing taratil and passing out cassettes to onlookers, young couples, and groups of young men who looked to get away from supervising parents, church officials, and the village's police.
193 Taranim, Taranim, Taranim
Refrain Taranim, taranim, taranim to Jesus, the greatest God Taranim, taranim, taranim, his praise fills all life
Your kingdom has no limits, and the devils way is closed With the Grace of the Son of God, [the devil] will be blocked
The devil is conquered, conquered, a deceleration that is clearly written in our blood and in the crucified one. With our Christ we challenge you
A faith in Christ grows, [with] a book full of dates and promises of His victory. The promise of victory is with Him
A faith lives in light as it sees the devil captive his wings broken, and [our declarations] that demolish his haven
With our cries, we break down the barrier and our God extends bridges The people will awake victorious, declaring the glory of God
Modern Songs, Modern Service: The Holy Family Choir
The Holy Family Choir officially started some time in the early 1990s among friends in the ʼigtimaʻ al-shabab, a youth meeting at St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis. Amir Rafla, one of the choir's remaining original members, formed the choir as a young khadim who served in the church. Today, he tells me, many of his old cohorts are ordained Orthodox clergy, serving Coptic communities in the
United States and Canada. From the choir's original roster, he counted over five members who had devoted their lives to service, including one of the choir's earliest co-directors who first served as a priest in an Orthodox missionary parish in Nairobi, Kenya for twelve years before relocating to California.
194 When the group first began, Amir emphasized that they were mainly guided by spiritual concerns and not artistic or musical ones. Instead, their meetings largely focused on taratil in between sermons presented during their youth meetings and Bible studies, as both spiritual pedagogical tools and entertainment in between presenters.169 Most of their musical choices even emerged from "taratil min guwa al-kanisa," [" taratil from inside the church"]
—texts directly drawn from Orthodox liturgical rites and Biblical scripture, much like the earlier taratil Habib Girgis organized in his own pamphlets (see chapter 2). HFC only became interested in service trips to Upper Egypt when Adel, a devoted khadim, approached
Amir and challenged the choir to be "khuddam al-mawalid" literally "servants of the mulid."
There, he told Amir, the choir could bring the service of taratil to the Christian poor and in the greatest need of both social and spiritual development, known known as ʼikhwat al-rab
(lit. "the Lord's brethren).170
In his work on Guatemalan neo-Pentecostal Christians, Kevin O'Neill writes that charity among the country's poor and rural indigenous helped urban volunteers cultivate a sense of civic responsibility that emphasized their own moral self-governance as more developed, modern believers with a closer proximity to God (2010: 159). Social development, such as the promotion of routinized hygiene (i.e. brushing one's teeth, brushing one's hair) became makers of Christianity civility; in the exterior enactments of brushing one's teeth, the act illustrated the "cleanliness" of a moral interior. In Egypt, churches and mosques have long regulated social services that the State abandoned, with leagues of volunteers (and paid employees) providing basic social and financial assistance embedded in
169 Personal communication (5 June 2010). 170 See Arabic glossary for a detailed definition.
195 a utilitarian religious education.171 In Egypt however, such discourse of modernity were also entangled in habituated acts of piety and self-governance as critical to both a spiritual and material progress; besides routinely brushing one's teeth, one also read the Scripture, fasted, prayed, and attended Orthodox liturgy with a punctuality regularity. In addition to educating the rural and urban poor in Orthodox pedagogies of piety, reformers also embedded a more subtle civilizing mission in which volunteers and khuddam hoped to impart the benefits of an urban modernity. Like brushing one's teeth and attending an Orthodox liturgy at the Church, singing the latest, vernacular, and popular taratil became sonic markers of Christian civility, modernity, and [spiritual] progress.
Adel was among a growing movement of middle class volunteers known as mukarrasin who donated their time, skills, and even vowed life-long celibacy to serve
Egypt's poor and whose services spanned from Cairo's slums to rural Upper Egypt.172 In
Gabal al-Tayr, he hoped to enlist Amir as part of a nahda ruhiya or "spiritual renaissance" that would bring taratil to those who did not regularly attend Orthodox Church services and
Sunday School lessons. Additionally, the choir's service would also compete with other
Protestant denominations whose financial, development, and spiritual services already permeated much of Gabal al-Tayr. Though Bishop Pavnutius had prohibited other denominations by settling in the village and refused to grant them rent permits during
171 One of the most notable movements is that of Abuna Dawud Lam'i of St. Mark's Church of Cleopatra. His publication, Al-Khidma Hiya al-hali translated Service is the Solution (Cairo: Dar Nobar Publishers, 2005) in which he argues that spiritual volunteerism is a solution to spiritual, personal, social, and even health ailments. Though he does not specify political gains, his title and intentions loosely echoes the Muslim Brotherhood's earliest mantra, “Al 'Islam Hwa al-Hal,” “Islam is the solution.” Along with Bible studies, taratil, volunteers teach the poor personal hygiene, cleanliness, and even how to raise their kids. 172 As I mentioned in chapter 3, part of Sunday School revival produced a class of middle-class volunteers known as mukarrasin who donated their time, skills, and even vowed life-long celibacy to serve Egypt's poor. Also see the Arabic glossary at the beginning of this study.
196 festivals, groups such as al-ʼikhwa al-rasuliyya or the Pentecostal Church purchased offices just outside the diocese's jurisdiction. To the bishop's great ire, they sent in representatives to proselytize among the village's Orthodox community and organized their own service tents and taratil concerts throughout the mulid.
In 2005, HFC began their work in Gabal al-Tayr with only twenty khuddam, eventually growing to about 130 servants who make this trip yearly.173 The choir also invited other urban khuddam from neighboring churches, such as Abu Sifain's Coptic Orthodox
Church in the posh Muhandissin district.174 Initially, when HFC tried to perform in front of the mulid's historic church, Pavnutius evicted the group as a distraction to those who may be visiting the shrine and offering their nadr.175 As the choir slowly grew, Amir described how they began to rent tents in various locations "taht fi ʼArd al-mulid," literally down the mountain in the mulid's secular sector and close to the rousing entertainment and public market until they grew popular enough and the Bishop finally allowed them to perform in the mulid's sacral center. There, the choir served as Adel's opening act before his sermons, warming up the crowed with taratil and religious bingo games known as sahb. Besides modern songs, the choir also offered other gifts of urban modernity such as fans, cell phones, and even cassette players for the taratil tapes they passed out during service. In their early days, the choir use to follow Adel from one service tent to the next, singing in between sites
173 These service trips became so popular, that by 2013, there was a waiting list of khuddam on their Facebook page hoping to join HFC's now capped numbers. 174 Abu Sifain's crew organized the mulid's Sunday Schools for children known as Philokidz, and taught their lessons through religious skits in costumes and by passing out pedagogical coloring books. With the help of HFC volunteers, they also taught children's taratil. 175 This is likely due to the fact that the diocese makes a significant financial gain from pilgrims visitation to these sites. Besides sacrificing their own fatigue by walking to the mulid by foot, many pilgrims also offer monetary donations as the nadr for miracles that saints rendered or prayers that they answered.
197 to attract pilgrims. Once their popularity grew, it was Adel who began his sermon as an opening act to HFC's substantially longer performances and embedded spiritual lessons.
It is important to note that, as a native Upper Egyptian, Adel's sermons were especially popular because he talked in the Saʻidi dialect. Additionally, Amir and other HFC members sometimes switched to the dialect when they addressed audiences in between songs and prayer lessons. Historian Ziad Fahmy writes that Egypt's southern dialect is often contrasted with "normal" Lower-Egyptian speaking urbanites as "dimwitted and backward."
With the dominance of the Cairene dialect due to the rise of television and radio at the turn of the twentieth century, regional dialects and their speakers began to take on different meaning in popular culture, theater, songs, and jokes. Additionally, with an emerging discourse of modernity and reform slowly brewing in metropolitan centers such as Cairo and Alexandria,
Saʻidi dialects and those who spoke them were concurrently deemed as the internal "other"
(2011:9). In urban cinema, elite and middle-class audiences would also nostalgically imagine
Saʻida, as Upper Egyptians or even rural folk on the peripheries in the south of Cairo were called, as "authentic" markers of an indigenous Egyptian culture. As a sector of the lower class with less access to the country's contemporary globalization and neo-liberalism, reformers assumed that they lagged behind in educational, material, even spiritual progress. 176
Like Muslim discourses of authenticity, Christian Saʻida also take on an additional image as the "truest bearers of faith" and the "purest" believers in contemporary urban Coptic
Orthodox imagination. In the belief that their forefathers held onto the antiquated Coptic
176 For more about neo-liberalism and popular culture in Egypt, see Lila Abu-Lughod's study about the proliferation of television drama series during a period of increased economic liberalization under President Anwar Sadat; Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago University Press, 2001).
198 language and culture the longest, they carried a religious quintessence in popular Coptic culture. However, many church reformists today conceive that it is the lack of education and poverty today that leaves them the most vulnerable to sectarian discrimination and religious conversion. Even if they did not convert, many contended, without the knowledge of
Orthodox rites, they were the unwitting victims of Islamicization in their everyday culture and performance of their Christian piety.177 Reformers such as Pope Shenouda who identified mulid's as "tagamuʻat shaʻbiyya," or lower-class gatherings, maintained that Orthodox conversion to other denominations or out of the faith all together was due to their lack of knowledge and access to Sunday School education. Like the American missionaries before them, urban khuddam put Christian Saʻida on the forefront of their most aggressive efforts to transform them into modern and Orthodox Christians educated believers in liturgical rites, prayers, and fasts.
HFC saw themselves as modernist reformers and engaged citizens who sang in the vernacular Arabic language of the region's common (wo)man. Their song materials also addressed Christians and Muslims alike and believed their colloquial song texts, demeanor, and presentation style was a sharp contrast to the Church's more official broadcast that highlighted sectarian and interdenominational differences. First, the choir learned a few
177 For example, like their Muslim counterparts, many pious Copts refuse to drink or eat ham citing religious reasons even though both items are not prohibited in Christianity. Despite his criticism of Islamicization, Pope Shenouda himself warned Copts not to eat pork products, citing health reasons (see “Pope Shenouda Warns Copts of Eating Ham” Arab West Report, 14 May 2008). Following the swine flu crisis when the government's Ministry of Health ordered the culling of the country's 300,000 pigs owned largely by Coptic farmers, he renewed his warnings, this time citing pigs s carriers of the virus despite the World Health Organization's(WHO) confirmation that the virus was not transmitted from eating properly prepared pork (See “UN Says Egypt Pig Cull Real Mistake” Al-Jazeera, 30 April 2009 (accessed 16 June 2013). For more on the political dimensions on Pope Shenouda's ban on ham, see Elizabeth Iskander's Sectarian Conflict in Egypt: Coptic Media, Identity, and Representation (New York, Routledge, 2012): 81-84.
199 "taratil shaʻbiyya" or local taratil themselves, a mix of popular regional songs thanks to interdenominational and neo-Pentecostal Christian satellite television and cassettes of local artists. Secondly, they musically emphasized simple spiritual message by performing them as lessons in song, a method not unlike the successful Protestant denominations evangelizing just a few streets over, or the early Sunday School reformers who imitated American
Presbyterian "spiritual songs" (aghani ruhiya; see chapter 2). Thirdly, the choir was proud to introduce the latest Cairene taratil, namely those of the Orthodox musician Maher Fayez to their Upper Egyptian listeners and whose texts aimed at a non-denominational specificity.
According to Amir, these new songs were more "open" because they lacked specifically
Orthodox and Christian markers. Furthermore, they were less "hissa" or "raucous" than the taratil shaʻbiyya and popular genres that predominated in folk worship because of their texts and spiritual message. Of course, there is an irony here, considering how Abuna Matta also identified HFC's songs as "hissa" due to their Western influence, bustling melodies, and emotive text.
What interests me here is the contradictions between Father Matta and Amir's conceptions of proper worship etiquette and shared cultural heritage with Egypt's non-
[Orthodox] Christians. Abuna Matta did not seem as bothered by the ululations, claps, and tabla beats that characterized religious expression throughout the mulid as long as they remained in the festival's popular domain. This included children's baptismal processions around the village when fathers held their newly baptized children high in the air at the front of a procession of local musicians. There, men, women, and children took turns to honor the family and dance to a tabla rhythm played by hired Muslim musicians who have learned to
200 play taratil accompany these processions. Additionally, many of these local songs are based on well-known folk songs such as Sayyid Darwish's "Salama Ya Salama" as family sprinkled the child with new and crisp Egyptian pounds.
HFC however, were critical of these boisterous folk and popular rites. Instead, they hoped to instruct their audiences on how to be modern pious Orthodox Christians throughout the mulid's grounds by shifting their broader musical tastes, singing style, and by introducing a more subdued expressions of taratil performance through HFC's concert-lessons. To the sounds of newly orchestrated songs, the electric org, a synthetic drum beats, and a bass guitar, they instructed their audiences to prayer with their hearts, and not their bodies (See chapter 2 for Habib Girgis' similar instructions to how to attend an Orthodox liturgy). In one of Amir's lessons to the crowd (28 May 2011), he emphasized the message to an overpacked audience:
So that we may extol Christ with praise, we can not just do it with our voices, but with our hearts as well--- we must do it with our voices and our hearts… What does it mean to praise the Lord? To praise the Lord, we must reject the world---reject the world and our [unclear] and thank God for all that He has done for us and for His love. Let's sing it together!
In turn, the Diocese's Lagnat al-Nizam ["Committee for Order"] who served as security at the choir's larger concert closely monitored the audiences: they asked audiences to stop clapping during songs lest they resemble their more charismatic Protestant competitors; They shooed away young children who mistook saint images embedded in taratil projected PowerPoint presentations and reached out to take baraka from the images on the screen; And finally, they asked audiences to remain seated to prevent any excessive movement during performance.
In previous chapters, I investigate how reformist figures such as Habib Girgis and his
201 subsequent Sunday School reform depended on taratil and sung saint hagiographies as pedagogical techniques to orient pious believers towards a heavenly citizenship. In turn,
Pope Shenouda mediated State's modernist efforts by initiating the largest institutionalization of Sunday School education, mirroring nationalist efforts to construct a modern public sphere in mosques through auditory transformations and state-educated preachers (Hirschkind
2004). As professional preachers (khutabaʼ) looked to instill in their audiences the opinions and attitudes that would constitute modern Egyptians, newly ordained Coptic clerics and khuddam performed many of the Pope's poetry as taratil, with a new emphasis on an inward ethical reformation that would produce Christians citizens faithful to "Egypt on the inside"
(see Chapter 3). In the mulid, urban khuddam such as the HFC also looked to taratil to restructure a pilgrim's interiority, but rather than the pedagogical Sunday School songs of their youth, they drew on growing charismatic ministries, neo-Pentecostal influences, and taratil that emphasized public performances of faith, spiritual happiness, and a spiritual subjectivity that transformed Egypt on the ground.
From my first meeting with Amir Rafla, he explained that many choir members chafed against the Church's habituated acts of piety, such as fasting, liturgical prayer in
Coptic, the singing of Orthodox alhan. Instead, many turned to the alternative and contested taratil emerging outside of the Church, such as those of Maher Fayez. Like Fayez charismatic-leaning ministry (see chapter 5), Choir members looked to these new songs to critique the Church's notion of a pious modernity that was largely (dis)engaged from their contemporary worlds and only looked towards a moral interior for a specifically Orthodox
Christian congregation. These efforts, the choir contended, remained invisible and inaudible
202 in the world beyond the institutional Church, hence their efforts to bring taratil concerts to the mulid's peripheries, even proselytize among non-Christians in the festival's market. Lara
Deed reminds us that the Lebanese Shiʻa volunteers in her study viewed public community activism as critical both to the spiritual betterment of the poor, but also to their own spiritual progress and development. "Volunteerism" she writes, "constitutes a critical thread in the social weft of the pious modern" (2006:169). HFC's new, electronicized, and amplified alternative taratil not only served to build their audiences' moral interior, but also to build their own. In other words, HFC look to sound and song to transform themselves into pious and modern Christian activists. The song below, composed by Maher Fayez and now one of the more popular taratil that HFC performed during their service, articulates this desire.
Ya Bani al-Kull / "You Who Builds all"
You who build all, return happiness again to your home Lord of the House, echo in us and return us to your home
Let people return once again to be human And fill the heart with your faith And those among us who are lost will one day return to [your] embrace And may all sing as their heart has returned to happiness
Hirschkind writes that state-sponsored preachers and sermons, as instruments of the state, were deployed as a technology of the modern subject, a device to encourage modern virtues such as hard work, individual initiative, cooperation, and obedience to state authority
(143). But eventually, such efforts failed. Mosques became panoptic sites of suspicion and censorship while many listeners viewed state-ordained preachers as ignorant of sermon's auditory potential to tune their hearts to God, even outright spies. Instead, they turned to a
203 new and rising class of popular preachers who took sermons outside of the mosque in the form of cassette-sermons and transformed them into tools of contestation against state authority, control, and the discursive politics of modernity (2004:145). As I illustrate in the next section, HFC's ministry also looked to reform the Orthodox Church from within, reconfiguring the mulid's sacral soundscapes into one that merged the festival's ambiguity and ambivalences that contested, but at times, also inscribed the Orthodox Church's authority.
Song as Sermon; Visiting the Poor, Visiting Our Selves
"Niftaqidhum bi al-Masih illi muftaqidin al-Masih"
(We will visit them with Christ for those who are missing Christ)
Amir Rafla instructing HFC in spiritual home visits known as iftiqad May 28, 2011
As they did every year, the Holy Family Choir took up residence in Samalut's Coptic
Orthodox Diocese, in the city and daily took a water ferry across the Nile to the Gabal al-
Tayr village. The diocese compound included a tall and narrow social services building
(mabna khadimat), a grocery store, a cafeteria, and large basketball courts. It was also adjacent to its very own hospital, a part of Pavnutius' expansion efforts in the small city.
During HFC's stay, the diocese was teeming with people, with up to 8 or more choristers crammed to a room. In the cafeteria, Samalut volunteer khuddam and paid employees cooked up meals for the new guests. Others manned the grocery store on the first floor with familiar urban commodities such as Pepsi, chipsy, and Nestle's Juhayna chocolate milk. In the
204 courtyard, local young boys dressed in galabiyyas (traditional cotton dresses) played soccer and eyed our comings and goings intently, curious about the uniformed jean-wearing shabab
(youth) from Cairo.
I was fortunate to have found myself in a quiet room with only 6 people. It was there that I met Lola, a bright-eyed middle aged woman whose dyed red hair revealed her to be considerably older than most of the choir members. As I began to introduce myself, my unease must have been visible when I confessed that I was still quite new to the group and new to their mulid service. She grinned warmly and quickly tucked me under her arm: "Don't worry habibti (my beloved), I am everyone's mama around here." During my time with the choir, she routinely introduced me to choir members, made special effort to translate sermons, and helped me locate taratil in the choir's song books. In addition to teaching me new songs, she frequently engaged me in intimate conversations about faith and piety, hoping to impart on me lessons of how to believe. In her simple but pedagogical act of hospitality,
Lola adopted me in an act of iftiqad.
Coming from the Arabic root [f-q-d] broadly meaning to lose, iftiqad means to search or to seek for that which is lost. It also means to visit, and during Shenouda's religious reforms, took on the meaning of visiting "lost" parishioners who did not regularly attend church services and Sunday School. Loosely, iftiqad also resembles the Muslim act of daʻwa
(literally, a summons or a call) that has grown popular in the 1970s at the same time the
Coptic Renaissance and the Muslim religious revival emerged in Egypt. Drawing on Quran, daʻwa emphasizes a duty incumbent upon some or all members of the Islamic community to actively encourage fellow Muslims to pursue greater piety, public and private, in all aspects
205 of their lives (Hirschkind 2008:109).178 While it was Coptic clergy who first practiced iftiqad to educate families about their spiritual values and to help them apply religious principals to their daily lives (Oram 2004: 159), it is now Sunday School khuddam, choir directors, and volunteers who pursue their missing students, visit their homes, and even pick them for
Sunday School classes. One of the most ubiquitous images I saw in Shubra on Friday mornings were Sunday School khuddam who walked around the neighborhood church with a long line of young children behind them. During my time in Gabal al-Tayr, Lola always accompanied me to HFC's worship sessions, prayer meetings, and took me aside to explain spiritual lessons.
In the mulid, it was urban khuddam like Lola who undertook iftiqad among Gabal al-
Tayr's rural residents. They too had become a familiar sight in the village as a trail of pale blue or pale green HFC shirts maneuvering the mulid's dusty roads with boxes of taratil cassettes (sharayyit taratil) and religious tracts (nabzat). Their image had become so ubiquitous, that one day as I joined one group's iftiqad to a house, the young men sitting on the porch lowered the popular music on their hand held stereos and yelled out in English "We love Jesus! We love Jesus!" khuddam from Samalut also joined the HFC and their visits ranged from spiritual sermon-lessons to, at times, social development and financial help.
During their service in mulid al-ʻAdra however, HFC largely concentrated their effort on spiritual education programs by providing a small sermon and then singing taratil together with the Christians they visited. In Amir's witty play on words, he imparted to the group the goal underlying iftiqad: "Niftaqidhum bi al-Masih illi muftaqidin al-Masih"---"We will visit them with Christ for those who are missing Christ."
178 For more on daʻwa, see Hirschkind chapter 4
206 Iftiqad, however, was not simply about visiting the mulid's rural poor, but also about visiting "our selves." For the khuddam, it was also about taking a brief hiatus from the madness of city life and its social pressures to "find" and visit their spiritual selves. Deeb writes about the meshing of the pious modern and the social embeddeness of "developing" the poor: "self-development is not a private act," writes Lara Deeb, but it is also a relational one between Lebanese reformers and the Shiʻa Muslims they served (2006:186).179 Besides the baraka or blessings of "spiritually developing" the poor in Gabal al-Tayr, iftiqad was also critical to many HFC member's personal moral restructuring. Furthermore, iftiqad create a sense of community that surpassed the mulid and created important relations they took back to the city, connecting HFC members to each other, to God, and finally to themselves. Hence,
Amir's frequent final words to the choir before service: "Remember, here we are served more than we serve."
* * * * *
A typical day of khidma with HFC began with breakfast. Almost always, breakfast ended with an outburst of taratil accompanied by the rattling of forks and knives on the table and the sounds of a large frame drum known as daff. In a way, it was the most seamless segue between breakfast, prayer meetings, and a brief sermon in the diocese chapel before heading out to sing all day in the mulid grounds. During these sermons, choir members received their directions from Amir and volunteered for one of three kinds of khidma: a Sunday School service undertaken for children in one tent; a taratil service (khidmat al-taranim) in which a
179 The Turners write about how "good works" are central to the pilgrimage experience in religious festivals and are a part of the drama's climax; "No one good work will ensure ultimate salvation; but in the popular view it ensure many occasion of grace (baraka) as rewards for a good work done freely out of a desire for salvation and for the benefits of others" (Turner & Turner 1978: 17).
207 choir performed taratil for adults in another tent; and finally, a third group of volunteers who joined diocese representatives in home visitations, iftiqad. In addition to taratil singing and a small sermon, khuddam would advertize their worship concerts in service tents positioned around the festival. In the evening, all of HFC volunteers would gather together in front of the largest service tent to perform a public taratil procession from the bottom of the mountain, where their tents were located, through the mulid's market to the top where the historic church was located. For the remainder of the night, everyone participated in a large open-air concert of taratil in the mulid's sacral center in front of the Marian shrine, the
Orthodox diocese, and the baptismal fonts. We were seldom back at the diocese in Samalut before 3 or 4am, and the choir woke up only a few hours later to do it all over again.
In all of these services, pedagogical songs and sermons were intimately tied: HFC began their day with a brief sermon either by Amir or a guest speaker; Amir and Adel began choir performances with a brief word; and finally, during iftiqad, HFC members would sing a tartila after a compact sermon-lesson to mulid-goers in their homes or tents. These sermons modeled what Hirschkind called a "paradigmatic rhetorical form" that he had studied in
Muslim daʻwa, where sermons mixed practical and political constraints on moral action, linking public activism (and, I add here, public expressions of piety) with moral reform
(2006: 114). And, as Armanios notes, by the eighteenth century, Coptic clerical sermons looked to reform their congregants towards a path of salvation and hoped to protect Coptic moral and communal boundaries from Catholic and Protestant missionary activities. They did so by presenting their sermons as "weapons of the faithful," chastising missionary's "loose" morals and corrupting influences on its congregants. Additionally, Armanios even quotes one
208 manuscript where the bishop struggles with his parishioners' misbehavior and dancing at martyr's feast celebrations, and lists his dire attempts to impart the church's "true" beliefs through pedagogical sermons (Armanios 2011: 131).180 In Gabal al-Tayr, it was HFC's pedagogical sermons during iftiqad visits that looked to reconfigure pilgrims' moral interiors and transform them into modern, pious and practicing believers. taratil followed to embed this spoken lesson into a sung one, much in the same way that Habib Girgis enforced his earlier Sunday School lessons through song.
As Abuna Matta already noted, festival goers constantly heard sermons and taratil bellowing loudly through Church loudspeakers in the mulid center. But, as Amir reminded the group with a sense of urgency, missionary competitors proselytized beyond the diocese's sonic reach: "Durna ikhtitaf al-nufus"—"Our job is to seize [their] souls," he told the choir during one prayer meeting, from the grip of these competing ministries who also entangled their own theologies in sermon and song.181 Along with HFC's presence at the mulid, the largest Coptic Evangelical Church in Cairo, Kasr al-Dobara, has also sent down khuddam from Cairo to preach, serve and sing. A Presbyterian organization, the Egyptian Bible
Society, also organized a children's service only an hour before HFC, and volunteers from
Abu Sifain presented their own Sunday School lessons. HFC and diocese members were not deterred however. During the prayer meetings or on the the bus from the diocese to the ferry that would carry us across the Nile to Gabal al-Tayr, I could hear khuddam organizing a list of taratil and leafing through Bibles preparing brief sermons for home visitations. In May 2011,
180 “Weapons of the Faithful” is also the title of eighteenth-century Bishop Yusab; PatriarchalLibrary in Cairo (MS Theology 134). 181 HFC prayer meeting; 29 May 2011.
209 choir members reminded me, it was critical to bring the Word of God to people beyond the festivity's center through iftiqad, especially as rumors of insecurity after January 25th minimized people's movements through the mulid.
During one evening, I joined two HFC volunteers Mariette and Bishoy in our first iftiqad with three seasoned diocese volunteers from Samalut. The three middle-aged women were a boisterous crew who did not bother with introductions, but instead pulled out a pair of church metal cymbals (daff) before hitting the road. As an instrument that evenly regulated congregational responses in the liturgy, the daff took on a whole new life in their hands as it was made to sound out a local maqsum rhythm fit for a wedding.182 Furthermore, it accompanied a popular and local tartila that Mariette, Bishoy, and I did not recognize: "ʼIwʻa
Tikun Mashghul"—"Do not be busy."183 Between the sounds of auto-rickshaws (tuktuks) that veered frighteningly close, blaring car horns, and overpowering stereos, these women somehow threaded their way through the narrow and crowded mulid streets on new routes we had never seen before, singing taratil nonchalantly at the top of their lungs. They did not stop until we walked into the next open home, catching a family off guard as they gathered over a freshly split watermelon. A woman sitting close to a boiling kettle did not appreciate this interruption and muttered something begrudgingly, signifying both a tired sense of nuisance at the regularity of these iftiqad visits.
182 The precise rhythmic strokes are Dumm takk – takk Dumm – takk (DT–TD–T). For a detailed explanation of Arab rhythmic modes (iqaʻat), see Scott Marcus' Music in Egypt; Experiencing Music, Experiencing Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007). 183 Mari, Bishoy and I likely did not recognize the song “ʼIwʻa Tikun Mashghul” because it was largely popular in Upper Egypt. The only well known murannimin to sing it and make an official recording was Fadia Bazzi, a singer whose popular and Sa'idi inflections did not extend to an appreciation in neighborhoods such as Heliopolis Cairo. Also, the tartila itself, with its adventist texts, further marginalized it from Orthodox Church approved settings, despite its shared themes of the eternal bliss and praise in a heavenly afterlife.
210 After the diocese khuddam had finished performing their tartila, they stepped aside for Bishoy who had volunteered to give this first sermon. In a catechism style similar to
Girgis' earliest methods, he opened his Bible and meditated on a verse: "My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."184 Like the vitality of drinking water everyday—Bishoy signaled to the boiling kettle—"good" and "pious" Christians had to daily search for God as a living spring from which to "drink." Orthodox rites such as confessions, liturgy, and repentance became the wellspring at which to find God and to quench one's thirst. Investing in broken cisterns, he explained, was like being distracted by the toils of the world and its fleeting promises of happiness and money—the same opening words of the popular song that the Samalut khuddam sang walking into this home: "Do not be busy, our days will not last long this world is empty and will pass." These efforts would be futile, he warned his audience, if not wedded to Christian practices of piety: prayer, fasting, reading the
Bible, confession, communion, singing alhan and taratil, and examining one's conscience daily in repentance.
In his work, Kevin O'Neill describes rituals of piety not only as key to a Christian citizenship, but also argues that rituals of piety are not only about belonging to others, but also to one's self (2009; 2010). In other words, fasting, prayer, and religious songs were relational practices and relation-making activities that carry actual effects in the world. They also sustain a self-to-self relationship that informs one's mode of personhood as a Christian citizen, as they did in post-war Guatemala (2009: 340-41). Like Orthodox sermons, singing devotional taratil were not just about protecting communal and moral boundaries, but also
184 Jeremiah 2:13
211 about shifting the inward movement of the heart to a site of self-governance for the betterment of one's religious community, village, perhaps even country. Hirschkind reminds us that "to speak publicly on ethical issues is one of the ways one hones and enacts ethical knowledge" (2006: 110). In other word, to sing a spoken sermon or its embedded lessons is to learn it by heart and then sing it out loud for others to hear. In the same way that Church reforms hoped to convert mulids into increasingly liturgical and holy sites by broadcasting liturgical alhan and sermons, HFC and the diocese volunteers hoped to transform their listeners and their own selves into sites of discipline, what Foucault calls the "interiorization of governance" through taratil and sermons (Foucault 1999: 126). By teaching pilgrims how to perform Orthodox rites—for example, baptism, confessions, and communion—HFC hoped to extend membership of a pious modernity in which they too were trying to gain entry.
Kevin O'Neill meditates on Foucault's notion of governmentality as the means of understanding the moral register that prompts citizens to govern their conduct and the conduct of others, efforts that constitute citizenship participation and civic engagement
(2009: 342). As Bishoy and other urban volunteers looked to spiritually develop the rural pilgrims' interiority into pious and disciplined believers, these khuddam also looked to develop their own morality for a larger Coptic pious modern, efforts that resembled the
Church's own reformist agenda to transform the mulid into "ʼamakan ʻamr" (1999: 9): a productive ground of moral and spiritual refashioning. I return once again to Lara Deeb's work on Shiʻa Muslims in Lebanon: visible piety among the country's poor was critical to the volunteer's personal membership and civic engagement in a pious modern (2006: 34). I
212 would add that in Coptic mulids (and Egypt broadly) such membership is also cultivated in most audible ways: HFC looked to teach their audiences how to perform piety in public, out- loud ways, and to claim the mulid's aural and physical topographies spaces as a "heaven on earth" through religious ritual and song by first disciplining and singing themselves. HFC brought these audible practices back to their urban worlds as cell-phone ringtones, videos of the mulid shared on Facebook, and routine worship rehearsals in St. George's Church of
Heliopolis, creating a "heaven on earth" wherever they sang and publicly witnessed their
Christian piety.
Singing Coptic Counterpublics: HFC "Serving in Heaven" as Modern-Day
Martyrs
In one of his daily sermon to the choir, guest speaker Abuna Musa from Samalut spoke about service, khidma, as one of the most critical ways in which to directly experience
God. A quiet timid man, his heavy Saʻidi (Upper Egyptian) dialect echoed in the diocese chapel where the choir typically started their day after breakfast (29 May 2010):
…Generally, khidma is a form of encountering God, and a direct form of ʻibada (piety). It is an activity that we have inherited [as a responsibility]…. Ask yourselves: do I serve? Is it through iftiqad? Singing taranim? Teaching Sunday School?
Interweaving scripture with rich metaphor and colloquial proverbs, Abuna pressed on that any pains and suffering undertaken for khidma were the pains of salvation, a route to a heavenly afterlife. More importantly, khidma was a person's God-assigned responsibility and a pre-requisite to becoming part of "a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to
213 God."185 In other words, suffering was not only critical for a heavenly belonging, as Sunday
School teachers taught their students in Shubra (see chapter 3), but the "pains of salvation"— such as the hardships that HFC endured to bring taratil to the mulid—were also key to forging a lived "holy nation" on this earth.
In this final section, I investigate the hazards of HFC's taratil services in Gabal Al-
Tayr and the choir's efforts to "reclaim the mulid" as piece of a heavenly nation, al-watan al- samawi. Building on Webb Keane's notions of the hazards of social interaction (1997), I explore how such risks of overt Christian audibility were productive in crafting a kind of
Coptic counterpublic, a sounding discursive space of faith that is otherwise relegated to private contexts outside of the mulid's Christian terrain. Finally, my discussion culminates around one taratil procession when the choir brought taratil to the mulid's most public realm, the market, and brazenly proselytized to its largely Muslim vendors and shoppers. It was in the clashes that followed, when the choir was greeted with a hail of carobs and pebbles by disgruntled listeners, that the choir momentarily embodied the potentials of their Coptic eschatologies and martyr hagiographies. Like the saints, they felt the consequences of their public audibility of faith on their bruised bodies. As the group reviewed their minor injuries the next day, Amir insisted they continue their taratil processions despite the dangers, calling it the most important part of the spiritual "war" to reclaim the Christian mulid and bring pilgrims "back to God."186
In his study of the Muslim daʻwa movement and religious activism in Egypt's modern public sphere, Hirschkind (2006: 117) writes:
185 Like most of his sermons, Abuna Moussa was quoting a verse from the Bible here (Peter 2: 9). 186 May 31, 2011
214 While participants in the daʻwa movement clearly consider themselves to be Egyptian citizens, they also cultivate sentiments, loyalties, and styles of public conduct that stand in tension with the moral and political exigencies and modes of self- identification of national citizenship. In this sense, they inhabit a counterpublic: a domain of discourse and practice that stands in a disjunctive relationship to the public sphere of the nation and its instruments.
As the Egyptian State increasingly policed mosque sermons and shaped them with a rhetoric of a modernist reform, religious sermon activists (known as daʻiyat, lit. "proselytizer") emerged to sound an alternative ethical soundscape that aimed to make Muslims more pious.
Many of these underground sermons were characterized by death, writes Hirschkind, creating
Islamic counterpublics invested in the presence of the eschatological world of the afterlife, sermons that emphasize death to govern life (2006: 178). In turn, Copts have also crafted their own counterpublics by highlighting saint hagiographies and martyr narratives, stressing the moral excellence, spiritual victory, and heavenly rewards of dying in service of one's faith
(see chapter 3). More importantly, they defy a national exception of their community's silence, directly or indirectly proselytizing despite it being officially illegal in Egypt. 187
Coptic minority dynamics and recent flare-ups of sectarian violence in Egypt only heighten these martyr motifs and, as Anthony Shenoda writes, these narratives empower
Copts with ways to redress their lived sense of marginalization, reminding them of the final triumph and power in death (2012: 481). HFC's suffering and "small deaths" to bring taratil to the mulid were the moments in which heaven touched down on earth in a particularly visceral, felt away—the loss of one's voice, numbness from overplaying, and the overall physical fatigue. Pain, sickness, and lack of sleep only strengthened the choir's resolve to reclaim and reform the mulid's Christian ethical soundscapes. In Abuna Musa's words, it was
187 http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/newspaper-government-mulls-regulating-proselytizing
215 a direct route to a heavenly nation and a spiritual victory in the afterlife. While Hirschkind concludes that an experiential knowledge of death is a condition of moral agency 2006: 176),
I add here that it is also critical to a political and civic agency in this life as well, crafting what it means to be an engaged Egyptian Christian citizen in an Egypt beyond one's moral interior.
Amir and experienced HFC members knew of the physical demands, risks, and suffering inherent in the mulid's taratil service. Following the January 25 uprising especially, the director's concern was never lost on the group. During his own sermons, he frequently confessed to the worried parents who had called him because they were afraid for their children and who urged him to come back to Cairo. During the morning prayer meetings following the January 25th uprising, he also admitted that Abuna Musa had pleaded with him to forgo public processions that year due to the lack of security, and to proceed instead silently up the mountain—something that he adamantly refused to do. These concerns shaped actions beyond the diocese: on the bus rides to the service tents, Amir and older choir members instructed us to shut the curtains on our bus rides through Samalut so that people in the city could not see and recognize that a Christian choir was heading the mulid.188 Women's movements through the festival grounds were largely confined to the choir's service tents, the diocese, and accompanied iftiqad visits.
To grapple with the service's grueling physical demands, Amir also organized the
188 There is a certain traumatic flashback to this this; in 1999, Amir tells me that 13 members of another Church choir from their church, named Abnaʼ al-Rasul (lit. Sons of the Prophet), had died in a fatal bus crash while coming back from a service trip in Upper Egypt. While the incident was recognized as an unfortunate motor accident, there are certain implication made as if they died because of their services. Additionally, their photos posted on Facebook are framed by a heavenly realm surrounded by angels and Christ as martyrs for their faith.
216 taratil service into two shifts. Over the course of ten days, he split a total of 125 khuddam into two groups: 70 khuddam serving for the first 5 days, followed by another 55 volunteers who arrived for the "second shift." Core members stayed behind and ushered newcomers into their roles. While many returned for work or family obligations in Cairo, others left early simply because of fatigue, exhaustion, or sickness. The long stints of performing, sermonizing, and singing taratil—averaging over 16 hours a day—took a heavy toll: due to the strenuous and excessive singing and playing, almost all musicians complained of injuries and "broken bodies," from simple aches and soreness to downright numbness and tendinitis.189 Another member fell ill, likely from poor sanitary conditions, and contracted a serious fever for which he was rushed home. When Amir announced this young man's fever, he reflected that such sickness was an example of the price the choir had to pay for
"ascending too high" to heaven. Something had to break down, and almost always it was the body. Besides sore limbs, almost all choir members lost their voices, taking turns behind the microphone to sing hoarsely while others rested. The overall exhaustion prompted Lola's joke to me one morning before bed. Touching her arm lightly, she whispered to me in a raspy voice "Caro, I can no longer feel myself. Can you?" I confess, I was a mess.
In her work on Shiʻa Muslim women in Pakistan, anthropologist Mary Elaine
Hegland writes that self-flagellation presents potential for agency and a renewal of social power structures (1998: 240). In Gabal al-Tayr, HFC's self-flagellation by over-playing and over-singing was not only about renewing potent cultural paradigms of suffering and sacrifice, but also about redefining the practices of witness in these tense and politically
189 Marcus had arrived to this mulid a couple of days late, and instead of his usual routine of taking photographs and making videos he served mostly as a first-aide respondent, bandaging up musicians and getting medicine for the sick.
217 fraught conditions.190 While traditional saint hagiographies called for a literal suffering and martyrdom in their witness of their faith, choir members activated and legitimized a civic and political agency through a different kind of suffering and self-mortification: the hazards of public audibility, witness and overt identification as Christians.
Foucault writes "mortification is not death, of course, but it is a renunciation of this world and of one's self: a kind of everyday death. A death which is suppose to provide life in another world…." He continues, "Christian mortification is a kind of relation from oneself to oneself…. It is a constitutive part of self identity," (1999: 143). Like monks in their death to the world, these modern-day witnesses engaged in strategic (dis)engagements with the world to find and constitute themselves. When Lola could no longer feel her self—"Ana mish hasa bi nafsi"—"I no longer feel my self"—she reached out to find her arm. Gruber (2003: 169) also reminds us that Coptic Orthodox monks look to suffering as passage to the heavens:
By the symbolic potency of [their] sacrifice, the ethic burden would be spiritual transformed from an external social threat to transcendent social affirmation. If the Copts must suffer at the hands of their occupier, their sacrifice is turned by the monks, and by the sacrificial dynamic which the monks embody, into an engagement with the terrible and immanent God. The grounds of that engagement is suffering….
Besides a kind of closer spiritual engagement with God, HFC looked to their taratil and hardships as a rite with which to better endure, negotiate and (dis)engage the immediate realties of their urban lives back in Cairo and creating a heaven on this earth. Such service trips revived their own communal identities and boundaries in the face of the city's Islamic
(sonic) hegemony, and sheltered them in alternative soundscapes and networks that
190 In his work “Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam,” Mohamoud Ayoub provides a brief survey of the term shahid, particularly as it emerged in Christian texts and early theological writing (in Religious Resurgence; Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Mary Elaine Heglan and Richard Antoun eds., Syracuse University Press, 1987: 67-77).
218 congregated around taratil rehearsals and song preparations for the mulid every year. These rehearsals, which took place once a week, were only a small fraction of the engagements and services that the choir provided year round. This included other song services in Cairo's slums, performances in citywide and countrywide youth religious competitions known as
Mahragan, and touring performances surrounding church communities. Besides these gatherings, many choir members also became close friends through their songs services, attending each other's engagements, weddings, and family gatherings. In many of these social reunions, the choir almost always paused to sing.
These taratil services also offered HFC alternative motifs of suffering to maneuver the Orthodox Church's new centralization and narrowly standardized performances of piety in the city—fasting, liturgical prayer, and reading the Scripture. During my own meetings with Lola, one of the most valuable lessons that she shared and reiterated was about how to believe. "You don't always have to fast or go to Church to be pious," Lola impressed on me.
The most important element of faith is the heart, she explained, and a willingness to serve and "nitʻab ʻashan al-akharin"—literally to suffer for the sake of others, and more specifically, the Egyptian Christina poor (ikhwit al-rabb). In short, HFC members such as
Lola looked to craft their own civic and pious participation in the world through the sacrifice of one's time, sweat, health, even one's voice. While Amanda Weidman reminds us, in her study of classing singing in South India, that it is in the voice where we can locate subjectivity and agency (2006: 10). Here, in Gabal al-Tayr, it was the loss of voice, where
HFC singers found their own empowerment, representation, and self-knowledge.
It is important to note that many of these internal spiritual renewals depended on the
219 charismatic taratil by the popular singer Maher Fayez who sang a counternarrative of happiness, spiritual joy, and victory, contradicting the Church's strategic discourse of suffering for one's faith. As I will discuss in the next chapter, it was Lola and other HFC members who introduced me to the singer, a rather liminal figure in Coptic devotional landscape. Many HFC members initially attended his worship concerts in Shubra in secret for fear of reprisal from the Orthodox clergy in their own Church communities. As a self- proclaimed Orthodox murannim, Fayez is neither accepted nor officially outcast from the
Church and his liminal status is a suitable case study to examine questions of belonging and counternarrative of happiness to an Orthodox Church institution, to Egypt, and finally to one's self as a modern but pious Egyptian Christian citizen. While Fayez claimed alternative spaces outside of Orthodoxy, such as satellite media and Protestant performance spaces, HFC worked to reclaim public spaces by singing his songs on the ground; and through taratil processions they suffered to reclaim a kind of sonic sovereignty otherwise silent outside of the mulid.
When HFC typically set out in their own taratil zaffa through the mulid's market every night, they aimed to momentarily transform the festival's layered cacophony into a productive, pious and transformative soundscape. As Adel explained to the group during a morning sermon, the choir's procession was inspired by the Upper Egyptian dawrat in larger
Christian mulids when, in cooperation with State security, local bishops would leave their diocese and circle a saint's shrine or tomb in a loud procession.191 The spiritual sounds of
191 In her work on Coptic Christians in eighteenth-century Egypt, Febe Armanios writes that, as costly and precarious as they were, pilgrimages to Jerusalem constituted one of the most important public manifestations of Christian religious expression within the Ottoman world (2011: 91). It was also an opportunity when lay and clerical members worked together to negotiate state and local authorities. As early as the seventeenth century, Armanios writes, these processional preparations and planning were
220 these procession would "hid al-tigara wa al-flus, wa al-laghbata di,"—literally "bring down the mulid commerce, money, and other questionable business."192 These clerical parades were also usually organized around the time of Vespers prayers (tasbiha) offered in the diocese church or in the saint's shrine. Adel continued that the sounds of dawrat al-alhan (alhan processions) were intended to remind people of the spiritual purpose of a saint's festival and bring them into the Church or the shrine for these liturgical services, a kind of call to prayer.
In their reformist efforts, HFC offered taratil processions as a colloquial and informal version of dawrat al-alhan. Instead, the choir offered many of the familiar, Arabic songs that they had proliferated in their Sunday School services for children, iftiqad home visits, and smaller concerts throughout the mulid. Unlike the church procession, they did not accompany the local bishop around the Marian shrine or collaborate with the state police. Rather, they organized their own security (namely the men in the choir), and also traced their route from their service tents on the fringes of the festival through some of the most destitute and forgotten neighborhoods in Gabal al-Tayr, the market, before finally arriving at mulid's sacral center at the Marian shrine. There, on a makeshift stage, they performed a major outdoor concert in front of their largest audience, many of them pilgrims who followed them from the markets.
On one particular evening in May 2011, the procession began as usual: HFC gathered
shared religious practices, constituting an important legitimacy for the Ottoman Sultan, local military, and political leaders. They even emulated Muslim hajj or processional pilgrimages to the holy city of Mecca (2011: 92). Despite the sources available about early Christian pilgrimages however, many have neglected to describe many of the failed processions due to periods of inter-communal tensions and outright expulsion due to overtly boisterous and public celebrations of Christian ritual. 192 Here, Adel was indirectly citing a frequently evoked Biblical verse, Isiah 19: 1; “The burden concerning Egypt. Behold, the LORD rides upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall tremble at his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.”
221 in a madly chaotic mass in front of one service tent and organized themselves into strict, military-like formation. Women were ushered into in the middle of the procession, standing in pairs. Using hand-held megaphones, they would be doing most of the singing during the procession's route to the top of the mountain. They would also be accompanying themselves on church cymbals, daff, and the metal triangle (trianto). On either side, a single file of men, juggling boxes of religious literature, taratil cassettes, and electronic instruments formed a tight and seemingly impenetrable barricade around their female counterparts. Towards the front of the formation, another group of men protectively surrounded Abuna Musa as he would be passing out cassettes and religious tracts.193 Beside him, someone held high a processional cross and banner, leading the group in what resembled the all-male shamamsa choirs (church cantors) who navigated the spaces in the church and around the altar, an ultra sacral place during church feasts. The processional cross looked strangely out of place against the backdrop of the festival's lights, tattoo parlors, and tents. Finally, a tabla player sounded fiercely at the back of the formation, creating a thick percussive wall insulated the choir from mulid market sounds, aghani shaʻbiyya, and taratil shaʻbiyya.
As we began our route, Lola informed me that this military like formation was to protect the women from possible harassments from the siyaʻ or "deviants" in the market.
Anytime I tried to walk outside the group, a chorus of voices rang out after me to get back in line, where I would slide back next to Lola and she would gently remind me of the texts of the procession's opening anthem:
193 In an Interview, Amir informed me that the HFC usually gives one taratil cassette or CD per family, bringing down with them about 80,000 cassette tapes, 60,000 CDs, and 100,000 pamphlets in 2010 (5 June 2010). However, there were a few individuals who would take a number of tapes, only to turn around and sell them to make a few extra pounds. The men accompanying Abuna were not only there for his protection, but also to monitor how many tapes, CDs, or nazat individuals took from the priest.
222 Nawwari / Shine! (O Church of Christ)
Shine...Shine Oh Church of Christ Shine, Shine, Shine
It's the martyrs' feast, the victorious saints Shine, shine, shine
Nayruz is the commemoration of the saints the saints, the saints, the saints
The blood flowed, oh how it flowed, the blood of the saints, the victorious, the pure, the blood of heros
O Lord, protect our faith and our patriarch Shine, shine, shine
While the procession typically crossed through the mulid market, this year the choir stopped at a severely busy intersection and took on an overtly proselytizing tone, likely because the lax state security guards simply looked the other way following the January uprising. Despite the cars passing through and the crushing throng of the market's crowds,
HFC unloaded some boxes and passed out religious fliers and taratil cassettes to anyone passing by. At one point, I watched as a choir member slipped a few items to a driver as he veered uncomfortably close to the standing procession. But as the choir sang louder over the din of the market, I began to recognize an annoyance and disenchantment from some of the vendors. Curiosity slowly shifted to annoyance when the choir did not move. After an extended stay, largely because we had gotten stuck in the intersection's unforgiving congestion, we all came under a hail of dried carobs and stinging pebbles. Soon afterwards, as we shifted slowly forward, a number of onlookers managed to break through our formation. They assaulted one female singer and stubbed out a cigarette in the back of a man
223 who went to her aid. Other members looked nervous as we overheard myriad insults pelted our way. Nonetheless, we pushed forward and the choir continued to sing. In the center of the processions, as they dodged low to the ground to avoid the next wave of seeds, a number of women adamantly sang loudly and aggressively, remembering the suffering of the martyrs:
"The blood flowed, oh how it flowed, the blood of the saints, the victorious, the pure, the blood of heros. Shine, Shine, O Church! Shine, shine, shine!"
In his work on Suffering for Territory, anthropologist Donald Moore writes that
Zimbabwean farmers squatted on white-owned land as a way of grounding post-colonial claims to land rights and forging a sense of belonging into the land's physical topography
(2005). In acts as simple as making irrigation tunnels, plowing the land and making mud huts, they shaped, shifted, and graphed the land, defying colonial administrators in their agrarian micro-practices. In turn, they frequently suffered forced evictions, physical violence, and post-independence state brutality. Despite such hardships, many remained and continued to radically remap land rights, race, and national territory, and framed their experience through a discursive narrative of Chimurenga, "uprising" and "rebellion" that evoked earlier armed resistance against British settlers in 1896 and the guerillas during the 1970s liberation war (Moore 2005: xi). "Subject who are not self-sovereign" he writes, "nonetheless exercise agency through 'suffering for territory,'" (2005: 2).
Momentarily squatting in the middle of the busy mulid market and openly disrupting business, HFC tried a similar sonic repossession of the mulid as part of an exclusively
Christian space, but they encountered the hazards of such direct and overt audibility. To return to Webb Keane's notion of the hazard's of social encounter, the choir's performance in
224 the largely Muslim market brought into question a given order of things, here the assumed silence of the Coptic presence in Egypt more broadly. Amir's insistence on a procession and the instance of failure when the choir become too audible "out of place" and beyond the festival's solely religious contexts, seemed to highlight this sonic dispossession that many choir khuddam felt in their experiences back in the city, despite belonging to some of the most elite and upper middle class sectors. Nowhere in Cairo, not even in Heliopolis's posh neighborhood where a growing number of Copts are living, is it possible to sing taratil so loudly and publicly except for Church courtyards. All other sonic markers of identity are hidden or muted, relegated to taratil cassettes in the car, in one's home, or cellphone ringtones that momentarily sound and then fall silent. In Gabal al-Tayr, HFC's public taratil processions not only looked to change the mulid's sonic topography into a holy one but also looked for the potentials to disrupt, reconfigure, reorder social and power relations that the choir, and Egyptian Christians more broadly, navigate daily. To evoke Maher Fayez's ministry in the next chapter, these processions momentarily looked to "repossess the
[Egyptian] land" as part of a Christian territory, even if only through sound.
That morning, after a long four-hour concert, HFC filed into the buses silently. As we drove back to the diocese in Samalut, I could hear a clear and resonating azan go off in the distance. It was a sound I had not heard in days since my time enveloped in the mulid's layered soundscapes and choir's continuous taratil services. In a poignant exchange, Mina, a young HFC member, looked up at me across the bus aisle and, leaning his ear towards the window, said wistfully, "Wow! I almost forgot that sound. It means we're leaving heaven now."
225 Some Conclusions
Writing about social poetics of the nation-state, Herzfeld (2005: 21) observes that when piety merges with nationalism, it is first made pubic and written on the body:
There is sometimes expressed through the somatization of embarrassment as pain, especially where the state brutality leaves few private spaces uninvaded and so makes the self the only available refuge for any sense of intimacy. The body is exposed to such extremes because it is the primary site of both privacy and display.
In this chapter, I presented taratil beyond the Sunday School classroom and in more liminal and contested sites that are both intensely public and private. I investigated taratil as practiced in the more public domains of popular Christian saint celebrations known as mulids, with a focus on how the genre publicly crafts and marks Coptic modern subjectivity on the body and inside one's self. More specifically, I analyzed how, when public piety leaves a few public spaces uninvaded, sounds and bodies collide.
In their efforts to reform the mulid's spiritual debauchery into ethically productive spaces, HFC tackled the festival's ambiguities and exposed themselves to the hazards of audible social encounters with the festival's Muslim attendees. HFC's fatigued, broken voices, injuries, and tendinitis illustrate how suffering, martyrdom, and death continue to be productive in engendering a Coptic civic agency, even if only in marginal peripheries of a religious festival or, more broadly, Egypt's periphery in Upper Egypt. Drawing on Pope
Shenouda's religious revival that refashioned a Christian selfhood through religious education, liturgical rites, and service so that Copts could be useful members of a "nation on the inside," the Holy Family Choir looked to make the interiority of their Christian faith public in both visible and audible ways. They reinscribed the Church's modernist reforms
226 through their own use of pedagogical taratil, sermons, and iftiqad home visits, and they merged the Church's reformist intentions with growing charismatic ministries that emphasize public performances of faith, spiritual happiness and a spiritual subjectivity that transform
Egypt on the ground. Finally, by bringing their taratil khidma (lit. "song services") in Egypt's rural and most impoverished areas as elite and urban khuddam, they also assert a public and
Christian claim to aural spaces that are otherwise muted and private in the city.
227 CHAPTER 5
"REPOSSESSING THE LAND:" NEGOTIATING
MODERN COPTIC CITIZENRY THROUGH NEO-
PENTACOSTAL PEDAGOGIES
Introduction
At first glance, it is easy to mistake popular murannim Maher Fayez for an Orthodox priest, an Abuna. His fully bearded and bespectacled face gives off a distinctly pastoral look, especially when he is dressed in a black button-up shirt with a while collar. The deliberate quietness when he speaks, despite the loud volume of his voice when he sings, adds yet another layer of reverence. In June of 2011, when he first walked into the large auditorium of the retreat house out in the Nitrean desert just two hours west of Cairo, a buzzing anticipation filled the hall.194 Lola and I were amongst a large audience of over 500 people, quickly moved to take our seats and prepared ourselves for the transformational worship to come for the next three days.
194 This spiritual khilwa took place at Beit Magdy Saber, a religious center that also operated as a Madrasat al-Kitab al-Muqadas, a Holy Bible School. Magdy Saber, a businessman not to be confused with the famous actor, established the religious center with his Swiss wife. According to an interlocutor, they initially catered their school to foreigners who would live there for up to 9 months, dedicating their lives to learning about the Holy Bible. Now, Maher Fayez and other church ministries rent out the complex for their own conventions. Down the road, Kasr El-Dobara, the largest evangelical church in Egypt, also operated its own khilwa house in the Nitrean desert.
228 Informally themed and titled after Fayez's web lessons called "Daʻwat al-ʼArd" or
"Call of Salvation to the Land," this khilwa or spiritual retreat focused on the creationist story from the biblical account of Genesis (1: 2–4) as a lens through which to talk about Christian selfhood and reformist citizenry, particularly after the January 25th uprising.195 Unlike typical
Sunday School lessons or servant preparation meetings for adults, these web sessions were intimately filmed in Fayez's home office and then broadcast on his web ministry known as
El-Karouz. Along with impassioned and extended musical worship sessions and sermons expected at this year's convention, Fayez had also invited three English-speaking guests from Ghana, Malawi, and Nigeria to participate in his ministry, giving a transnational element to his ministry. From the Global Apostolic and Prophetic Network, an organization
"dedicated to raising leaders in Africa and establishing the presence of God in every sphere of society,"196 their sermons drew on Fayez's original taratil and convention themes and embellished upon his web lessons. In their own sermons and prayer sessions, they called on
Egypt's Christians to rise and "repossess the land" specifically in the name of Jesus.
On this first day, when Maher Fayez quietly took his seat to the left of the stage, his ensemble was just beginning to warm up an exceptional crowd made up of Coptic
Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and even a handful of newly-converted believers. Behind the audience, camera men from the interdenominational Arabic Christian satellite channel
SAT-7 got into position as a singer on an electronic organ began to lead the group, the microphone close to his mouth visibly connected to an voice auto-tuner. As a young man on
195 “Daʻwat al-ʼArd” or “Call to the Land” is short for “Da'wa al-Fidaʼyia li al-ʼArd” translated “Call of Salvation to the Land.” Also, see the Arabic glossary at the beginning of the dissertation introduction for a complete definition. 196 See gapnetwork.org (accessed 16 April 2013).
229 an electric guitar strummed the opening melody of one of Fayez's taratil, someone pulled out the daff, a small hand held cymbals usually associated with Coptic Orthodox liturgical services. Though the daff looked oddly out of place next to the electric guitar and drum kit, it fit in with the chorus of woman standing at the back of the stage, their heads covered with lace éscharpes typical of Orthodox liturgical worship. To add to the eclectic mix, another player held up a shufar, a long ram horn known for its central role in Jewish liturgical services. Together, everyone looked up to a PowerPoint presentation project onto the wall to the right of the stage where taratil texts looped against a background of various images of nature and people fervently in prayer.
The ensemble led the audience in singing "Ya Rafʻi min Abwab al-Mawt" or "You
Who Saved us from the Gates of Death" based on the various names of God from the Old
Testament. As more and more people moved to their feet, a woman to the left of the stage stood up and began to wave a silver and a gold flag against the tartila's driving duple rhythm.
The deliberate slow wafting of the flags, as the silky fabric caught in the air, seemed a surreal image against the rush of sounds, movements, and ecstatic prayer that quickly picked up momentum. I was later to learn that this was a form of flag worship, part of an emerging dance ministry becoming popular among evangelical and interdenominational congregations in the southern United States. A guttural, synthesized drone two octaves below the singers' low melody carried an unnatural and otherworldly sound.
230 Ya Rafʻi min Abwab al-Mawt / You Who Saved us from the Gates of Death
Refrain You who saved us from the gates of death so that we may undertake all praise within the gates of the daughters of Zion enthralled with Your salvation
As the song came to a close, Maher Fayez and one of the prophets from the Global
Apostolic and Prophetic Network approached the stage. To Fayez's quiet ʻud accompaniment, Malawian pastor Chris Daza reached out both hands and passionately prayed over the congregation's bowed heads in English. The audience raised their hands high in response to the pastor, with some congregants even holding small wooden crosses in their hands imprinted with the words: "al-Majid qadim," meaning "the Glory is coming."197 Daza's
English words echoed in Arabic through a translator (27 June 2011):
We thank you Jesus that you are healing the land of Egypt. We thank you Jesus that your Spirit and light and angels of life are being released over Egypt and over the whole Arab world being the peace of God. Thank you for the Holy Spirit. Even as you overshadowed the Earth at the beginning of the creation of the Earth, overshadow us tonight. Overshadow Egypt tonight. Overshadow the whole Middle East. Bring forth life, peace, and joy. Let your kingdom come. Let your kingdom come.
Over the continued strumming of his electric ʻud, Fayez got up to the stage to lead his own prayer. He did not explicitly address the January 25th revolution that had taken place only six months earlier; instead, he passionately invited his listeners to be spiritually remade and to be as part of a movement that would "bring the Kingdom of God to the land of Egypt,
197 These hand held crosses were not unlike the larger crosses the Coptic clerics hold when greeting and blessing their parish. It is also important to highlight the millennialist and neo-Pentecostal ideologies implied in the messages imprinted on these crosses. “Al-Majid qadim” or the “Glory is coming” not only indicates the belief in the second coming of the kingdom of God on Earth, but “al-Majid is also another name for God who will arrive to fashion this kingdom Himself.
231 beginning at this very retreat." As murmurs of fervent out-loud prayers swept through the crowd, Fayez dramatically released his ʻud to hang against his chest and opened his arms in a twofold image: at once a father ready to embrace his entire audience one by one as well as a life-size vision of the crucified Christ. I could hear Lola take a deep breath next to me and pull out a kleenex to wipe her face. As Fayez slowly brought down his arm and began the next tartila, I looked around me. In the front of the room, one of the youngest audience members, a girl of about 8 or 9, knelt down to her knees and began to weep with a grief seemingly strange for her young age. Behind her, fists raised high in the air pumped open then closed in rhythm to the texts. To the left of the stage, a new flag had been raised: an
Egyptian one bellowed softly in time with the next tartila.
* * * * *
In this chapter, I investigate taratil and discourses of al-watan al-samawi or a heavenly citizenship outside of the Orthodox Church's normally-accepted platforms such as
Sunday Schools and mulid services. Instead, I pursue taratil and their accompanying discourses in alternative spaces beyond the Church's direct grasp and authority: a quickly growing realm of web ministries, interdenominational spiritual retreats, and popular worship sessions with performers and figures that are rejected outright by the Church. I focus on
Fayez's ministry because, as one of the most popular devotional singers in Egypt, he is also one of the most fiercely contested by Orthodox clergy. His taratil, as part of a larger alternative evangelical movement, present a rich lens through which to address issues of belonging that thread through this project: to a Church institution, to a Muslim-majority nation during a pivotal moment of transition, to other Christian denominations and, finally, to
232 one's self as a modern but pious Egyptian Christian citizen.
As Coptic Orthodox Church discourse embraces al-watan al-samawi or a heavenly citizenship as something to strive for in the afterlife, Maher Fayez and an increasing number of evangelical ministers believe that a heavenly citizenship can be achieved right here, in a
Kingdom of God on Earth that is heard and sung into being during one's lifetime.198 Such a millennialist perspective, with an additional emphasis on the sensuousness of the ear, reflects the growing influence of charismatic encounters and neo-Pentecostal eschatologies that are slowly shaping contemporary Orthodox and non-Orthodox religious expressions in Egypt. As the late Pope hoped to refashion the moral interior of citizens of an "Egypt on the inside" until they reached their "true home" in the heavens in his Release of the Spirit (see chapter
3), Fayez looked to the Holy Spirit to revive a different spiritual paradigm. His revival was increasingly framed by counternarratives of spiritual happiness, hearings of an alternative politics of (dis)engagement, and neo-Pentecostal pedagogies to repossess a modern subjectivity in a contemporary Egypt beyond Shenouda's interiority, in a lived Egypt to come. As described in the opening vignette, parishioners held crosses imprinted with the words "Glory is coming" not only to signify their belief in the second coming of Christ but also as banners for their hope of an imagined nation in the future, one that would overcome today's political instability, economic failings, and sectarian tensions.
Drawing on neo-Pentecostal pedagogies, Fayez emphasized what Matthew Engelke calls the "direct and live affects of the Spirit"—the visceral sense of God through language
198 One of these increasingly popular figures is Sameh Maurice, pastor of one of the largest evangelical churches in the Middle East, Kasr El Dobara. For more on contemporary charismatic movements in Egypt, see Febe Armanios' forthcoming study “Coptic Charismatic Renewal in Egypt: A Modern History” (University of Southern California Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiatives).
233 and song (2006). Through his own taratil and sermons, Fayez hoped to recover what religion scholar Harvey Cox called primal spirituality, "archetypal religious expressions" (1995) that would renew and purify the old Orthodox guard inside out. Yet, as Fayez roots his taratil in biblical imagery and ecstatic worship, he fiercely defends his own Orthodox identity despite efforts from the clergy to identify him otherwise.199 Rather, his focus on spiritual victory, a radical millennialist hope, and reformist lessons of engaged Christian citizenry have become contemporary critiques of Orthodox pedagogies of piety that solely focus on Coptic saint hagiographies, martyr paradigms and a heaven that only opens its gates specifically to Coptic
Orthodox believers. In his interdenominational ministry and ecumenical taratil, Fayez contests Orthodox ethnic and religious exceptionalism, a discourse that contends that they are the true and "modern sons of the pharaohs" as well as the true [and only] sons of God.
Despite his critiques of the Church's binary oppositions that deem Muslims as spiritually and even ethnically inferior, Fayez still maintains Christianity's spiritual superiority as the "true path," a theme that is critical to his ministry and to which I return to later when I discuss the rising number of converts in his service.200
I also focus on Maher Fayez's ministry because it emerges at the intersection of
199 After I presented a paper about Maher Fayez at the International Association for Coptic Studies (Rome, 2012), a Coptic Orthodox monk in the audience approached me and disputed the fact that I identified Fayez as an Orthodox Christian, arguing that his musical style and ministry openly contested Orthodox doctrine. During my interview with Maher Fayez, the singer also recounted how Bishop Bishoy of Damiette in the Nile Delta had spoken critically of his taratil during his theological sermons and was just short of advising his audiences not to listen to them. 200 In her work “When 'Imperial' Love Hurts Our Neighbors: Islamophobia and Korean Protestant Churches in the U.S.” religion scholar Nami Kim investigates how Christian discourses of loving one's neighbor in Korean and American evangelical churches creates binary oppositions that deem Muslims as spiritual inferior, and only perpetuate Islamophobia and undergirds U.S. military hegemony directed at Muslims around the world. In VOICES, Volume 24, No. 2013/1 (January-March 2013): 61-74. I will return to her work later in this chapter.
234 several media technologies that are integral to his service: his use of YouTube to facilitate his
El-Karouz web ministry, appearances on Christian and liberal interdenominational satellite television, and his dependence on social networks such as Facebook and YouTube to connect and communicate with his various audiences. In these alternative contexts, I explore how
Fayez's audience listens to and performs taratil, not just to negotiate an Islamic hegemony in their daily experiences, but also to contest Orthodox clerical authenticity and authority in their lives. Following the Arab uprising and particularly after the rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood, many Orthodox Copts have felt both politically and socially disenfranchised in
Egypt, and frame their own moral interior as one of the last remaining ethical frontiers and an emerging nexus of individual and spiritual agency. Using Webb Keane's notion of semiotic ideologies (Keane 2003, 2007, 2008) and the materiality of texts, I investigate the materiality of taratil's electronicized sounds as sonic evidence and materiality of God's presence.
Lastly, I will explore the discursive politics of the recurring trope of ʼard or land in
Fayez's "Call of Salvation to the Land." This series of web spiritual lessons and related taratil are part of a prophetic narrative to repossess Egypt as a solely Christian nation that addresses how believers hope to achieve their goal through digital sound technologies,
Christian evangelism, and alternative neo-Pentecostal pedagogies. Through Fayez's ministry, reinterpretations of Orthodox liturgical alhan, and his use of biblical scripture, I argue that mediated taratil and their new digital-mechanized sounds such as that of auto-tuner mentioned in the opening vignette, have become agents to both personal salvation as well as a sense of social justice in a world where State and Church confine individual and spiritual
235 sovereignty. In other words, as taratil sounds are mediated through microphones, auto- tuners, loudspeakers, cell-phone rings, and satellite television, Egyptian Christian citizens hope to alter the encounter with God and, through audibility, hope to reconfigure their faith
"on the outside" of themselves, their community, and their cyber/satellite imagineries and shape their nation into an authentic, modern, and Christian land "in the real."
Singing on the Margins: the Trials of Maher Fayez
Figure 5.1: A photograph of Maher Fayez from one of his numerous fan pages on social networking sites;
Maher Fayez was not always the poster child of contemporary religious piety. Rather, in a series of interviews posted on YouTube known as as "Ikhtibar Maher Fayez" or the
Trials of Maher Fayez, the singer openly reveals his early days as a runaway and a drug addict. Like HFC's early morning sermons, Fayez's salvation rhetoric closely mirrored the biblical story of the Prodigal Son and the transformative trials of St. Paul the Apostle as he
236 detailed his troubled relationship both with his father and the Orthodox Church.201 Born into a conservative Orthodox middle class family, he initially grew up in ʻAttaba, where he was drawn to what was then the pulsing center of Egypt's popular music scene, Mohammed Ali
Street. When his family moved to the predominantly Christian neighborhood of Shubra he was stunned at the sharp and somber contrast of church liturgical worship and song. Under his father's disapproving gaze he increasingly chafed against Orthodox seriousness, what he joked as "faʼr" or the severity that he felt marked stern religious piety. Eventually, he was kicked out of Sunday School for refusing to sing Coptic liturgical hymns, alhan, exactly as they were taught to him, instead improvising beyond the traditional melodies of the revered genre. Feeling he had no "place" to grow in the Church, he recalls this moment, among a few others, as his initial break from the institution, leaving and vowing never to return. During our personal interview together, he also recalled trying to bring a Muslim friend to attend
Sunday School and participate in the other social activities offered in his church, only for his friend to be turned away for not being Christian.202 His accounts of chafing against institutional constraints for being too ecumenical, liberal, and even musically and spiritually innovative return again and again and resemble the stories of early Pentecostal preachers who were kicked out of their churches and had doors locked against them.203
In another redemptive testimony, this time for a program Malafat al-Madi or "The
201 Ikhtibar Maher Fayez, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=celJYc-v25A (accessed 18 April 2013) 202 Personal communication (24 May 2011). 203 In his book Fire from Heaven; The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (1995), Harvey Cox recounts a similar story when William Joseph Seymour, whom he credits with starting the 1906 Azusa street revival and a Pentecostal revolution in the USA, found a storefront church where he had been preaching locked against him for his ecstatic style and innovative theology. Similarly, Fayez frames much of his own (re)conversion as a practicing Christian along these accounts of hardship and rejection, closely resembling Orthodox persecution narratives.
237 Old Files" on SAT-7 in 2004, Fayez outlined the precise moment he met Christ and was born again as a practicing Christian.204 After rejecting his father's pleas and pursuing a career as a professional musician, he soon found himself entangled in a snare of alcohol and drug addictions. In his words, he had become mired in his misguided search for what he called a sense of "freedom and happiness." His spiritual epiphany came in 1987 when his father's prayers were finally answered: in a matter of days, Maher Fayez lost all of his contracts as a composer, and he was mysteriously moved by what he called a ghira ʻan al-din or "religious protectiveness" when his bandmates made fun of a saint's pictures at a Christian patron's home. That evening, Fayez walked out on his band and essentially his old life, and he vividly recalled tasting happiness for the first time in years as the "blackness fell out of his heart."
He returned home to his father fully repentant, and from that day forward he dedicated his entire life and vocation to devotional service and song, even naming his two daughters
Taranim and Tasbih, the Arabic word for praise.
One of his earliest appearances on interdenominational Christian television further solidified his image as a prodigal son. In his reinterpretation of Akram Lewis' popular song
"Ya Sahib al-hanan," translated as "O Compassionate Friend," as a taratil music video, the audience glimpses Maher Fayez behind bars, a petty criminal who is roughly interrogated and then hauled off to a solitary prison cell. In the monochrome setting of this music video,
Fayez turns towards the light of a narrow window—not unlike when saints and monks turn towards the light of the moon or divine apparitions in their own cells in popular Coptic religious films—and sings a remorseful tartila, signaling the beginning of his own spiritual transformational, repentance, and return to God. When towards the end of the video Fayez is
204 Malafat al-Madi, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kicjD2JJGTs (accessed 17 April 2013).
238 finally released, he literally walks into into the light and his wholesome image reflects his internal conversion, swapping his initial leather jacket and slick hair for a clean pressed qamis or button-down shirt and a closely shaven face.205 Once again, the video not only resembles evangelical born-again narratives but also draws heavily on familiar themes, images, and tropes in traditional saint hagiographies, namely redemption through a personal encounter with the divine.
Ya Sahib al-Hanan / O Compassionate Friend
Compassionate friend, and refuge for my self You are the benefactor in the midst of my alienation I need You, I need You, I need power from you to lift me up You alone, You alone, You discern my weakness and have mercy
Bridge My Master, I desire depth in You, show me and guide me I desire the light of Your love to be inside of me
Refrain Compassionate friend, I call out to you, I am returning to You Returning to Your embrace, returning to Your path, Returning to Your light, O compassionate friend
Compassionate friend, the wellspring of my strength In the midst of my melancholy, You comfort my feelings I yearn for You, I yearn for You, that You may abide in me, my King With Your Spirit, with Your Spirit, You lead me my life and my journey
Bridge My Master, with Your Spirit, change my life, take charge of my will Touch my heart, my senses, touch all of my world
205 Like a woman's veil in Egypt, beards are markers of Islamic religiosity. Towards the beginning of his career, Fayez sported a neatly trimmed mustache, but as his taratil shifted towards ecumenical and even evangelical themes later in his career, he grew out a full beard despite Orthodox criticisms. While I have no way of commenting on the intentionality of his personal grooming, it is noteworthy that in this video his conversion from bearded criminal to clean shaven Christian can be interpreted as a broad commentary about Christian evangelical desires to bring Muslims “to the light” of their own faith.
239 Refrain Compassionate friend, I call out to You, I am returning to You Returning to Your embrace, returning to your path, Returning to Your light, O compassionate friend
Despite Maher Fayez's public (re)conversion back to Coptic Orthodoxy, he never managed to re-envelope himself in the Church's folds by serving as a Sunday School teacher, choir director, or a youth leader—some of the typical routes of service that reinvigorated khuddam take as a part of a more public piety. Instead, Fayez went the way of the spiritual pilgrim, becoming an itinerant of sorts. He did not fully embrace contemporary trends in the
Orthodox Church and maintained a critical spiritual distance from explicitly Protestant movements.206 Yet, his desire to maintain a status of ambiguity and inbetweenness was not always voluntary. Since he was not welcome to perform or preach in any Orthodox settings
—clerics were suspicious of his itinerancy and regarded the revivals that he fostered as overt challenges to their authority and order—Fayez began to organize meetings in various locations around Cairo several times a week, ranging from Presbyterian Churches in the upscale neighborhood of Maadi to others in the more middle-class neighborhood of Shubra.
Today, Kanisat Allah, a small Apostolic and Pentecostal Church on Sharʻ al-Biʻtha or
Missionary Street largely serves as his home base. There, every Saturday night he and his ensemble perform for an overflowing and jubilant interdenominational congregation in a small building that seems barely to be able to contain his growing audience. People come not just from Shubra,but from all over Cairo to hear his bustling, joyful, and popular taratil
206 Thanks to anthropologist Daniel Gilman here for bringing this to my attention. It is important to note that Fayez also struggled with the same institutional restraint in some Coptic evangelical churches that were also ambivalent about his musical style and ministry.
240 blaring through the large speakers on the church stage and echoing off of the neighboring buildings. Many times, I attended his worship concerts with several members of the Holy
Family Choir who braved Shubra's fiercely congested streets and regularly drove from the calmer suburb of Heliopolis.
In his work on early Methodist spiritual revivals of the 1740s, Leigh Eric Schmidt describes how lay preachers and itinerants were moved by extraordinary calls to pursue evangelical missions to preach and spread the gospel. These divine invitations were almost always characterized by an "auditory intensity" and a direct immediacy (2000: 39). In
Fayez's case, he recalled the night of his own spiritual rapture when he turned to the sky and yelled out loudly, "God, can you hear me?!" As he described in his evangelical auto- biography posted on YouTube, he remembered how he immediately felt a fire in his chest and "a presence " that heard, cleansed, and finally soothed him in prayer.207 Like these early
Methodists and Pentecostal preachers—many of them simple shoemakers, farmers, tanners, and slaves—such experiential public testimonies recognized a vernacular self-authorization that legitimated their spiritual calling. Fayez's story illustrated that anyone, regardless of previous history, socioeconomic class, or even official religious education, can become a returning prodigal son. In his own case, he highlighted his own deflated social class as a drinking, smoking musician for whose (re)conversion was even more miraculous—for it is widely regarded that only non-believers smoke, drink, or do not fast according to the
207 In her memoirs, Methodist preacher Fanny Newell testified how, as preachers prayed over her at a camp revival meeting she felt a “felt something in my heart like a burning fire,” (Diary of Fanny Newell, Boston: Peirce, 1848: 77-80). Schmidt describes her sounding vision and her spoken, out-loud conversation with Jesus, after which she arose from her knees and “shouted her praises to God,” (Schmidt 2000: 70).
241 Orthodox calendar.208 Nevertheless, perhaps even because of his marginalized economic and social experience, Fayez felt that he had an extraordinary calling with the summoning of a prophet to preach and sermonize through taratil as parts of a grass-roots ministry outside of the Church. As I will soon illustrate, he set out to revolutionize official Orthodox and
Protestant institutions inside out as part of a larger evangelical movement in Egypt, an alternative to traditionally strict religious, social and even class hierarchy within church settings. In our interview together, he envisioned soccer stadiums and spaces open and large enough to accommodate thousands of people coming together from all backgrounds, and as I will discuss later, he even hinted at substantial numbers of Muslim converts who would sing his taratil.
A Call of Salvation to the Land: El-Karouz and Neo-Pentecostal
Pedagogies
Today, Maher Fayez is the head of a fast growing ministry and a musical ensemble known as El-Karouz. Literally meaning, "the evangelists" or "the bearers of the good news"
(bashrit khayr). El-Karouz is an interdenominational group of Fayez's talamiz: designated disciples of his teachings, taratil, and sermons. El Karouz's famous logo outlined their
208 In the tight-knit quarters of Shubra, any acts of deviance from eating animal foods during Coptic vegan fasts to smoking and drinking quickly circulated around the neighborhood as comments about one's religious devoutness, even one's social stranding. Because of many interlocutor's predominant status as Sunday School teachers and khuddam, many refused to drink or buy alcoholic beverages close to their churches or homes despite no official ban in Christianity. It was the same for eating meat products during Lent.
242 ministry—a beaming lion's head, indicating St. Mark who preached to Egypt, looks down at three meaningful symbols: a Coptic cross, a pyramid, and a small ikhthus better known today as the "Jesus fish." While the first two symbols are quite obvious, rooting Coptic Christianity in its Egyptian homeland, it is the Jesus fish that merits a few words here. Traditionally used as a subversive marker of ancient Christianity under Roman persecution, it highlighted El-
Karouz's underlying ministry to hearken back and revive a lost patristic heritage and worship that the ensemble believed was lost due to Church institutional corruption and elitist obsessions with empty rites and rituals.209 Like the early American Pentecostal movement
(see Cox 1995: 94), El-Karouz's ministry hoped to peel away the excrescence of tradition and get back to the simple Gospel message itself. In Maher Fayez's words, he hoped to return taratil and liturgical worship "to the streets" beyond the Church's walls and to revive their
"original" and "natural" states as colloquial genres that were "marina," that is, open and
"accepting of change and progress" (24 May 2011). The ministry official mission statement reads:
The movement seeks: (culturally and spiritually) … to achieve the salvation of the land by way of research and dedication, to revive and introduce the Egyptian character, language, music, and spirit in worship. [The movement seeks] a conscious harmony with the spirit of the land, a feeling of its pulse, its needs. Firstly: to ignite the spirit of prophecy and the knowledge of God's will concerning this precious land, Egypt and His people [in it] … Secondly: by developing means of communication with the community, and to break the ecclesiastical barriers that the Church has built, with or without intention, against the "street" and against other [Christian] believers.
Fayez's intentions here are not unlike Ragheb Moftah's endeavors to preserve and
209 “We focus on patristic heritage and piety, and we strive to revive it through our taranim that are based on Biblical verses, the Christian creed, and teachings[hadith] based on the names of God and His nature, characteristics, and description from the Holy Bible, and our research of all Christian heritage that follows the Nicene creed of faith.” See http://www.elkarouz.com/elkarouzteam/about-us.html (accessed 14 December 2012).
243 revive alhan as the last vestiges of an authentic ancient Egyptian heritage (Chapter 1), or unlike Pope Shenouda's intentions to refashion a Coptic moral interior through the revival of early saint and martyr hagiographies and their reformed religious mulids (Chapter 3). Rather, like the figures before him, Fayez emerges as another reformist. While Church leaders and educators such as Habib Girgis (Chapter 2) nostalgically looked backwards for both political and spiritual legitimacy, Fayez turned to an even "more sacral" and apostolic time in biblical scripture to recover a "primal piety," what Cox described as archetypical religious expressions characterized by mystical experiences, a sense of purification, trance, and healing (1995: 83). Fayez also reinterpreted neo-Pentecostal inspirations to "ignite a spirit of prophecy" in colloquial worship, Egyptian folk piety and syncretisim, as well as the renewed notion of talmaza (discipleship) and khidma (service) in his ministry.
I begin by discussing Fayez's notion of discipleship and service in an effort to revive a contemporary Apostolic time and the search for an "Egyptian character, language, music, and spirit in worship." Like Orthodox mukarrasin and devoted Sunday School khuddam, many ensemble members and El-Karouz's spiritual volunteers are not professional musicians or official shamamsa (cantors) in the Orthodox Church. Rather, many of them left behind affluent posts and a secular life, consecrating themselves fully to various branches of services. Between 300 to 500 talamiz serve in El-Karouz's ministry in one way or another, with many largely considered young and affluent shabab or youth ranging from their early twenties to middle and late thirties. Their number is unclear because, besides visible volunteers such as musicians, Sunday School teachers, retreat coordinators, and social site and media technicians, there is also the more hidden arm of the service: Fari Shafi‘ or the
244 Intercession Team. Many Fariʼ Shafiʻ members do not disclose their identities to members outside of their team and keep their participation entirely secret as their sole contribution is to pray fervently on behalf of the larger group. As Kevin O'Neill describes of Guatemalan neo-Pentecostal Christians, these intercessors work "to shoulder the weight of transitional times by praying, fasting, and performing rituals as a soldier," (2010: 89) fighting for the soul of the nation. Yet, while Guatemalan neo-Pentecostal efforts looked to spiritually renewed interiority as well as individual prayer and fasts to influence social change—what O'Neill described as the I of a spiritual warfare (2010: 114)—El Karouz's case is inherently communal and steeped in the We, a collective spiritual transformation. In Egypt's ongoing revolution and repeated marches to Tahrir Square, Fari‘ Shafiʻ believe that each Christian citizen, despite denominational divisions, can come together and physically reconfigure their land and their neighborhoods in Egypt through collectively sounded prayer and song.
For example, Fayez's talamiz take pride in their distinct closeness to one another and to the singer. One member recalled when Fayez assigned them special prayers during the
January 25th revolution and organized an emergency worship session where they read the
Bible together out loud and in one voice. In such out-loudness, "our proclamations were not a fight," she told me, but "in joining our heart, our tongue and our voice to proclaim—using all of our senses, the Word of God became protective." She described as the talamiz raised their prayers and viscerally spoke, listened, heard, and felt the Psalms as a cloud of incense—a direct reference from Orthodox liturgy—that could manipulate the world around them and prevented any unfortunate incidents from taking place in their neighborhoods and their ʼard
(28 June 2011). I will return to this trope of ʼArd or land momentarily, but it is important to
245 note the emerging importance of the constitutive quality of "live and direct" audition of these sacral words as rendered out-loud (Engelke 2006: 202) and rendered out-loud together. In the same way that nineteenth-century British Protestant evangelicals looked to the Bible as an agent that could reconfigure their missionary territories into a Christian one (ibid., 48), El-
Karouz's emergency meetings pointed to sounded scriptures and devotional texts as sonic agents with which to engender real change on the ground.
With Christian protests against the government growing following the 2011 New
Year's bombing of the Two Saints Church in Alexandria, similar "emergency" meetings had already begun, recorded and posted on the ministry's website for private use. Six months before the revolution, El-Karouz had already drawn on the spoken voice as "the rightful channel through which God becomes present in language" (Engelke 2006: 201), highlighting the themes of "hearing" the word of God, "feeling" spiritual joy, and "seeing" imagery of nature and the land that thread through of Fayez's lessons of "Daʻwat al-ʼArd" or the "Call of
Salvation to the Land." More importantly, they connected song, worship, and taratil, to coming together in God's presence:
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the Earth Worship the Lord with gladness; Come before him with joyful songs. It is he who made us, and we are his; We are his people, the sheep of his pasture.210
The Arabic word, al-ʼard, is not simply a plot of land, soil, or earthly ground. The
Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Arabic notes that the word is also embedded with
210 El Karouz, Monday meeting on June 28, 2010; http://www.elkarouz.com/elkarouzteam/meetings/monday-meeting/245-monday_28-6-2010.html (accessed 7 May 2013).
246 meanings of nationhood, one's country, and homeland (1976: 13),211 the term's everyday usage in Coptic conversation directly connects al-ʼard with a spiritual eschatology of a watan al-samawi. In my frequent conversation with interlocutors, many understood al-ʼard as a lived experience on this earth, a necessary conduit of trials and tribulations before arriving to a heavenly nation, one's true homeland. The following passage taken from the liturgical Commemoration of the Saints, in which a priest remembers all those who suffered for their faith, highlights such a liminal state and the rewards that believers attain upon death:
Those, O Lord, whose souls You have taken, repose them in the paradise of joy, in the region of the living forever, in the heavenly Jerusalem (ʼurshalim al-samaʼiyya). And we too who are sojourners in this place (makan), keeps us in Your faith, and grant us Your peace until the end.
This contrasting notion of al-ʼard, from its more formal use to the Coptic spiritual vernacular, is critical to understanding the contemporary community's ambivalences to belonging to this place (makan), a lived nation, state, or land on this earth. Rather, Coptic ambivalences about belonging, a long recurring theme in this study, are deeply rooted in a spiritual eschatology of not wanting to belong entirely to the world at all. One only has to remember the contemporary ascetic revival under Pope Shenouda and the poems from his hermitic years in the desert now sung as popular taratil: "Gharib (A Stranger)," "saʼh
("Sojourner"),"and ʼIghlaq al-Bab wa hajij ("Close the Door and Sojourn"), to name but a few (see chapter 3). Al-ʼard, one's land and Egypt, then, is at once a place that is desired and yet one that must be (dis)engaged and detached in the name of heaven.
Kevin O'Neill described how Guatemalan neo-Pentecostals utilized a combat-
211 Note, for example, the frequent epithet “masr al-ʼArd al-tayiba” (Egypt the bountiful land) in everyday speech and example of tourist marketing, where al-ʼArd implies Egypt's land, its people, its soil and, finally, the abundant yield produced from the land.
247 centered vocabulary to articulate a Christian citizenship in heaven which is dependent on
"pedagogical paradigms" of prayer, praising, and fasting to teach national responsibility, belonging, and participation (2009: 334). El-Karouz couched their ministry in similar military and scriptural discourse and looked to reclaim al-ʼard from an Orthodox detachment. Thus, by relying on sounded praise and taratil as sonic agents, they hoped to transform al-ʼard into a place of desire, a heavenly Jerusalem and God's second kingdom on
Earth.212 Starting in 2005, Maher Fayez recorded and broadcast four sermons from the intimacy of his home office titled "Daʻwat al-ʼArd" or "the Call of Salvation to the Land," that would critically shape his ministry over the ensuing seven years. They were based on following verses in the book of Romans (8: 20–23):
For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.
Using anthropomorphisms, Fayez described al-ʼard and the self interchangeably in eighteen points listed synoptically, much like the textbook presentations that Gregory Starrett described of early religious Islamic texts for public education and Habib Girgis in his own early Sunday School pedagogical pamphlets (Starrett 1998: 9; and see my chapter 3). As a trope to addressing one's moral interior, Fayez called for a spiritual revolution building on
212 One only has to recall how, in the previous chapter, Holy Family Choir members identified themselves as past of “God's army” on their Facebook page, regarding their service (khidma) to purify and reform mulid popular festivity back to a heavenly state through taratil performance and Sunday School education. In turn, I found out about Maher Fayez through a number of dedicated HFC Choir members who were loyal fans and regular attendees of his worship concerts.
248 familiar millennialist rhetoric of returning to God and (re)claiming one's self and, by extension, one's land to an original state of tasbih or musical praise. Like al-ʼard, the notion of tasbih or musical praise is deeply nested within the Coptic Orthodox eschatological worldview: that after one's death, one's spirit returns to God in heaven to sing, and spends eternity in a state of sung worship known in Arabic as tasbih. Fayez's notion to revive the
Kingdom of God on Earth is not too far from the Orthodox belief that, when performed in prayer, Coptic liturgical genres such as alhan could momentarily reconcile the earth and, through musical worship and taratil, redeem al-ʼard as part of heaven. By developing one's
"spiritual senses," more notably, one's "spiritual ear," one could then attain a spiritual and lived communion with God while still here and on this earth. And more importantly, they could also sound the call of salvation to the land in an evangelical sense, and bring
Christianity's message out to Muslims in "the Egyptian street."
A Counternarrative of Happiness: Hearing and Singing an Alternative
Politics of (Dis)Engagement
"Have you eyes, do you not see? And have you ears, do you not hear?"
Mark 8:18
"Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator."
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems
(New York: Henry Holt, 1927): 218-19.
In his study, Hearing Things, religion scholar Leigh Schmidt explores how early
249 American Enlightenment discourses of ocularcentrism increasingly emphasized the status of the eye and contributed to a history of diminished hearing that affected modern Christian encounters with God through the ear. With the printing press revolution of the early modern period and the flood of newspapers, books, and Bibles into an American cultural marketplace, vision and the eye that sees, or more accurately the eye that reads, emerged as the dominant sense of modernity (Schmidt 2000: 16). This discourse did not only remain in the West. As I illustrated in the second and third chapters, these metanarratives of modernity began to make their way to Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century; they first arrived through missionaries whose religious endeavors were also embedded with desires to
"modernize" new converts by teaching them how to encounter the word of God through reading the Bible (Sedra 2011; Sharkey 2008). In other words, reading become a route to both spiritual and material salvation. The following generation of Sunday School teachers would only imitate Presbyterian missionaries who looked to compete with them by modernizing religious education and "singing the Word" in pedagogical taratil and in printed taratil hymnbooks.
Media technologies such as the taratil videos used in today's Sunday School classrooms (see chapter 3) and official church satellite channels such as CTV seem to only heighten this emphasis on the ocular, as Coptic Orthodox modern technologies of selfhood and pedagogies of piety have been increasingly interwoven with images of martyrs, Coptic saints, and the crucified Christ. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, such imagery as embedded and delivered in song has engendered a particular kind of political
(dis)engagement in Egypt's civic landscape as Copts increasingly turn inwards to a heavenly
250 citizenship and a "nation on the inside" of a moral refashioned self along tropes of monastic and saintly detachment. It is important to note that these developments echoed similar movements in Egypt's Islamic revival. In his work, Charles Hirsckind investigates how many
Muslims turned to cassette sermons to drown out the noise of outmoded religious authority— that of State-hired preachers and imams. Instead, ethical listeners looked to the ear for concerted interventions to create a "modern national auditory," an ear resonant with the tonalities of reason and progress that chafed against an increasingly reformist political (and religious) order (Hirsckind 2006: 41). Through such renewed ears, listeners abandoned State religious initiatives for alternative and embodied ethical sociability (ibid., 124):
Quran and sermon tapes do not simply frame space discursively, but also shape it sensorially by animating, below the threshold of consciousness, the substrate of visceral, kinesthetic, and affective experience that is integral to the tapes' ethical reception.
In his own ministry and lessons such as "Daʻwat al-‘Ard," Maher Fayez's ministry rebels against the Church's ocularcentric emphasis of modernity and looks to craft new sensory epistemologies. That is why, Fayez explained to me, his PowerPoint presentations projecting taratil texts during worship are "imageless," instead emphasizing "neutral" scenes of nature. Unlike Orthodox presentations that are typically characterized with images and icons of the saints and martyrs, Fayez explained that he wanted to give his audience the space to allow for their own spiritual agency, and to use their imaginations to improvise the images they hear.213 In turn, Fayez as well as an increasing number of evangelical ministries
213 Fayez's aversion to religious imagery here closely mirrors Islamic aniconism, the belief that the depiction of God's form or images of the Prophet and his relatives are sacrilegious. In turn, this has led to the promulgation of geometric patterns and calligraphy in Islamic art in a style widely known as arabesque. For more on images in Islamic art, see Oleg Grabar's “From the Icon to Aniconism: Islam and the Image.” Museum International, Vol. 55/2 (September 2003): 46-53.
251 are now offering alternative auditory sensibilities that not only engage God through the ear as early Orthodox religious education emphasized (see chapter 2), but also through the singing voice. Through singing taratil, I argue that modern day Christian citizens can hear the
Kingdom of God on earth as a sonic manifestation of God's presence.
In his lessons of repossessing and redeeming the land, Fayez's sermons are deeply embedded with critiques of the Orthodox institution for "having ears but not hearing" the
Word (Mark 8: 18). Most notably, Fayez argues that through the elitist and strict canonization of liturgical genre of alhan—the genre that is largely performed by ordained clergy and practiced shamamsa—the Church muted the sounds of the Church's true calling and negated its presence and sounds "from the street," the everyday shaʼab who sing and pray in colloquial Arabic. This was what got him kicked him out of Sunday School in the first place when, as a young boy, he wanted to improvise beyond the genre's traditional and orally transmitted melismas. In its strict canonization, Fayez argues, the Church institution thwarted
"al-ibdaʻ al-ruhi," a "spiritual ingenuity" to create, improvise and compose in prayer. Harvey
Cox argues that the reason jazz music became the impromptu sound of early American
Pentecostal movements was the genre's proclivity for improvisation and, quoting Clarke
Garrett, its "extraneous bits of deviance" that are the very stuff of religious experience (1995:
148). In this case, Fayez missed the spiritual ingenuity that he vividly recalled at a turning point in his life when he could not improvise beyond alhan's traditional melismas or ornamentation.
As the Church deviated from its quintessential desire to draw believers into a state of tasbih, Fayez even questioned the Coptic Church's very authenticity and sense of
252 Egyptianness. In his first daʻwa or lesson online,214 Maher Fayez looks sternly into the camera and asks his viewers "Why is the [Orthodox] Church in Egypt not Egyptian?"
Because, he explained, the Church did not heed its "original" call as an evangelical institution. Rather, he argued, the Church became implicated in the colonialist past and lost knowledge of itself when it succumbed to missionary pressures that arrived and fashioned its features based on their own European image—literally "taking on the color of another church" (Daʻwat al-ʼArd, Lesson 1).215 In its attempts to mimic Western modernity, the Coptic
Church became crippled by empty rituals, tainted theology, and borrowed cultural practices both as a result of missionary pressures and missionary education. Specifically, Fayez leveled his criticisms at the Church's murshidin al-ruhi or "spiritual leaders" who seem to have lost their way, alluding indirectly to the late Coptic Patriarch Pope Shenouda. He even evoked the story of a misguided monk and spiritual volunteer or khadim who lost much of his time in institutional service when his true callings may have been as simple as individual intercessions and "to sing on the behalf of those who could not sing" (Daʻwat al-ʼArd,
Lesson 1). It is a bitter case of not just the blind leading the blind but the deaf leading the deaf and maintaining their sonic distance from the presence of God.
When I met with Maher Fayez in his home office to talk to him about his ministry, I
214 Daʻwa, literally meaning a summons or a call, has a number of connotations in Islamic thought that are also mirrored in Coptic contexts. It is also a term that Fayez uses intentionally to appeal to Muslims and potential converts in his audience, a tactic I discuss later in this chapter. In his own work, Hirschkind outlines how, when found in the Qur'an, daʻwa means a direct invitation from God to humankind as transmitted to the prophets (2006: 108), a widely-shared belief also stemming from the Bible (Hebrews 1: 1; 2 Peter 1: 21). Deployed in political contexts, Hirsckind writes, daʻwa have become infused with ethical and civil agency to speak out against the state when believers feel that it has not upheld the ideas of Islam. In Fayez's Daʻwat al-ʼArd or the Call of Salvation to the land, Fayez depends on daʻwa in a similar way, to speak out against the Coptic Orthodox Church for not fulfilling Christian beliefs. 215 Daʻwat al-ʼArd, Lesson 1, http://www.elkarouz.com/home/curriculums/call-of-land/25-da3wet-el-ard-1, (accessed 19 April 2013).
253 quickly recognized the stoic gaze of a bigger-than-life Tutankhamen poster strategically placed in the wall behind him from the Daʻwat al-ʼArd YouTube videos. After introducing myself and a quick summary of my project, Maher Fayez quickly dismissed my entire premise about taratil and their revival through the Orthodox Sunday School Movement.
"You've got it all wrong," he told me, "even your definition of taratil is incorrect." I squirmed under Tutankhamen's cold disappointment. "taratil are directly connected to the
Psalms," Fayez explained to me. "They have been around from the beginning of Christ's time"—"al-kanisa kanit daiman bitranim," the church always sang taratil. The canonization of alhan as a liturgical genre and the marginalization of taratil outside of church worship was a new phenomenon. Such sole and strategic dependence on an ancient Egyptian past, he argued, negated, even thwarted contemporary spiritual innovations nestled within a historically popular and colloquial Christian experience.
In a softly-spoken but assertive monologue, Fayez explained how taratil have always been a part of Orthodox Church liturgy and history, merging alhan, Saint doxologies known madaʼih, and Psalmodies into one holy and consecrated repertoire to be practiced and performed in and outside of Church contexts. taratil were also part of old khulagis or old liturgical books (Euchologion).216 Even as Ragheb Moftah's star cantor Muʻalim Mikhail
Girgis al-Batanuni, who recorded alhan for Ernest Newlandsmith to transcribe into Western music notation (see chapter 1), regularly composed and reinterpreted new materials during his tenure as teacher. Specifically, Fayez is critical of Pope Shenouda's Sunday School institutionalization that muted the ear of the soul in the form of homogenized worship and
216 Fayez asserted that he had a number of these “historical khulagis”in his personal library, but he refused to show them to me despite several requests.
254 perfectly coordinated alhan. One only has to remember the opening vignette in the first chapter of this project where the Coptic Orthodox Satellite Television (CTV) choir practiced long into the night to "iron out" their improvisations on alhan and produce a neat and perfectly coordinated studio sound for the channel's music videos. Specifically, Fayez centered his critique on Pope Shenouda's personal deacon, Ibrahim Ayad, whose rise to celebrity status has canonized his melismatic and nasal renditions of alhan informally among his followers and, more officially, as he became a professor of liturgical music at the Institute of Coptic Studies in the Coptic Cathedral.217 Ayad sounds like a makana, Fayez contended, a machine, because of his overtly resonant sound and the legions of deacons who exactly imitate his sound and his improvisations. He was sounding without hearing, a clanging machine that had lost touch with his "spiritual senses."
Methodist devotional writer, John Fletcher, wrote about "the spiritual senses" as a medium "with which to intercourse between Christ and our souls," and called upon his readers to refine and seek new ways of seeing, hearing, and experiencing the presence of
God. Namely, he emphasized the role of the internal and spiritual ear.218 If it was true that institutional Christianity in Egypt "had ears but did not hear" (Mark 8: 18), Fayez looked to hone the "spiritual ear" of his many institutional and Orthodox detractors, turning to the words of St. Paul that "faith comes by hearing" (Romans 10: 17). It was not enough to listen to clerical sermons, serve as Sunday School teachers, or simply attend liturgical services,
217 Today, Ibrahim Ayad's lessons also echo widely in a cyber realm, as more and more immigrant cantors organize, share, and use digital archives and Coptic social networking sites as part of their pedagogical tools. The most prominent sites include tasbeha.org, coptichymns.net, and copticheritage.org. 218 John Fletcher, “On Evangelical Mysticism,” in The Works of the Reverend John Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, 4 vol. (New York: Lane and Scott, 1851): 4.
255 Fayez told me. Rather, Fayez tuned his disciples and audiences to the sounds of fervent prayer and urged withdrawal from the mundane soundscapes of the world for (a musical) meditation, one with an ascetic and disciplinary commitment. Such withdrawal—from mainstream churches or from the city of Cairo—was not unlike the way in which the Coptic
Orthodox Church urged its own Sunday School students to achieve perceptual purity in preparation for their encounter with the presence of God. He urged an alternative politics of
(dis)engagement not only to counter the cultural hegemony of Islamic state but also that of the Orthodox Church, and to locate the power of the ear. To draw on Hirschkind once again, it was listener's auditory sensibilities that cultivated the affects and attitudes of Egyptian
Muslim citizens who acted, engaged, and formed ethical, albeit Islamic, counterpublics. They achieved this by listening to cassette sermons as well. Schmidt adds to Hirschkind:
It takes, indeed, a very short excursion into to the auditory to know how closely listening is knotted with feeling, desire, responsiveness, and touch, with the stirring and soothing of passions—whether joy, grief, courage, or heavenly yearning. It is precisely hearing's potential for participatory dynamism that has made it so threatening to those philosophical models in which the eye is celebrated for its freedom, disengagement, and perspective at the ear's expense. (2000: 34)
In Egypt, such participatory dynamism became mediated through new sonic technologies and the presence of God experienced in a plethora of ways ranging from cell phone rings, television, concerts, and web ministries. Fayez's use of new technologies, ranging from El-Karouz's website to the use auto-tuners and the live recordings of audiences for the televangelical ministry, meant that participators were not simply auditors but were transformed into engaged listeners and bodies sounding with a different kind of agency, an agency that would reach beyond their own communities and out into the largely Muslim
256 world.
Mediating Spirituality: taratil, Technology, and Sounding the Presence of
God
In the West the ear gave way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information about the time of the Renaissance, with the development of the printing press and perspective painting. One of the most evident testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously he had been conceived as sound or vibration.
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
R. Murray Schafer (1977: 10)
The first time I walked into Kanisat Allah to hear Maher Fayez sing in May of 2010, the church doors were flung open like a valve, seemingly unable to contain El-Karouz's overpowering sounds flowing out to Sharʻ al-Biʻtha, or Missionary Street. Approaching the little Pentecostal church from one of Shubra's main arterial streets, Shariʻ al-Tirʻa, the audience's singing overtook the surrounding traffic noise, the occasional sounds of the azan from a neighboring mosque, and echoed loudly against neighboring balconies and convenient storefronts. As soon as I passed the main gate and crossed the church's threshold, I found myself overwhelmed by the vibrations in the building: in the ground, on my skin, in my ear.
When I touched the door frame to squeeze past other latecomers, the walls seemed to push back, throbbing and pulsing with the volume. Unable to make way further down the aisles because of the crowds, I stood still in the door frame for the entire four-hour service, leaning
257 against it tentatively as if it was on fire. It seemed the presence of God was all around, running through the walls, the pews, and directly under my feet.
Fayez's voice, booming over his amplified ʻud, emerged over layers and layers of moving and shifting parts: an electronic organ sounding out his melody in octaves, the loud improvisation of the female choir with every singer holding her own microphone, a man singing in a high falsetto harmony, drumming cajons and congas, a drum kit, a blasting shufar, and a pair of clashing hand cymbals. Embedded deep below this reverberating surface
I could also hear someone singing an electronically altered pitch, far too low and unnatural even for the male voice. This low drone—oscillating between an octave, a fourth, and a sixth, below Fayez's melody—carried through the roughly twenty-member ensemble and tied their frantically moving voices together into one dense and unified sound. Filling the pews at the foot of this small elevated stage, the audience joined in seemingly at the tops of their lungs, mutually tuning into the ensemble's performance.219 Arms were thrust wide and open, clapping high into the air. Women ululated. Ecstatic prayers could be heard from the back balcony. To the left of the stage, I could also make out an audio engineer, hovering deftly over a soundboard, adjusting microphone volumes and periodically teasing out different strands of sound. It was a sonically frenzied scene, one to which I would quickly get accustomed as I began to regularly attend Fayez's worship concerts.
In his work, Schmidt describes the demonstrative loudness of American evangelical piety, saying that "The distance between this world and the next narrowed in the ears of the
219 In his study “The Walkman Effect” (Popular Music 4, 1984: 165-180), Shuhei Hosokawa talks about the act of “tuning one another” where audiences and musicians share an ongoing flux of time and consciousness to recover the lost links of a social life in urban contexts (1984: 167). Most of Maher Fayez's audiences are largely urban, coming from metropolitan Cairo where he is based.
258 devout. Heaven was so close that on a good day, they could could hear it" (2000: 65). In this section, I will address Maher Fayez's distinct musical sound. More specifically, I investigate how his use of electronically amplified and altered sounds, particularly that of the auto-tuner, helped to bring heaven closer, while such mechanized sounds were integral to bringing the presence of God into his audience's ears as sonic evidence of the divine. Using the June 2011 retreat as an ethnographic lens, I explore how these live performances, combined with the encounter of taratil on satellite television and on a range of web ministries, have mediated contemporary Coptic spirituality and helped listeners to create what Japanese scholar Shuhei
Hosokawa called personal and "secret theatres" (1984). Writing about the new technological and cultural revolution of the walkman in the 1980s, he explained (1984: 178):
…the walkman is able to construct and/or deconstruct the network of urban meaning…because it can organize an open and mobile theatre by means of its clandestine manoeuvres [as seen and unheard sounds in the ear], which transforms the spatial constellation of the urban, communicate autonomously, surreptitiously, tacitly, and present the user as a possible stranger who speaks an incomprehensible pedestrian language.
Maher Fayez's worship concerts operate similarly to create "secret theatres" that transfigure Coptic urban constellations and create Christian devotional infrastructures in and around an Islamic sonic hegemony. One only has to walk through a public market to understand Maria Golia's descriptions of Cairo as a sound museum and an aural diorama
(2004: 20); with the call to prayer sounding five times a day, sermons echoing from mosque towers on Friday mornings, and the ubiquitousness of cassette anashid or Sufi anthem recordings that permeate other Egyptian public spaces such as the taxi, Cairene soundscapes are dense with overt Islamic markers.220 Fayez's taratil ministry take place away from all of
220 On a Sunday morning, Shubra's soundscapes are also very dense with overt Christian sonic markers. For
259 these sounds, even from sounds of a predominantly Christian Shubra where on a Sunday morning the Muslim calls to prayer echo side by side with Christian Orthodox masses and evangelical worship services. Rather, his concerts take place in largely marginalized contexts ranging from a small Pentecostal church on Sharʻ al-Biʻtha, to retreat centers outside of
Cairo, to private satellite television channels. All together, his live performances, online ministry, and even the old-fashioned cassettes that the Holy Family Choir passed out in
Gabal al-Tayr in the previous chapter create sound havens that span from the real to the virtual. Additionally, audiences can later access many of the live and broadcast performances archives on El-Karouz's website, elkarouz.com. During these performances, Fayez regularly comforted his audiences by telling them that camera crews were instructed to film from the back of the hall or church and to avoid directly recordings people's faces in order to protect the identity of the growing number of the (largely female) Muslim converts who now attended his services and retreats. Indeed, almost all video recordings of Maher Fayez narrowed in on him, and such religious conversions become another covert intimacy with his followers.
In my interview with him, Maher Fayez shared one of the visions that have undergirded his ministry for the past ten years. One day—he leaned in as if confiding a secret
—Christian services such as the Eucharist will take place throughout Egypt in stadiums and open spaces large enough to accommodate believers by the thousands, many of them new
(read, Muslim) converts into the faith. He identified his ministry and worship as unique for its use of "lughat al-sharʻ," literally "the language of the street" to reach others beyond
Egypt's strict religious boundaries. Fayez explained that he endeavored to make Christian
a detailed description of these various sounds, see chapter 3.
260 worship and culture more accessible and ecumenical, intentionally peppering his sermons and taratil with Muslim colloquialisms and the use of Egyptian popular music idioms. It was something that institutional churches should have done long ago, he contended. It is not that people do not accept Christians and Christianity, he emphasized, but in reality they do not understand their religious language or sound and, in turn, do not understand the community as a whole. That is why Fayez started the satellite program Estenara ("Enlightened") where his disciples and talamiz are taught to offer Christian ideologies using Islamic and interdenominational language, an ecumenical "lughat al-sharʻ."221 More importantly, like
Habib Girgis' Sunday School education and Pope Shenouda's meetings, this pedagogical program aimed to teach viewers how to live and witness as Christians "fi wist al-ʻalam," that is in the "midst of the world" as "the salt and light of the earth."222 The program's goal is to reunite Christians despite denominational divisions and, without stating it outright, to also reach out beyond and evangelize specifically Muslim audiences.223
In her work on Korean-American Presbyterian Churches, religion scholar Nami Kim
221 http://www.estenara.com/ (accessed 1 May 2013). 222 Here, Fayez's co-host and a fellow El-Karouz ensemble member Kero was drawing upon a well-known Biblical verses Matthew 5: 13-16: “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” 223 It is interesting to note that Fayez's Estenara program takes place on the charismatic Arab Christian satellite channel Al-Haya. Known as “Life TV,” the channel broadcasts dubbed sermons of the famous televangelist Joyce Meyers (whose evangelical ministries partly own the channel), and number of popular Muslim converts including the well-known televangelist Rashid who now hosts the program “Bold Questions.” At one point, Al-Haya was notorious for broadcasting Father Zackaria's sermons; Zackaria was a polemic figure who critiqued and denounced the Qurʼan in the hopes of converting Muslims. In 2010, the Joyce Meyers Evangelical Ministry cancelled his show (BBC Arabic, 22 May 2010).
261 investigates how a Christian movement known as the 30-Days of Prayer—an intercessory prayer for Muslims during the month of Ramadan—strategically instrumentalizes discourses of Christian "love for one's neighbor" with evangelical intentions.224 While Korean-American parishes largely side-stepped the incendiary rhetoric against Muslims frequently found in
U.S. media, she argued that such a putatively sensible framework of love and praying for one's neighbor actually reinscribed Islamophobia in a different way. Instead redemptive narratives that called on believers to "love your Muslim friends" while patiently explaining the moral, social, and spiritual superiority of Christianity only reinterpreted American exceptionalism into a Christian one (2013: 69-70). Additionally, they reified Orientalist ideologies of Muslim backwardness as agent-less inferiors who needed to be civilized through Christianity. Like the 30-Day Prayer movement, Maher Fayez's intentions are clearly evangelical. One only has to remember that his ensemble's name El-Karouz directly means
"the evangelists" or "the bearers of the good news." And, just as Korean-American Christians may have usurped American biases to identify themselves as a "spiritual model minority,"
Fayez also co-opted the Coptic community's Orientalist discourses of an "authentic Egyptian character, language, music, and spirit of worship" (El-Karouz mission statement) to deliver
Christians from institutional confines and to "enlighten" Muslims from the darkness of their ways. Such efforts did not differ greatly from Ragheb Moftah's reformist intentions within the Coptic community that drew on European biases against Arab sounding musics and sought to negate their melismas for a more "modern" sound (see chapter 1). Now couched in a different, softer language, Fayez's missions still echoed with a similar evangelical project,
224 The movement's goal is "to pray for all Muslim people groups [sic.] until all are reached." See www.30- days.net (accessed 2 May 2013).
262 but now aimed outside the Christian community: "We have a happiness they [Muslims] do not have. It is their right to know why we are happy…. This person is my brother, and he knows what I owe him."225
In turn, Fayez's audiences developed and crafted their own sense of a pedestrian language, intimate encounters of the Spirit that transformed and converted one another through taratil, language and, as I argue here, through sound. Webb Keane defines a semiotic ideology as an argument about "what signs are and how they function in the world" (Keane
2003: 419), while Engelke emphasizes the materiality of these signs as embedded in song texts and melodies (2007: 10). In his own work on Coptic miracles, anthropologist Anthony
Shenoda built on both and explored evidence of the divine not only as matter of semiotic forms that reveal beliefs and ideas but rather as actual matter that collides with the bodies of religious practitioners leaving signs of otherworldly agency (2010: 186). Here, I add that such semiotic and material collisions happen in the devotional ear. As Maher Fayez brings his listeners into the sounded intimacy of these "secret theaters," I explore the meanings that emerge from the materiality of mechanically and electronically altered sounds. How have such new sounds contested the rising homogenized sound of the Orthodox Church and facilitated an alternative encounter with the presence of God? More broadly, how have these changes altered Coptic encounters of Egypt through the ear?
While Deborah Wong and Mai Elliot emphasized the microphone as a powerful vehicle of the "eye/I" in defining and asserting identity in her work on Asian-American hip- hop, I argue that mechanisms such as the auto-tuner that change vocal timbre reflect an inner, spiritual "eye/I" that, while discerning a higher and perhaps more heavenly realm, still
225 Personal communication (24 May 2011).
263 reflects earthly desires and anxieties as they are sonically imprinted on this new sound technology.226 More importantly, Fayez's ministry evokes an all-sensory experience of taratil: through volume, vibration, and the tactility of altered timbre, as potential to drown out the sounds of the ominous and turn a deaf ear to "the loudspeakers of history"227—the sounds of political uncertainty following the Egyptian's uprising, the desperate honking of Cairo's oppressively overpacked city, and the regular sonic reminder of Christian's minority status in a Muslim-majority country. As with the Walkman effect where listeners can retreat into the aloneness of their ears, Maher Fayez's audiences retreat out of the city, or even simply into the haven of their living rooms where a satellite television is usually located, and into a collective aloneness during live or mediated worship concerts, cutting the auditory contact with the outer world where they live "seeking the perfection of the individual zoning of listening," (1984:167) for hours, even days at a time.
Sonic Materiality of the Divine
Besides serving as a lens with which to articulate the tensions and paradoxes of a religious minority, Shenoda contends that miracles are also a means through which an invisible world makes appearances in this world (2010: 3).228 While offering prayers, he
226 Deborah Wong and Mai Elliot, "I want the Microphone": Mass Mediation and Agency in Asian- American Popular Music. TDR (1988-), Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994): 152-167. 227 In "Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question about Revolution," Rey Chow Walkman explores how, with the walkman, listeners have the ability to "miniaturize" the world around them and to be "deaf to the loudspeakers of history; in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During. (New York, Routledge, 1993): 49. 228 Angie Heo adds that religious icons do in the same in her article "The Bodily Threat of Miracles: Security, Sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of Public Order," American Anthropological Association Vol. 40, No. 1 (2013): 149-64.
264 writes that priests wave censers in front of icons as a symbolic representation of people's prayers as a practice of "censing the unseen seen while simultaneously making sensible the visibility invisible" (ibid.; his emphasis). It is in such materiality—incense, icons, miracles— he argues, that become physical manifestations of faith and, more specifically, of God's practices. Yet, he neglects to mention the sonic materiality of sound—that as the priest prays he also sings. As pious Orthodox Copts depend on the saints and their material actions for survival in Egypt, their conversations, encounters, and experiences of the miraculous emerge against a backdrop of sacral soundscapes, traveling through the mouth and felt on the body in sung genres of saint doxologies (madaʼih), alhan, and taratil. While miracle narratives emphasize direct and material encounters with the saints, I take sound—particularly mediated, regenerated, electronic sound such as Fayez's use of the auto-tuner—as a material manifestation of God's presence. And, as Fayez and his ensemble El-Karouz increasingly depend on and borrow neo-Pentecostal expressive pedagogies like the use of innovative auditory technologies, their performances present alternative ways to directly experience
God and the fire of the Holy Spirit as vibrations in the ear and on the skin. Indeed, El-
Karouz's and Fayez's revivalist intentions ring with Schafer's suggestion of an earlier time when God's presence echoed as sound or vibration in the ear (1977: 10).
The use of electronized sounds in taratil recordings and performances is not new. In chapter 3, I recalled how one of the earliest popular murannimin, Faisal Fouad, recorded his own songs using early cassette technologies beginning in the 1970s. Meager when compared with what contemporary singers have to work with today, Fouad still managed to mediate taratil sound with his use of an electronic organ, guitar, and carefully-spaced microphones to
265 emphasize and eliminate particular sounds, such as the call of the cucumber seller from the street below (something Fayez would have theoretically contested). In Fayez's contexts however, it is the use of the auto-tuner that distinguishes his ensemble's sound, momentarily transforming it beyond the human to convey both otherworldly and local agency. In other words, Fayez took it upon himself to evoke the voice of God in a kind of "posthuman ventriloquism"—what Joseph Auner called a modulated, denaturalized, and mechanized sound (2003)—to expand Coptic spiritual and sonic imaginaries. Technological ventriloquism, in its early role to impress rationality, modernity, and a scientific superiority over the supernatural, played a pivotal role in Enlightenment discourses to discredit
"religious oracles" and a clerical occult (Schmidt 2000: 148). As I will explore in the next section, an auto-tuned ventriloquism in El-Karouz's performances operated not to disenchant the spiritual; rather, it emphasized a sonic presence of the divine outside of official liturgical rites and beyond the power of the Orthodox clerical elite who had traditionally represented the voice of God in the community.229 By themselves evoking the presence of God through auditory technology, Fayez and his ensemble negated the need for officially consecrated moderators and introduced Schmidt's notion of participatory dynamism, mentioned earlier.
As performers and listeners of taratil, Fayez's audience now had the agency to sing God into presence themselves. To evoke Anthony Shenoda once again: "Agency is not in the objects themselves, but in the people depicted or otherwise connected to the object" (2010: 221).
By producing sounds otherwise unheard of in the Orthodox Church, or even in
Egypt's Islamic soundscape, Fayez and El-Karouz facilitated a space for an alternative
229 Again, Fayez was not only critical of the Coptic Orthodox Church but also maintained his reservations about growing charismatic movements and their lack of “rootedness” in Orthodox theology and doctrine.
266 modern Coptic subjectivity. Susana Loza writes that "these techno-organic entities traverse the space between desire and dread; their indeterminate forms simultaneously destabilize and reconfigure the dualistic limits of liberal humanist subjectivity" (2001: 349). In the privacy of taratil concerts, Coptic listeners can release their spirit and negotiate their own ambivalences of belonging both to the Orthodox Church and to the State on their own terms.
By moving, dancing, and singing loudly, these emerging interdenominational audiences are overriding Orthodox etiquette, Shenouda's ascetic teachings and, more broadly, Egyptian propriety for restrained religious expression.230 Sound specialist Kay Dickinson writes (2001:
336):
The expulsion of feeling through the voice, through visceral bodily vibrations, consequently bears the potential to trigger sentient responses within the listeners too, responses which vary from elation to the threat of harm. The issue we need to focus on here is not the tactility per se, but how its meanings and consequences reverberate through equivocating networks of power. The involvement of the body—also a fluctuating cultural factor—means that all the attendant politics from which it is woven and which it attracts cannot be erased from the sphere of popular music and discourse.
Of course, the question remains beyond the tactility of Fayez's sound: by mediating
God's voice through techniques such as reverb, amplification, and modulation, what kind of agency is afforded to Fayez himself, particularly as these sounds are filtered through web streaming and satellite broadcasting? How did such agency change as Fayez increasingly
230 Most Egyptian Muslims belong to the Sunni sect of Islam that officially bans charismatic worship and deems excessive displays of emotion, movements, and overtly boisterous chanting as haram or profane. Sufi remembrance ceremonies such as samaʻ and zikr however, depend on the emotional ecstasy of anashid and the repeated name of God so that participants can also momentarily release their spirit back to the heavens. Despite Sunni etiquette, many Egyptians do attend these ceremonies during the popular religious festivals or mulids. In his dissertation “Snacks & Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety, and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt,” Samuli Schielke traces recent reforms in popular Egyptian piety during recent movements to police mulids as pious but “modern” Egyptian enterprises (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2006).
267 emerged as a singing televangelist, joining a growing number of celebrities on Arabic
Christian satellite TV? I turn to these questions in the next section, but first I highlight the role of the auto-tuner in these alternative worship concerts.
As a descendant of the vocoder, a 1939 German invention to disguise military voice transmissions,231 today the auto-tuner operates to digitally modulate vocal pitches, timbre, texture, and even the coherence of texts. In its ability to blur the sonic lines between instrument, machine, and human voice, Dickinson identified the vocoder's decidedly jolty and robotic sounds as its most recognizable signature and signifier (2001: 334). El-Karouz did not wholly depend on the effect of the auto-tuner throughout their powerful performances but instead featured its use during a selection of taratil whose texts largely engaged in a direct conversation with God—or in some cases, when God spoke in the first person. During the June 2011 spiritual retreat, one of these auto-tuned taratil, "Mid ʼIdaik ʻal Bahr Ya
Musa" or "Moses, Extend Your Hand Over the Sea," became the khilwa's most requested impromptu anthem. The tartila gained popularity among the audience as one of Fayez's latest and most catchy compositions, and also gained favor due to its victorious texts based on the exodus story of the Israelites from Egypt and the defeat of the Pharaoh's armies. Following the January 25th uprising, it struck a particularly personal chord.
Mid ʼIdaik ʻal Bahr Ya Musa / Moses, Extend Your Hands Over the Sea
Refrain Moses, extend your hands over the sea this one last time, as I have commanded so it shall be
231 Kay Dickinson, “Believe”? Vocoder, Digitalised Female Identity and Camp,” Popular Music, 20 (2001): 333-47. Well-known examples of auto-tuned pieces include Cher's “Believe” and Madonna's “Music ”
268 afterwards, you will not see the Pharaoh's army
Extend your hands over the sea and part it, with your faith you will break the head of the dragon and crush Leviathan
Extend your hands with the rod of the cross and touch the world You will harvest a victory, reap the land, and the enemy will find ("Ah!")
In God's first-person voice, the texts evoked His commandments to Moses to lift his rod and split the Red Sea so that the children of Israel may escape oppression and slavery at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaoh (Exodus 14: 16). After crossing safely to the other side,
God commanded Moses to lift his rod one more time, bringing the sea crashing down and ultimately eliminating the chariots, the horsemen, and all of the Pharaoh's army. The allusion to the present political situation could not be more clear—despite his defeat and hospitalization in the resort-town of Sharm el-Sheikh also on the shores of the Red Sea, many felt that Hosni Mubarak's fulul, or the corrupt remnants of his regime, still remained in the guise of the ruling Security Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). Fayez's sermon prayer before beginning the first verse only confirmed his metaphor, his deliberately quiet but fervent spoken voice emerged against a low auto-tuned drone coming from the singer on the keyboard behind him. With his hands tightly on his ʻud, Fayez instructed his audience in prayer, and soon they began to repeat verbatim after him, their voices one against the mechanized hum (28 June 2011) :
Tell Him, I believe you Lord, that this rod [he lifts his ʻud ] in my hands will summon and fill the people around me. I believe You, I believe in Your voice (sutak). I believe in Your power, I believe in the power of life, I believe in the works of the Holy Spirit…. I believe in Your promises for this land (wuʻudak li al-ʼard) in which I live. I believe that you are using only the few, O Lord, to redeem the land, who realize the call of salvation, as living witnesses to you on this land.
269 Tell Him to tell you to rise. I believe in Your voice, O Lord. Fill my life. Command me to arise more than once like the angel did with Elijah. For I am tired of my stillness…the fatigue of my service. Send your angels. Send your revival through your light voice (sutak al-khafif). Redeem my self (istirad nafsi). Redeem me to You. Give me back power, your promises, your ability. Amen. Say Amen.
That the tartila slowly unfolded to the loud and familiar sounds of the maqsum rhythm232 typical of weddings processions (zaffa) automatically signaled the sounds of a victorious celebration from the onset of the first Dumm beat. As Fayez sang "as I have commanded so it shall be, you shall not see the Pharaoh's army," women erupted, one after the other, into jubilant waves of zagharit, loud ululation fit for weddings. An ensemble member bellowed into the long shufar, and though without their own divine rods the audience raised their arms high in the air to part the seas of their own troubled world. Indeed, in the loud volume of their performances, it seemed at this moment that "al-Majd qadim,"
"the Glory was coming." People stepped into the aisles to dance, and below the texts on the power projector at the front of the room young men formed one long kick-line, jumping up and down in a one synchronized motion and holding on to each other for support. The scene momentarily seemed to mirror the Exodus story when, after their escape, Mariam the prophetess led the rest of the Israeli women in triumphant song and dance with timbrel in hand (Exodus 15: 19). Fayez evoked this moment in the ninth and tenth verses, and in the last two verses of this extended song (running close to twenty minutes) he led the crowds to sing in God's voice as He directly spoke to the people:
Extend your hand to people so that people may praise, and with her timbrel, Mariam says "God has been glorified" Be joyous so that the land may witness
232 Please refer to footnote 181 for an explanation.
270 Extend your hand to Joshua [who came after Moses] and intercede as [you will face] one war after another until I myself return and bring comfort to the people
Besides its popularity, what makes this tartila noteworthy is its text. While Fayez's
"Call of Salvation to the Land" has been largely about spiritual metaphors about how believers could change and reclaim the ʼard, here he evoked how through God's intervention one could change the actual physical and material topography of the land. 233 With God's help,
Moses lifted his staff upwards and the Red Sea parted. And, while the ocean stood as a wall to their left and right, (Exodus 14: 22) the embattled people of God escaped the ruthlessness of the Egyptian Pharaoh.
Beyond the materiality of taratil text, there is also the sonic materiality and agency of the auto-tuned voice that manifests God's presence into sonic utterance. Fayez frequently instructed his audience to repeat after him, and to the backdrop of an unnaturally low hum, call out a similar prayer before continuing to sing the next verse of the tartila:
I believe You [Lord], I believe in Your voice (sutak). I believe in Your power, I believe in the power of life, I believe in the works of the Holy Spirit…. Send your revival through your light voice (sutak al-khafif). Redeem my self (istarid nafsi). Redeem me to You. Give me back power, your promises, your ability. Amen.
In its modern standard Arabic, saut has much more to do with agency, power, even polity than simply denoting a sonic vibration, sound, or voice. Embedded in the Fusha definition, sauat not only means to make a sonic utterance, but can also signify casting one's ballot in an
233 This is not a new phenomenon. In another well-known saint hagiography, Samaan the Tanner defied an Arab Caliph's challenge and proved he could move a mountain through prayer and song. See Gaëtan du Roy's “Le miracle de la montagne et les chiffonniers du Moqattam” in Figures contemporaines de la transmission, edited by Nathalie Burnay and Annabelle Klein (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2009).
271 election. Ideally then, taswit (to vote) is to make sound and have a civic voice. In her work on the "politics of the voice" in Karnatak music, Amanda Weidman argues that the voice, as a sonic and material object, must be examined in its historical and cultural contexts with special attention to issues of representation, subjectivity, and agency (2006: 9). As the disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology have historically treated the voice as a means of technology that produces music, she reverses this idea and proposes that we exam music as a means or technology for producing a representational voice, in both a sonic and ideological sense (2006: 12). Here, as El-Karouz's technology of the auto-tuner actually changed the material sound of the voice, I add that we must also investigate how subjectivity, spirituality, and agency change as the voice becomes mediated by sonic-altering technologies. As Weidman points out, a "politics of voice" is not just about practices that resist, talk, or even sing back to hegemonic (and in the case of Karnatak music, colonial) powers but it also highlights the fact that such performances can also be modes of discipline though which subjects are produced and their presence made most audible. In Fayez's superhuman ventriloquy, he translated neo-Pentecostal pedagogies for interdenominational audiences in Egypt and, as a meditator of God's voice, he also expanded Coptic spiritual imaginaries to include interdenominational, international, and even inter-religious movements, something not plausible in most Orthodox and increasingly in contemporary
Egyptian contexts. I turn now to a more detailed discussion of GAPNET presence at the June
2011 retreat. As a neo-Pentecostal global ministry, Fayez depended on their millennialist perspective to negotiate a modern Coptic citizenry following the January 25th uprising.
272 Repossessing the land, Repossessing Ourselves? Negotiating a Modern
Coptic Citizenry Through Neo-Pentecostal Pedagogies
I wonder if the land of Egypt was going to talk to God what it would say about you and me? I want to pray a very simple prayer. Put your hands on your ears, and say with me: Lord, teach me to hear the voice—let us say together: Lord, teach me to hear the voice of the land as it speaks to me. Open my ears Lord. Open my eyes Lord that I may see and that I may hear the condition of the land and what the land is speaking.
It is going to start here. It all began here. It will all end here, in this part of this world. Jesus is coming back soon, but before he comes, creation has been waiting for you to take your place. And when we see this ministry [he gestures to El-Karouz], this powerful prophetic minster [he gestures to Maher Fayez] that God is raising in the land of Egypt, our hearts are melting.
Chris Daza (28 June 2011)
In the prophetic revelations of his opening sermon, Malawian guest preacher Chris
Daza had picked up so much momentum that his Arabic translator could barely keep up. As his English sermon clipped over the translation, the audience listened tentatively, quietly. At a seemingly familiar climax, one person managed to yell out a hesitant "halleluiah" but their feeble exaltation went unheard under the crossing languages from the stage. When it was over, the crowd seemed lost in translations of Daza's pauses, pacing, and emphasis.
Nonetheless, one message of his sermon was clear: like the millennialist phrase,"al-Majid qadim" (Glory is coming) printed on the wooden crosses that many audience members used for worship, the Kingdom of God in a post-January 25th Egypt was closer than ever. More importantly, it was also clear that Maher Fayez, through reaching out to such international ministries as GAPNET, seemed to fulfill the prophecy of a global evangelism that would
273 proceed the second coming of Christ.234 For Fayez however, a millennial revelation was also intimately interwoven into another conversation, one of a contemporary al-watan al-samawi or a heavenly citizenship as embodied on this earth and one that depended on neo-
Pentecostal eschatologies to redeem and repossess a modern but specifically Christian subjectivity in an Egypt following the transformational uprising earlier that year.
Pastor Daza was one of three guests from the non-profit organization known as the
Global Apostolic & Prophetic Network (GAPNET) that Maher Fayez invited to preach at the
June 2011 spiritual retreat. Their mission, as stated on their website, was to help various leaders, businesses, families, government officials, and church leaders "to discover their mandate in God and take their rightful position in the development of their continent." 235 In
Daza's words, GAPNET's prophetic vessels hoped to serve as midwives to an apostolic people who worked fervently to possess their land in the name of Jesus and evangelize to non-Christians in their communities. That is why, he insisted, GAPNET was here, to facilitate Fayez's "Daʻwat al-ʼArd" or the Call of Salvation to the Land of Egypt. Despite such wide cultural and linguistic barriers, GAPNET's presence not only introduced neo-
Pentecostal pedagogies but also highlighted Fayez's role as a prophetic "megaphone,"
(Engelke 2007: 1999) a vessel of the Holy Spirit to project and translate the message of God into ecumenical even inter-religious songs.
In this last section, I explore how Maher Fayez's ministry negotiated a modern Coptic citizenry through neo-Pentecostal and charismatic encounters, and through the acts of listening and singing helped audiences be witness to their faith. Like his extended prayer
234 Revelations 1:7 235 Gapnet.org, “About Us,” (accessed 22 April 2013).
274 before the song "Mid idaik ʻal-Bahr Ya Musa" or "Moses, Extend Your Hand Over the Sea" in the previous section, Fayez depended on GAPNET's emphasis on the sensuousness of the ear—literally putting one's hand to one's ear—to locate God's voice and the voice of the land.
With such emphasis on hearing the voice of God, the murannim hoped to (re)introduce taratil as part of a new ethical and aural therapy, one that Hirschkind more aptly described as
"a powerful instrument for honing this reverberatory faculty [the ear]…and for attuning and orienting the senses to a divinely ordered world," (2006: 37). Drawing on neo-Pentecostal pedagogies, Fayez underlined what Matthew Engelke called the "direct and live affects of the
Spirit" (2006)—the visceral and personal sense of God's presence through mediated sound and through live televised and streaming worship concerts. By doing so, Fayez not only emerged as an alternative prophet of the ear, but he also honed Pentecostal appropriation of media technologies (Hackett 1998) to articulate a counter-modernity to the Orthodox
Church's ocularcentric emphasis on saint and martyr images in taratil videos and texts on
Church owned satellite TV. By doing so, he prophesized a new world-order to come that involved many new converts to the faith.
While Marwan Kraidy identified the 1990s as the age of an "Arab Media
Revolution" (2010: xi), Egyptians did not get religious satellite programming until nearly a decade later; the channel by the name of Iqraa (Read) was established in 1998 through the
Arab Radio and Television (ART) satellite service, one of the biggest satellite providers in the region aimed from the start to compete with European and American satellite content for regional viewers.236 Coptic Orthodox TV channels grew exponentially in the following
236 See Yasmin Moll's “Islamic Televangelism: Religion, Media, and Visuality in Contemporary Egypt” in Arab Media and Society, Issue 10, Spring 2010.
275 decade to compete with neighboring religious programming coming largely coming from
Lebanon: to SAT-7, an interdenominational Christian channel largely based in the U.S. 237
Beginning in 2005 with the the Church's official channel, the Coptic Orthodox Church
Television channel (CTV), numerous other channels have been established directly by the
Church, individual congregations inside and outside of Egypt, and even by large single donors.238 While the specific study of Coptic satellite television is beyond the scope of this project, I want to focus Maher Fayez's engagement with one particular station to illustrate how through the use of satellite television Fayez merged both ocular and auditory sensibilities as part of a new ethical therapy to help his audiences attune to what Charles
Taylor called alternative modernities (1995). While Taylor discussed popular understandings of "rational" modernity as inevitable operations awaiting the proper conditions to unfold— that, for example, under certain conditions humans will see the validity of scientific validity or that instrumental rationality pays off (1995: 25)—Fayez negotiated a Christian modernity whose developments he argued were also inevitable. Steeped in the neo-Pentecostal eschatologies of the second comings of Christ, the makings of a heaven on earth, and in prophesied conversion to Christianity by the thousands, Fayez argued that major evangelical transformations only awaited the proper conditions to unfold, namely the rise and use of digital and satellite technologies. Again, one only needs to remember the small inscriptions
237 In 1995, British national Terence Ascott launched the first Arabic Christian television channel in the Middle East with the hope of broadcasting to Christians all over the region. Today, SAT-7 boasts Arabic, Farsi, Turkish channels with its headquarters stationed in United States. By their own estimates, their channels serve approximately 15 million viewers globally.
276 on the hand-held crosses many parishioners held during prayer and ones that refracted back on countless televisions: "Al-Majid qadim," "the Glory is Coming."
As Fayez's ministry is almost entirely censored and banned from Orthodox television, he turned to SAT-7 to air his own religious program, Hanranim, as well as live worship concerts. Hanranim [We will Sing], the first Arabic program devoted to taratil, is a weekly hour-long program of sermon, taratil, news commentary, and largely Protestant guest murannimin. It was on this show that the June 2011 retreat was broadcast live as a kind of reality TV. This show, along with his live worship concerts not only emphasized Fayez's counternarratives of spiritual joy and happiness, but also anchored his own status as a prophetic televangelist. But unlike Daza, Fayez did not foretell of a new world order to come but rather that it had already begun: people had answered the call of salvation to the land as they sang taratil, and new Orthodox and Muslim converts joined their midst. The message of a Christian millennialist hope thus spread both on the ground and also through satellite and digital technologies that had the capacity to transcend space and time and reach a vastly wider and more global audience. No longer encumbered by the institutional restrictions, his audience, whether live or sitting on the other side of the television screen, simply had to heed the call, as reflected in one of the taratil broadcast from the June retreat:
Al-Majdu Lak / Glory Unto You
The living son of God is among us, say the blessings are coming Sing in the name of the Lord, Hosanna the coming King
Refrain Glory to you, O lover of mankind Glory to you, my Lord Jesus Christ
277 Arise O Church, the Lord is in your midst, the titan of salvation for the Glory has come and is revealed for all
During our interview just a few months before the retreat, Maher Fayez spoke of the breakthrough of Christian satellite television (24 May 2011):
Satellite television is starting to break through the church's enclosure on spiritual ingenuity—Il media ikhtiraq—the media is a breakthrough. It returned us to the old spirit of improvisation, prepared us for new innovations, and broadened our perspective…. All it did was enlighten us to be like we were—Il media nawaritna zay zaman….
I want to bring attention to Fayez's use of how the media nawaritna zay zaman, how satellite and digital technologies "enlightened us like we were before." The question of course is before what? It is a question that Fayez leaves strategically open for a number of interpretations: before the Arab conquest? Before the institutionalization of Orthodox and
Protestant piety in Egypt? He does not make this clear, but like his television program
Estenara, or "Enlightened," he clearly targeted his critiques and ministry at Christians who practiced without "knowledge of their faith" and Muslims who were still "in the dark."
Fayez's symbiosis of technological advancement with an authenticated practice of
Christianity, a discourse that, as illustrated earlier and in the first chapter, entangled
Christianity in a Western-centered notion of progress. Lara Deeb writes (2006: 34, her italics):
In the end, despite its messiness, the attempt to redefine the terms of discourse around being modern was really an attempt to posit a way of being that is neither West nor East, and that is both 'modern' and 'authentic'…. This has involved two parallel notions of progress: progress as increased modernization and progress as "increased" piety. Increased piety means piety that is more deeply felt, more clearly understood according to specific interpretation, and crucially more visible. As both evidence and
278 methods of spiritual progress, public piety is the key to the pious modern.
Through his ministry, Fayez hoped to make modern Egyptian Christianity more audible. In our conversation, Fayez also alluded to the kind of democratization that comes with sonic technologies, mass communication, and the digitalization of sound, the very same kinds of technology that helped and continue to propel Pentecostalism as one of the fastest growing Christian denomination both in U.K. and in the U.S.239 Tasbih, or one's original state of musical praise, no longer hinged on the clerical elite through liturgical rites or access to central religious broadcasting but rather extended to a wider non-Orthodox and even non-
Christian public. What Fayez neglected to acknowledge, however, was that such "real virtualities" (Castell 1993) also created a media environment that was exclusionary and promoted new cultural forms of privatism, the same kind of cultural isolation which Fayez was so critical of in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Rather, in line with sociologist Jürgen
Habermas' thinking, satellite TV had the potential to by-pass a public arena where polity, claims related to rightness, and civic responsibilities could be discussed (Habermas 1989).
Such a media culture both reaffirms that the private sphere as the principal site of political engagement and avoids engagement with the voice of the other; the more sensational the output of television, "the more the pubic sphere withers on the vine" (2003: 99). As Fayez's web and satellite ministries increase—as illustrated by his El-Karouz website and programs such as Estenara and Hanranim, Coptic polity and citizenry merge further and further away from urban centers and non-digital realities, audible only to audiences that are tuned in to these secret theaters and hidden spiritual infrastructures. It is noteworthy to remember, once
239 “Pentecostalism” BBC News (7 February 2009). < http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/>(accessed 22 April 2013).
279 again, that this June retreat took place two hours west of Cairo in a gated auditorium out in the Nitrean desert.
In his work on reality television and Arab politics, Mawran Kraidy writes that by getting mixed up in political spectacle, reality TV augured new uses of public space by honing mobilization tactics and voting rituals that were transferred into "real" politics (2010:
16). I return full circle to Shuhei Hosokawa's notion of personal and "secret theatres" and argue that through the convergence of various medias—satellite TV, an interactive website, and streaming web ministries—that Fayez ushered in a kind of public secret theaters shared by those connected, singing, and listening in these overlapping networks in a kind of spiritual infrastructure. By singing texts, whose materiality, meanings, and even double-meanings concern the present Egyptian State, taratil auditors are negotiating a different political reality, a symbiosis of screen and street that is still removed from the realities of everyday life. Christian citizenry, with "episodic utterances of national identities constantly in the making," (2010: 18), is then made in these hidden auditoriums on the margins of the city, living rooms, and church spaces tucked away from the gritty honking of the Cairene street and what a majority of Copts regard as obtrusive Islamic sonic markers of the daily azan or the Friday sermons. They are made in the spaces between headphones that block out these sounds, connecting people's ears to phones and gadgets that stream El-Karouz's website, taratil downloads, and sermon lessons. In these contexts, participatory auditors create a hypermedia space that, while eluding censorship and facilitating distinct social and political communication (2010: 17), also allows for imagining, intermingling, and mixing of social realities, the Kingdom of God and their own version of the "real." Such auditory
280 interconnectedness to taratil in these various overlapping circles highlighted the
"participatory dynamism" that Schmidt initially identified as hearing's potential for intermingling the senses in which one cannot differentiate between the one who speaks and the one who listens. This is aptly illustrated when, as SAT-7's cameras spanned the audience,
Fayez called out: "If the camera comes on you, it could be your features as your worship that moves them to Christ!" As listeners and singers, audience members becoming embedded in a kind of global evangelism, they bring Daza's prophecies into the reality of changing the social, political, and even religious topography of their land:
This is an army of God that God is raising in the land of Egypt, rising up in the spirit of power, rising up in the spirit of a fighter to begin to possess the land. I pray that God will open your eyes. I pray that God will open your ears that you can understand that you are the one that God has been waiting for, that you are the one that the anointing of God has come, that you are the one that will deliver Egypt.
The reasons, Kraidy writes, that reality television became so contentious in Arab public life was because it mobilized people, crystalized issues, and incessantly stressed the question of "what constitutes reality?" while simultaneously preempting the formation of consent on that question (2010: 193). Similarly, over his career, Maher Fayez's ministry became increasingly contentious among conservative sectors of the Orthodox community for a number of things: he refused to consent to such a shared reality as presented on CTV and other official Church operated media outlets; by questioning clerical authority and the exclusivity of "who belongs to God," Fayez questioned the Church's choices of a strategic marginality, spiritual withdrawal, and cultural (dis)engagement from "the Egyptian street.".
Inherently, his own withdrawal from official religious contexts also engaged his critics in broader and more polemic issues of national and religious belonging, of who really belonged
281 to heaven and who did not.
Some Conclusions
In this chapter, I have presented taratil outside of the Church's nominally accepted platforms such as Sunday School and Church-organized mulid festivals. As the Orthodox
Church (dis)engages contemporary politics in Egypt by turning increasingly towards martyr tropes and a heavenly nationhood, Maher Fayez (dis)engages the Orthodox Church and negotiates an alternative watan al-samawi or heavenly citizenship hinging on interdenominational and charismatic encounters in Egypt on the ground. In other words, like the bustling sounds of Kanisat Allah's services reverberating in Shariʻ al-Biʻtha, Fayez hoped to provoke his listeners to bring his mediated sounds and taratil beyond the Church and into the Egyptian street to build a "lived" Kingdom of God. It is a ministry that is no longer really at the margins, thanks to the widespread use of media and digital technologies. Instead, neo-
Pentecostal and charismatic movements are quickly gaining popularity in Egypt and mobilizing the masses at a staggering rate "to repossess the land" and to evangelize to
Egyptian Muslims, even if only through the digital imaginaries of satellite television and online sermons.
Inspired by neo-Pentecostal pedagogies, Fayez appropriated and converged various media technologies to articulate a counter-modernity to the Orthodox Church's ocularcentric emphasis on saint and martyr images in taratil videos and texts on Church-owned satellite
TV. Instead, he hoped to bring his audiences beyond the Church's strategical cultural marginality by introducing them to the sounds of the Egyptian "street" and achieve a kind of
282 "de-territorialised listening" (Hosokawa 1984: 17). While, Hosokawa argued that such manners of listening—whether it is through the walkman, satellite television, or streaming recordings online—could induce an autonomous, pluralistically-structured awareness of reality, he neglected to admit that they can also provide a self-enclosed refuge into which people withdraw. Instead, by emphasizing auditory sensibilities that brought people into the ear, Fayez not only helped his audience listeners to encounter the presence of God in their ears but also (dis)engage with other undesirable sounds. Like the Holy Family Choir in the previous chapter and Sunday School students in the chapter before, Fayez crafted what
Danièle Hervieu-Léger called a "spiritual bricolage"240—a radically personal style of piety in which each person is constantly compiling his or her own collage of symbols, experiences— and here I add sounds—to navigate an increasingly hostile soundscape where, for many, the old and allegedly comprehensive charts of the Orthodox no longer command confidence.
240 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Present-Day Emotional Renewals: The End of Secularization of the End of Religion?” in W.H. Swatos, ed., A Future For Religion? A New Paradigm for Social Analysis (London: Sage 1992): 129-148.
283 CONCLUSION
On August 14, 2013, when the Security of Armed Forces (SCAF) brutally dispersed massive sit-ins by the Muslim Brotherhood protesting their candidate President Mohamed
Morsi's forced eviction from office, a severe backlash whipped throughout the country. In a span of 2 days, over 600 protestors were killed, about 4000 injured, and more than 40 churches, Christian schools and properties were burned and looted.241 On the news, the pictures looked so very different from the hopeful images that tante Cecile and I had watched together in her living room over two years previously when Muslims and Christians gathered together in Tahrir Square raising their clasped fists high: "Muslim, Masihi, ʼid wahda!"
[“Muslim, Christian, Hand in Hand!”]. Instead, the coverage revealed charred and broken churches, mangled bodies in converted mosques as morgues, and an increasing violence aimed at Coptic Christians. It seemed that, due to a growing audibility and presence in the latest political protests against the removal of Mohamed Morsi from office, extremists targeted Coptic Christians to vent their rage. It was the hazards of a growing Coptic political and civc engagement following the January 25th uprising. In light of this violence, the hopes for Muslim and Christian unity, one that allowed them to sing taratil together in the Square, suddenly seemed both so far away, or perhaps even, uncomfortably too close. With every recurring image of a crumbling church, heaven on earth was tested.
241 Hamza Hendawi, “Egypt: Islamists Hit Coptic Christian Churches, Torch Franciscan Schools” The Huffington Post, August 17, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/17/christians-in- egypt_n_3773991.html (accessed 21 August 2013).
284 Among the pictures of damaged altars, upturned pews, and shattered doors, Coptic interlocutors on Facebook widely shared pictures of communities determined to undertake liturgy services in these burned churches. In one photograph, a group of young men stood side by side in the wreckage and raised their arms in prayer to echo the sounds of alhan and taratil in the building's hallowed remains. It seemed, like the Holy Family Choir in chapter 4 and Maher Fayez in chapter 5, that they too looked to repossess the broken place through sound and to enliven heaven on earth once again. An interlocutor called me, "Did you see this picture? They can burn down our churches, "bas mish hayihraʼuna" [They cannot burn us]. The Coptic Orthodox Church's official statement reminded its parishioners that despite such horrific acts, God was ever closer, perhaps even on "our side":
While the hands of evil are involved in burning, killing, and destroying, the hands of God are close to us: protecting, fostering and building. We have confidence in God's assistance that will help our Egyptian people in overcoming such a difficult chapter of our history towards a better and brighter future, where justice, peace and democracy will prevail, exactly what the people of the noble River Nile valley deserve. Long live Egypt, free and dignified.242
In this dissertation, I have explored questions of belonging. More specifically, I have investigated the convergences, ambivalences, and contradictions of belonging to a nation as
Egyptian Christian citizens in a Muslim-majority nation while, at many times, articulating that the price of civic and political participation is far too high. What does it mean to belong to God, to heaven, to one's self, to one another and, finally, to a nation? How do people perform, live, and practice acts of belonging? In Egypt, Coptic Christians delicately negotiate belonging both to an earthly nation and a heavenly one, al-watan al-samawi, in shifting and
242 “Statement by the Coptic Church” The Arabist, The Website on Arab Politics and Culture, August 17, 2013. http://arabist.net/blog/2013/8/17/statement-by-the-coptic-church (accessed 21 August 2013).
285 at times volatile political landscapes. Coupled with the late Pope Shenouda's saying "Egypt is not a nation in which we live, but rather a nation that lives inside of us," I have investigated contemporary Orthodox religious education that infused voluntary withdrawal, saint hagiographies, and martyr motifs with a new political utility and refashioned a Christian selfhood through bodily acts of piety and service so that Copts could be useful members of an imagined "nation on the inside." taratil emerge at the nexus of these reformed pedagogies of piety to negotiate a heavenly realm and, eventually, pedagogies of politics to repossess
Egypt as part of a lived [Christian] Kingdom of God (see chapter 5).
As I have illustrated throughout this project, Coptic pedagogies of piety and pedagogies of politics are intimately interwoven, tied together through song. Rather, sonic objects---from historical transcription manuscripts in western music notation, taratil pamphlets, cassettes, and satellite media---are critical to cultivating a Coptic moral subject and, at times, a sense of ethnic (and religious) exceptionalism that is part of a larger political conversation of belonging. As many Copts learn and sing about retreating from the world to attain eternal salvation by modeling saint hagiographies and recurring martyr motifs in taratil, they not only learn about the potentials of death, sacrifice, and (dis)engagement to reform a Christian moral interiority as well as delineate a modern and pious Coptic citizenry.
But also, they negotiate the discursive logics of “modernizing” religion into easily tangible cultural and religious practices as a specific kind of belonging to a heavenly nation as pious
Egyptian and Christian citizens.
In chapter 3, I outlined how Pope Shenouda's education reforms in his Church
Upbringing movement (al-Tarbiyya al-Kanasiyya) grew from Habib Girgis' early Sunday
286 School reforms (chapter 2) and focused on an ethical restructuring through bodily acts of spiritual volunteerism, fasting, prayer, listening to sermons and, I have argued, the singing of taratil. Such a religious revival (nahda ruhiya) transformed churches into bustling Sunday
School centers that not only offered religious education but also other social activities including choir rehearsals, field trips, community clubs, even organized computer labs.
Throughout these contexts, taratil are part of a ubiquitous and pedagogical soundscape, outlining saint hagiographies and meditations on Christ's ultimate sacrifice on the cross.
Many songs are also based on the Pope's early poems composed during his early hermitic years as a monk, songs emphasizing tropes of voluntary and involuntary social exclusion, suffering, and sacrifice in order to belong to heaven. As taratil grew in popularity as part of
Coptic Christian satellite broadcasts, the genre has become increasingly interwoven into mundane soundscapes as cell-phone ring tones, music videos, as well as a central soundscapes of popular Coptic religious festivity and service (see chapter 4).
While Sunday School education and reforms produced a seemingly (dis)engaged congregation that propelled the late Pope Shenouda as a sole political mediator and representative, Coptic education reforms and pedagogies of piety also facilitated alternative agentival capacities within the Church and, eventually, beyond into public political arenas.
Towards the end of his career as Patriarch, Pope Shenouda witnessed a rising opposition within the Orthodox Church that chafed against his highly centralized authority and sought alternative modes of piety and public performances of politics. In chapter 4, I have outlined how one affluent choir from the neighborhood of Heliopolis, The Holy Family Choir, undertook yearly taratil service trips to the peripheries of popular religious festivals (mulid)
287 outside of Cairo to avoid restrictions or outright rejection by the Church of their performances of alternative and popular taratil. There in rural Upper Egypt the choir sought to make the interiority of their Christian faith public through taratil services, and their concerts, home visitations, and public processions emerged as critical forms of civic engagement and a desire for a more audible and visible Christian citizenry. In chapter 5, I have explored the ministry of one charismatic Orthodox singer, Maher Fayez, as part of a larger evangelical trend that believes a heavenly citizenship can be achieved right here on this earth, and which looked to repossess Egypt as part of a lived Christian Kingdom of God.
Maher Fayez's revival contradicted Pope Shenouda's ascetic meditations and use of martyr motifs and instead framed his ministry with counternarratives of spiritual happiness, interdenominational (and at times, inter-religious) worship, future visions of stadiums full of thousands of Muslim converts, and the use of mediated sounds and mass media to effect a visceral encounter with God in the "spiritual ear." In the cases studies presented throughout this dissertation, I argue Coptic (dis)engagement is not passive but rather takes on various alternative and agentival capacities to repossess a heavenly citizenship, not only in the afterlife, but here on this earth as well.
While taratil services, evangelical and interdenominational concerts, as well as
Orthodox pedagogies of politics illustrate the genre's productivity (and hazards) in social encounters to question and reconfigure Coptic citizenry in Egypt, Butler and Athanasious remind us of the stakes of surviving such a social recognition. In other words, what is the price of Coptic audibility in Egypt's contemporary landscape, and what are the conditions for maintaining a civic presence in the transitions following the January 25th uprising? Athena
288 Athanasious (Butler and Athanasious 2013: 78-79) writes:
The relationship between recognition and survival is inherently a melancholic one in its dependence on social normativity. Survival is configured and differently allocated by normative and normalizing operations of power, such as racism, poverty, heteronormativity, ethnocentrism, and cultural recognition. It denotes the subject's avowal of the losses and foreclosures that inaugurate her emergence in the social world and, at the same time, her reworking of the injurious interpellations through which she has been constituted and on which she depends for her existence.
In this project, I have investigated the Coptic reworkings of an injurious interpellation, the martyr motif and the normativity of death, suffering, and sacrifice that are increasingly central in Orthodox narratives of identity and national belonging. Butler and Athanasious continue by asking whether recognition and assimilation amount to a subject's self- determined life or whether survival and recognition are merely living in matrices of self- definition provided by other regulatory powers. As I illustrated, there are multiple actors, figures, and movements that regulate Coptic conversations of identity, pedagogies of piety and, finally, a pedagogy of politics. This includes the Coptic Orthodox Church as well as the
Egyptian state that deeply inflect Christian and Muslim encounters with their own agendas. 243
Furthermore, new players such as the Patriarch, Pope Tawadrus II who was recently enthroned after Pope Shenouda III's death and Egypt's transition government[s], only complicate these conversations and shape them in new ways.
In the end, I still grapple with the paradoxes of a Coptic civic and political audibility increasingly built on martyr motifs and political (dis)engagements. What is at stake in this exodus from a lived self, not only for Copts but for all Egyptians? Throughout this project, I have wrestled with this question, as interlocutors worked so hard to delineate clear and hard
243 Paul Sedra, “From Citizen to Problem: the New Coptic Tokenism” Mada Masr August 18, 2013. http://www.madamasr.com/content/citizen-problem-new-coptic-tokenism (accessed 21 August 2013).
289 differences between believers and non-believers, "authentic" and modern Egyptians with
"backward" and non-modern Egyptians, Copts and Muslims. In these conversations, many interlocutors struggled with lines that were almost always blurred, arbitrary and often uncomfortably shared. In the recent struggles between the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian popular opinion, and SCAF, Copts are discovering that they are not the only ones to echo a hauntingly similar ambivalence to belonging to a modern pious Egyptian citizenry. While I cannot provide answers to myriad questions raised here, the targeting of religious minorities, among them Coptic Orthodox Christians, and the army's determination to blot out all Muslim
Brotherhood loyalists as "terrorists" heightens how all citizens in Egypt have the power to constitute and de-constitute one another. Such power begets the following questions for future research: How are taratīl shifting, changing, and even propelling conversations of national and religious belonging following the January 25th Uprising and in the dynamic political shifts that continue to ensue? How are they implicated in broader conversations of
Egyptian Christian (in)audibility, not only for Copts in Egypt, but for a quickly growing diaspora that is intimately connected through satellite media and social networking sites?
What is the role of a growing neo-Pentecostal movement, whose popular songs are increasingly permeating religious festivals and digital spaces, and come with their own dynamic performative politics of Kingdom of God that is both on earth but also hidden in their own satellite “secret theatres” ? While the possibilities for these conversations of belonging to turn increasingly exclusive, marginal, separate, and even violent are chillingly real, the potentialities of Tahrir Square, the same jubilant one tante Cecile and I, among millions of others, witnessed are ever-present.
290 291 APPENDIX
ARABIC taratil TEXTS
Barik Biladi / Bless our Country
مهما كان ياللي بتشق البحور مهما كان ع الرض ضلمة السما ماليانة نور إنتَ فوق الكل سيد رب عالي في سماك صرخة الظلوم بتسمع تنصفه من فيض غناك
[القرار] بارك بلدي بارك بلدي يا سامع الصلة في قلوب كل البشر بارك بلدي بارك بلدي التفت لصراخ قلوبنا وارسل لينا الطر
من قلوبنا بنناديلك القلوب تصرخ إليك يد واحدة وقلب واحد واضعي حياتنا بي إيديك لا صوت الق يعلى يهرب الوف والضلل نزع الب في بلدنا نحصد الير والسلم
يا إله الب اسمع لدعانا أجمعي خللي مصر بلدنا جنة رد حق الظلومي ارفع الوف والظالم واطرد الوع والفساد وانشر الق في وطنا والعدالة في البلد
292 Al-ʻalam Iyybni wa Yzraʻ / The World Builds and Plants
العالم يبني ويزرع وتلي مش شبعان همه يكنز ويجمع، وعن يسوع غفلن
[القرار]
لكن أنا مش من هنا أن، دا كله عالم فاني ل مال ول جاه ول غني، أنا ليا وطن تان
Asrar al-Kanisa al-Sabaʻa /The Seven Sacraments of the Church
قد أسس الفادى لنا سبعةَ أسرارِ الفداءْ أعمدةً لبيت ربنا وتدعيمِ الرجاءْ
العموديةُ التى قد جدّدتْ لنا اليلدْ ثم بيرونٍ مُسحنا ختمُ تثبيتِ الهادْ
وسرّ توبةٍ يقى نفوسنا من ارتدادْ والشكر سرٌ أقدسٌ يحفظ سر التادْ
ومسحةُ الرضى التى يَصحبها عَرفُ الصلةْ يشفى الريض شاكراً يسوع ينبوع الياةْ
وزيجةُ رباطها قدّسه الرب اللهْ وكهنوتٌ سرّهُ توزيع إنعام الياهْ
وهذه السرارُ كلّها مواهب الكريْ قد أُودِعت في بيعةِ الفادي كأنهار النعيمْ
ينحها خدامه رعاة ربنا الرحيم فلنشكرن الهنا القدوس فضله العميم
293 Nahnu nasl al-Shuhadaʼ/ We are Descendants of the Martyrs
مصر أمّ الجد كانت فى عصور القدماء قبطُ مصر يجرى فيهمْ عنصر تلك الدماء
[القرار] نحن نسل الشهداءِ من جدود شرفاءْ عهدنا عهد الباءِ نفتديهِ بالدماءْ
فى سبيل الجد نسعى ناظرينَ للسماءْ نذكر عهد الوفاءِ بقلوبِ المناءْ
مبتغانا مجد مصر حبها ملءُ الفؤادْ مجدها مجدٌ قديٌ يعلو أمجاد العبادْ
Nashid li Madaris al-ʼAhad / Anthem for Sunday School
نحن جندٌ للمسيحِ فى مدارس الحدْ قد نشأنا فى صلحٍ نتبعُ الَ الصمدْ
[القرار] أيها الرفاقُ هيّا واسلكوا هذا السبيلْ واصحبونا وتعالوا نحو مجدٍ ل يزولْ
نحن جيشٌ للخلصِ فى صفوفِ الؤمنيْ ننمو فى الروح وفى الجسادِ نحيا طاهرينْ
من كتاب ال نروى الروح من نبع الياهْ يَنحُ النفس سلماً وهناءً فى حماهْ
فى مقادِسِ العلىّ نصرفُ يوم الحدْ إنه سبتٌ كريٌ رمزُ راحة البدْ
وبيوت الرب دوماً حبها ملء الفؤادْ مجدها مجد السيحِ وهى مرساةُ العبادْ
نخدم الربّ صغاراً فى سبيل مستقيمْ فى شباب العمر نغدو هانئي فى نعيمْ
294 Ghariban fi al-Dunia/ A Stranger in the World
غريبًا عشت في الدنيا نزيلً مثل أبائي غريبًا في أساليبي وأفكارى وأهوائي غريبًا لم أجد سمعًا أفرغ فيه آرائي يحار الناس في ألفي ول يدرون ما بائي يوج القوم في هرج وفي صخب وضوضاء وأقبع ههنا وحدي، بقلبي الوادع النائي غريبًا لم أجد بيتًا ول ركن ليوائي
Abwab ah-Jahim / Doors of the Inferno
كم قسى الظلم عليك كم سعى الوت إليك كم صدمت باضطهادات و تعذيب و ضنك كم جرحت كيسوع بسامير و شوك عذبوك و بنيك طردوك و نفوك عجبا كيف صمدت ضد كفران و شرك هو صوت ظل يدوي دائما في أذنيك يشعل القوة فيك حي قال ال عنك إن أبواب الحيم سوف ل تقوى عليك
ʼAghlaq al-Bab wa Hagig / Shut the Door, and Sojourn
أغلق الباب وحاجج في دجي الليل يسوعا وأملء الليل صلة وصراعًا ودموعًا
295 Huzn Girah wa Sirakh wa Dimuʻ / Sadness [and] Wounds and Tears
حزن جراح وصراخ ودموع حربة وشوك وصليب مرفوع خاطى بيطلب دم باريه ودموع ام بتبكى يسوع
عدى يسوع كل اللمات وفتح ابواب الفردوس شال عنا خطيانا ومات لكن كان على الوت بيدوس
Qalbi al-Khafaqu / My Beating Heart
قلبي الفاق أضحى مضجعك في حنايا الصدر أخفي موضعك قد تركت الكون في ضوضائه واعتزلت الكل كي أحيا معك ليس لي فكر ول رأي ول شهوة أخرى سوى أن أتبعك وأبي يعقوب أدري سره قد عرفت الن كيف صارعك يا أليف القلب ما أحلك بل أنت عال مرهب ما أروعك يا قويا مسكاً بالسوط في كفه والب يدمي مدمعك ل يسعك الكون ما أضيقه كيف للقلب إذا أن يسعك
296 Taranim, Taranim, Taranim
[القرار] ترنيـم ترنيم ترنيـم ليسـوع أعظم الـه ترنيـم ترنيم ترنيـم مجده بيمل اليـاة
ملكوتك ما له حدود وطريق إبليس مسدود بالعز كمان هيسود سلطانك يا إبن ال
إبليس مغلوب مغلوب اعلن واضح مكتوب في الدم و فى الصلوب فى يسوعنا بنتحداه
إيان في يسوع بيزيد وكتاب مليان مواعيد والوعد بنصره أكيد سلطان الوعد معاه
إيان بيعيش في النور و يشوف إبليس مأسور وجناحه صبح مكسور وهتاف بيهد حماه
بهتاف ينهد السور وإلهنا يد جسور والشعب صبح منصور وبيعلن مجد ال
Ya Bani al-Kull / You Who Builds all
يا باني الكل. حلّْ تاني بالفراح في بيتك يا رب البيت طلّْ فينا ورجعنا تاني بيتك
خلّي النسان يرجع تاني إنسان والقلب كمان يتلي بيك باليان والتايه منا يعود اليوم للحضان والكل يغني اكمن القلب رجع فرحان
297 Nawari / Shine! (O Church of Christ)
نورى...نورى يا كنيسة السيح نورى نورى نورى
دا عيد شهدائك البرار القديسي نورى نورى نورى
فى النيروز ذكرى الشهداء القديسي القديسي القديسي
الدم سال ياما سال انهار دم الشهداء دم البرار ..دم الطهار ..دم البطال
يارب احفظ لينا ايانا واحفظ لينا بطركنا نورى نورى نورى
298 Ya Rafʻi min Abuab al-Mawt / You Who Saved us from the Gates of Death
[القرار] يا رافعي من أبواب الوت لكي أحدث بكل التسابيح في ابواب ابنة صهيونَ مبتهجا بخلصك
Ya Sahib al-Hanan / O Compassionate Friend
ياصاحب النان ياملجا نفسي انت هو الضمان في وسط غربتي احتاج اليك احتاج اليك احتاج منك قوة لترفعني انت وحدك انت وحدك انت تعي ضعفي وترحمني
ياسيدي اني اريد العمق فيك فأروني وأهدني أني اريد نور حبك يسطع في داخلي
[القرار] ياصاحب النان هاصرختي الي ااني اليك راجع راجع اليك راجع لضنك راجع لدربك راجع لنورك ياصاحب النان
ياصاحب النان يانبع قوتي انت وسط الحزان تعزي مهجتي اتوق اليك اتوق اليك اتوق ان تيا في يامالكي انت بروحك انت بروحك انت تقود عمري ورحلتي
يا سيدي غير بروحك حياتي واملكن إرادتي الس فؤادي وحواسي بل وكل دنيتي
[القرار] ياصاحب النان هاصرختي الي ااني اليك راجع راجع اليك راجع لضنك راجع لدربك راجع لنورك ياصاحب النان
299 Mid ʼIdaik ʻal Bahr Ya Musa / Moses, Extend Your Hand Over the Sea
[القرار] مد إيديك عالبحر ياموسى أنا أمرت وسيكون مرة أخيرة وبعدها لن تروا تاني جيوش فرعون
مد إيديك عالبحر وشقه يدي مع اليان تكسر رؤوس التناني وتسحق لوياثان
مد إيديك بعصا الصليب واضرب عالياه تصد نصرة وتصد أرض والعدو يحصد )آه(
Al-Majdu Lak / Glory Unto You
ابن ال الي ما بيننا قولوا مبارك التي باسم الرب وغنوا أوصنا فهو اللك التي
[القرار] الجد لك يا محب البشر الجد لك يا ربي يسوع السيح
قومي يا كنيسة الرب في وسطك جبار للخلص استنيري أهو جالك مجدك واعلنيه للناس
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322