Every June, Coptic Solidarity, a lobbying organization, holds an annual conference in Washington, DC, with the aim of raising awareness of the persecution of Coptic and other Middle Eastern Christians. The Copt-run organization reaches out to American politicians, religious leaders, and advocates of human rights and religious freedom. During their 2016 conference, a panel entitled “What is the Future of Egypt's Minorities?” sparked a heated debate. Panelist Fatima Naoot, a secular, liberal Muslim activist from Egypt, was firm in her commentary that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are an integral part of its character. “It's impossible to say that there is a Coptic minority in Egypt because Coptic is not simply a religion, but also an ethnic category that forms the basis of Egyptian identity. Therefore, if Copts are citizens [of Egypt], they cannot be part of a minority.” An organizer for Coptic Solidarity emphatically disagreed with Naoot, speaking from the audience during the Q&A period: “We are the indigenous people of Egypt, of course! But we are also a minority in Egypt and we are persecuted, whether we are citizens or not. Because of persecution, we are here [in the US] because our people are a persecuted minority there!” Naoot responded, admitting that there was discrimination but insisting that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are integral, as one of the ethno-religious peoples of Egypt, to the abstract idea of the Egyptian nation and therefore to Egyptian citizenship. She concluded with the following clarification: “In Egypt, you are not [a minority], but here in America you are!”
Within the Egyptian political context, national unity discourse (or the idea that there is no essential difference between Muslims and Christians in Egypt) has been used by both Muslim and Coptic elites to dispel any idea of endemic sectarian tension or religious conflict within Egypt. In this reading, one which I take Naoot to exemplify, the designation of “minority” threatens to set Copts apart from a national identity, distancing them further from the idea of universal equality through citizenship. In contrast, there are Copts both in Egypt and the diaspora who call upon their coreligionists to embrace the “minority” designation to make what they take to be their discrimination and persecution in Egyptian society visible. The minority question then is a debate over whether persecution is endemic to Egyptian society. Yet, it also has been shaped by imperial formations and geopolitical binds. To obtain recognition of oppression and violence in Egyptian society, transnational Copts have looked to Western, mainly Christian conservative political partners that have given specific attention to their plight.
Tracing the transnational translations of the Coptic community as a minority has been the focus of my research. Between 2016 and 2021, I conducted multi-sited ethnographic work among recent Coptic migrants: first-, second-, and third-generation American Copts and clergy members moving transnationally between Egypt, primarily the village of Bahjura, Naj Hammadi, Upper Egypt, and the United States, primarily Jersey City, New Jersey. Shuttling back and forth across these sites of migration, my work has examined the everyday practices and processes that shape transnational Coptic communal formation and belonging as it interfaces with the tension between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious placement within an American Christian conservative landscape. My interlocutors relate to each other through their religious tradition as well as their politicized transnational minority condition. As I argue, their struggle to grapple with their minoritization, modulated as it is between Egypt and the United States, poses the question of political praxis and interpellation in a broader geopolitical frame of international religious freedom and counterterrorism, as well as scholarly study.
The Egyptian national debate on minority rights in the early 20th century took place in the context of British colonial rule and its stated “protection” of non-Muslim religious communities. During the postcolonial period and the rise of Arab nationalism, the minority rights movement was sidelined by the depoliticization of Coptic lay leaders, intellectuals, and elites under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in favor of the Coptic Orthodox Church's supremacy in Christian representation.Footnote 1 In the late 20th and early 21st century, debates on minority rights in Egypt have been modulated by an increasing Coptic migration to the United States—de-territorializing Coptic life beyond Egypt's physical borders, as Coptic life is translated through contemporary narratives of global Christian persecution.Footnote 2 Yet most scholarship has focused on either framing (Coptic) minoritization as a political process or attending to social forms of shared life (pluralism) within a national (Egyptian) context, decidedly eschewing the decisive influence of contemporary migration to centers of global power like the United States.Footnote 3
The context and audience of the Coptic Solidarity debate in Washington, DC, exemplifies a shift in the present economy of global minority discourse. As a Christian community in Egypt, Copts have variously experienced forms of discrimination and outright persecution by governing authorities, political factions, and their Muslim neighbors. Yet, the manifest anti-Coptic discrimination in Egypt also is the primary area of interest to US foreign policy and less mainstream academic circles, in which Coptic advocacy networks such as Coptic Solidarity track. Other forms of social antagonism in Egypt—for example, those of class, gender, politics—are typically eschewed.
In tandem, the precarious status of Muslims in the West and the broader impact of Islamophobia have deeply constrained the possibilities of fully integrating a critical Coptic studies into mainstream Middle Eastern studies—fully accounting for Copts’ intersectional dynamics, while also taking seriously how Copts’ Christianity impacts upon their daily lives in Egypt. Not taking seriously the Christianity of the Copts within Middle Eastern studies, as integral to understanding the fullness of religious life in the region, foments very real political and social consequences for transnational Coptic life as well as knowledge production. Put another way, Coptic entanglements in the minority concept, as it exists in the US religiopolitical terrain as well as academia, not only suture Copts to liminal spaces of minor knowledge production but also shape the possibilities of alternative forms of solidarity in diaspora contexts and bind imaginaries of liberation that flow in and out of Egypt.
Minority Translations
Transnational Coptic life offers a window onto how hegemonic political forces shape diasporic communities in their translation of collective praxis—the transformation of political orientation, racial identification, and religious solidarity. The transnational lives of my interlocutors I take to exist within multiple realities, following what anthropologist Ghassan Hage has called “diasporic lenticularity,” which directs us toward how migration has impacted upon life beyond homeland-diaspora framings.Footnote 4 Among Copts, the narratives and collective memory of violence and persecution that shape diaspora communities also (re)circulate back to Egypt and are modulated in turn; the news of violent incidents against Copts that occur in Egypt travel to places like the United States, which galvanize American Coptic politics and shape Coptic placement in an American racial-religious landscape.
On 11 September 2010, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, lead speakers for an anti-Muslim organization, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), staged a protest against the Cordoba House community center at 51 Park Place next to the site of the World Trade Center.Footnote 5 That day, among other American Christian speakers, a Coptic Christian, Joseph Nasrallah Abdelmasih, also took the stage. Nasrallah is the founder of the California-based The Way TV, a Christian satellite television station, as well as Media for Christ, a conservative Christian production company responsible for producing Innocence of Muslims (2012), an Islamophobic short film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad. In a letter addressed to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer following another rally in June 2010, Nasrallah described himself as a refugee from “the oppression of Islam” and said that he seeks to “expose to the American public what kind of instigation we [Coptic Christians] suffered at the hands of hateful Muslim preachers.” He approached the microphone wearing an American flag necktie and started his speech with an impassioned wail: “God bless America!” The crowd roared. He continued:
I come from Egypt. Egypt was Coptic; it was Christian until 1,400 years ago when Muslims conquered our country with their lies. . . . They [think they can just] lie just to build this mosque . . . [over] my dead body! Do you know why? Because I escaped from Egypt for freedom here.
Nasrallah held a white cardboard poster in his left hand depicting a bloodied image of a man from the Naj Hammadi Christmas massacre of January 2010. Below the image, it read, “Stop killing the Christians of Egypt.” He held it up toward the audience: “This is one of our dear friends in Egypt [killed] . . . in the name of Islam. They said “Allāhu akbar” and they killed them in front of the church. Three thousand persons burned here.” He pointed back toward the site of the World Trade Center:
And in the same area they need to build a mosque! Can you imagine that?. . . I know the truth because I'm from Egypt. I know the truth because our country [was] conquered [by them]. The same way they need to conquer America. . . . That's why I'm saying to you now. I'm coming all the way from California, on behalf of all the Coptic Egyptians and Christians and even the human rights I'm saying to you—wake up America! America, you don't need to be like this picture. Stop [the] Islamization of America!Footnote 6
After delivering his passionate speech at the ten-thousand-strong protest, he was later escorted off the premises by police. According to some media reports, Nasrallah and a friend were speaking Arabic to one another, which inflamed members of the rally.Footnote 7 Even if his testimony was cheered on stage in front of the crowd, offstage, while speaking in Arabic, his audible difference stoked fear among the crowd.
The contradictions at the rally and Nasrallah's ambiguous position of solidarity with his American audience speak to a larger social transformation. Since 9/11, Coptic migrants to the United States have been racialized as Middle Eastern, Arab, Muslim, non-white others through governing practices and everyday experiences in the context of War on Terror securitization.Footnote 8 The racialization of Coptic migrants is a dual process, oscillating between Christian kinship with white America and a sensorium (including audition) of non-white suspicion. Yet, as with other racially minoritized migrant communities, Copts have varyingly sought inclusion in the American body politic by claiming a Christian kinship forged in persecution. This inclusion is conditioned by both religious marginalization in Egypt and the supremacy of Christianity in the United States.
The minority Christianity of the Copts allows for a kind of religious inclusion in the United States as it shapes the contours of their activism and advocacy. Although their racial difference from and discrimination in white America is imagined by progressive and leftist academics and organizers as a logical form of solidarity with other marginalized groups, this presupposition displaces the main communal thread of transnational Coptic life—Christianity. Although Coptic Christianity, like other Eastern Christian traditions, has been theologically and socially marginalized within a broader ecumenical Christian project, it is the Christianity of the Copts that is not only relevant to Western religiopolitical interests, but also to Copts who are discriminated against on the basis of that religious difference in Egypt. That religious discrimination and the relevance of Copts’ Christianity travels with them to the United States, but it homogenizes and simplifies readings of Christian discrimination in Egypt as well.
Diasporic Feedback Loops
The village of Bahjura lies on the outskirts of Naj Hammadi, in the governorate of Qena, Upper Egypt. Over the past fifty years, Bahjura's residents have sought employment and better livelihoods outside of the village—moving to Cairo, or abroad, to Persian Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for work, or Canada, Europe, and the United States to permanently resettle. In particular, the village has been a wellspring of US Diversity Visa (or Green Card lottery) applicants and “winners” over the past decade.Footnote 9 Bahjura also is home to a number of large Coptic landowning families who once held considerable political and social power, prior to the 1952 revolution. The families that remain in residence in Bahjura continue to hold influence, even if not as strongly as a century prior. Their relations to Muslim villagers are conditioned by this remnant prestige and continued economic stability through the revenue of their agricultural lands.
Religious difference and sectarian tension are imagined quite differently for families who have a considerable number of Muslim workers. This asymmetry offers a different perspective from the din of transnational persecution politics that homogenize Coptic inequality in Egypt solely through the lens of religious difference. When compared with interlocutors from the middle and working classes in other parts of Egypt, in Bahjura the ways in which sectarian tension arose in conversation were more abstract. The sound of the adhān (or call to prayer) would produce a face of disgust for Demiana, the matriarch of one family. At the same moment, she would note how dutiful their Muslim secretary was—always attentive to the needs of the family; she also reminded me that he was educated at al-Azhar. This abstraction was even more emphasized during conversations about the perspectives of transnational kin.
Over lunch one hot summer afternoon in 2021, Demiana described how, when her mother visited London, she rode a taxi with a Pakistani driver. Along the way, the driver asked her if she was Muslim. Her mother responded with an emphatic “No!” After recounting the story, she asked me: “Why do they allow all of these Muslims into England and America? My sister in Florida says that they are taking over whole neighborhoods near her. You think that you'd be able to escape them after leaving Egypt!” Demiana's frustration was couched in the fact that she had applied more than once for a visa to visit her sister in the United States, but had been rejected.
The family patriarch, Nader, interjected in a more even-handed tone to talk about religious difference and minority positionality in Egypt and beyond. “How many millions are we [Copts, here in Egypt]? Why should Muslims even consider us?” Nader explained that majority-minority dynamics are similar across cultures, mentioning the treatment of Black people by the white majority in the United States. Nader suggested that local solutions are the only way by which this condition can be “ethically thematized.”Footnote 10 “This is why I am against the Coptic activism in America. Why don't those Copts abroad help here instead of going to a protest, holding a microphone, and telling people about the ‘Coptic cause’? They are only making the situation worse here for us.”
This sentiment also was voiced by others in the village, especially those that had had diaspora kin come to visit them in Egypt. A teacher at the local primary school noted the following during one of our conversations: “Coptic people in the diaspora don't understand everyday life in Egypt, and especially Upper Egypt. They have their own image in their minds as to what life is like here, especially in the village—that there is religious persecution nonstop. But the reality is that here, in Egypt, Copts have to deal with the messiness [bahdala] of the everyday, living in poverty, without jobs or a future.” Although religious difference and sectarian violence condition intercommunal relations even in places like Bahjura, other factors such as class also shape persecuted positionalities and (im)possibilities of repair. An ethical thematization of religious difference in Egypt includes an intersectional approach to precarity. Put simply, Coptic precarity also is dependent upon class and economic inequality. As economic opportunities dwindle in Egypt, and especially in the south, migration to places like the United States, where relatives speak of Christian flourishing and the American dream, becomes the solution to broader structural inequality at the intersection of religious identity and poverty.
Transnational Plasticity
Minority, a concept that developed through the entangled structures of the liberal European state and its colonies, promises to make politically visible the marginalization of a group within a polity; the plight of Coptic Christians, as the disagreement at the Coptic Solidarity conference evidenced, stakes its legibility on the grammar of minoritization—that Copts are persecuted and require social and political redress, beyond the realm of the nation–state and from global, imperial powers like the United States. Yet even while Coptic life in Egypt exceeds this grammar (of religious persecution and marginalization), its processes continue in the diaspora, bolstered by translational activism, Christian majoritarianism, white supremacy, and the exceptionalism of US empire. Minoritization shows its plasticity as it is translated across borders and through empire, sustained by the very contradictions—between homeland and diaspora, race and religion, minority and majority—that seemingly undo it. This bind that Copts and Middle Eastern others must traverse in their transnational community-fashioning and political activism is one that has framed knowledge production about them in Middle Eastern studies—as liminal, peripheral, and problematic for their contested relationship to Islam, Muslim-majority governance, and the broader Middle East. By taking the experiences, narratives, and interests of Copts and Middle Eastern others seriously as part and parcel of mainstream discussions and debates within the discipline, as integral to a better understanding of nationalism, empire, class, and migration, scholarly erasure can be better remedied.
