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Abstract
In the dark midnight hours of 11 December 2009, the Virgin Mary (al-'adhra) burst into visibility against the skyline of al-Warraq, a working-class district on the neglected peripheries of Giza, Egypt. Hovering within a glowing triad of crosses, the apparition attracted spectators to the Church of the Virgin and the Archangel Michael along the main thoroughfare, Nile Street, even in the inconvenient hours between dusk and dawn. Within days, the Virgin was being discussed far and wide by Christians and Muslims, Egyptians and foreigners, skeptics and believers. Reactions were diverse: A journalist announced to his friends, "Even if the Virgin appeared before my very eyes, I would deny her." A cab driver explained, "It is a trick, a big laser show in the sky." A young mother urged, "Why [forbid oneself] the joy that the Virgin brings?" Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012.
... The building yard zone needs two rows of trees adjacent to each other to achieve more security for inner prayer, given the current wide voids of the fence, which can be attacked easily. Al Qiddissin church Year's Eve of 2011, there was a car bombing attack to the church of the Saints, St. Mark and Pope Peter I Coptic church in Alexandria, which caused 23 deaths and more than 100 injuries (Heo 2012;Knell 2011) (Fig. 13). ...
A vast amount of literature discusses the physical attributes of a built environment for the purposes of creating lively and inclusive public spaces for the sake of its temporary appropriation by citizens. Here, the term temporary appropriation is defined as the act in which people use public spaces to carry out individual or collective activities other than the purpose for which the space was originally designed. The paper reviews relevant literature and analyses urban design elements of the streetscape that are related to the temporary appropriation. This paper identifies elements supporting temporary appropriation in the context of Mexico City Centre. The main aim of the study is to explore this relationship by assessing the softness of the streetscape and the diversity index of temporary appropriation in Mexico City Centre. The analysis and the study of the selected area may provide insight and contribute to a better understanding of this relationship within heritage city centres in Latin American cities.
... 29 Arjana (2017:33) (Hoffman 1997) and more recently in 2009 in Giza Egypt (Heo 2012). Such apparitions are often the impetus for the development of pilgrimages. ...
... The building yard zone needs two rows of trees adjacent to each other to achieve more security for inner prayer, given the current wide voids of the fence, which can be attacked easily. Year's Eve of 2011, there was a car bombing attack to the church of the Saints, St. Mark and Pope Peter I Coptic church in Alexandria, which caused 23 deaths and more than 100 injuries (Heo 2012;Knell 2011) (Fig. 13). ...
All over the world, many types of building and spaces have been targeted to be more secure because of the current political, social and cultural situation. Urban cultural landscape can support the necessary condition of social security. Landscape design elements have many purposes, such as functional, environmental and aesthetical aspects. One of these purposes is to ensure the defensive role that the design could apply to different zones of building security. The balance between security aspects and other aspects of landscape design is a must to achieve effective risk reduction without losing the identity of a building’s surrounding spaces. This paper aims to observe and analyse the efficiency of landscape elements in acting as defensive tools, through the different levels of security building zones (such as building parameter, building yard, sidewalks, parking line and street) in several case studies in the Middle East.
... The church of The Saints, St. Mark and Pope Peter I, which is known as Al-Qiddissin church is located in Sidi Bishr district. At midnight on New Year's Eve of 2011, there was a car bombing attack to the church of The Saints, St. Mark and Pope Peter I Coptic church in Alexandria, which caused 23 deaths and more than 100 injuries (Heo, 2012); (Knell, 2011). pg. 9 Figure 13: The location of Al-Qiddissin church in Sidi Bishr district in Alexandria, Egypt (authors) ...
All over the world, many types of building and spaces have been targeted to be more secure because of the current political, social and cultural situation. Landscape elements can support the necessary concept of security.
Landscape design elements have many purposes, such as functional, environmental and aesthetical aspects. One of these purposes is to ensure the defensive role that the design could apply to different zones of building security. The balance between security aspects and other aspects of landscape design is a must to achieve effective risk reduction without losing the identity of a building’s surrounding spaces.
This paper aims to observe and analyse the efficiency of landscape elements in acting as defensive tools, through the different levels of security building zones (such as building parameter, building yard, sidewalks, parking line and street) in several case studies in the Middle East.
How do Coptic Christians make sense of a predominantly negated practice such as drinking and selling alcohol? What do they do when they are forced or voluntarily desire to join alcoholic spaces that are refused by ruling religious and social forces? In this article, I build on the unorthodoxy of beer and liquor as per the hegemonic Coptic Orthodox Church tradition of khidma in Egypt by pointing out to completely overlooked interactions that Coptic Christians have at alcoholic spaces. I argue that experiences of Coptic Christians at a bar complicate how and where Copts strive for a ‘visibility’ (i.e. recognition) in a country of a Muslim majority. Especially with the brutal crackdown on the post-2011 street activism following the 2013 coup, predominantly negated venues of entertainment and fun give us hints to important meanings of agency in the lives of members of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East.
During the 19 th century, the relation between the Egyptian ruling system and the Coptic Christian community has witnessed a remarkable shift, which has given new meanings to the Coptic mode of giving. For centuries, the former was predominantly dependent on the Coptic clerical order to fulfill the needs of its poor congregants. Because of this alliance, which is known as the millet-system, the Coptic Patriarchate was able to form a central ecclesial government of care. In my thesis, I argue that amid modernization processes, the Egyptian state tended to decentralize this government and to secularize the millet-system. It allied with Coptic laymen to move the practice of Coptic charity to spaces that do not belong to the benevolent services offered by the Church hierarchy. As a result of this move, the practice of Coptic philanthropy has become conducted through small fragmented religious networks. Instead of being attached to the Coptic Patriarchate, the lives of the recipients and the donors of Coptic charity have turned out to be entangled with state secular laws and to be idioms of wider national discourses. CEU eTD Collection ii Acknowledgments:
This study is an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of religious objects, their uses, and mediation of authority within the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Universal Church) in Brazil. Drawing on scholarship within media studies, religion and media, and material religion, I distinguish between artifacts used to cement implicit contracts between Universal Church followers and their church community, which I call contractual media, or swag, and those that followers bring to meetings to be blessed and then take home to mediate both good and evil forces in family, work, and social life—these I call portable media. While portable object media are seen by their owners as powerful tools, contractual media, on the other hand, create implicit power relations that keep followers tied to the institutional church in a reciprocal exchange predicated upon expected prosperity as evidence of faithful attendance, fidelity, and personal sacrifice. The physical exchange of material goods in religious spaces constitutes a perpetuation rather than a disruption of institutional religious authority. As infrastructure, contractual object media establish and maintain conditions for otherwise mundane materials to mediate power on a daily basis. Through attention toward portable and contract object media, as part of what I am calling material microstructure, we can further complicate religious authority as it is mediated through objects, not just in one-way flows but as dynamic exchanges and trade-offs between personal empowerment and institutional control.
During the Egyptian uprising in 2011, a TV crew accidentally filmed a ghostly horseman in the midst of protesters. This essay takes the ghostly horseman as a starting point for thinking about the possibilities of an anthropology of al-ghayb, the invisible and unknown. Drawing on fieldwork in Egypt, as well as online reports and contestations of apparitions, visions, and dreams seen during the uprising, I suggest that accounts of the unseen pose a profound challenge to (and open up new possibilities for) doing ethnographic research, writing ethnography, and thinking anthropologically. Inspired by Michael Taussig, I suggest that the challenge is not to undo the invisible but to find a language that runs along the seam where the visible and the invisible connect and disconnect.
This article explores the performative politics of devotional soundscapes at Coptic Christian mūlid festivals. Echoing the state's reformist efforts in the 1990s to transform Muslim saint festivals into utilitarian spaces and their goers into “modern” Egyptian citizens, today the Coptic Church works to refashion these popular festivals from places of debauchery into morally productive spaces. Aided by affluent Cairene-based volunteers, church choirs travel from Cairo's poshest neighborhoods to these festivals to actively sing, disseminate, and teach popular religious songs ( taratīl ) in an effort to develop poorer Christian pilgrims into modern, pious, and more audible “citizens of heaven.” Through the analysis of one church choir's taratīl ministry at the mūlid , I illustrate how middle-class spiritual volunteers disrupt and, at times, reinscribe the Coptic Church's disciplinary efforts on the festival's poorer pilgrims, particularly as they look to modernize popular festivity into grounds of Christian ethical transformation.
This article is based on a fieldwork in the garbage collectors (zabbalîn) neighborhood of Manchiyit Nâsir, during the legislative election of 2011. Most of the zabbalîn are Copts. This study deals with the Free Egyptians party’s campaign put in the context of local networks of power including development associations, the Church and some young people eager to change their community after the revolution. This careful examination of the political work on the field in an informal area highlights the local stakes and how they articulate with national politics. Furthermore the article underlines the dialectic of conflict and solidarity within the Coptic community.
In January 2011, Egyptian protestors arrived to Tahrir Square wearing stickers reading ‘a martyr is available here’ to highlight their willingness to die for the revolution. Many Coptic Christians also arrived to their own demonstrations wearing the same sticker. Drawing on a biblical verse ‘For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain’, they claimed they came ready to die, not only for their nation, but also for their faith. In this article, I examine martyr themes in a popular and Coptic religious song genre known as tarātīl. Specifically, I explore the ambiguity between dying for one's nation and dying for one's faith as reflected in these religious nationalist anthems. How do song motifs negotiate ambivalences and seemingly contradicting desires to belong to an Egyptian nation and a heavenly afterlife as pious Christians? This article analyses songs of death as modes of political belonging and civic (dis)engagement.
In the anthropology of Christianity, and more broadly in the anthropology of religion, methodological atheism has foreclosed ethnographic description of God as a social actor. This prohibition is the product of certain ontological presumptions regarding agency, an absence of autonomy of human creations, and a truncated conception of what can be said to exist. Reading Tanya Luhrmann's recent ethnography, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), in light of both the ontological postulates of Object Orientated Ontology and the work of Bruno Latour, this article proposes an ontological framework that makes it is possible to ethnographically describe God as a social actor without adopting methodological theism. This article also notes, however, that the ethnographic description of religious practice, found in studies of the Vineyard denomination such as Luhrmann's, challenge Latour's own account of the difference between science and religions as distinguishable enterprises.
This article examines the depiction of women and gender within Coptic Orthodox video films or “hagiopics” produced between 1987 and 2010. As part of a recent religious renewal, hagiopics have expanded, altered, and reinvented traditional stories of saints and pious figures and have also generated, within this traditionally patriarchal setting, a wider space for the articulation of female voices. While their inclusion can be seen as potentially empowering for women, this paper suggests that during Pope Shenouda III's reign (1971–2012), the films became a powerful vehicle for broadcasting the church's conservative teachings on female power and authority, marriage and marital dissolution, spousal abuse, and femininity. By highlighting an array of exemplary female characters, hagiopics capture women's role as custodians of a distinctive Coptic ethos and of family and communal cohesiveness. The films’ emphasis on women's physical modesty, submissiveness, and obedience to male figureheads also hints at the modern church's anxieties about women's increasing autonomy in choosing marriage partners and their growing demands for more equal treatment within the church.
This article approaches transformations of social identity in situations of nationalist conflict through an examination of Christian and Muslim Palestinian interpretations of, and practices at, two shrines on the Israeli-Occupied West Bank. The semantic multivocality of one holy place, studied in the early 1980s, is seen to reflect the diversity of interests of the various communities which revere it. The other shrine, studied during the Palestinian uprising, is seen to be more `fixed' in its meaning, and this apparent univalence is analysed as an expression of a new form of social identity generated by struggle against the Israeli occupation. The article contrasts the new secular nationalist identity to alternative forms of community founded on sectarian affiliation, and demonstrates how, in situations of radical social conflict between a multi-sectarian community and a `foreign' enemy, perceptions of the antagonism of the Other can generate new forms of imagined community within which communal differences are subsumed but not elided. As a consequence of the formation of a `national' identity, local Christian and Muslim traditions come to be seen as expressing simultaneously sectarian affiliation and an overarching national unity.
The Copts of Egypt are the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. In recent years they have often been victims of persecution and violence at the hands of the Muslim majority. This volume is the first full study of Coptic Christians in contemporary Egypt. Hasan begins by looking at how the Coptic generation of the 1940s and 1950s remembered, recovered, and invented the ancient history of Christianity in Egypt in order to weld the Copts into a unified nation. The book then focuses on the period beginning with the consecration of Pope Shenuda in 1971. During this revival period the church took over much of the responsibility for the welfare of the Coptic community. The leaders of the revival, she shows, have nurtured a potent and distinctive religious culture with a sense of communal pride and identity despite its hostile surrounding environment.
In the early days of April, 1968, ten months after the Six-Day War, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo there occurred an event that for several months became the focus of attention not only for thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds but also hundreds of foreigners, members of the international press, resident scholars and diplomats, representatives of Western Christianity and the perennial tourists. This event, known locally as the Apparition of Zeitoun, involves the alleged multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitoun. The Copts are an Egyptian Christian minority who are descendants of the original Egyptian population at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and who were never converted to Islam.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the mother of all the churches, erected on the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and rose from the dead and where every Christian was born. In 1927, Jerusalem was struck by a powerful earthquake, and for decades this venerable structure stood perilously close to collapse. This book tells the engaging story of how three major Christian traditions - Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox - each with jealously guarded claims to the church, struggled to restore one of the great shrines of civilization. For centuries the communities had lived together in an atmosphere of tension and mistrust based on differences of theology, language, and culture - differences so sharp that fistfights were not uncommon. And the project of restoration became embroiled in inter-church disputes and great power politics. The author shows how the repair of the dilapidated basilica was the result of unprecedented cooperation among the three churches. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of a cast of kings, popes, patriarchs, governors, monks, and architects, the deadlock was eventually broken on the eve of Pope Paul VI's historic pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1964. Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in better shape than it has been for five hundred years. Light and space have returned to its ancient halls, and its walls and pillars stand sound and true. This book is the riveting story of how Christians put aside centuries of division to make this dream a reality.
This book is a study of ancient and medieval Christology. Employing a range of interdisciplinary methods derived from the fields of social history, discourse theory, ritual studies, and the visual arts, the book demonstrates how Christian identity in Egypt was shaped by a set of replicable 'christological practices'. It traces the fascinating lines of the Coptic church's theological and cultural transition from late antiquity to Dar al-Islam. The book includes translations of Coptic and Arabic texts which allow non-specialists access to these important documents for the first time.
The schismatic “Church of the martyrs” which arose in Egypt after the last persecution possessed, at the time of Nicaea, twenty-eight bishops besides its founder Meletius. Nothing survives to tell us with what rites these men were made bishops. But the schism was so nationalist in character that it is likely to have followed Egyptian church tradition. It has been contended that this tradition, as regards episcopal succession, was peculiar, and followed a pattern different from that established for the propagation of a Catholic hierarchy by the Fourth Canon of Nicaea. The aim of this article is to show that this contention finds support in the Meletian story.
Visions play a pivotal role in the religious life of both major religious communities of Egypt, the Muslims and the Coptic Christians.1These visions may take the form of dreams, appearances of light, or apparitions. Classifying dreams under the category of visionary experiences considerably extends the field of participants in what might otherwise be considered the preserve of the rare mystic, the type of person Maxime Rodinson described as ‘pathological’ and ‘exceptional,’ though, paradoxically, he also suggested that the ‘abnormal’ psyche is not far removed from the ‘normal.’2Although William James had decried the ‘medical materialism’ which dismisses religious experience as symptoms of organic dysfunction, he too described the visionary experience as the preserve of eccentrics, of religious leaders subject to abnormal psychical visitations.3The tendency of Western scholars is to see visionary experience as both rare and symptomatic of psychic imbalance. What is striking about the Egyptian case is the frequency with which visions occur—all kinds of visions—and not only with those whom we would characterize as unusual or psychically imbalanced. Another striking feature of visionary experiences among Egyptians is the similarity of the nature and significance of these experiences among the two major confessional communities.
Long-distance trade, entailing as it does repeated exchanges across countries and cultures, often brings in its train consequences beyond the exchange of goods and specie. As other exchanges—of warfare, kinship, supplication, devotion—thicken social relations across routes pioneered by trade, new ways of imagining society across a larger space emerge. This paper examines the transcultural work that may be performed to create such enlarged imaginations of society, with a particular reference to the Hadramis of Yemen. In such ways, we suggest that a world religion, such as Islam, can give specific cultural shape to the distant horizons of world trade, as both expanded across the Indian Ocean over the past five centuries.
It is a strange interaction that occurs between Muslim and Copt in the passage above, which was written in the 11th century and set in the 10th century. What might be proven by such a debate over a dog's religion? What is more, why record such an incident in a church-sanctioned history? Because the dog cannot speak, there must be another way to know whether it is Christian or Muslim (for those are the only two possibilities in the story). In the end it is through the dog's ritual practice - drinking wine or eating meat or not drinking wine or not eating meat - rather than through the dog's outward proclamation of religious affiliation that the Copt and the Muslim come to an agreement about what distinguishes one from the other. Ritual practice, action such as abstinence from meat or alcohol that demonstrates adherence to particular religious ideas, distinguishes Copt from Muslim even in the absence of a shared spoken language to communicate that difference. Copts and Muslims in Egypt, the story teaches, are different, and they may be distinguished even by something as minor as their food and drink.
This paper asserts that in 1952 an entente was forged between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Egyptian government that provided the church with concessions in return for its political allegiance to the regime. The period prior to 1952 also witnessed the Coptic church leadership forging alliances with regimes in power; however, its ability to represent Copts vis-à-vis the state was rivaled by other Coptic voices in civil society such as the Majlis al-Milli. From 1952 on, the inhibition of Copts' voices in civil society increased the church's political power, and it developed into the undisputed voice representing the Coptic community. The relationship between church and state in the past fifty years has been volatile, affected not only by the nature of the relationship between leaders of the church and state but also by the emergence of other important players within and outside these two entities. Strains characteristic of the period leading up to the temporary dissolution of the entente in the 1970s are becoming visible today in the church–state relationship. This paper suggests that the current entente between the church and the state is being stretched to its limit although it is not likely to be dissolved.
In most English minds, episcopal succession from the apostles is associated with the unbroken series of impositions of episcopal hands, stretching right back to certain layings-on of hands by apostles whereby the first bishops were set apart for an office that perpetuated something of apostolic authority. That this notion is thus prevalent is due to the Tractarians. Characteristic is their emphasis upon a particular action, the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Einar Molland doubtless had this in his thought when, in the first issue of this Journal, he showed that Irenaeus, when upholding the importance of a regular and continuous succession from the apostles, laid no such emphasis on the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Molland went on to indicate that Irenaeus himself cannot have received episcopal consecration at the hands of bishops. Only his fellow-presbyters of the Rhône valley can have solemnized his succession to the office of the martyred Pothinus. Professor Molland says, ‘Irenaeus may have been consecrated in the same way as the bishops of Alexandria’. It is probable that a majority of scholars hold the opinion that the early bishops of Alexandria received their episcopal office at the hands of their fellow-presbyters. Nevertheless Bishop Gore claimed that the opinion had not become a certainty, even after the discovery of the support it receives from Severus of Antioch. Gore saw clearly what were the consequences as touching the nature of valid episcopal succession, and endeavoured to maintain doubt concerning the fact of presbyteral ‘consecration’ at Alexandria.
In this essay, I examine several events involving Filipinos at home and abroad that organize themselves around convergences of mediation: sites and events where figures and practices of religious mediation interact with modern technologies of the mass media. Illustrating these at the center of the essay is an ethnography of a festival celebrating the Virgin Mary's birthday that was organized by a Filipino devotional group and took place in New York City. Framing this event in the essay is a seemingly unrelated incident: the kidnapping of an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) by a group demanding that the Philippine government withdraw its coalition forces from Iraq. One extraordinary coincidence and the appeal for divine intervention immediately links the two. What further draws these two events into relatedness, however, is that they both entail imaginaries of the global Philippines that are rooted in a shared history of transnational movement, but diverge owing to significant differences in socioeconomic status and physical vulnerability. For the religious imaginary wherein the Philippines is firmly and safely situated in a worldwide order of Marian redemption betokens the privilege to assume preemptive control over dangerous worlds via particular frameworks of interpretation. Using Filipino Marianism first as a lens through which to understand the range of affinities between religious and technological mediation, I then examine the ways in which such intermedial relationships reveal the associative paths that generate class-inflected interpretations of crisis and danger, as well as the strategies of power and control to which those paths give rise.
Balancing the Many and the One: Processes of Recognition and Image-Making in Marian Apparition Sites in the 20th Century. Paper presented at the conference “Catholicism and the Visual Study of Religions
- Scheer Monique
The Emergence of a “Coptic Question” in Egypt
- el-Amrani
Sectarian Conflict in Egypt and the Political Expediency of Religion
- Ansari
Al-ta'lim al-dini al-masihi. Al-bidayat wal-masarat
- Morcos