Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt

Ibrahim, Mina

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-10179-3

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“…6 4 Angie Heo, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018), 14. 5 For an ethnographic study of Copts at the margins of the Coptic Orthodox Church see Mina Ibrahim, Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, andVictimhood in Egypt: Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community, 1st ed. 2022 edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children of Day: Diasporic Ambivalence and Religious Revival Among Coptic Orthodox Youth in Mississauga, Ontario

Markos

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In this thesis, I examine a local religious revival movement among Coptic Orthodox youth in Mississauga, Ontario, with the aim of understanding what it means for my interlocutors to seek a faith-based identity as an alternative to national belonging in the diaspora. Like many diasporic cohorts, Coptic youth in Mississauga experience what I call diasporic ambivalence. Caught between two nations and two cultures, they struggle with a prolonged sense of liminality between Canada and Egypt. Drawing primarily on the works of Saba Mahmood (2004, 2016), Carolyn Ramzy (2014Lara Deeb (2006), I argue that my interlocutors ameliorate their ongoing sense of diasporic ambivalence between Canada and Egypt by detaching themselves from "earthly" cultural identities and instead understanding themselves as "citizens of Heaven." Based on ethnographic evidence, field research, interviews, and my own autoethnography, I illustrate that, through this religious revival, Coptic Youth in Mississauga shed earthly cultural attachments to the "World" and focus on what Orit Avishai calls an "authentic religious subjecthood" (2008:409) in pursuit of a "heavenly citizenship" (Ramzy 2015). In this religious revival movement, youth draw on ancient exegetical texts called the "patristic canon" to inspire "authentic piety" and challenge the older generation's attachments to Egyptian culture. Women navigate an additional layer of gendered liminality by employing texts about women in ancient Christianity to forge a "more authentic" vision of feminine piety that does away with what they perceive to be Egyptian cultural norms that keep them marginalized within the Church. By examining the case of Coptic Orthodox youth in Mississauga, this study aims to better understand the role of religion in mediating questions of identity and belonging in diasporic contexts. 4My analytical commitment to specificity follows Lila Abu-Lughod's (2008) call to "write against culture" as "untouched," 7 "timeless," 8 "static, homogenous, and bounded," 9 by attending to the local negotiations, tensions, and contradictions of Coptic Orthodox life in Mississauga. Through this work, I hope to challenge scholarly and popular romantic notions of Coptic Orthodox Christianity as a static ancient religion and of Coptic people simply as living repositories of pharaonic DNA. 10 The value of this specificity is not in its claim to ascertain generalizable trends, but in its ability to help us see how broad concepts like "heavenly citizenship," "piety," "femininity," and even "the Church," are not simply transposed onto the blank lives of "automatons programmed according to 'cultural' rules or acting out social roles," 11 but are filtered through the complex kaleidoscope of my interlocutors' relationships, dreams, fears, desires, needs, opinions, and fluid social positions as they navigate life in a diaspora. An Ethnographic Map of the Coptic Orthodox Community in MississaugaCoptic Orthodox Christians are the largest Christian minority in the Middle East and are indigenous to Egypt. Th...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children of Day: Diasporic Ambivalence and Religious Revival Among Coptic Orthodox Youth in Mississauga, Ontario

Markos

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Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt

Cited by 1 publication

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Children of Day: Diasporic Ambivalence and Religious Revival Among Coptic Orthodox Youth in Mississauga, Ontario

Children of Day: Diasporic Ambivalence and Religious Revival Among Coptic Orthodox Youth in Mississauga, Ontario

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