The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (By Angie Heo)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt by Angie Heo Aomar Boum (bio) The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt Angie Heo Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 316 Pages. In the last few decades ethnic and religious minorities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have continued their long postcolonial migration outside of the region. These migratory trends risk to turn the region into a homogeneous ethnic and religious locality void of religious and ethnic diversity especially given the rising ideological extremism. In this context of growing rejection and [End Page 114] animosity towards minorities, more academic scholarship is needed to describe and analyze the histories and articulations of the “minority question” in the MENA region. The Political Lives of Saints provides one answer to this shortage of scholarship on the minority question in Egypt and a needed addition to the larger debates on Christian-Muslim relations in the MENA region where academia tends to focus mostly on Jewish-Muslim relations. The publication of this ethnographic work comes at a unique moment in the history of Middle Eastern Christians. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 set the stage for a new American human rights policy voiced publicly by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. It prioritizes mostly Christians of Iraq and Egypt and acknowledges, for instance, Middle Eastern dictators such as Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Sisi as the champion of minority rights for allowing the building of Coptic churches. The Political Lives of Saints is a major contribution to the study of minority politics in the Middle East and North Africa largely because of its focus on one of the most important Eastern Christian communities, especially at a time when Christians in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt have undergone experiences of violence in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. Nevertheless, while the media has largely focused on the bombings of churches, destruction of private property and sometimes individual killings, Heo’s fieldwork adds a complex dimension to our understanding of Coptic life in Egypt using media studies and semiotics. The ethnography showcases a life of marginalization where Coptic political involvement remains alive. The Political Lives of Saints is an anthropological approach to saints as a vehicle to understand Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. For Heo, while the ethnographic subject is the Orthodox Coptic Church and Egyptian Christians, the central argument of the work is how Christian and Muslims mediate their daily social relations as members of a political, national, sectarian, and minority group. Heo claims that the two central players, the Church and the Egyptian State, in these social encounters use mostly saints to oversee and manage Egyptian Muslim and Coptic differences under the umbrella of the nation-state. By using the material culture and saints in particular as a subject of study, Heo re-shifts our ethnographic eye and analytical perspective from the human subject to holy figures, sites, material objects and places. Visual objects and iconographic materials, Heo claims, are vehicles through which people understand, interpret and express their views of the world. In this context, the book proposes to study Christian-Muslim relations by moving away from individual interviews and the Coptic Church hierarchy to “relics, apparitions and icons” (p. 6). Heo sees this approach a new way to add to our understanding of how Egyptians imagine their national and religious belonging through their “distinctive styles of material imagination” [End Page 115] (p. 6)). The semiotics of image-objects is therefore central to The Political Lives of Saints. Heo focuses on the categories of “nation” and “religion” to highlight the broader intersections of the Christian-Muslim relations. In her analysis of the different stages and aspects of Copts and state relations, Heo succeeds to a larger extent in demonstrating the extent to which both institutions support each other to maintain a sense of “Egyptian-ness” grounded on nationhood and sectarianism at the same time. Yet, while Heo manages to a large extent to explore the different aspects and features of Coptic relics and ritual memories, there are larger gaps within the broader analysis of Christian-Muslim relations. The focus on materiality...