Copts In Egypt Research Articles

The Arab Spring and the Challenge of Minority Rights: Will the Arab Revolutions Overcome the Legacy of the Past?

The blood of Egyptian Copts on the streets of central Cairo on 9 October 2011 could be accurately described as the first major set-back for the Arab Spring. Preserving the rights of minorities as full citizens in the face of long-standing persecution and neglect is a pressing challenge for the Arab revolutions. However, the dilemma of the rights of Christian minorities within the Arab world is a historical one, deeply rooted in a complex interplay of social, economic and political factors predating the Arab Spring and its unpredicted implications. The growing signs of a radical Islam empowered by the loosening grip of Arab dictatorships raise concerns that go beyond the question of security and political representation for minorities. There is a bitter race between, on the one hand, secular forces weakened both by the absence of any previous organisational cadres and by the misuse of secularism by nationalist Arab regimes and, on the other, religious forces that are pushing forcefully for further overlap between religion and the state. As the results of the first free elections in Tunisia demonstrate the popularity of Islamism in the midst of entrenched secular countries, it is clear that the battle between the two trends is an unequal one.

Arabic Culture of the Melchite Church in the early Middle Ages (7th–11th Centuries)

Christians that were loyal to the orthodoxy of the Chalcedony ecumenical Council (451) were named as “Melchites” by Heterodox monophysites, that is Copts in Egypt and Jacobits in Syria. Before the Moslem conquest the Melchite were mainly connected with Grecian culture, although they became influenced by the Arabic and Syriac environment. The Moslem conquest of Syria (636) took the Melkite homeland out of Byzantine control and placed it under the occupation of the Arab invaders. Although the Byzantine cultural influence, the Greek language and culture remained important for the Melkites, Melkite tradition became systematically fused with the Arabic language and culture.

End-notes on Israel–Iran relations (unabridged)

End-notes on Israel–Iran relations (unabridged)

Between arabic and coptic in a bilingual manuscript of the pentateuch: The case ofla’alla

The Arabic version of the Pentateuch in MS Paris BN copte 1 (14th century) was basically translated from the Bohairic Coptic version which is set in parallel columns to it. The comparison of the two versions is sometimes very instructive regarding the transition period in which the main language for the Copts in Egypt was Arabic, but Coptic was not completely forgotten. The translation choices of the Arabic word are examples of changes in meanings, connotations and functions of that word in Middle Arabic in general, and under the influence of Coptic in particular. The studies of Joshua Blau on Christian-Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic of the Middle Ages, and of Ariel Shisha-Halevy on the Bohairic dialect are extremely important for establishing any study of this kind.

Divorce and Remarriage of Orthodox Copts in Egypt: The 2008 State Council Ruling and the Amendment of the 1938 Personal Status Regulations

AbstractIn June 2008, the 1938 Personal Status Regulations for the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt were amended to limit the grounds for divorce to adultery and change of religion. This revision followed a ruling of the State Council requiring Pope Shenouda III, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, to grant a divorced Orthodox Copt a license to remarry. The amendments ended a long-standing conflict between the Egyptian national courts and the Coptic Orthodox Church regarding the effects of judicial divorce: prior to the revision, thousands of couples divorced before the courts were considered by the Church to be still married. However, by restricting the possibilities for Orthodox Copts to obtain a divorce, the 2008 amendments may lead to an increase in conversions to other religious faiths to escape application of the revised 1938 regulations. In this essay, I analyze the 2008 amendments, the State Council ruling, landmark decisions of the Court of Cassation, comments by legal scholars and articles in newspapers, in an effort to assess the current status of divorce and remarriage among Orthodox Copts in Egypt and the problems generated by the application of conflicts rules between non-Muslim personal status laws in case of inter-religious marriages. At the end of the essay, I mention developments that took place in June 2010 after the release of a new ruling by the State Council.

Finding a Platform: Studying the Copts in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Research on the Copts of Egypt has developed especially rapidly in new directions during the past twenty years. Having started as a corollary of Egyptology, it is advancing from the study of the early Christian centuries to include medieval, early modern, and contemporary Coptic Studies. Concurrently, Coptic issues are being inserted into studies of Egypt in general. Publications on the 19th century mostly ignored Copts, but they were given stereotypical cameo appearances in the prolific research on the profound transformations in 20th-century Egyptian society.

Guardians of contested borders. Transnational Strategies for Coptic Survival

Coptic interpretations of the status of Copts in Egypt affect their trans-national strategies and their gender constructs embedded in their minority discourses. In particular, different Coptic transnational organisations and their negotiations of Coptic identity are influential.

Digital diasporas and governance in semi-authoritarian states: the case of the Egyptian Copts

This article explores the potential role of diasporas and information technology (IT) in fostering good governance in semi-authoritarian states. Following a review of the literature on good governance and information technology, the case of the Egyptian Copt community and its diaspora is explored, focusing on the activities of the U.S. Copt Association. It is argued that, whether or not it is an explicit objective, the U.S. Copt Association is supporting improved and more democratic governance in Egypt. The case confirms that heterogeneous networks of communication and people can promote good governance, even for the socially excluded and disempowered in a weakly penetrated state. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Christians versus Muslims in modern Egypt: the century-long struggle for Coptic equality

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.

Problems of Studying Minorities in the Middle East

The Middle East like many other regions of the world, is heterogeneous and comprises of numerous ethnic, national, religious and linguistic societies, groups and sects. Much of the troubles facing this region revolve around the treatment or mistreatment of its minority population. Most of the post-Ottoman states are yet to evolve a national identity that would encompass and reflect their multi-ethnic social composition. At the same time, discussions on minorities have often been controversial and politically loaded. States by their very nature are sensitive towards any outside criticisms over their treatment of their minority population and consider it to be a sovereign and inviolable subject. Simultaneously, they do not hesitate to use the treatment of minorities by their adversaries as a useful foreign policy instrument. Great powers and regional players have used the plights of Tibetans in China, Muslims in India or Christians in Indonesia to promote their narrow national agenda. The Middle East is no exception to this prevailing trend and discussions on the treatment of Middle Eastern minorities such as Egyptian Copts, Israeli Arabs, Turkish Kurds or Iranian Bahais have been highly politicized. It is undeniable that substantial gaps exist between the official positions vis-avis minorities and the perceptions of the latter concerning their status. Whenever a society is threatened by an external enemy or an internal crisis over its identity,

How to think about mass religious conversion: Toward an explanation of the conversion of American jews to christianity

Mass religious conversion refers to the conversion of a society and of its institutions. Individual religious conversions follow from this social contextual change. This article is an exercise in developing social science concepts for the analysis of mass religious conversion. It draws on comparative historical, social survey and autobiographical materials. The conversion of the Copts of Egypt to Islam following the Arab conquests and the Christianization of Europe from medieval times illustrate the roles of social shock, the breakdown of communal authority and how a hegemonic religious system is adopted to restore social order to a subordinate community. The centrality of missions in the Christian case is illustrated. Data from the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 permit an examination of the contribution of change in economic, social organizational and kinship institutions to change in religious institutions. Autobiographies of converts from Judaism to Christianity reveal some psychological mechanisms for dealing with societal and institutional religious changes. The article closes with a short exercise applying concepts developed here to understanding the conversion of American Jewry to Christianity.

Book Review: The Copts of Egypt

Book Review: The Copts of Egypt

Minorities in the Middle East: a history of struggle and self-expression

This updated and revised edition of the 1991 original (impressive - Choice; informative...useful - Library Journal) provides a wealth of historical and political detail for all the indigenous peoples of the Middle East. Pressed to persist in a threatening environment, these minorities (Kurds, Berbers, Baluchi, Druzes, 'Alawites, Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Sudanese Christians, Jews, Egyptian Copts, and others) share similar experiences and have been known to cooperate for shared goals. Important events and new trends regarding the welfare of these groups are covered, and numerous oral histories add to the new edition.

Alchemy, Chinese versus Greek, an etymological approach: a rejoinder.

The theory generally accepted maintains that Alchemy arose at Alexandria as a child of Greek culture. It has two names, Chemeia as the earlier and Chumeia as the later. There is another theory that Alchemy arose in China. Its founder was the aged ascetic who longed after drugs of longevity. He first tried jade, next gold and cinnabar, but the ideal was a drug which was red like cinnabar and fire-proof like gold. But what was actually prepared was red colloidal gold or "calcined gold," by grinding gold granules in a decoction of an herb of longevity. It was called Chin-I; Chin = gold and I = plant juice. In Fukin dialect Chin-I = Kim-Iya. This was Arabicized, by pre-Islamic Arabs trading in silk with China, as Kimiya, whence arose Al-Kimiya and finally Al-chemy. It was first accepted by Bucharic speaking Copts in Egypt who transliterated Kimiya = Chemeia, pronouncing it as the Arabs did. With the increase of trade in silk the Chinese also went to Alexandria and helped the Greeks to translate Chin-I as Chrusozomion meaning, gold (making) ferment, instead of gold making plant juice. Consistent with this origin of the word Chemeia is the fact that the earlier Alchemists were not Greeks but probably Bucharic speaks Copts or Egyptians. The consumer of Chin-I or Chemeia became "a drug-made immortal" called Chin-Jen, Golden-Man. This was translated into Greek as Chrusanthropos. Thus the etymoloogy of two Greek words Chrusozomion and Chrusanthropos support the origin of the loan word, Chemeia as Chinese. To save space it is not proposed to discuss the origin of Chumeia.

Libanon in het Christelijk Reveil

Lebanon and its p lace in a christian revival movement This article tries to describe and to explain some recent (since 1977) developments in the lebanese crisis. It traces the outlines of a „Christian revival”, a movement parallel to the well-known islamic revival movement. This is illustrated with facts and statements by copts in Egypt, melkites in Syria and christians from Palestine. Though in Lebanon everything seems to be provoked by some political or military struggle, the influence of christian and islamic revival movements is traccable and cannot be denied. The article distinguishes three forms of revival: a religious revival in a strict sensc („ecclesiastical”), a religious-cultural revival (a scarch for religious and cultural identity) and a religious-political revival (to assure an all-importan, role for the religious systern inside its social and political context).

Social and economic geographical analysis of the Egyptian Copts

This paper gives a brief account of the social and economic situation of the Copts in Egypt. As an ethnic group the Copts are the pure successors of the ancient Egyptians. This does not imply that the Moslems are pure Arabs. At least 90% of the Egyptian Moslems are of Coptic origin, so that no particular differentiation should be made between the Copts and the Moslems of Egypt from the ethnical point of view. The Copts are fully integrated into the Egyptian population. Only in times of religious persecution, they huddled together in villages of Upper Egypt in the provinces of El Minia and Assiut. The recent wave of reislamisation in the Near East has inflicted some suffering on the Copts of Egypt. This was combined with economic losses. Nasser's nationalisation of private concerns and confiscation of large tenures of land was a blow directed against the Copts. Suggestions are made to improve their situation with the aim of giving them equal rigths with the Moslems in the political, social, economic, and religious fields.

Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework

Since the 6th century B.C., Jews have created unique variants of many coterritorial non-Jewish languages with which they came in contact; Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Persian, and German are just a few examples. Widespread shifts to non-Jewish languages throughout the world and to revived spoken Hebrew in Israel are now resulting in the obsolescence of contemporary Jewish languages and putting an end to 2600 years of Jewish language creation. The present paper proposes a typology of Jewish language phenomena, explores the common linguistic components and processes attending their genesis and development, formulates urgent research tasks in comparative Jewish interlinguistics, and assesses the contribution of Jewish language study to general linguistics. A shift in the language of a community can have three effects on the identity of the speakers: (a) Language shift might be accompanied by a shift in ethnic identification; e.g., the Turkic-speaking Bulgars who emigrated to the Balkans in the late 4th century A.D. eventually assimilated fully to the local languages and cultures. (b) Language shift can take place without the loss of ethnic identity; e.g., the Egyptian Copts switched from Egyptian to Arabic, but retained some elements of a distinctive national culture, in particular a Christian identity. (c) Finally, cultural and ethnic assimilation can take place in the absence of language loss; e.g., various Balkan populations, in the wake of widespread intermingling and language contact over a millennium, have developed a large body of common ethnic, cultural, and even linguistic features, though there is little tendency to give up individual Balkan languages.' In any typology of linguistic and cultural shift, the Jews occupy a unique position. On the surface, the original Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine who adopted Aramaic and Greek as their spoken and written media would seem straightforward representatives of the second type-language shift without full ethno-cultural submersion. However, two factors render these and most other instances of Jewish language shift distinctive from the Egyptian Coptic experience: the Jews have had a tendency (a) to create a unique variant from the adopted coterritorial non-Jewish language, while (b) retaining written forms of Hebrew (the original language of the Jewish people in Palestine) and of Aramaic (the first successor language to Hebrew) as liturgical and literary languages and as potential sources of enrichment for the new vernaculars. Hebrew-Aramaic elements take the form of adstratal borrowings and occasionally even substratal retentions, transferred through successive Jewish languages and thus partly erasing the effects of the loss of spoken Hebrew and Aramaic. Hence language shift among the Jews-unlike that of the Egyptian Copts and Balkan

Communal Violence: The Armenians and the Copts as Case Studies

Historically, communal conflict seems to have occurred in four environments—during the evolution of the major European states, in post-independence colonies, during the disintegration of polyglot empires, and in post-industrialized societies. Within these environments, six conditions serve to heighten the possibility of the use of violence. These conditions include: (i) the presence of communal cleavages based on religion, race, or language, combinations of these cleavages being more volatile than their occurrence singly; (2) the absence of a common value or identity; (3) the concurrent development of antagonistic nationalisms; (4) the possession of an economic or cultural elite status by a subordinate communal group; (5) differential rates of modernization; and (6) the displacement of anticolonial feelings upon a communal group perceived as associated with a colonial power. The examples of the Copts in Egypt and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire are presented as illustrations of the interaction of these conditions in two different environments and the use or absence of violence in communal conflict.

Sacred Women in Coptic Cinema: Between Faith and Resistance

The present religious revival in the Arab world has not only initiated new politics or individual devotedness and piety, but has also resulted in a rise of mediated religious memories. Hence, as a promoter of a community revival, the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church has disseminated narratives about the Coptic saints to the members of the church. During my fieldwork among the Copts in Egypt in the nineties, I was continuously presented with these saint stories without really taking notice. But, as the storytellers seemed to insist on being heard, I started listening. Meanwhile, I had become aware of the Coptic cinema which since 1987 till today has produced and distributed more than thirty screen versions (in Arabic) about the life stories of sacred figures of the Coptic Church.

The Arab World Today

THE Arab world is the world that speaks Arabic. Language is its one satisfactory test, and a much better one than the territorial. It is true that a continuous and fairly well de fined area of the earth's surface contains all the Arabic-speaking peoples (except voluntary exiles living in Java, America, East Africa and other foreign regions) ; but the same area includes too many speakers of other tongues ? of Turkish, for example, or Kurdish or Armenian or Hebrew or Berber or some European language ? whose non-Arab speech invariably goes with lack of conscious community with Arabs and even with contempt or hostility. A religious test would be more faulty still; for Christian minorities, which are not only in, but of, the Arab world are numerous. Such are the Egyptian Copts and several denomina tions which carry on in Syria a pro-Arab tradition, dating from distant days when hatred of Greeks drove Syrian Christians, as eager allies, into camps of the Prophet's Companions. On the other hand, roughly speaking, all societies whose mother tongue is Arabic, whatever they be racially, are more or less conscious of integral community with an Arab world. These societies fall into two divisions, Asiatic and African. Such dictotomy by continents is no mere fiction for classifica tion's sake. It does, in fact, correspond to a difference of political outlook. While the societies of the Asiatic Arab world feel some