Identity, Marginalisation, Activism, and Victimhood in Egypt: Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community

340 Pages·2022·4.232 MB·English

by  Mina Ibrahim

MINORITIES IN WEST ASIA AND NORTH AFRICA
Identity, Marginalisation,
Activism, and
Victimhood in Egypt
Misfits in the Coptic
Christian Community
Mina Ibrahim
Minorities in West Asia and North Africa
Series Editors
Kamran Matin
Department of International Relations
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Paolo Maggiolini
Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
Milan, Italy
This series seeks to provide a unique and dedicated outlet for the pub-
lication of theoretically informed, historically grounded and empiri-
cally governed research on minorities and ‘minoritization’ processes in
the regions of West Asia and North Africa (WANA). In WANA, from
Morocco to Afghanistan and from Turkey to the Sudan almost every
country has substantial religious, ethnic or linguistic minorities. Their
changing character and dynamic evolution notwithstanding, minorities
have played key roles in social, economic, political and cultural life of
WANA societies from the antiquity and been at the center of the mod-
ern history of the region. WANA’s experience of modernity, processes
of state formation and economic development, the problems of domes-
tic and interstate conflict and security, and instances of state failure,
civil war, and secession are all closely intertwined with the history and
politics of minorities, and with how different socio-political categories
related to the idea of minority have informed or underpinned historical
processes unfolding in the region. WANA minorities have also played a
decisive role in the rapid and crisis-ridden transformation of the geopoli-
tics of WANA in the aftermath of the Cold War and the commencement
of globalization. Past and contemporary histories, and the future shape
and trajectory of WANA countries are therefore intrinsically tied to the
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minorities in WANA therefore cannot be overstated.
The overarching rationale for this series is the absence of specialized
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Mina Ibrahim
Identity,
Marginalisation,
Activism, and
Victimhood in Egypt
Misfits in the Coptic Christian Community
Mina Ibrahim
University of Marburg
Marburg, Germany
Minorities in West Asia and North Africa
ISBN 978-3-031-10178-6 ISBN 978-3-031-10179-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10179-3
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To Lokman Slim‚ Giulio Regeni‚ and the survivors of torture around the
world
P
reface
On February 3, 2016, the body of Giulio Regeni was found naked
and bearing signs of torture on the Cairo-Alexandria highway. Regeni
was an Italian doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and
International Studies at the University of Cambridge. The topic of his
research was independent labour unions in Egypt with a particular focus
on street vendors and how they organise themselves vis-à-vis state poli-
cies of displacement and gentrification. Thanks to investigations by the
Italian police and various news reports, four senior Egyptian security
officials are accused of kidnapping, torturing, and killing Regeni. Even
worse is that one of whom Regeni interviewed during his fieldwork
reported him to the police, thinking that he was a “foreign spy”.
In the 2015 fall semester, I met Regeni at the American University in
Cairo (AUC) where I worked as a research assistant in the Department
of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology (at the time
SAPE, currently SEA). I also met him in November 2015 at an ethnog-
raphy workshop at Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS).
Regeni presented his project and we promised each other that we would
share the difficulties we encountered during our fieldwork. Carrying out
interviews or becoming a participant observer is a privilege since “we”,
researchers, get special access to people’s lives and careers, and also come
to understand their mundane hopes and frustrations through theories,
methods, and histories that add nuanced layers of analysis and conclu-
sion. However, the choice to become visible to, and live with, “others”
who, after all, expect different sorts of support or reward also presents a
vii
viii PREFACE
concrete concern that goes well beyond our limited fieldwork schedules
and research grants.
For many years and particularly since Regeni’s death, I have been
critical of the absence of research hubs in nearly all middle-class and
impoverished neighbourhoods and villages in and outside Cairo. These
areas are considered “labs”, that is, important sources of knowledge
production for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. However,
their importance fades considerably when it comes to the sites where
this knowledge is published, studied, and debated. Take the example
of the Cairene neighbourhood of Shubra, where I was born, and on
which many parts of this book focus. Shubra is present in many books
and journal articles. Its name is usually mentioned amid discussions of
Muslim–Christian relations and Cairo’s “cosmopolitanism”. I have also
contributed to these debates through articles I have published during
and after my fieldwork. However, as I write in English and present my
writings in Europe or the United States, it seemed important to me to
establish a physical entity in Shubra to tell and circulate my stories in
Arabic and at a close distance from their “original” owners. Called SARD
for History and Social Research (Shubra’s Archive), the purpose of this
research space is to reduce this gap that isolates our interlocutors from
the publications that document and analyse their lives. Equally impor-
tantly, Shubra’s Archive seeks to grapple with another gap that separates
researchers and their intentions from the social and political imaginaries
of their interviewees. Put simply, Shubra’s Archive is situated in the belief
that (Western/secular) academia and research communities need to have
“local” bases on the ground to further understand and hopefully resist
false accusations such as the one that led to Regeni’s death.
Shubra’s Archive was launched in May 2020 when I have been invit-
ing Egyptian and foreign scholars to share their research projects with
local residents through online talks and workshops. As a result, I began
to think about the different power dynamics that set boundaries for the
presentations scholars to give to “specialists” at academic congresses, on
one hand, and those they give to “ordinary” citizens on the other hand.
What can and cannot be said in certain contexts not only undermines
the promises of “liberal” education and research (under-)graduate stu-
dents get at Western universities, but is also a reminder of the limited
impact our projects have on a practical level. It is precisely this puzzle
that inspired me to begin writing this book at the end of 2020 after
PREFACE ix
long years of studying a topic that was also part of my “pre-academic”
years. However, February 2021 brought the further shocking news that
haunted the writing plan and disrupted my initial utopian (i.e. pacifist)
vision for Shubra’s Archive. Exactly five years to the day after Regeni’s
death, Lebanese writer, publisher, director, and activist Lokman Slim was
found dead in his car on a highway in Hezbollah-dominated southern
Lebanon.
On February 3, 2021, Lokman left his house to visit a friend
and was never to return to his home, where he co-founded UMAM
Documentation and Research (UMAM D&R) with his partner, jour-
nalist and director Monika Borgmann. Located in southern Beirut
(Dahiyeh) since 2005, UMAM is a significant inspiration for the estab-
lishment of Shubra’s Archive as well as for many parts of this book.
UMAM includes archives about Dahiyeh and others that highlight the
long Lebanese Civil War in addition to other contemporary political,
economic, and social upheavals in Lebanon and the wider region. The
importance of UMAM’s archives is their geographical presence close to
the location of Hezbollah’s leadership, against which Lokman devoted
notable segments of his writings and activism. When I met Lokman for
the first time in September 2018, he told me that UMAM has developed
the idea to shift the centre of the knowledge produced about Lebanon in
general and Beirut in particular, to an area that, like Shubra, is strongly
present in academic studies, but is absent in the “afterlives” of such stud-
ies. For Lokman, as well as for Monika Borgmann following Lokman’s
death, such archives need to be accessible to all not only by making them
available to the public but also by literally bringing them close to even
those who (might) want to conceal certain elements of the past either by
making false accusations or by shedding blood.
Against this background, the story of this book is situated in the
“afterlives” of the deaths of Regeni and Lokman Slim in February 2016
and February 2021, respectively. While the former pushed me to think
about the power relations embedded in ethnographic studies, the lat-
ter violently showed the unpleasant consequences of insisting on living
and working close to repressive forces. While presenting socially and
theologically negated spaces, practices, and relationships among Coptic
Christians in Egypt to the Western/secular academic community, I won-
der how my relationships with my acquaintances in Egypt will change,
if at all, after sharing the book with them through Shubra’s Archive.
x PREFACE
Moreover, as s Archive is situated not far from the eyes and the build-
ings of Egyptian religious and political authorities, I have rehearsed my
responses to their expected accusations, if not to their violence. And
since God has influenced the plots of many stories in this book, I would
like to begin my text with the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s
soliloquy:
“In my despair I remember that there is life after death; there is life
after death and I have no problem. But I ask: my God, is there life before
death?”
Berlin, Germany Mina Ibrahim