Over the past two decades, scholars have produced a diverse body of historical, ethnographic, and theological literature on Christians in and from the Middle East, contributing to an emerging field of Middle Eastern Christianity Studies. What is the scope of this field? How has it been studied? What are the possibilities for future research? This panel uses three different research projects on Coptic Christians as case studies for answering these questions. The first addresses the role of charitable institutions, like the Coptic Hospital in early twentieth-century Cairo, the second considers the place of Copts in modern Egyptian historiography, and the third examines the ways the contemporary Coptic Orthodox diaspora navigates shifting identities between Egypt and Europe.
This paper examines how the physical and discursive development of the Coptic hospital in Cairo reflected shifting notions of social responsibility, national belonging, and the very meaning of sectarian identification during early twentieth century Egypt. These developments were also reflected in the establishment of other charitable projects that permeated the landscape in proximity to the hospital—a confessional mushrooming that offered and organized benevolence work according to sect-based affiliation. This proliferation of institutions and projects are part of what I consider a ‘sectarian corridor’—a high concentration of sect-based philanthropic institutions established in Cairene urban neighborhoods along Ramses Street such as Fagalla, Azbekia, Daher, and Shubra. The Coptic Hospital became one of the most prominent charitable institutions of the corridor and continued to represent contested sectarian meaning and space into the twenty first century.
This paper aims to present the theoretical-methodological approach of the three-year European Union(EU)-founded project NEGOTIA and its main updated results. The NEGOTIA project focuses on the Coptic Orthodox diaspora communities in Europe, which it analyzes in the light of three key aspects: identities, needs, and relations. Its first goal is to examine the origins and the history of Coptic communities, their cultural and religious peculiarities, but also the dynamics of deconstruction and reconstitution of the material, emotional, and relational dimensions experienced by such communities in their migration path. Its final goal is to define the research field of religious mediation through an integrated, methodological approach to Copts, who are a peculiar case study to conceptualize this topic, which has never been systematically studied before. The NEGOTIA project has been conducted on three case studies located in Egypt, Italy, and Germany, and their recognition and integration process.
This project explores the notions of success and divine favor in medieval Middle Eastern Christian-Muslim discussions, with a focus on success related to the spread of religious adherence and political domination. It looks primarily at Arabic texts produced in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt from the eighth to fourteenth centuries. Four related themes are investigated: 1) a longing for and expectation of divine intervention and verification of truth claims, 2) occasions of ambivalence toward worldly success and prosperity, 3) redefinitions of success, and 4) ways to cope with situations in which expectations of success and prosperity are unmet. The study looks at these themes to ask how this group of Christians on the margins of their society learned to live faithfully in their time. The hope and expectation is to bring fruitful insights into interreligious relations, missiology and understanding of the Christian faith in relation to power and privilege.
| David Grafton | dgrafton@hartsem.edu | View |