Introduction

1Being the first scholar to write a report about studies on contemporary Copts for the International Association for Coptic Studies, I will try to sketch broad trends of research that will show how the richness of this field of research has become in the last thirty-five years.1 Hopefully this effort will be pursued collaboratively, and more reports will follow by other scholars. A panel on contemporary Copts was organized for the first time in 2012 at the Coptic Congress in Rome. So much has happened since then and many studies of excellent quality have been published in different languages. Contemporary Coptic studies have really had to struggle to have their value and interest recognized. Before that, it was often seen as too contemporary for scholars of “Coptic studies,” not mainstream enough to find its place in “Christian studies,” and not linked enough to Islam to be recognized by “Islamic studies.” But the situation has changed.

2A field dedicated to the various aspects of the culture of contemporary Copts and their history since the 19th century is emerging. I hope, however, that this will not lead to an over-specialization of the study of modern Coptic Christianity. It would be preferable, in my view, that scholars working on recent Coptic history interact and collaborate with colleagues specialized in more ancient periods of Egyptian and Coptic history, and with scholars working on other themes related to Egyptian society, primarily of which, those working on Islam. We, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, have a lot to learn from researchers studying texts and artifacts from the past. Indeed, Coptic traditions, even if they change over time, are still alive and we thus need to address this continuity by studying how they are reinterpreted for contemporary uses. To do so, we need to acquire, at least, a basic knowledge of the history of Coptic Christianity. Discourses about the past are indeed omnipresent in today’s Egypt, and Copts are no exception. Narratives of Pharaonic Egypt, ancient saints, and miracles, as well as the lives of the patriarchs, are told again and again, they are the subject of books and movies. The recent “Cleopatra affair” has shown that those questions were not only perceived as relics of a distant past.2 It is thus more urgent than ever for scholars to share our discoveries, methodologies, and insights of all kinds to make sense of the different “regimes of historicity”3 at play in today’s Egypt.

3Copts, and more generally Christians, are an integral part of Egyptian history which is still, and too often, neglected. When I started my PhD almost twenty years ago, there were still few studies on contemporary Coptic realities besides the unpublished doctoral thesis of D. El Khawaga (in my view still the best introduction to contemporary Copts) and O. Meinardus’ books, mixing personal observation, scholarly work, and the testimony of a committed Christian.4 There is now a new and very active generation of scholars who have published, or will publish soon, important contributions to the knowledge of Egyptian Christianity in contemporary Egypt and on various diasporic contexts. The bibliography for this report shows an increasing variety of themes, periods and places being addressed by scholars of different disciplines.

4The bibliographical survey will be divided into categories which are clearly disputable and often intersect, but which underline some important trends in research on Copts since the mid-1990s. First, I would like to insist again on how long it took to have the legitimacy of this object of research recognized by our colleagues specializing in other fields of Egyptian history. Almost all scholars that had studied the Copts from the mid-1990s to the 2010s were told at some point in their career that it was not a subject that would grant them a stable academic job. However, Copts have progressively become more accepted as a full part of Egyptian society (at least in academic literature). For instance, N. van Doorn-Harder asks, in an article summarizing the knowledge about Copts in contemporary Egypt: “Copts, fully Egyptians but for a tattoo?”5 Here, it is worth mentioning the important role N. van Doorn-Harder played in encouraging the emergence of a field of contemporary Coptic studies by publishing three important collective books on Copts and by organizing several international conferences on the subject.6 Another landmark publication is certainly S. Mahmood’s book Religious Difference in Secular Age: A Minority Report. The book was received with mixed feedback by scholars of the field but, coming from a well-known anthropologist, it gave some credit to the studies on Christian minorities in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.7

Copts in politics

5As I already mentioned, the standing of Copts within Egyptian society became a prominent theme, often studied from the perspective of elite politics, for instance the relations between the pope and the president or, for earlier periods, the role of Christian politicians during the so-called liberal period in which the Wafd party dominated the political scene.8 Some of those questions are related to the theme of inequalities before the law, or to the pact between the pope and the president, which is called “neo-millet,” “entente” or “corporatist politics.”9 Probably, the most addressed issue concerns the ways in which Copts are portrayed in public discourses, especially by Islamist movements. These studies on Copts and politics allowed us to better understand the place of Christians in Modern Egypt and the dynamics of interreligious relations since the emergence of religious revivals in the 1970s. A very important contribution was made by D. El Khawaga, who wrote her PhD thesis about the Copts in the mid-1990s. Her main hypothesis was that the movement she calls “renouveau copte” and the “clericalization” of the faithful from the 1970s was not only a reaction to the Islamization of Egyptian society, but that it had its own dynamics, its own logic. In doing so, she paid close attention to the agency of Coptic Christians who had often been portrayed as passive victims of Islamist violence. A lot of studies continued in that direction including my study on local politics and the social role of priests. Considering that Coptic Christians were not only passive victims of violence and intolerance, but also actors thereof, making their own choices, and influencing on the ground, opened new avenues for reinterpreting their history during the last two centuries. Important contributions in that vein are those of L. Guirguis, S. Elsässer, and M. Tadros, to only quote a few of them.10 Others also went in similar directions even though their analysis was more focused on religious practices, among whom C. Mayeur-Jaouen, A. Heo, and A. Shenoda.11 But those three authors also showed very well that Coptic political participation is mediated by religious experiences such as apparitions, miracles, icons, and fasting, the latter being the privileged way used by Pope Shenouda to show his discontent with Egyptian political leaders. In times of tension, the late patriarch would retreat to his monastery, fast, and state publicly that he was doing so as a mark of discontent. Concerning the place of Copts in Egyptian society, probably the most original contribution has been made by M. Ibrahim, who addresses Coptic lives from the margins of clerical institutions such as bars and prisons. Through this fresh approach including his own experience as a Copt, he shows how reductive it is to present Coptic Christians as if they were all fully integrated members of the Coptic church and thus perfectly following the prescriptions of their priests.

Religious practices

6Another strand of research focused more directly on Coptic religious practices. The pioneer work was that of N. van Doorn-Harder who published a book on Coptic religious orders of nuns and their role in the revivalist Coptic movement.12 C. Mayeur-Jaouen also made an important contribution with her book on religious Coptic and Muslim pilgrimages (or mawlid in Arabic), studied comparatively. She demonstrated how the increasing tensions between religious communities went along with the destruction of shared beliefs and practices, such as going to each other’s pilgrimages.13 B. Voile then proposed in the early 2000s a historical reading of the hagiographies produced in the 1950s and 1960s and used them as a mirror of the Coptic community.14 She showed how this literature was in fact a sort of response to a demand for renewed models of piety adapted to the new urban middle classes. It must be noted that few scholars had, before B. Voile, taken religious literature as a direct source to study the Copts. F. Armanios pursued B. Voile’s effort with two important contributions addressing the situation of Coptic women through a close reading of religious texts and hagiographic movies.15 More recently, some anthropologists have continued to investigate Coptic practices, among which religious music (S. Gabry-Thienpont, C. Ramzy),16 saint veneration (A. Shenoda, A. Heo), or the syncretic trends which developed under the influence of Evangelical missionaries (F. Armanios, G. du Roy) or by the Egyptian Evangelicals and Charismatic Catholics (S. Gabry-Thienpont).17 The religious revival, le “renouveau copte,” was accompanied by a multiplication of miracles and apparitions which were studied by anthropologists such as C. Nelson, A. Shenoda, S. Keriakos and A. Heo.18 Apparitions were, and still are, important for the definition of Coptic identity since the famous apparition of the Virgin in Zaytūn in 1968. However, if Muslims and Christians together saw the Virgin’s apparition in the 1960s, this possibility seems now to have faded away from the religious repertoire of Egyptian Muslims, as C. Mayeur-Jaouen convincingly showed in a recent paper.19 Coptic images have also attracted the attention of some historians, art historians and anthropologists. The proliferation of images of all kinds intrigued researchers and led to interesting investigations on the way they are used by Copts. Besides a neo-Coptic style, claiming to go back to the roots of the “authentic” Egyptian tradition, a mix of styles frequently inspired by Western images is used in contemporary Egypt. This presence of (mostly) Catholic images in the Coptic repertoire dates back from the 19th century, even before Yuḥannā al-Armanī, the famous 18th century-icon painter, found his inspiration in illustrated bibles consulted at the Franciscan library in Cairo, as J. Auber de Lapierre has shown.20

Christian missions

7The history of Christian missions in Egypt has been an important way to renew contemporary Coptic studies, even if the Copts were not the main focus of those investigations. Protestant and Catholic missions were described in some details, as well as their influence on Egyptian and Coptic Orthodox Christians, but also on Catholics and Protestants. This body of work underlined the deep influence missionary schools had on the development of Coptic educational institutions from the end of the 19th century. P. Sedra studied the role of imported pedagogies in “disciplining” Egyptian children and more largely the Egyptian society, in an analysis inspired by T. Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt.21 Other researchers have shown that the role and influence of missionaries were linked to colonial powers but also had their own logics of action and that missionaries needed to adapt to the moving political and social context. H. Sharkey offered a beautiful and deep survey of American Evangelicals’ action in Egypt from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.22 Practices of charity, philanthropy, and development were the object of many interesting books and articles.23 Catholic and Protestant missionaries were key to introducing new educational methods in Egypt —as the Coptic Sunday school movement shows24— but they also strongly influenced local charity practices that I named “home missions” in an article. Missionaries also played a role in developing a system of technical schools important for Egypt’s labor history.25 The impact of those missions was broad and deep and probably still needs more research for us to get a full picture of the phenomenon. Recent studies have convincingly shown that missionary techniques of outreach were also greatly influential on Islamist movements, like the Muslim Brotherhood, who borrowed from foreign missionaries some of their approaches to proselytism.26 The influence of those missionaries has been perpetuated by the foundation of local Catholic and Protestant Churches in Egypt as well as by the persistence of many missionary schools, which still teach a considerable part of Egyptian elites in French or in English.27 Those minorities within the minority have been the object of very few studies and probably need more research for their role to be reassessed in Egyptian society.28

Other Christians

8A recent trend of research deserves being mentioned here, even if it is not directly centered on Coptic Christians. However, being linked to “Christian minorities,” it is an important field for Coptic studies as well. It has taken the “European” and Levantine communities living in Egypt as an object of investigation. I am careful in calling them Europeans as some of those were for example Greek Catholics, sometimes assimilated to Greek communities from Greek descent.29 The Italian presence has recently been studied by young scholars who are renewing our knowledge of this important diasporic community.30 Other studies have described our knowledge of “foreign” communities who left Egypt during the 1950s, such as the above mentioned communities.31 It would be particularly insightful to further study the interactions between those ethnic and religious groups with Copts and Muslims. These diverse communities living together —or probably side by side— led to the description of a cosmopolitan era, a concept criticized for its ignorance of the colonial and unequal character of Egyptian society. This cosmopolitan era generated, however, a range of interactions between very different groups, both ethnically and religiously, and which has disappeared in the second half of the 20th century. Alexandria has been the most widely studied example, while Shubra, in Cairo, has been the object of some attention recently.32 We still need studies or, even better, collective research programs to understand the interactions of those different groups with Egyptian Christians and Muslims.

Everyday Copts

9Copts were also studied from a social perspective. Gender is one of these mainstream themes that recently emerged in the studies on Copts.33 The place of Coptic women in communal life and Coptic masculinities were addressed in some articles. Copts (and more generally Christians) in novels, TV series and movies also received some attention.34 Interactions between poor and rich Copts as well as internal conflicts within the community (for example the generation gap) were the subject of some interesting works. M. Ibrahim has recently opened new perspectives by considering Coptic lives outside communal networks, which gives an idea of what communal belonging does to people’s lives.35 The broader question is, I think, to understand more precisely what it means to be a Christian or a Copt in Egypt, beyond the question of creeds and beliefs. Many studies have looked for an answer to this question in issues related to the personal status, which links individuals to their religious community well beyond religious belief. Divorce and the ongoing debates about its reform (for instance by S. Mahmood, R. Scott, S. Elsässer) have been particularly scrutinized.36 These are highly political topics as they have strong implications on how citizenship is conceived in Egypt. Indeed, full equality in front of the law would imply promoting new rules of personal status, identical for all Egyptians. The Coptic clergy would lose in this case its more powerful instrument of control over the faithful. Often related to this question of divorce, conversion also attracted some attention. Many Copts did convert to obtain the right to divorce and remarry, and discourses around forced conversion have been one of the main causes of sectarian tensions and even episodes of riots in the last decades.

Copts abroad

10The most recent trend —and one of the most interesting— is probably the new focus of Coptic studies on the diaspora question. Diasporas have first been studied in the North American context, especially to describe the action of lobbying to influence the Congress’ approach to Egyptian affairs.37 Scholars also started studying everyday communal life in Coptic communities abroad. For instance, M. Akladios collected oral histories of American and Canadian Copts, and took into account various aspects of their life, such as work and involvement in the parish, but also their relation to Egypt and to Egyptian Muslims.38 Various fieldworks were done or are ongoing in the United States, Australia and Kuwait and focus on a single national context while others deal with the connections between diasporas.39 Recently, European communities have started to attract the attention of researchers including M. Miličić, F. McCallum Guiney, A. Bernardo, A. Schmöller, and myself to mention only a few names.40 Some studies try to take into account both the Egyptian and the diasporic contexts, which is probably the most promising way to further develop the study of Coptic Christians abroad.41

The question of race and imperialism

11A critical approach inspired by the work of T. Asad and S. Mahmood has recently addressed the issue of Coptic rights transnationally, in relation to the influence of conservative Evangelical movements. C. Lukasik is the most active scholar following this path. This type of research addresses important issues but sometimes neglects local Egyptian dynamics. It represents in my view an intervention in the American intellectual debate as it mainly targets liberal positions, while seeking at the same time to trigger a sense of solidarity between Copts and other minorities by gathering them under the banner of “racialized” minorities, struggling together against racism.42 These new approaches show the growing importance of Coptic diasporas in the production of academic knowledge about Copts in and outside Egypt. Indeed, the context and the ongoing debates in North America increasingly shape the research topics addressed by this new generation.

Coptic missions

12Another aspect that is gaining momentum is the increasing Coptic missionary activity, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and in some Asian countries. This trend had already been described by J. Masson twenty years ago and is now being investigated by H. Miyokawa.43 To give only one striking example, F. Mutonkonle, a Coptic convert from Lubumbashi, where a Coptic church has recently been founded, wrote a book about the history of the Coptic Church which was recommended to French-speaking Copts on a smartphone app from their church.44 A Coptic church is also active in Hong Kong and several have opened in Latin America. If most Copts living outside Egypt are certainly of Egyptian origin, the number of converts gets bigger, either by conviction or through marriage. This new trend raises the question of the Ethnic (Egyptian) character of the Coptic church.

New directions of research

13By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest some perspectives of research that would need further development. First, I would like to recommend the use of the printed material available in Coptic libraries and at Dār al-Kutub (magazines, Church publications, hagiographies, local histories), and second, I would suggest collecting oral histories. M. Ibrahim recently created a research center in Shubra, called SARD (Shubra Archive for Research & Development), which aims to collect memories and documents relating to one of the main centers for Coptic life in Cairo and which offers promising and fresh perspectives on local communities.

14Another aspect, which is not specifically related to Coptic studies, is the overrepresentation of Cairo, whereas Upper Egypt, where many Copts live, remains understudied. There are various reasons for this situation, such as the difficulty in accessing the region since the 1990s, but C. Mayeur-Jaouen, M. Wassef45 and C. Lukasik, among others, have shown that it is possible to travel there, to meet Copts and to conduct fieldwork among them. Including Copts from this region would probably provide a more balanced image of the community and would deepen our knowledge of the important division between rural and urban communities. Even in Cairo, this division continues to play a role, at least in discourses, as many Cairenes have their origins in Upper Egypt.

15Finally, I would like to encourage comparative research, which would study simultaneously Copts and Muslims, Copts and other Middle Eastern Christians, Copts and other minorities, religious or not. In brief, Coptic studies should participate in the field of religious and political studies (among others), if it wants to contribute to the debates on Egypt’s history.