>> Muhannad Salhi:
Hello everyone.
My name is Muhannad Salhi.
I am the Arab World specialist in
the African Middle Eastern Division.
As part of the Lilly project, which 
is being undertaken by the division,
we invite scholars
to come and do research on
national religious literacy
based on the resources
of the division
and of the library as a whole.
Our speaker today is Weston
Bland, who is a PhD candidate
at the Department of Near East
Languages and Civilizations
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Weston's field of academic specialty
are the history of modern Egypt
and Christianity in the
modern Middle East
with a particular focus on
20th century Coptic history.
He is particularly interested in
Christian communal organization,
the role that violence
plays in constructing
Middle Eastern Christians
as historical subjects,
and the resonance of
missionary encounters
in the modern Middle East.
His dissertation,
Communal Liberalism,
representative institutions
and the transformation
of the Coptic Sphere
in Egypt, 1927 to 1961
explores the role that liberal
political ideals played in
Coptic debates and controversies
regarding their
communal institution.
His talk today, Communal
Representation and Church Politics
Among Coptic Orthodox Christians
in Egypt, 1927-1961.
Without further ado,
Weston Bland.
>> Weston Bland: Thank you so
much for that introduction, Muhannad.
So, I say, I'm really excited
to have the opportunity
today to talk about the
research I conducted at the
Library of Congress as a Lilly
Emerging Scholar in Residence
in the summer of 2024.
I'm going to be talking about,
as the title presentation suggests,
ideas of representation
and church politics
in Egypt's Coptic Orthodox
Christian community
from the early to
the mid-20th century.
In this presentation, I'll be
discussing the research, I did on
this topic while
writing my dissertation
at the University of Pennsylvania,
and that I continued
on during my time
at the Library of Congress.
I have three main
goals from this talk today.
First, I want to give an
overall introduction and
overview of my research.
Secondly, I want to highlight
in detail the rich collections
at the Library of Congress
has to offer for studying
the modern Coptic community.
And finally, I want to identify
how this research and these
materials converge to strengthen
and develop religious literacy
in line with the goals of the
Lilly Scholar in Residence program.
And by religious literacy,
I mean gaining a more
thorough understanding of
religion, religious community,
and how religion
operates in the world.
For this talk, I'm going to
start by talking a bit about the
questions that drive my
research and the unique analysis
I bring in responding
to these questions.
I'll then turn to some basic
background information on
Egypt's Coptic Orthodox
Christian community, before
discussing in detail the research
I did at the Library of Congress.
Specifically, I'll be highlighting
three unique case studies
from my research on Coptic
communal identity and politics.
These case studies
are the history of Coptic
communal elections from
1927 to 1961, the intellectual
development of the Coptic
Journal of Salama Musa,
and the modern history of the
relationship between the Coptic
and Ethiopian Orthodox churches.
So, start off with the core questions
that drive my research.
I am first and
foremost a scholar of
the idea of community, which
you might think of here as a
form of identity that extends
beyond the individual to a
broader social environment.
The primary question I ask when
studying any community is
what does community mean for them?
For my research on Coptic
Orthodox Christians,
this entails investigating
how Copts define themselves
as a community, whether it be
through the language and
terminology that they used or
what they saw as the essential
bonds linking them
together as a social unit.
As a historian, I don't assume
that these bonds stay stable and
static forever, but I'm
interested in understanding
how they change over time.
And importantly, I contend that
for understanding community,
it is important to not only know
who is a member of the community
or included in those bonds, but
also, who is excluded, separated,
or marginalized from
communal membership.
Approaching the idea of
community from these questions
illuminates the complex and
diverse forces that operate
together to bond individuals
together as social units.
Now, there are a number of
approaches one might take to
answer these questions.
In my own research, I focus on
the idea of institutional
governance. That is, by
looking at the structures and
institutions that hold
authority in the community,
which may include figures or
organizations within the church,
administrative councils
or social organizations.
In my research, I explore the
relationship between these
inter-communal
governing institutions and
members of the community, with
a particular interest in finding
where the authority and
legitimacy of these institutions
stems from. For example, from
religious tradition, popular will,
state force or informal mechanisms
of influence and power.
And it's from investigating
the relationship
between community members and
their institutions that I derive
the primary analytical argument
that drives my research, that by
exploring how community members
discuss their institutions,
we can gain insights into how they
understand themselves as part of
a community. I want to get off
an important note here that
when I use the word community,
I'm using this as a single
English language translation for
several Arabic words that Copts
use to describe themselves as a
community during my period of study.
These included terms like
Sha'b, Umma, Ta'ifa, and Milla.
Each of these terms has unique
vector of meaning and baggage.
Sha'b, which is typically
translated as people
and Umma, which is typically
translated as nation, are both
words linked to the language of
Egyptian nationalism that
emerged in the 19th
and 20th centuries.
For Copts, this language
had its genealogy
in a genre of history writing
that stressed both the sacred
and the secular in Coptic
historical experiences.
Ta'ifa, a word typically
translated as sect or grouped,
is linked to the phenomenon
of sectarianism or ta'ifiyya,
a process of dividing a society
on group distinctions often
linked to religious identity.
And finally, Milla, often
translated as people or nation,
is a word often linked with a
so-called millet system,
a set of ideals promoted by
the late Ottoman Empire in which
religious communities held authority
over their own internal affairs.
I flagged these terms not only
to highlight the diverse ways in
which Copts expressed how they
were community, but also to
illustrate the complex ideas
that formed the possibilities of
how Copts understood themselves
as bonded to one another while
distinct from others.
Moreover, while some of
these terms had a religious
connotation, religion was not
the exclusive force animating
them, meaning that Cop's sense
of community was not only
determined by their spiritual
practices or ties to a church,
but through their sense of history
and relations to other groups.
So already, in looking at
the very vocabulary that Copts
use to express community, we
can see that the very idea of
community itself is not
necessarily a straightforward
process, but the accumulation
of a complex variety of forces
that are shaped by history.
With my study of community, I
hope to offer some alternative
approaches for how we study
modern Coptic Christians,
something I found in studying
works written about the modern
Coptic community, is that
violence and suffering play a
dominant role in how
Coptic history is written.
Between media coverage,
scholarship on Copts, and places
in which Copts appear in works
not focusing on the community,
one might get the impression
that Copts only exist when
something bad is happening to
them. This overemphasis on
violence and constructor in
Coptic history has the effect of
obscuring the rich history of
political thought, religious
practice, and literature that
has been produced by the
community in its journey
through modernity.
Moreover, the emphasis on
violence and suffering tends to
overstate Copts marginalization
as a minority community, as a
singular defining experience
shaping their modern history.
This is linked to the second
major trend I've noticed in a
lot of scholarship discussing
Copts, which tends to focus
heavily on the relations
between Egyptian Christians and
Muslims, in which Copts are
frequently referred to using the
phrase Copts and Muslims,
implying that inter-religious
relations are the primary force
shaping Coptic history, and that
studying Copts is only useful
for what it can say about
Egypt's Muslim majority.
By focusing on how Copts
understood community,
I highlight how forces internal
to the community itself.
That is, relations between Copt’s
and other Copts were just as
important for the community's
history. By exploring the
history of Copts internal
governing institutions, I offer
an approach to the history, to
the community's history that
moves beyond violence centric
narratives and takes seriously
intercommunal relations
in the development of
Copt’s communal identity.
In pursuing this research,
I found a number of
extremely useful materials at
the Library of Congress that
shed light on how Copt’s
discussed the relationship with
their governing institutions
and in turn, articulate a
diverse set of interpretations
of what they meant by community.
Among these were specifically
Coptic periodicals, such as the
daily lay managed newspaper
Misr and the church affiliated
magazine Al-Karma.
I also found useful resources
in a number of non-Coptic
periodicals that touched on
Coptic affairs, which included
several Egyptian intellectual
and scientific periodicals, and
the Ethiopian Herald, a state
controlled English language
Ethiopian newspaper.
I supplement these press
materials with minutes of the
Egyptian Parliament held at the
Library of Congress, which offer
important insights into
how the state managed Coptic
institutions and how Coptic
politicians engage with the
state in its relationship
with the community.
I want to emphasize that
these are not the only
materials held at the Library
of Congress which offer
important insights that
offer important insights into
studying modern Coptic history.
As there was a vast collection
of monographs, documents, and
secondary literature
held at the library.
These, however, are the other
materials most relevant to my
analysis and research questions.
Now, I've talked somewhat
abstractly so far about my
research, but before moving
on to discussing it in more
specific and concrete terms,
I want to give a little bit of a
background of, a little bit of
background information on the
Copts and the
institutions that I study.
The word Copt is an anglicisation
of the Arabic word Qibt
which itself derives from
the word aegyptus in
Ancient Greek term for Egypt.
That is to say, the word Copt
literally means Egyptian.
Following the Arab Islamic conquest
of Egypt in the seventh century,
the term Copt picked up
a specifically religious
connotation, referring to the
Egyptian Christians and their
descendants who maintained
their Christian identity
following Egypt's incorporation
into the Islamic world.
While the word Copt now refers
to a number of Islamic--
a number of Christian
communities who tie
their history and
faith to geography.
I'll be using Copt as a shorthand
to refer to Egypt's
Coptic Orthodox community,
the largest of the country's
Christian communities.
The religious institutional
home of the Orthodox Copts is
the Coptic Orthodox Church.
It's an independent church with
its own internal ecclesiastical
hierarchy that is part of
the Oriental Orthodox or
non-chalcedonian
branch of Christianity.
The church's leadership makes
its claims to apostolic
succession. That is to say,
it's linked to the first
community of Christians and
the Apostles of Jesus through
Saint Mark the evangelist, who,
according to tradition,
founded the Coptic Church in the
first century CE in Alexandria.
As I mentioned previously,
my research focuses
on the governing institutions
within the Coptic Orthodox
community. Specifically, I
focus on three institutions that
claim governing authority on
a community wide level in the
early and mid 20th century.
The first of these is the
Coptic Patriarch or Pope.
These terms are used
interchangeably in the materials
that I work with.
The Coptic Pope is formally the
Bishop of Alexandria and the
successor of Saint Mark.
Next is the Holy Synod of the
Coptic Orthodox Church, which
consists of the highest ranking
clergy in the church, most
prominently the metropolitan
and diocese and bishops.
The third institution is the
Coptic Orthodox General Communal
Council or [Inaudible]
The council is a primarily lay
body that held administrative
authority in specific realms of
communal governance, such as
education, finances,
and family law.
The council was first
established in 1874, and in the
first century of its existence
underwent several
transformations in its
membership, methods of
composition, and
realms of jurisdiction.
The period that I study from
1927 to 1961 was defined by
shifting rivalries and
alliances between these three
institutions as they endeavored
to settle the question of who
represents the Copts.
A question itself that was
linked to the more fundamental
question of how
representation should occur,
which compelled Copts to
publicly articulate what exactly
they meant by a Coptic community.
With that, I'll turn to the
first of my three case studies
to illustrate how the politics
of these institutions granted
Copts a space to express various
interpretations of community.
The first of these cases is a
history of Coptic communal
elections from 1927 to 1961.
Coptic electoral history was
the core topic that I explored
in my PhD dissertation, and
continued on in my research at
the Library of Congress.
I show how from 1927 to 1961,
elections were a significant
basis for Coptic communal
institutions, authority and
legitimacy, leading to the
development of a vigorous
inter-communal electoral scene
that was defined by both
campaigning as well as critical
discussions of the nature of
elections as they related to
popular will, tradition and
religious leadership.
During this period, there were
11 election seasons, including
seven communal council
elections, which are scheduled
to take place roughly every
five years, and for papal
elections, which took place
between 1 to 3 years following
the death of the previous pope.
My core argument in exploring
these elections is that the
discourse surrounding elections
offered Copts a unique platform
to define community and put forward
novel ideas of communal authority,
history and religious
practice in a public venue.
I start this history in 1927
with the passage of
Law 19 of 1927 by
the Egyptian Parliament.
This law was passed at the
urging of Coptic lay reformers,
who sought democratic reforms
in communal governance that
would grant governing
authority to popular will.
It additionally took place
alongside the Egyptian
government's regulation of
Islamic religious institutions,
signaling a broad interest
in the state in regulating the
affairs of the country's
religious communities.
In effect, Law 19 reorganized
communal council elections on
democratic grounds, undoing
earlier amendments to the
council's charter that reduced
its membership and incorporated
appointed rather
than elected members.
Additionally, Law 19 codified
previously temporary law
regulating voting procedures for
the Council, which included specific
details on who was eligible to
participate in the elections.
These eligibility requirements
are instructive for
understanding the hierarchies
within Coptic communal authority.
According to the law, voters
could be eligible at 21 years
if they held a degree. However,
lacking a degree, they would not
be eligible until they were 25.
Additionally, registration
for voting was limited to the
Governor of Cairo and its two
neighboring districts,
with Egypt's other provinces only
allowed a smaller set number of
appointed voters.
On top of that, voters
were required to pay
a registration fee, any
position that restricted
lower income members
of the community.
One notable absence in the
voter law was that there were no
explicit references to gender.
Instead, eligibility was
implicitly limited to Coptic men
through the exclusive use of
masculine nouns in the
eligibility requirements.
I highlight these restrictions
in relation to my earlier point
on the importance of exploring
Coptic intercommunal relations
and understanding the
community's history.
While an emphasis on Coptic
Muslim relations emphasizes
Copts communal marginalization
as a minority.
Looking at this voter law
reveals that within the
community itself, there were
legally established hierarchies
of privilege and exclusion
based on age, education, class,
geography, and gender.
Beyond the text of the law
itself, the Library of Congress
has Congress's holdings of
Egyptian Parliamentary Minutes
show how Coptic politicians
debated the merits and
limitations of this law.
Among the matters of debate
were whether or not there should
be designated members from each
province represented in the
Council, and whether or not
there should be seats on the
Council reserved for clergy.
These debates signal important
conversations within the
community on the nature
of institutional authority.
Debates on provincial
representation offered
contrasting points of view on
whether or not the council
as a community wide body,
should equally incorporate
members from across Egypt or
alternatively operate as a Cairo
based institution following the
political centralization
of the Egyptian state.
Debates over designated
seats for the clergy,
on the other hand, served as a
significant discussion over how
intrinsic religious authority
was to Coptic governance.
With disagreements over this
matter serving as a very public
consideration of how much
religion operated as the
exclusive force bonding Copts
together as a community.
The outcome of both of these
debates, that there would be
no guaranteed provincial
representation and no
designated seats for the clergy,
indicating a preference
towards Cairo based secular
authority expressed by the Copts
and government who
push for the law.
Nonetheless, both of these
elements of authority would be
continuously contested
throughout the period of study.
Shortly after the passage of
Law 19 of 1927, Pope Cyril V,
the longest reigning
Coptic pope in Coptic history
died, ushering in a
movement to organize Coptic
papal elections along similar
democratic grounds as the
communal council.
This would not take place
until after the death of
Pope [Inaudible] the 19th in 1942.
Soon after the Pope's death,
the Communal Council and the
Holy Synod issued a new
election law granting papal voting,
granting papal voting
eligibility to a qualified
electorate of voters.
While the new law was praised
as a democratic step for
ensuring the popular election
of the patriarch,
its eligibility requirements were
notably more exclusive than
those of the communal council,
as the law introduced income
thresholds and approved
occupations for voting
eligibility. Nonetheless,
the introduction of
regulated voting procedures
and the expansion of the
electorate had the effect of
radically changing the nature of
Coptic papal elections.
In the lead up to the
subsequent elections, which took
place in February 1944,
Coptic papal elections saw,
for the first time in history,
the adoption of electoral campaign
techniques, including candidate
rallies and extensive
endorsement articles for
specific candidates published in the
Coptic and non-Coptic press.
This contributed to an intense
and divisive lead up to the
election, as bitter rivalries
emerged between opposing camps
for the six approved
papal candidates.
The intensity of the 1944
elections was fueled not only by
the expansion and regulation of
voting privileges, but also
through the unique stakes
at hand in the election.
Historically, Coptic bishops
were considered ineligible to
become patriarchs based on
an interpretation of the early
Christian ecumenical councils.
This led to a tradition of selecting
patriarchs from among Coptic monks.
In 1928, with support from
allies in the Egyptian
government, Bishop Ioannis of
Beheira and Menoufiya became the
first metropolitan bishop to
ascend to the papacy, eliciting
controversy over the apparent
contravention of tradition.
In 1944, this matter would
be put to a popular vote,
as four bishops and two monks had
been nominated as papal candidates.
In electoral discourse, the
debate between bishops and monks
served as a proxy for a larger
conversation on the nature of
communal authority.
With tradition of
electing monks being pitted
against the administrative
authority that
bishops were deemed to
hold in administering
their dioceses.
That is to say, the
election. was a referendum
of sorts on Coptic voters view
of whether communal leadership
should be based on religious
tradition versus worldly
administrative capacity,
Alongside the monk
versus bishop debate,
the 1944 papal elections were
defined by a debate over whether
the Coptic Lady should have
a role in communal finances,
or if this should be the exclusive
prerogative of the clergy.
Papal candidates were praised
or disparaged on their positions
of cooperation with the lady on
finances, or for retaining
church control on this matter,
like the Bishop monk debate,
the opposing positions on finances
were tied to the larger question
of religious authority in the
community itself rooted in the
foundational question of
whether or not religion was the
exclusive force binding Copts
together as a community.
The result of the election was a
turning point in Coptic
communal politics.
Bishop Makarios Havasu
won by a high margin on a
platform of sharing authority on
communal finances with the laity.
His election was secured
in no small part by the savvy
electoral campaigning of laymen
associated with the communal
council, illustrating how
public engagement with voter
sentiment could shape the
realities of communal authority.
Furthermore, in 1944, at least,
the outcome does seem to be
a clear move away from
tradition and religious authority
as the core sources
of institutional legitimacy
in favor of popular will,
power sharing with the lady
and administrative experience.
This will not last forever.
And while I don't have time
to detail the full history of the--
the full electoral history
of the Coptic community,
in short, the 1950s witnessed
a populist shift in Coptic
electoral politics that led to
a resurgence of tradition and
pious personality as sources
for institutional authority and
elections. Over time, this
process would be attended by the
withdrawal of democratic
practices in Coptic elections,
culminating in the cancellation
of communal elections of
communal council elections in
1961, leading to a 12 year gap
in elections. What I'll say in
summary, then, of this history
of the Copts elections is that
this history of elections
really signals Copts sense of
community as attested by their
electoral practices in discourse.
and this history shows
that the discourse
over electoral practices was by
no means a static and stable
phenomenon, but was a fluid,
dynamic, and contingent on
historical process.
This idea of contingency
is important element
of my next case, the
curious intellectual
trajectory of the Coptic
journalist Salama Musa.
Salama Musa was one of
Egypt's foremost intellectuals
of the early and mid 20th
century, pursuing a journalistic
career that lasted
nearly five decades.
Musa was a pioneering figure
in several fields of Egyptian
political, social, and
scientific thought, for example
as an early proponent of
socialism, secularism,
pharaonic nationalism,
and Darwinism.
For much of his journalistic
career, Musa did not write as
a Coptic communal figure, and
particularly in his early career,
was actively hostile to religion.
This changed in the 1940s, a
period that I have labeled his
communal turn.
Starting in the mid-1940s until
his death in 1958, Musa took
on a role as an editor and writer
for several Coptic periodicals.
From these positions, Musa began to
actively engage in church
and communal politics, playing
important role in the hotly
contested 1946 papal elections
by throwing his support behind
the eventual winner of the
elections, Bishop Yousab of Girga.
Musa's communal turn began
during a fraught and an anxious
period for Coptic Christians,
in which an authoritarian turn
in Egyptian politics
and the growing public
influence of Islamist organizations
put many Copts on edge.
Musa reflected this
anxiety in his writing,
frequently fixating on Coptic
precarity in his articles and
calling for Copts to mobilize in
the name of democracy and for
separating religion from the state.
While Musa's writings
certainly, tapped into an anxious
communal mood in the
context of the 1940s,
his writings were not
universally approved in the
Coptic sphere, with some in the
community criticizing him for
his involvement in church
politics, given his previous
hostility towards religion.
My research primarily focuses
on Musa's communal shift and its
connection on electoral politics
that I explored in my dissertation.
As such, I used my time
at the Library of Congress
to explore Musa's
writings before this shift
to better understand the continuities
and ruptures in his writings.
The Library of Congress
holds an expansive
collection of Musa's works,
including several of his books,
extensive holdings in the
journals he published for and
compiled collections of his
articles from across periodicals.
In looking at Musa's
earlier writings, I was
particularly interested in how
he wrote about identity as a Copt,
as an Egyptian,
and as a secularist.
Musa's writing on identity
were incredibly complex
and at times messy
and even troubling.
Evolutionary theory stood at
the nexus of several of his views.
Musa was a staunch believer
in biological evolution,
and was critical of the
role that religion played in
undermining teaching on evolution.
Beyond biological evolution,
Musa's writings fixated
on societal and
civilizational evolution,
arguing for the linear
development of civilizations
and their economic, political,
and social systems.
According to Musa, a central
component of this evolution was
the triumph of patterns of
identity, of social identity
based on the nation over
those based on religion.
Indeed, Musa held that the
complete separation of religion
in the state was a high
aspirational ideal and a key
development for securing the
complete freedom of a people.
Within his vision of
civilizational evolution,
Musa held Egypt to be in an
exceptional position, arguing
that Egypt was the true
birthplace of civilization given
the Egyptians early adoption of
agriculture, a development that
itself was linked to the unique
geographical conditions of the
Nile Valley. Musa put this
Egyptian exceptionalism to work
in his present, advocating, for
example, for the use of Egyptian
colloquial Arabic rather than
Modern Standard Arabic as a
literary language,
as well as repeatedly
arguing that Egypt stood apart
from its Arab and
African neighbors,
in that it was better
understood as a Western nation
that rather than an
eastern nation with strong
affinities to Europe.
To this end, Musa deployed
racial and biological arguments
detailing what he saw as
physiological similarities
between ancient Egyptians
and therefore Copts
and ancient Europeans.
It is here that some
of the more troubling aspects of
Musa's thought become clear,
as he explicitly linked his
arguments for biological
affinities between Egypt's
Egyptians and Europeans with
his with the racial prejudices
he held against Arabs and Africans.
These ideas of Egyptian
exceptionalism that Musa curated
in his earlier writings played
an important role in the
arguments he made during his
communal turn. As he advocated
for the shared heritage between
Egyptian Christians and Muslims,
rooted, according to him, in
history, geography and biology,
to serve as a counter against
the divisive fusion of religion
and politics that he saw
occurring in the 1940s.
I highlight Musa's writings
because they offer an important
look into the complex and
diverse ways in which an
individual might express their
sense of community and their
ties with religious institutions
and religious identity.
For Musa, being a Copt
was not merely defined by
one's ties to the church or
engagement with ritual and pious
practices, but through Copts
unique links to the space and
identity of Egypt, links he
expressed primarily through his
belief in Coptic
biological indigeneity.
For Musa, being a cop was
inextricably tied
to a sense of Egyptian
nationhood, which in his eyes
needed to overcome religious
identity as its primary social bond.
And even his engagement
with church politics was not
solely defined by the idea of
the church as a vessel for
sacred practices, but in an
understanding of the church as
an institution of authority for
the Copts as they face precarity,
and as a historical and
civilizational marker of their
long heritage in Egypt.
As Musa's trajectory shows,
religion was one of several
strands that Copts could grasp
as the bond linking them as a
community. And even then, as
evidenced by Musa, the typical
markers associated with
religion carried a variety of
interpretations that varied
from individual to individual.
The final case study I explored
at the Library of Congress was a
historical relationship between
the Coptic and Ethiopian
Orthodox Churches. For some
brief context, according to
tradition, the institutional
origins of the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church began in the
fourth century, when the Coptic
Pope at the time dispatched a
Syrian Christian to serve as a
bishop of Ethiopia and the head
of its Christian community.
This initiated a tradition that
lasted for 16 centuries,
in which the head of the Ethiopian
Church was a Coptic bishop
dispatched from Egypt.
At various times, the situation
was challenged in Ethiopia, but
never in a way that
ruptured the tradition.
Calls for Ethiopian ecclesiastical
independence began to pick up
steam in the late 19th century,
and then accelerated in 1926
with the death of Matteos,
the Coptic bishop of Ethiopia,
after which Crown Prince
Rastafari, later Emperor Haile
Selassie adopted Ethiopian
church independence
as a nationalist cause.
This initiated three decades of
negotiations between
the two churches.
In 1948, the Coptic Church
agreed that following the
death of the current
Coptic Bishop of Ethiopia,
his successor would be an
Ethiopian. In 1950,
the Coptic Bishop of Ethiopia,
Kyrillos, died and was replaced by
Bishop Basilios, the first
Ethiopian bishop of Ethiopia.
In 1959, the newly elected
Coptic Pope Cyril VI elevated
Bishop Basilios to the status
of Patriarch Catholicos, a move
that effectively achieved the
ecclesiastical autonomy and
independence of the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church, granting it off
autocephalous status.
So this is the rough outline of
the historical developments of
that relationship.
What I'm interested in is the
institutional discourse that
surrounded those developments.
Looking at Coptic and Ethiopian
sources reveals very different
narratives of this story.
Coptic sources emphasize the
historical unity of Ethiopians
and Egyptians bound
through their links
between their two churches
to the Coptic Bishop of Ethiopia,
and also through their shared
geography of the Nile Valley.
Coptic sources generally
portray the Ethiopians
as having deep reverence and
respect for the Coptic clergy
who held authority over the
Ethiopian Church, as evidenced
by the outpouring of grief for
the death of Bishop mateos in 1926.
Coptic sources refer to the
Christianity as the gift that
Egypt gave to Ethiopia, a
history that bound the two
nations in union and was
structured over equality between
Copts and Ethiopians
within the church structure.
In spite of this language of
equality, Coptic sources place
the Ethiopian Church in a firm
hierarchy under Coptic Church,
frequently referring
to the relationship
between the two churches as
ones between a mother,
the Coptic Church and her daughter,
the Ethiopian Church.
This played out in practice
through the restrictions placed
on Ethiopians and Coptic affairs.
In spite of the sheer number
of Ethiopian Christians
under the ecclesiastical
authority of the
Coptic Church, Coptic leaders
limited the role the Ethiopians
could play in communal elections,
and treated Ethiopian
demands for a seat at
the table in church
institutional life with suspicion.
While limiting the
participation of Ethiopians
in Coptic church affairs,
Coptic leaders simultaneously
expressed
great reluctance to grant
significant autonomy to
the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,
with the authority of Ethiopian
clergy to consecrate their own
bishops, being a particularly
sensitive matter that the Coptic
Church did not relent on
until the last minute in 1959.
This tension between discourse
and practice is laid bare when
turning to how Ethiopian sources
cover the autocephaly movement.
For an Ethiopian perspective,
I turn to the
coverage of church affairs
in the Ethiopian Herald
in English language newspaper
managed by the Ethiopian state,
with the Library
of Congress holds in
print, microfilm and
electronic formats.
Looking at this source
reveals a very different story
of the Ethiopian
autocephaly movement
from that portrayed
in Coptic sources.
The Ethiopian Herald framed church
autonomy as a nationalist issue,
looking at autocephaly
as a means of liberating
Ethiopians from foreign
ecclesiastical control.
The paper frequently reported
Ethiopians frustrations on the
limits, on the participation and
autonomy in church affairs, and
argued that Coptic control over
the Ethiopian Church was not a
religious issue informed by the
Coptic Church's maintenance of
tradition, but a political
issue tied to its desire for
continued influence and
authority over Ethiopians.
This tension between discourse
and practice is laid bare when
turning to how Ethiopian sources
covered the autocephaly movement.
For an Ethiopian perspective,
I turn to the
coverage of church affairs in
The Ethiopian Herald,
an English language newspaper
managed by the Ethiopian state,
the Library of Congress
holds in print, microfilm,
and electronic formats.
Looking at this source reveals
a very different story of the
Ethiopian autocephaly movement
from that portrayed
in the Coptic press.
The Ethiopian Herald framed church
autonomy as a nationalist issue.
Looking at autocephaly
as a means of liberating
Ethiopians from foreign
ecclesiastical control.
The paper frequently reported
Ethiopians frustrations on the
limits on their participation
and autonomy in church affairs,
and argued that Coptic control
over the Ethiopian Church was
not a religious issue
informed by the Coptic Church's
maintenance of tradition, but
a political issue tied to its
desire for continued influence
and authority over the Ethiopians.
The Ethiopian Herald
likewise stressed the
distinct nature of
Ethiopian Christianity
from Coptic Christianity,
arguing that in spite
of its Coptic leadership,
Ethiopian Christianity had
developed independently over the
centuries in its local practices.
To this end, in contrast to
the Coptic sources emphasis on
Ethiopian respect
for Coptic clergy,
the paper claimed
that the influence of
the Coptic bishops on Ethiopian
Christianity was shallow, as the
bishops were alien to the
popular practices and popular
practices and faiths
of Ethiopian Christians.
The relations between the
Ethiopian and Coptic churches
illustrates an additional
complex layer to the links
between Coptic communal
identity and the community's
internal institutions.
Just as Coptic election laws
place limits on who in the
community could participate
in communal elections, so too
do Coptic authority over the
Ethiopian Church mark the
boundaries of who could engage
as an actor in communal politics.
In this case, historical
ecclesiastical links
came at odds with the rise of
nationalism and liberatory
politics in the 20th century,
as well as the democratic
trajectory of the Coptic Church
at the same time.
As a marker of identity
and a demarcation of
boundaries, religion served as
a fraught tool for opposing
sides to make claims
on communal authority.
In this case, religion was
a malleable tool that could
intersect with concepts of nation,
history, tradition, and liberation.
I want to conclude by
considering what we can
take away from these
three case studies.
First, I find these three cases
to be instructive in revealing
the diverse ways that
religion can manifest.
These cases show that in
understanding how religion
operates in the world, it is
important to not only
consider things like individual
belief or devotional practices,
but also to understand how
religion operates as a fluid and
contested bond of communal
identity and a mechanism for
enforcing or even challenging the
authority of social institutions.
Secondly, turning more narrowly
to the Coptic community,
these cases illustrate
just how significant
dynamics within the Coptic
community and between
Coptic individuals were in guiding
the community's
historical experience.
Middle Eastern Christians,
like the Copts,
are not merely the passive objects
of the power imbalance fostered
by the minority status, but are
active agents who shape their
own path, whether in the
electoral politics of
institutional governance or
in intellectual production,
considering the nature of their
identity. And on a related note,
these three cases are
significant and complicating
simple views of Middle Eastern
Christian marginality alongside
the privilege of their Muslim
majorities. As shown by the
specific examples of voter
eligibility restrictions and
Coptic laws, or the church's
continued limitations on
Ethiopian independence, these
Christian communities held the
power to create their own
hierarchies of privilege and
marginalization through their
ability to demarcate inclusion
and exclusion in
institutional life.
This power to demarcate
frequently leaned on diverse
interpretations of religion
as a historical force rooted in
tradition and as a set of moral
regulations that had the power
to both liberate as
well as to restrict.
In some, the experiences of
Egypt's Coptic Orthodox
Christians from the early to the
mid-20th century offer several
unique glimpses into the complex ways
that individuals and communities
engage with religion.
The Library of Congress
has collections related
to the Copts in periodicals,
government records, documents,
and monographs. Searches
serves as a rich repository
for better understanding
this history.
Thank you.