This paper traces the introduction and effects of the concept “minority” in early twentieth-century Egypt. After World War I, the newly established League of Nations made the concept “minority” a legal category in an attempt to protect vulnerable groups in new states (although, ironically, not in Great Power states, where protection was also in need). The category functioned similarly to what Ian Hacking terms a “human kind,” recruiting the identification of ethnic, national, and/or religious groups for whom the League of Nations afforded a set of collective rights it had little ability to enforce. Rather than ensuring inclusion or even security for these groups, it enacted their differentiation and exclusion. In Egypt, the Arabic term for “minority,” aqliyya, came into use in the early 1920s. However, minority politics emerged earlier, particularly among the Copts though arguably among other non-Muslim groups as well. In 1911, a group of Coptic laymen organized the Coptic Congress in Asyut to demand collective rights from the colonial state on the basis of their minoritarian identification. The congress was soon contested by the Muslim Congress—later renamed the Egyptian Congress—which refuted the claims of the Copts. Intense and often acrimonious debate over whether state law should recognize minorities, and if so, over the privileges minorities should enjoy, continued until the 1919 revolt, when Egyptians are often said to have united in anti-colonial resistance. The subsequent 1923 constitution built on this unity by not acknowledging the existence of minorities. This paper analyzes comparatively the complex encounters of Coptic, non-Coptic Christian, and Jewish groups with the concept “minority.” Hannah Arendt has argued that in Europe, the best protected minority groups were those associated with majorities elsewhere, while minorities par excellence, or those nowhere forming majorities (i.e., Armenians and Jews), often became refugees or stateless people. However, I argue that in Egypt, where the nation-state formed under colonial rule, the opposite was true. Christians originating from Bilad al-Sham, who were tied to new nation-states that the British and French carved out of the Ottoman Empire, were largely excluded; the status of Armenians and Jews remained as nebulous as that of the Armenian and Jewish national projects; while Copts, who were nowhere a majority and often thought to be “original Egyptians,” most clearly formed a national minority. The paper promises to contribute to our understanding of the emergence of minorities, minority politics, and citizenship in the Middle East.

Allegedly defending a constitution that would guarantee equality of citizenship for Egypt’s non-Muslim, as well as its Muslim, populations, a Coptic lawyer wrote a twenty-five page letter to the British Consul General in 1911, preserved in the Foreign Office Archives in London. The author, Mikhail Fanous, claimed that the country’s British reformers had, over the past three decades, displaced Egypt’s Copts, ‘the actual rulers of country [sic.]’, and replaced them with the ‘most inefficient and disreputable’ sort of ‘Moslem rulers’. The British occupiers of Egypt had pushed ‘the Moslem native in the place left vacant by the overthrowing of the Turkish rulers,’ while the Christian Egyptian who had ‘a better claim both by ability & character to fill those positions in his own fatherland’ was barred from holding positions in government. The British, he argued, were fearful of altering ‘the religious colour of the governing element in order not to excite the religious feeling of the masses whom they were anxious to reconcile to the occupation.’ In Fanous’s argument the removal of the Copts—descendants ‘(by pure race) of the Upper Class ancient Egyptian’, with ‘superiority of inherited ability’—from their rightful position at the helm of the nation, had wrenched Egypt’s hitherto seamless socio-political fabric apart. Though his retelling of history is extensive, and his ideas about its rightful remedy exhaustive, Fanous’s voice has largely been ignored. Although fundamentally anti-imperial in both logic and tenor, Fanous has been evicted from the pantheon of modern Egyptian political thought. The author and his ideas were considered crude and unpalatable to the regime that emerged out of the 1919 revolution— a revolution that had allegedly banished sectarianism forever. His writings, deemed unsophisticated and anomalous, much like those of his Muslim nemesis Abd al-Aziz Jawish, have been sidelined by nationalist historians. But if, as this paper argues, we are to come to grips with the events of 1919, beyond the clichés of crescent embracing cross, we must turn to such ‘extremist’ thinkers as Fanous and Jawish. Representing a corpus of texts and ideas that fit neither in the genealogy of Islamic modernism, much studied as it is, nor in that of ‘secular’ liberal nationalism, they are worthy of attention, if we are to avoid the overbearing telos of nationalist historiography.

“The Nubian-Egyptian Novel: The Quest for Identity in the works of Idris Ali” Egyptian Nubian author Idris Ali announced a new genre by labeling his first novel Dongola “a Nubian novel.” In this and his subsequent works, Ali gave this new genre its distinct form: a bildungsroman for the displaced Nubian minority for whom education only exacerbates marginality. Among the populations that have been rendered “victims of the map” of the modern Middle East, few have lost as much or received as little attention as the Nubians caught between Egypt and Sudan. Egyptian author Idris Ali, who lived much of his life in obscurity and poverty, captured in his novels the frustration of the Nubian community denied a place in the official nationalism of independent Egypt, and unable to forge its own national identity in the shadow of that Egyptian nationalism. This paper examines how Ali depicts the contradictory process of identity formation experienced by Nubians growing up under Egyptian state nationalism as the heart of a distinct, if small, genre developed over his novels Dongola, Beneath the Poverty Line and Above Nuba Mountains. It will apply a theoretical perspective based on Benedict Anderson’s theory of post-colonial nationalism, in particular, the distinctive grammar of emerging state nationalism, as a means of viewing the process of marginalization that the grammar of Egyptian nationalism forced upon minority populations like the Nubians. Anderson’s paradigm fits well with the clash of Egyptian and Nubian national identity that Ali depicts in his novels. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how the 2011 revolution changed the conditions of marginalization depicted in Ali’s novels.

The rise of 20th century nationalisms is entwined with Egypt's marginalization of Nubian Egyptians: building up their own self-image within the framework of Arab nationalism, Egyptians thus rejected black Nubian culture as ‘the other,’ despite its culturally and politically significant role in the region. This ‘othering’ continues to play out in the contemporary misrepresentation of Nubian Egyptians in Egyptian national media and journalism. Seeking to contextualize that phenomenon through an analysis of relevant history and literature, this research paper focuses on the literary production and political activism of Nubian Egyptian writer Muhammad Khalil Qasim (1912-1968), particularly the writing of his novel Ashamandoura during his years in Egypt’s Oasis Jail. Moreover, it juxtaposes the critical responses of Abdul-Rahman Al Sharaqwi's novel "Al-Ard" with Qasim's novel to explain the binaries media and national culture reception of two Egyptian unique literary productions. Written around the same time period yet published almost ten years apart, the two novels “Ashamandoura” and “Al-Ard” have received completely different critical and reading responses. Sharaqawi's novel was published in 1954, two years after the Egyptian revolution and translated in several foreign languages. Moreover, 'Al-Ard' was transformed into a movie by Youssef Chahine and ever since considered a breaking novel in celebration of 1952 successful end of feudalism. This disparity in accrediting both writers reveal basic bias in what should constitute an example for an Egyptian rural themes. Hence, the theoretical framework of this paper relies heavily on what Stuart Hall reception theory. Hall's approach to engaging the audience in the textual analysis might give an insight on why there is a difference in recognizing both literary works. By the time Nubian Egyptian writer Qasim was writing from jail about his inundated lost village of "Qattah", Sharqawi was celebrated for his outrageous exposition of injustices, political corruption and feudalism during British Colonial Egypt.

In his response to the U.S. Congress delegation inquiring about the situation of the Copts in Egypt with the escalating violence against Christians in September 2013, Patriarch Tawadros affirmed, “freedom is precious, and the burning of our churches is but a small offering for our country.” The Patriarch’s response is not only in line with his relentless support of the military coup taking place a few months earlier overthrowing the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, but is also reflective, as this paper argues, of his overall political theology emphasizing the state as the sole guarantor of the Church’s survival. In this light, this paper sets out to investigate the scope and dimensions of the Patriarch’s political theology. Accordingly, there are three questions guiding this research: (1) What is the Patriarch’s perception of the state? (2) How does he portray the relationship between the Church and the state? (3) How does the Patriarch reconcile what Johann Baptist Metz calls the “dangerous memory” of the Christian Gospel with the state narrative? The present study rests on three sets of sources corresponding with three areas of investigation: first, a synopsis and a working definition of political theology as presented in the works of Metz and William Cavanaugh; second, a synopsis of Patriarch Tawadros’s political theological views through an analysis of his statements and political stances since his enthronement November, 2012 drawn from Egyptian newspaper coverage (primarily, al-Ahram, al-Masri al-Yawm, al-Akhbar, al-Shuruq, al-Yawm al-Sabi‘, etc.), as well as independent Coptic websites; and third, a contextualization of the Patriarch’s political theological views in the wider context of the Coptic Church’s position under his predecessor, Shinuda III (1971-2012) drawing on newspaper coverage of certain milestones in his reign, as well as analyses of his politics. Whereas the Patriarch’s unabashed support of the military leadership can be attributed to the overarching—and understandable—anti-Islamist sentiments, especially in the aftermath of the crescendo of sectarian violence under Mursi’s presidency, this paper pushes for a deeper reading of the Patriarch’s stance, which can be attributed to his belief in the salvific image of the state as the sine qua non of the Church’s survival and prosperity. Unlike the government of the Muslim Brotherhood, the military rule, this paper will defend, epitomizes the image of state-as-savior.

This paper examines the discursive trajectories of the cosmopolitan Egyptian Jew in the documentaries Salata Baladi (Nadia Kamel, 2007) and Jews of Egypt (Amir Ramses, 2012) in light of Youssef Chahine’s classic Alexandria…Why (1978). Undoubtedly, each of these films provides a complex story of Jewish life in Egypt and, taken together, these creative works offer an alternative to formulaic representations of the Jew in Egyptian cinema and television. Given the historically close association between the Jew and cosmopolitanism and taking into account the cosmopolitan nature of Egypt in the pre-1952 era, it stands to reason, as Deborah Starr (2009: 86) implies, that the Egyptian Jew of that period should epitomize cosmopolitanism. However, the analysis of the films at hand and an adumbrative review of scholarship on the topic may attenuate this often celebratory discourse which foregrounds cosmopolitanism’s inclusiveness and syncretism. Specifically, I argue that the films’ rendering of the cosmopolitan Egyptian Jew is fraught with a conspicuous absence of the poor, uneducated, monolingual, and religiously traditional Jewish residents of Egypt. For example, Ramses’s film, having the all-encompassing title of “Jews of Egypt” (or, in Arabic, “ʿAn Yahud Masr,” literally, “About Egypt’s Jews”), relies almost exclusively on Parisian-Jews expatriates to narrate the story of the Jews of Egypt. This paper broaches the dilemma of whether the filmmakers’ main interest in attending to the Jewish question has to do more with nostalgic views of Egyptianness as a cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and multi-religious identity, rather than with a genuine interest in Jewish life, history, and religion. Nearly two decades after the completion of Alexandria…Why, Chahine reflects on his film and the pre-revolution period it depicts, “All religions, all cultures, all kinds of ideas lived side by side in that Alexandria. There were no barriers between people: Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Jews, Russians and French were all friends... This melting pot of people and cultures has vanished today, and this is something I bitterly regret.” Ultimately then, this paper suggests that the limited and skewed view of the Jewish community, with its nearly exclusive focus on one group only of which this heterogeneous community comprises, is driven primarily by anxieties about Egyptian identity in which the cosmopolitan Jew is assigned a supporting role in the play of an idealized Egypt of the past and in challenging xenophobic sentiments at the present.