The increased presence of Catholic missionaries in Egypt during the eighteenth century and their modest but noticeable success in winning converts prompted high-ranking Coptic clergymen to assert themselves as true communal leaders. In countering missionary sermons which censured Copts for their “deviant” practices, Coptic religious leaders similarly preached against spiritual and moral degeneration among coreligionists. Their homilies suggest that they were frustrated with their declining position in relation to Coptic lay notables (archons) and with the erosion of a Coptic identity, a concept referenced more overtly here than in other Coptic writings of the early modern period. These discourses are most apparent in the sermons of Coptic Patriarch Yu’annis XIII (r. 1769-1796) and Yusab (r. 1791-1826), Bishop of Akhmim and Jirja. Using research primarily drawn from Coptic archives, this paper focuses on the portrayal of women in Coptic sermons and on their perceived role in preserving communal boundaries. When preaching to Copts in Ottoman Egypt, missionaries recurrently targeted “inappropriate” practices such as underage marriage, polygamy and concubinage. As they formulated their counter-sermons, Yu’annis and Yusab emphasized the church’s vision of normative marital relations and stressed women’s duties towards their husbands. Through a close textual analysis, this paper will show how Coptic clergymen used these sermons to speak directly to women, whom they viewed as vital in maintaining the loyalties of male members. In lamenting the vices of intermarriage with Catholics, which included the spiritual and physical corruption of the community, Coptic clergymen distinguished between good, “believing” Coptic women and sinful, “non-believing” Frankish women, the latter blamed for the demise of the Coptic man and the former capable of saving him. Ultimately, Yu'annis and Yusab's homilies reveal the Coptic Church’s underlying concerns that the Catholic mission, its foreign teachings, mores, and conceptions of gender relations diluted the Coptic identity and, in the end, threatened the clergymen’s authority as spiritual leaders.

During the 18th century Christianity in Bilad al-Sham underwent dramatic transformations. Underpinning these changes was the confluence of an aggressive Latin missionary movement, the rise of a prosperous local Christian bourgeoisie and a religiously-grounded intellectual renaissance. Latin missionaries and a new generation of local Catholic clerics attempted to “modernize” Christianity and to transform it from a diffuse religious culture to a disciplined and disciplining religious faith. Both groups saw women as key to this process. They were the mothers who would raise Christian children, and they were the conduits for bringing the new religion into the most intimate aspects of society. Simultaneously, these competing visions of “modern” Catholicism created a space within the religious landscape of the Levant allowing some (overwhelmingly Aleppan) women to construct and advance their own alternative notions of Christianity. A key episode in this long history centered on Hindiyya al-‘Ujaimi, an Aleppan Maronite visionary woman who occupied the heart of a political and religious maelstrom traversing the better half of the 18th century. Through her vivid and erotic visions of Christ, Hindiyya gained renown as a living saint among most of the Maronite clergy and populace who saw her as symbol and tool for an effervescent “Eastern” Christianity. Latin missionaries, the Vatican and some local opponents regarded her at best as a deluded woman, but more frequently as a fallen woman who dabbled in satanic witchcraft, and who—like the “strange traditions of the East”—had up-ended the gender hierarchy within the Church. After a brief survey of the story of Hindiyya, this paper will focus on the Vatican inquisition of Hindiyya in the 1770s. In particular, it will analyze the narratives of passion, sexuality, demonic possession and exorcisms which came to the fore during the deposition of nuns, priests and bishops. The paper will take us from the eroticism of Hindiyya’s spiritual and physical union with Christ, to the purported midnight liaisons within the convent, to the emergence of a religious fraternity in Aleppo whose central rituals involved sexual practices. These scintillating tales illustrate how sexuality was publicly construed as part of social relations but also as a manifestation of anxieties about the changing religious and secular worlds. Thus, rather than a private enclosure of “virgin” women, I approach the convent as both a lens that refracts the tensions of the larger society, even as it shapes ideas about religion, sexuality, and gender roles.

Although the complexities of “conversion” of Eastern Christians to Western Christian confessions have been looked at with respect to some outstanding figures such as Hindiyya or As’ad as-Shidyaq, little research has been done on what this process meant for ordinary men and, particularly, women. The case of the Kaiserswerth deaconessate offers a unique opportunity for analyzing this phenomenon. From the time this German Protestant organization settled in the Middle East in 1851, it had intended not just to free the girls and women of all religious communities from their alleged servitude and lead them to modernity through education, but also to recruit, from among their pupils, future Protestant deaconesses. Until World War One, approximately forty-three Arab women, mainly former Greek Orthodox Christians, entered the organization as aspirants – a step for which conversion to Protestantism and a break with one’s former community were deemed essential. Required, like all sisters and novices, to hand in a curriculum vitae and to maintain a confidential relationship to the Board in Germany by regular correspondence, the Arab deaconesses left a precious body of autobiographical documents allowing for a nuanced analysis of the problem of “conversion”. Although none of them suffered as drastic persecution as the “martyrs” / “heretics” As’ad and Hindiyya, all of them experienced personal as well as religious crises, being torn between seemingly mutually elusive social and religious allegiances. Having been in a “doubly marginal” position as women and members of a religious minority, they were even more marginalized by their entry into a Protestant institution. Even their new community did not treat them as equals. While fulfilling important functions as cultural intermediators and raised to be forerunners of a modern Protestant society, they could, at best, become “almost the same but not quite”: from the point of view of their German superiors, theirs would always be an imperfect Protestantism. This paper will look at the way the Arab deaconesses managed to manoeuvre between both worlds, which conflicts, compromises and complexities arose from their conversion to the Protestant faith, and which consequences resulted from it for the organization they served.

In late Ottoman and mandate Palestine, Christians emerged as a major part of a new, self-consciously "modern" middle class, intent on reinventing themselves and their communities as a central part of a transnational Arab intellectual and political elite. This paper examines the ways in which women became important symbols of the Christian centrality to this new modernity through their reinvention of Palestinian Christian religious institutions. Women placed themselves and were placed at the forefront of this new Christian “modernity” in a number of ways. Their participation in unprecedented numbers in Christian educational institutions throughout Palestine, and the remaking of Christian educational curricula to serve the needs of these Palestinian women, deliberately broadcast the role of a specifically Christian education in the construction of a Palestinian middle class. New women’s church clubs and charities undertook to support the work of clinics, schools, and orphanages, often focusing on assisting poor women with education and job training; these women’s organizations advertised Christianity as central to the project of transforming Palestine into a “modern” state. Socially, Christian women used their church circles as venues for the sorts of bourgeois activities – music, theater, sports – that publicly demonstrated the emergence of a new Palestinian Arab middle class. During the mandate period, Palestinian Christian women became an important public signifier of the centrality of Christian institutions and communities to the project of middle-class modernity in Palestine. The transformation of women’s church-related public spheres – including education, charitable organizations and social spaces - was intended to broadcast the Christian communities’ claims to be a central part of Palestine’s emergence as a modern nation. It also, of course, had the inverse result of shaping Palestinian feminist approaches around a particular brand of middle-class thought heavily influenced by the structures of Christian education.