In February 2015, Islamic State militants murdered 21 Coptic Christian migrant workers in an execution-style ceremony. This brutal act of violence elicited strong responses from both the Egyptian state and the Coptic Orthodox Church, with the Egyptian military launching retaliatory airstrikes in Libya, and the Church commemorating the victims as martyrs in its liturgical calendar. These responses contrasted starkly with comments made by the Coptic Church regarding another horrific act of violence: the 2011 killing of Coptic activists by the Egyptian military at the Maspero building Cairo. In December 2014, coinciding with the initial abductions of the Libyan victims, Coptic Pope Tawadros II encouraged Copts to put Maspero behind them and to move on in the sake of national unity. Why then, did one act of violence elicit policy responses and official memorialization while the other was pushed aside? This paper will pursue this question through an exploration of narratives of violence in contemporary Egypt. I approach this topic through the conceptual premise of an “ideal” moment of violence, which I define as an act of violence that, based on its characteristics, can be optimally deployed in service of a particular political narrative. Because of their utility, these moments of violence attain heightened visibility. I argue that Libya as a space is a key element in constructing the 2015 murders as an ideal moment of violence. In Egyptian imagination, Libya since the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 is characterized by violence and chaos. Imagined as a wild space, Libya serves as foil to the security upon which the Egyptian state legitimizes its authoritarianism, and ultimately offers a cautionary tale for Egyptians on the hazards of revolutions following the uprisings that broke out across the Middle East in 2010-11. Comparing the violence in Libya and Maspero, I identify three core differences that mark the violence in Libya as ideal for the Egyptian state: the perpetrators (nefarious transnational militants), the victims (vulnerable minority migrant workers), and the form (ritualized beheading employing the language of religious difference). Each of these differences, I argue, affirms the contemporary Egyptian imagining of Libya as a dangerous space. Through the lens of Egyptian media and government policy, this paper explores how the tropes of the beleaguered minority, the barbaric other, and the comparative morality of state vs. non-state violence converge in Libya and are employed to legitimize state violence inside and outside of Egypt.

“In the mountains of Syria, the valleys of Lebanon, on the plains of Nineveh, the plateaus of Armenia, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the delta of the Nile, the fathers and mothers of our faith planted the seeds of belief… but now that garden of faith is under threat.” During the fourth annual advocacy summit hosted by In Defense of Christians on October 27, 2017, Keynote Speaker Vice President Mike Pence evoked the sacred landscape of the Middle East to underscore the urgency of protecting the region’s beleaguered Christians under attack from ‘Islamic terrorists.’ Pence’s exhortation was couched in the language of Christian kinship and obligation to aid the global persecuted church. He assured attendees that the Trump administration would make the protection of Middle Eastern Christians a top foreign policy priority. Yet during Pence’s first trip to the Middle East in January 2018, several church leaders-- including Coptic Pope Tawadros II-- cancelled their meetings with the Vice President on the basis of conflicting policy priorities. This presentation examines the Trump administration’s statecraft in the Middle East through its politicalization of the conditions faced by Middle Eastern Christians. It locates the administration’s position within a broader historical genealogy of saving Christians from malevolent ‘others’ and attends to the political shifts that enabled US policymakers’ interest in the plight of Middle Eastern Christians. By drawing from US government sources and religious publications, this paper assesses the influential role of Trump’s evangelical advisers and their advocacy networks to forge religious-based solidarity for new initiatives such as the US State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom and an ambassadorial appointment for International Religious Freedom. It also explores how these strategies align or diverge from the interests of the region’s Christian communities on issues such as the refugee crisis, regional counter-terrorism measures, and US-Israeli relations. By interrogating how the Trump administration developed a vanguard role over the region’s Christians, this paper argues that persecution has become a central feature of US policy discourse in the Middle East.

In 1943, Lebanon gained independence and implemented a sectarian power-sharing structure across all levels of the government. Early nationalist figures such as Charles Corm embraced Lebanism, which paralleled Zionism in its call for a state for a minority religious group within the region. However, the borders of the young nation-state included numerous peoples of differing religious beliefs, which made such a goal unfeasible. Instead, a negotiated system of representation guaranteed the protection of Maronite hegemony within the nation, while also according power to other religious groups in lieu of civil law. Its most palpable manifestation was the verbal agreement known as the National Pact that dictated the apportioning of parliamentary seats and government positions by sect. Through this accord, Lebanon instituted a system guaranteeing representation for religious minorities and conferred Maronites privileged status. However, the sectarian system allowed elites from across sects to maintain hegemony. Over time, the sectarian system was increasingly out of sync with national demographics, and the rationale for preserving sectarianism shifted from needing to maintain Christian hegemony to enriching the nation through pluralism. My paper explores the evolving parameters of Lebanese discourse of sectarianism as political practice. Using the presidential speeches from the founding of the first republic to the start of the civil war (1943-1975), I examine the changing conditions that modulated sectarianism. The second Lebanese president Camille Chamoun invoked sectarian tropes to justify his power, while naturalizing Christian Palestinians to bolster the Christian population. In his presidential speeches, Lebanon was a nation-state imbued with Christian symbols. Lebanon’s shared Christianity with Europe, in his discourse, configured the nation as a unique entrepot between the Arab Middle East and Europe. Following the 1958 Lebanon crisis that led to Chamoun’s leaving office, subsequent presidents sought to preserve the sectarian system that protected Christian primacy in the state, while being inclusive of all citizenry. Resultantly, presidents such as Fuad Chehab and Charles Helou spoke of a Lebanon that drew upon previous sectarian logics but repackaged them to be non-denominational. Chehab and Helou in addresses to the military, parliament, and foreign dignitaries talk of a pluralistic Merchant Republic rooted in a shared history of trading and guaranteeing religious freedom. The shifts in Lebanese sectarian praxis represent how justifying the laissez-faire economic system through a pluralist discourse became more desirable for elites than erecting a state promoting the interests of Christians above all.

The armistice marking the end of the First World War on November 11th, 1918, should have brought relief to the residents of Tunis and to the roughly one hundred thousand demobilized conscripts and forced laborers now returning home. On the day after the armistice, two veterans led an enthusiastic crowd of Jews (among them Tunisians, Algerians, and European settlers) accompanied by several cars adorned with Zionist and French flags down the Avenue de Carthage, reportedly chanting “Long live France! Long live the Allies! Long live Palestine! Long live the Jews!” Yet as it passed the Café du Casino, the group was met with opposing chants: “Down with the Jews!” The ensuing scuffle, which pitched the Jewish demonstrators against a collection of European settlers and Muslim Tunisian participants, resulted in dozens of hospitalizations and at least one death, with police shutting down entire neighborhoods of the capital. This incident was not the first of its kind: over a hundred reports on intercommunal violence and tensions are compiled in a dossier entitled “War of 1914-18 – Jewish Community” in the French diplomatic archives. In truth, the dossier, despite its name, includes little information about anything but what are categorized as “anti-Semitic incidents.” A deeper reading reveals how the French colonial “politics of protection” set the stage for the production of Tunisian Jews as a minority apart and of a crisis of “anti-Semitism” at a time when France was positioning itself on the international stage for a role in governing the former territories of the Ottoman Empire. This paper examines the French construction of a “Jewish Question” in Tunisia during the First World War and its immediate aftermath, within the emergent international context of minority regimes that would inform French membership in the League of Nations and its justification for the Mandates in Syria and Lebanon. What circumstances helped forged the category of “anti-Semitic incidents”? How and why was a “Jewish Question” constructed? In turn, I investigate how Jews in Tunisia responded to intercommunal violence and the upheavals of the colonial war, with a focus on new transnational political visions. In what terms did Jews themselves make claims for justice? And how did transnational connections and the international community figure into these claims? Drawing from the popular press and colonial archives, this paper reveals the diversity of political visions among Jews in Tunisia at the war’s end.