Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt stands out among fewer than a dozen monographs that tackle the communal ethos and social history of Egypt's Copts, remaining the sole comprehensive assessment of the Coptic community in the Ottoman period. A prominent voice in a growing field of scholarship on Copts in early and late modernity, Febe Armanios establishes her rightful place as a leading scholar whose expertise covers the yawning gap between late antiquity and the contemporary period. In this book, Armanios excavates previously untapped sources, piecing together a myriad of primary sources from chronicles and travel narratives to hagiographic martyrologies and sermons. Stylistically, her study strikes an enviable balance between elegance and clarity, offering an indispensable primer for navigating a relatively understudied terrain with pleasure and ease.
In the face of scarce and fragmentary sources, Armanios's resourcefulness and inventive spirit win the day. Her approach appeals to religious traditions, those of Coptic Orthodox Christianity, in order to craft a social history populated by governors, wealthy patrons, clergy, missionaries, and the masses. In the opening pages, Armanios puts forward that she “look[s] to faith, piety and practice to gauge how Copts interpreted their religion and, in the process, how they defined the boundaries of their community” (p. 10). At every turn, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt urges readers to imagine the popular and everyday aspects of Coptic life, emphasizing historical accounts of communal self-creation infused with an ethnographic sensibility. By capturing the life of religion against the backdrop of the Ottoman Empire, it further demonstrates how cultural resources of memory and persuasion were interwoven with the broader institutional canvas of rule, protection, and order.
On one level, this book offers a straightforward quartet of case studies organized by faintly chronological design. Following its introduction, Chapter 2 centers on the 16th-century neomartyr St. Salib, comparing and contrasting two interpretations of his death: one, a martyrology penned by a Coptic hagiographer which depicts Salib as a hero, and, two, an account by Muslim chronicler Ibn Iyas which depicts him as a criminal. By pairing these textual sources, Armanios throws into relief the methodological challenge of drawing on hagiography for reconstructing perceived pressures of Christian conversion to Islam in the tumultuous wake of Mamluk rule. Chapter 3 retrieves 17th- and 18th-century sources to illustrate the cult of the ancient martyr St. Dimyana, a virgin-saint whose far-reaching popularity among Copts has endured into the present. Here, Armanios argues that transformations in lay authority gave rise to varying, and arguably “heterodox,” imaginaries of female sainthood and gendered virtue. Chapter 4 journeys to early 18th-century rites of pilgrimage from Cairo to Jerusalem, during what Armanios argues to be a period of “modest” cultural resurgence for the Copts. In ways that resonate with the previous chapter on St. Salib, this one also gestures to similarities between Christian and Muslim practices of pilgrimage, and the contests surrounding them. Chapter 5 closes on a more exhortatory note, analyzing three sets of sermons that illumine the late 18th-century clash between Coptic Orthodox and Roman Catholic clerics. By analyzing the terms through which they forged distinctions between “faith” (i.e., Christianity) and “race” (i.e., Coptic origin), Armanios artfully discloses the intertwining origins of reform and nationalism among Copts in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt.
On yet another level, this book provides representative expressions of various social issues that defined the Coptic experience under Ottoman rule. Based on in-depth analyses of select sources, it is a study structured not so much by a systematic narrative, but around a mosaic of themes such as violence, gender, and conversion. The first chapters on martyrdom, for example, deploy literary and cultural tropes of suffering to grasp the peripheral status of Copts in an Islamic empire and the alternative practices of women in the grip of patriarchy. The final chapters on pilgrimage and foreign missionary presence, likewise, are windows into the moral geographies of divinely ordained travel and expansion into unconquered territory. At the center of all the body chapters is a core story of intracommunal authority which features the clergy (patriarch and bishops) and the “archon,” or lay elite, whose financial links to Istanbul's sultans secured their position as the Copts’ brokers of power. It is ultimately this crucial transformation in communal authority that also ended up setting the stage for heated controversy on the roles that religion and secularism would play in Coptic politics of nationhood a century or so later.
Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt should appeal to multiple scholarly audiences in Middle Eastern history and religious studies. For Ottomanists, Armanios's study elaborates on the life of non-Muslim minorities through the lens of religious texts, extending fresh insights in a field in which interpretations of legal and court documents enjoy a large presence. For Middle Eastern studies, it underscores the place of Eastern Christian traditions in a geographic region dominated by studies of Islam and Islamic civilization. And finally, for religious studies, it advances comparative perspectives on the social and historical dimensions of religious practice, as well as institutions of governing minority communities through religious identity.
Beyond a scholarly audience, this monograph, now available in affordable paperback version, merits a broader readership for anyone interested in the life of minority communities in the Arab Muslim world. It assembles a sensitive human portrait of the Coptic community, the largest number of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa. Displacing sensationalist caricatures of Copts as ageless victims of violence, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt attunes us to the cultural complexities of religious life and enriches our historical consciousness of religion and politics in much-needed directions.
