The Politics of (Dis)Engagement: Coptic Christian Revival and the Performative Politics of Song
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores Coptic Orthodox political (dis)engagement through song, particularly as it is expressed through the colloquial Arabic genre of taratil. Through ethnographic and archival research, I assess the genre's recurring tropes of martyrdom, sacrifice, willful withdrawal, and death as emerging markers of community legitimacy and agency in Egypt's political landscape before and following the January 25th uprising in 2011. Specifically, I explore how Copts actively perform as well as sing a pious and modern citizenry through negations of death and a heavenly afterlife. How do they navigate the convergences and contradictions of belonging to a nation as minority Christian citizens among a Muslim majority while feeling that they have little real civic agency? \n\tThrough a number of case studies, I trace the discursive logics of “modernizing” religion into easily tangible practices of belonging to possess a heavenly as well as an earthly nation. I begin with Sunday Schools in the predominately Christian and middle-class neighborhood of Shubra where educators made the poetry of the late Coptic Patriarch, Pope Shenouda III, into taratil and drew on their potentials of death and withdrawal to reform a Christian moral interiority and to teach a modern and pious Coptic citizenry. I also outline how one affluent choir from the comfortable neighborhood of Heliopolis, The Holy Family Choir, undertook yearly taratil service trips to the peripheries of popular religious festivals to make the interiority of their Christian citizenry more audible through public processions of taratil. Finally, I explore the ministry of one charismatic Orthodox singer, Maher Fayez, as part of a larger evangelical trend that advocates that a heavenly citizenship can be achieved right here on earth. Maher Fayez's revival contradicted Pope Shenouda's ascetic meditations and use of martyr motifs through counter-narratives of spiritual happiness, interdenominational worship, and the use of mediated taratil to effect visceral encounters with God. In the case studies presented throughout this study, I argue that Coptic (dis)engagement is not a form of passive political engagement but rather, is a public negotiation of faith and Egyptian civic identity in forms of spiritual service, song, and audible practices of piety.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".