Abstract
The year 2011 saw a remarkable visibility of Christian Egyptian activism, especially among Coptic Orthodox youth movements and Protestant churches. Drawing on both historical and ethnographic material, this article explores the idioms of blood and land used by Protestant pastors and lay leaders at Kasr al-Dobara Evangelical Church bordering Tahrir Square to explain their revolutionary sympathies and to impel those of their congregation. This research connects these twenty-first-century discourses of revolution and responsibility with late nineteenth-century colonial representations of Copts as the native sons of Egypt. I argue that it is through the historical reading of these landscapes of belonging that one can understand these moments of confident, self-assured Christian activism in the face of mounting sectarian and political violence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The ethnographic research on which this article is based was undertaken while I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo. For the most detailed account of this research, see Dowell (Citation2015), published in the Cairo Papers in Social Sciences series by the American University in Cairo Press. The ethnographic material is reproduced here with their kind permission.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anna Dowell
Anna Dowell is a doctoral student at Duke University.