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SINGING HEAVEN ON EARTH: COPTIC COUNTERPUBLICS AND POPULAR SONG AT EGYPTIAN MŪLID FESTIVALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Carolyn M. Ramzy
Carolyn M. Ramzy*
Affiliation:
Carolyn M. Ramzy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the performative politics of devotional soundscapes at Coptic Christian mūlid festivals. Echoing the state's reformist efforts in the 1990s to transform Muslim saint festivals into utilitarian spaces and their goers into “modern” Egyptian citizens, today the Coptic Church works to refashion these popular festivals from places of debauchery into morally productive spaces. Aided by affluent Cairene-based volunteers, church choirs travel from Cairo's poshest neighborhoods to these festivals to actively sing, disseminate, and teach popular religious songs (taratīl) in an effort to develop poorer Christian pilgrims into modern, pious, and more audible “citizens of heaven.” Through the analysis of one church choir's taratīl ministry at the mūlid, I illustrate how middle-class spiritual volunteers disrupt and, at times, reinscribe the Coptic Church's disciplinary efforts on the festival's poorer pilgrims, particularly as they look to modernize popular festivity into grounds of Christian ethical transformation.

Keywords

Coptscounterpublicsmusicpietysoundscapes
Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 375 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 A mūlid is the Egyptian Arabic pronunciation of the classical Arabic term mawlid (pl. mawālid). They are popular religious festivals largely attended by Egypt's lower socioeconomic sector, regardless of religious affiliations. In both Christian and Muslim contexts, their ambiguous festive atmospheres intermix sacred, profane, and popular elements for profound and extraordinary experiences of religious pilgrimage, community festival, or public affair. See Schielke, Samuli, “Policing Ambiguity; Muslim Saint-Day Festivals and the Moral Geography of Public Space in Egypt,” American Ethnologist 35 (2008): 539 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The Coptic community uses the terms taratīl and taranīm interchangeably to describe Arabic nonliturgical devotional songs that complement the official liturgical hymnody sung in the Coptic language, known as alḥān. For the sake of brevity and clarity, in this article I will continue to refer to taratīl and taranīm solely as taratīl (sing. tartila).

3 NIV Matthew 2:16.

4 Schielke, Samuli, Perils of Joy: Contesting Mūlid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 2 Google Scholar.

5 “Pope Shenouda's Words on the Day of Our Bishop Aghathun's Passing,” in Qawqab Lamaʿ fi al-Kanisa; Niyyafat al-Anba Aghathun, ed. anonymous (Ismailia, Egypt: Ismailia Bishopric and the Monastery of St. Paul, 1999), 9.

6 Amira Mittermair writes that in Egypt today, the category of “the poor” is largely understood through economic and material paradigms, with faqīr (impoverished, poor) understood as someone unable to earn a living (e.g., due to a physical disability) and maskīn as someone who lacks resources to earn a living (due to unemployment); her interlocutors also draw on a Qurʾanic understanding of poverty, as those in the need of God, adding a spiritual dimension as well. Mittermair, , “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: The Egyptian Uprising and a Sufi Khidma,” Cultural Anthropology 29 (2014): 54–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 2014, Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistic (CAPMAS) estimated that 26 percent of Egypt's 90 million inhabitants live in poverty, with 13 percent unemployment (and 24 percent for women); see al-Jihaz al-Markazi li-l-Taʿbiʾa al-ʿAma wa-l-Ihsaʾ al-Misri, accessed 1 February 2017, http://www.capmas.gov.eg. Within the Coptic Orthodox Church, Christians also categorize the poor as ikhwāt al-rabb (the Lord's brothers and sisters). The term is directly inspired from a Biblical verse (Matt. 24:35-40) in which Christ embodied material need and referred to giving as a direct encounter with the divine.

7 Framed within a Biblical salvation narrative of spiritual immortality after a pious life and/or a saintly death, Coptic Orthodox conceptions of a “heavenly citizenship” (al-waṭan al-samāwī) articulate a penultimate belonging in a heavenly nation in the afterlife. It is also a critical component of the Church's performative and piety politics in contemporary Egypt. See Ramzy, Carolyn, “To Die Is Gain: Singing a Heavenly Citizenship among Egypt's Coptic Christians,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 80 (2014): 649– 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Texts 25/26 (1990): 67 Google Scholar; Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 106–8Google Scholar. While I am aware that mūlid pilgrims also cultivate their own subaltern counterpublics in various ways, my ethnography here only extends to the Holy Family Choir and its use of popular Christian taratīl.

9 Schielke, “Policing Ambiguity,” 540.

10 Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. While Mahmood largely avoided an overdetermining grid of socioeconomic class in her work on Egyptian women's piety in a burgeoning mosque movement, here I want to highlight the role that class plays in Coptic religious ritual, and specifically, a bodily performance of faith through song. While a Bourdieusian understanding of habitus implies distinction of class, I draw on Talal Asad's analysis of habitus to “analyze the body as an assemblage of embodied aptitudes” as it is shaped by class. See Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993): 75–76 Google Scholar.

11 For more on neoliberal piety and giving in Egypt and how it reconfigures religious practices in line with economic rationality, productivity, and privatization, see Atia, Mona, Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Schielke, Perils of Joy, 19.

13 Eliade, Mircea first outlined the concept of a festival's “center” and “periphery” in his pivotal edited work Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: World Publishing Co., 1963)Google Scholar.

14 Brown, Peter, The Cult of the Saints: Its Ride and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3 Google Scholar.

15 Schielke, Perils of Joy, 44.

16 Jennifer Peterson writes about the rise of sampling Sufi inshād in Egyptian dance music and popular influences in contemporary Sufi piety. See “Playing with Spirituality: The Adoption of Mūlid Motifs in Egyptian Dance Music,” Contemporary Islam 2 (2008): 271–95; and “Sampling Folklore: The “Re-Popularization of Sufi Inshad in Egyptian Dance Music,” Arab Media and Society 4 (2008), accessed 1 February 2017, http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=580.

17 Bohlman, Philip, “Pilgrimage, Politics, and the Musical Remapping of the New Europe,” Ethnomusicology 40 (1996): 387 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid., 396.

19 For more on the a mūlid’s sense of suspended time, see Schielke's discussion “The Time of the Extraordinary” in Perils of Joy, 48–52; For more on the sense of cyclicity in music, see Becker, Judith, “Time and Tune in Java,” in The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems, ed. Becker, A. and Yengoyan, A. (New York: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1979): 197–210 Google Scholar.

20 Wegner, Phillip writes about the role of “utopian narrative” as way to navigate social spaces of the modern state in Imaginary Communities: Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), xviii Google Scholar. Also, in their pivotal work, Victor and Edith Turner describe the pilgrimage experience as one of the most extreme forms of the liminod phenomenon; see Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 1–39.

21 Schielke, “Policing Ambiguity,” 544–47.

22 The state's disciplinary efforts extended to everyday public soundscapes when there were attempts to synchronize the azan, the Muslim call to prayer, under government control. The process did not succeed but highlighted the state's understanding of religious soundscapes as important national publics in which to engage citizens’ pious polity; see Atia, Building Houses in Heaven, 81–82.

23 In religious contexts, women's voices are regarded with strong ambivalence, as they are also associated with temptation, pleasure, and distraction from prayer. See van Nieuwkerk, Karin, A Trade like Any Other; Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Nieuwkerk, Van, Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt's Islamic Revival (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

24 See, among many others, Starrett, Gregory, Putting Islam to Work: Education Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Sedra, Paul, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelical Reforms and Education in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2011)Google Scholar.

25 Armbrust, Walter, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9 Google Scholar.

26 Schielke, Perils of Joy, 85.

27 Schielke, “Policing Ambiguity,” 550.

28 The name is also likely due to the fact that the mountain used to be a significant site of hibernation for migratory birds. See Gabra, Gawdat and van Loon, Gertrud J.M., The Churches of St. Egypt: From the Journey of the Holy Family to the Present Day (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 238 Google Scholar. Finally, the mountain is also known as Gabal al-Kaff, or “Mountain of the Palm,” after a miraculous tale in which Christ placed and imprinted his hand on the mountain. See Evettes, B. T. A and Butler, A. J., eds., The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighboring Countries Attributed to Abu Salih, The Armenian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 218 Google Scholar.

29 In Egypt, Christians and Muslims alike revere Virgin Mary as a “shared saint” and one who, in mass public media, is celebrated for bringing people of different faiths together. Angie Heo explores the significance of growing Marian cults and practices of religious identification and differentiation in “The Virgin Between Christianity and Islam: Sainthood, Media, and Modernity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2013): 1–22.

30 Nadr (vow making) are not only financial donations that pilgrims offer to the saints in exchange for miracles rendered. But, walking up the mountain stairs, I learned that nadr can also include various forms of voluntary bodily suffering or hardship, as interlocutors offered to walk to the festival from their home villages and up the mountain, while others swept and cleaned the long staircase up Gabal al-Tayr (personal communication with the author, 10 May 2010). For more on nadr, see Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 7. For nadr in Coptic contexts, see Elizabeth Oram, “Constructing Modern Copts: The Production of Coptic Christian Identity in Contemporary Egypt” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2004), 215.

31 David Frankfurter gives more details of what pilgrims might do to receive baraka, such as collecting dust from the stones or the oil lamps near the shrine, sleep near sites to receive dreams of the saints, as well as listen to and sing their hagiography in song. He adds that, if they are able, people also write down requests that are slipped into the shrine. Frankfurter, David, “Approaches to Coptic Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. Frankfurter, David (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 4 Google Scholar. The cave of the Holy Family was covered with these little written hand notes, while names had been etched into the walls and the plexiglas over the site.

32 Like discussions and performances of taratīl, Marian apparition narratives also have political dimensions. See Heo, Angie, “The Virgin Made Visible: Intercessory Images of Church Territory in Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012): 361–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Father Matta, personal communication with the author, 11 May 2010.

34 ʿAbd al-Masih, Father Bishoy, Tarikh ʿIbarshiyat Dimyat (Hilmiyyat al-Zaytun, Egypt: Damietta Diocese, 1990), 216 Google Scholar.

35 Taha is particularly celebrated as a populist and shaʿbī singer for his well-known nationalist song “Ana Asli Falah” (I Have Peasant Roots).

36 For a thorough analysis of the Coptic Sunday School movement, see Reiss, Wolfram, Erneuerung in der Koptisch-Orthodoxen Kirche: Die Geschichte der Koptisch-Orthodoxen Sonntagsschulbewegung und die Aufnahme ihrer Reformansätze in den Erneuerungsbewegungen der Koptisch-Orthodoxen Kirche der Gegenwart (Hamburg: Hamburg Literaturzentrum, 1998)Google Scholar; and Hassan, S.S., Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

37 Notes from the first General Committee for Sunday Schools in 1922 in Sinout Delware Shenouda, “Madaris al-Ahad: Qissat al-Qarn al-ʿIshrin,” Majallat Madaris al-Ahad (November and December 2001): 47. For more on Habib Girgis, see Bishop Anba Suriel, Habib Girgis, Coptic Orthodox Educator and a Light in the Darkness (New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2017).

38 Sinout Delware, “Madaris al-Ahad: Qissat al-Qarn al-ʿIshrin,” 47.

39 Carolyn Ramzy, “To Die Is Gain.”

40 Many of his poems were first put to song by the now famous duo, Faisal Foad and violinist Gamal Zikry. Today, Fouad regularly appears on Christian satellite TV, while Zikry has been ordained a priest, Father Antonious Zikry, and serves in St. Catharine's of Ontario, Canada.

41 Shenouda III, Pope, Intilaq al-Ruh, 16th ed. (Cairo: Amba Rueiss, 2009)Google Scholar.

42 Mariz Tadros details Pope Shenouda's career and political encounters with Presidents al-Sadat, Anwar and Mubarak, Husni in “Vicissitudes in the Entente between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the State in Egypt (1952–2007),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 269 Google Scholar.

43 Sedra, Paul, “Class Cleavages and Ethnic Conflict: Coptic Christian Communities in Modern Egyptian Politics,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relation, 10 (1999): 228 Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., 224.

45 On the channel al-Haya 2, well-known media critic ʿAmr Adib questioned the Pope's recent communication with the president, to which the patriarch replied: “First, we wanted to check on him [niṭammin ʿalay] and we wanted to tell him that we are with you [iḥna maʿāk].” When Adib's coanchor Rola Kharsa pressed him, “That we [the Coptic Community] are behind you?” he replied, “Yes, I told him that we are behind you.” See Raʾi al-Baba Shenouda fi Thawra 25 Yanayir wa-l-Hizb al-Watani, YouTube video, accessed 27 June 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUU93DIxRHk.

46 Heikal, Mohame, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat (New York: Random House, 1983), 162–63Google Scholar.

47 “Pope Shenouda's Words on the Day of Our Bishop Aghathun's Passing,” in Qawqab Lamaʿ fi al-Kanisa, 9.

48 Amir Rafla, HFC Director, sermon between songs, 28 May 2011.

49 The choir raised a total cost 170,000 LE from their own funds for these religious materials as well as to rent buses, tents, and sound equipment for its performance. Amir Rafla, personal communication with the author, 5 June 2010.

50 This is the author's translation of the Arabic; for more on Maher Fayez's ministry see Ramzy, Carolyn, “Autotuned Belonging: Coptic Popular Song and the Politics of Neo-Pentecostal Pedagogies,” Ethnomusicology 60 (2016): 434–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Mona Atia write about daʿwa as a “call or invitation” of preachers towards an “Islamic lifestyle” or public piety. Atia, Building Houses in Heaven, 60.

52 There were a number of Protestant denominations whose services and song ministries permeated Gabal al-Tayr. Though Bishop Pavnutius refused to grant many of these groups rent permits on festival grounds, ministries such as the local Apostolic Church purchased offices just outside of the diocese's jurisdiction and sent their representatives to proselytize among the village's Orthodox Christian community. Father Matta, personal communication with the author, 11 May 2010. Along with the HFC's presence at the mūlid, the largest Coptic Evangelical Church in Cairo, Qasr al-Dubara, has sent down spiritual servants from Cairo to preach, serve, and sing. A Presbyterian organization, the Egyptian Bible Society, also organized a children's service only an hour before the HFC and volunteers from Abu Siffayyin presented their own Sunday School lessons. For more on Protestant activism, see Dowell, Anna, “Landscape of Belonging: Protestant Activism in Revolutionary Egypt,” International Journal of Sociology 45 (2015): 190–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 This number is taken from the HFC's secret Facebook group.

54 Another extension of the HFC's ministry includes members of the choir who stay behind in Cairo and, maintaining anonymity, simply pray for the success and safety of the choir's trip. Amira Rafla, personal communication with the author, 5 June 2010.

55 In her work, Mona Atia highlights that charity and daʿwa play a critical role in the formation of contemporary Egyptian Islamic subjectivities, and what she calls neoliberal piety. The growth of daʿwa in Egypt, she argues, is an unintended consequence of the state's co-optation of Islam. Afraid of the state's crackdown on Islamist organizing, volunteers have joined informal efforts to sermonize and serve the poor. Atia, Building Houses in Heaven, 60. Elizabeth Oram argues that in Coptic contexts the growth of iftiqād visits to people's homes has extended the Church's surveillance power over its communities. Oram “Constructing Modern Copts,” 215.

56 HFC and Samalut diocese volunteer iftiqād service, 30 May 2011.

57 Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿa Lebanon (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 186 Google Scholar. The Turners also write about how “good works” are central to the pilgrimage experience in religious festivals and are a part of the drama's climax: “No one good work will ensure ultimate salvation; but in the popular view it ensure many occasion of grace (baraka) as rewards for a good work done freely out of a desire for salvation and for the benefits of others.” Turner & Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 17.

58 As far as I can tell, no one really kept a close relationship with any local pilgrims from their ministry in Gabal al-Tayr.

59 For more on the mūlid's Great Night, see Schielke, The Perils of Joy, 29.

60 Morning sermon, Samalut diocese, 29 May 2011.

61 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 67; Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas with Lawrence, Fredrick (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

62 Hirschkind, The Ethnical Soundscape, 106.

63 Ibid., 107.

64 See Cesari, Jocelyne, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 More importantly, the Church has considerable control over their civic lives, beginning with questions of marriage and civic “personal status.” See Rowberry, Ryan and Khalil, John, “A Brief History of Coptic Personal Status,” Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern & Islamic Law 3 (2010): 81–139 Google Scholar.

66 For more about clerical authority in women's lives, see Armanios, Febe and Amstutz, Andrew, “Emerging Christian Media in Egypt: Clerical Authority and the Visualization of Women in Coptic Video Films,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 513–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Personal communication with Lola, 30 May 2011.

68 Shenoda, Anthony, “The Politics of Faith: On Faith, Skepticism, and Miracles among Coptic Christians in Egypt,” Ethnos 77 (2012): 481 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Hirsckind, The Ethical Soundscape, 176.

70 Large mūlid festivals can emerge as a site where women experience harassment. See Schielke, The Perils of Joy, 33.

71 The Arabic title for this song is “Nawari Ya Kanisat al-Masih” (Shine, O Church of Christ). Field recordings, 30 May 2011, Gabal al-Tayr, Samalut, Egypt.

72 Warner, Michael, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 67.

74 Ibid., 68.