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This book, first ethnographic attempt, examines negated spaces,
practices, and relationships that have been intentionally or
unintentionally dismissed from academic and non-academic studies,
articles, reports, and policy papers that investigate and debate
the experiences of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. By taking
the Coptic identity and faith to bars, liquor stores, coffeehouses,
weed gatherings, prisons, casinos, night clubs, brothels, dating
applications, and porn sites, this book argues that airing out this
"dirty laundry" points to the limits of victimhood and activist
narratives that shape the representation of Coptic grievances and
interests on both national and international levels. By introducing
misfits who exist in the shadows of the well-studied Coptic
rituals, traditions, miracles, saints' apparitions, and street
protests, the book highlights the contradiction between the
centrality of sin to the (Coptic) Christian tradition and theology,
on one hand, and on the other hand the dismissal of lives that are
dominantly labelled as sinful while simultaneously studying Copts
as agents or victims of history and in today's Egyptian society.
Drawing on many years of fieldwork accompanied and preceded by
periods the author spent as a student and a lay servant in
different forms of services in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the book
acknowledges the recent anthropological work that is critical of
how the secular West and its academia misrepresent God and His
believers in the Middle East. However, the fact that this book
extends its arguments from "ethnographic confessions" collected
from who deal with God on a daily basis since their childhood, it
investigates the implications and consequences of inviting God to
be part of an anthropological study that complicates aspects of
repentance and salvation among the largest Christian minority in
the Middle East.
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