Overview

Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and ISIS’s rise in 2014, Egypt’s Copts have attracted attention worldwide as the collateral damage of revolution and as victims of sectarian strife. Countering the din of persecution rhetoric and Islamophobia, The Political Lives of Saints journeys into the quieter corners of divine intercession to consider what martyrs, miracles, and mysteries have to do with the routine challenges faced by Christians and Muslims living together under the modern nation-state.   Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork, Angie Heo argues for understanding popular saints as material media that organize social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt toward varying political ends. With an ethnographer’s eye for traces of antiquity, she deciphers how long-cherished imaginaries of holiness broker bonds of revolutionary sacrifice, reconfigure national sites of sacred territory, and pose sectarian threats to security and order. A study of tradition and nationhood at their limits, The Political Lives of Saints shows that Coptic Orthodoxy is a core domain of minoritarian regulation and authoritarian rule, powerfully reversing the recurrent thesis of its impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world.

Full Product Details

9780520297975

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Reviews

Students and academics alike will find rich conversations here and a model ethnography that is candid in the challenges and omissions of capturing the ephemeral materialities of faith. * Anthropolgica * The book is a fascinating read for scholars of contemporary religion, modern Egypt, minority studies, material mediation of religion, and the entanglements of religion and politics. * Reading Religion * The theoretical contributions of this book extend beyond sociocultural anthropology, Middle Eastern Studies, and Coptic Studies and offer a framework for minority studies for scholars of multiple disciplines interested in religion, state politics, and citizenship. * The Middle East Journal *

The theoretical contributions of this book extend beyond sociocultural anthropology, Middle Eastern Studies, and Coptic Studies and offer a framework for minority studies for scholars of multiple disciplines interested in religion, state politics, and citizenship. * The Middle East Journal * The book is a fascinating read for scholars of contemporary religion, modern Egypt, minority studies, material mediation of religion, and the entanglements of religion and politics. * Reading Religion * Students and academics alike will find rich conversations here and a model ethnography that is candid in the challenges and omissions of capturing the ephemeral materialities of faith. * Anthropolgica * Heo is to be commended for showing the messy complexity of particular events and situations on the ground. . . . This work thus makes an important contribution to the literature on the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Coptic community more broadly, and to Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *

The book is a fascinating read for scholars of contemporary religion, modern Egypt, minority studies, material mediation of religion, and the entanglements of religion and politics. * Reading Religion * The theoretical contributions of this book extend beyond sociocultural anthropology, Middle Eastern Studies, and Coptic Studies and offer a framework for minority studies for scholars of multiple disciplines interested in religion, state politics, and citizenship. * The Middle East Journal *

Author Information

Angie Heo is Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago.  

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