Ordinary Copts: Ecumenism, Activism and Belonging in North American Cities, 1954-1992

This dissertation takes the oral testimonies of immigrants as the point of departure and seeks to restore agency to modern Coptic Orthodox Christians as a heterogeneous group. It charts the everyday social relations, religious duties and occupational demands of immigrant families and rejects a culturally driven interpretation that sees Copts as indistinguishable from their religion. In this materialist approach, immigration and the process of ethnicization that followed were conditioned by socialization in Egypt, spatial-temporal settlement patterns, and the integration of family and church in diversifying Canadian and US cities. It proposes two distinct but complimentary arguments. First, Copts who left urban centers in Egypt following the 1952 Free Officers revolution did not form insular, hermetically sealed communities following immigration. Instead, Copts integrated in Toronto, Montreal, and the New York and New Jersey area in two distinct ways: either choosing a two-way process of acculturation or cautious adaptation which best preserved their ethno-religious particularity. Second, Copts arrived with two kinds of ethnic cultures: sacred and secular. Whether church activism, cultural commemoration, or later diasporic nationalism, their lay initiatives were not uprooted from Egyptian soil and replanted in North America nor wholly reinvented with western values. Rather, institutional development was an adaptive process which drew on past experience in modern Egypt and the demands of their new environments. The two arguments about the material and spiritual aspects are grounded in the social world of Copts and the notion that a transnational analysis which attends to the heteroglossia of competing narratives among migrating actors is how we understand and appreciate this history.