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CHAPTER 1
Remembering Martyrs
Martyrdom is a love sacrifice burning. ... Its scent fills the whole universe, attracting all hearts of purity and filling them with jealousy and desire so that they can go along on the heavenly road.
Mothers of the Convent of Amir Tadrus, Harat al-Rum, "An Introduction to Martyrdom," preface to The Biography of the Great Martyr Prince Tadrus al-Shatbi (Sirat al-Shahid al-?Azim al-Amir Tadrus al-Shatbi) This anonymous hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies.
Michel de Certeau, "To the Ordinary Man," preface to The Practice of Everyday Life
ALEXANDRIA OF 2011: BETWEEN THE PASSION AND THE RESURRECTION
On January 1, 2011, a car bomb ripped through the Two Saints' Church in the Sidi Bishr neighborhood of Alexandria. The blast left twenty-four dead and over two hundred injured, transforming the New Year's Eve mass into a bloody midnight nightmare. In the following weeks, red-and-black posters of the cross with the crescent covered the Mediterranean promenade and permeated the urban squares of Cairo's neighborhoods. These posters of Christian and Muslim solidarity publicized sentiments loud and clear: "No to Terrorism, Yes to Egypt! [La li-l-irhab, na'am li-Misr!]."
For mourning Coptic Christians, however, the target of public reproach was neither terrorism from abroad nor sectarian conflicts at home. Their message of protest was rather directed at the failure of their political and spiritual leaders to protect them. On January 2, the funeral for the twenty-four new Alexandrian martyrs, or the "Two Saints' Martyrs" (Shuhada? al-Qiddisin), was held in St. Menas Monastery where an audience of thousands gathered with indignant rage. Seated in the front rows were the Church's highest-ranking bishops and Egypt's state dignitaries, including Alexandria's Governor 'Adil Labib. Behind these church and state leaders, the mood was stormier. Waving hand-held wooden crosses up and down in their hands, the crowds bellowed inside the cavernous cathedral: "With our souls, with our blood, we will redeem you, O Cross!" One martyr's relative cried out in pain: "Ya Samu'il! [Samuel!]." Others in the crowd demanded recognition from the Coptic Church's top figure Pope Shenouda who was absent at the event: "We want the Pope!"
Cameras for Aghapy TV, the Coptic Church's satellite television channel, broadcast the funeral live for Coptic viewers all over the world. At the center of the broadcast were the wooden coffins carrying the victims' bodies. The television footage alternated between the speakers and the people in the pews. Bishops Yu'annis and Bakhumius presided over the rituals of remembering the martyrs, speaking above the crowd's cries. Bishop Yu'annis invited the audience to reenvision the bodily fragments of martyrdom in Alexandria: "Dearly beloved, the event was terrifying [rahib]. So terrifying that fleshly parts of our beloved reached the sixth floor of the church! And so, our church was anointed with the blood of the martyrs!"
The congregation erupted into applause and cheers, chanting its refrain: "With our souls, With our blood, We sacrifice for you, O Cross!"
Bishop Yu'annis continued: "As dreadful as the scene of martyrdom [al-mashhad] was, how much more gloriously ascendant was the welcoming of their souls in heaven! And we remember what God said to Cain: 'The blood of your brother screams to me from the ground!' And God listens carefully to the blood of martyrs!"
Again, the crowds overwhelmed the bishop's voice with roaring cheers. The collective memory of violence stirred up the biblical scene of God holding Cain to account for Abel's death, building on fraternal tropes of Christian-Muslim unity in the shared blood of Egyptian nationhood. When the cathedral finally quieted down, Bishop Yu'annis began to carry out the Coptic Church's more administrative formalities: "We would like to thank our distinguished head of the Republic" — the crowds interrupted in protest, with many men and women standing and waving their hands furiously: "No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!"
Bishop Yu'annis signaled for silence. When an acceptable level of quiet was reached, he continued with the names of esteemed guests, reopening fresh wounds: "We would like to thank Alexandria's security forces" — once again, his ceremonial efforts roused deafening chants of rebuke: "No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!"
Bishop Bakhumius quickly took over presiding duties. Apologizing for Pope Shenouda's absence, he comforted the crowds and spoke about the martyrs in their last moments: "These are the ones who served the Lord in the last night of their lives with praises which reached the rooftops. Where God is, they are there because God loves them."
A new chant began gaining voluminous momentum throughout the pews and balconies. Slowly, the people directed their anger towards the defined target who was present at the funeral, Alexandria's Governor 'Adil Labib: "Remove the Governor! Remove the Governor! Remove the Governor! [Shil al-Muhafiz!]."
As Aghapy TV's cameras zoomed in on him, Governor 'Adil Labib's steely profile showed his refusal to wilt before the crowds around him. Bishop Bakhumius hurriedly moved to closing the liturgy, pressing ahead: "Where God is, they are there also because they died for his sake! And so, we are comforted that they left us as new martyrs who will intercede on our behalf!!"
Amid cheers and ululating trills, the coffins were hoisted and carried out of the monastery cathedral to the mausoleum outside. Crowds of angry Copts followed the martyrs' bodies, their cries voicing their collective indictment of the Coptic Church's failure to demand justice from Egyptian state officials for their communal loss.
Most Copts in Egypt and abroad did not make it to St. Menas Monastery, but watched Aghapy TV's live coverage of the martyrs' funeral instead. On January 2, 2011, I was tuned into Aghapy TV with several Copts inside the waiting room of a church in Heliopolis, an affluent suburb in northeast Cairo. We watched the flat-screen monitor together in silence for the most part, with the exception of a few quiet chuckles of satisfaction during the crowds' protests against the governor.
Aghapy TV's coverage closed with additional frames that interspersed visual images from the Two Saints' Church in Alexandria with select shots from The Passion of the Christ (2004), Mel Gibson's Hollywood blockbuster that depicts the final twelve hours of Jesus's life. The first frame presented the charred carcass of the bombed car on the streets of Sidi Bishr. The second frame was the bloody scourging of American actor James Caviezel's body. The third frame displayed the black body bags carrying the martyrs' bodies and the blood-splattered mural of Christ on the church's wall. The fourth frame was Caviezel's trembling wrist roped to the cross. The fifth frame featured the wounded bodies of Alexandria's victims in the hospital — bandaged, plaster-cast, scarred, singed, and bedridden.
In the final frames, the television screen turned pitch-black for a brief moment. Then, the luminous Caviezel as Christ reappeared, fully reconstituted into a resurrected whole. Gazing ahead with shining eyes, he appeared to look forward at a triumphant future.
AN INSTITUTION OF MARTYRS
Three weeks after the Alexandrian bombing, the January 25 uprisings launched protests nationwide demanding President Hosni Mubarak's resignation. Chanting for regime change, Christians and Muslims joined hands in their performances of interfaith unity against sectarian division. After the attack on the Two Saints' Church, images of the crescent with the cross had flooded the streets, fostering sympathy for the Copts' tragedy nationwide. The twenty-four deaths in Alexandria signified an attack against not only the Christian community, but also the entire Egyptian nation. The Alexandrian martyrs were one station on the road to Tahrir ("Liberation") Square.
The Coptic Church hierarchy, in support of the Mubarak presidency, prohibited its flock from joining the protests. And yet, as the crowds at St. Menas Monastery had already indicated, revolutionary sentiments overrode authoritarian alliances between leading bishops, state security forces, and Governor 'Adil Labib. The calls of Copts for justice and accountability were a stunning rebuke of the church-state entente which had repeatedly failed to protect them over the years. Pope Shenouda's absence at the funeral only attested to this chronic failure. More than anything else, the funeral was a public occasion for Copts to critically reflect on their own vulnerability and the limits of their communal representation in the hands of the Coptic Church's highest power-brokers. To this day, their cries go unanswered; no one has been charged yet for the murders in Alexandria of 2011.
This chapter argues that the Coptic Church is, foremost, an institution of martyrs. The ritual memory of holy deaths serves as the authoritative foundation for the making of the Coptic community and its self-representation. What does it mean to belong to the "community" of Coptic Christians? Who speaks for the Copts, and on what moral and political grounds? The Coptic Church's origin story lies in martyrdom: the martyrdom of its founding apostle and first pope, St. Mark, in Alexandria, and the glorious "Era of the Martyrs" which marks the beginning of the Coptic Calendar at 284 C.E. As historians of Coptic martyrology during Fatimid and Ottoman Islamic rule have shown, ritual narratives and depictions of holy deaths strengthened senses of communal identity and cohesion (Armanios 2011; Swanson 2015; cf. el-Leithy 2005). Currently, the political institution of papal authority and clerical-lay relations continues to crucially hinge on collective acts of remembering martyrs, old and new. At stake, therefore, in the memory of martyrdom is the possibility for communal self-transformation and the reordering of hierarchy internal to the Church. This possibility for communal self-transformation ultimately implicates the authoritarian politics of the Coptic Church and Egyptian state, a key target of revolutionary critique in Alexandria all the way to Tahrir.
Acts of picturing martyrdom are creative acts of communal self-institution, offering a margin of autonomy from the Coptic Church's more authoritarian impulses. Here, I am borrowing from philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis's notion of "social imaginary significations" that "institute" society, or more precisely, "institute a mode of being of things and of individuals which relate to them" (Castoriadis 1987:364). In its ritually imagined nature, the Coptic Church is reinstituted across each act of remembering scenes of holy suffering and violence. The visual memory of martyrdom organizes the ways in which Copts inhabit their collective past in divine sacrifice, reflect on the ethics of veneration, and evaluate their place in a larger body politic of collective representation. Social imaginaries of martyrdom are the common basis for Coptic communal belonging, promoted by the Coptic Church, even if they also eventually led to a deafening rebuke of its steep hierarchy and its concentration of power in the hands of the few. It was, after all, the high-ranking Bishops Yu'annis and Bakhumius themselves who had declared the potential for "new martyrs who will intercede on our behalf!" Rather than reinscribe a macropolitical model of the Coptic Church as an actor defined by its pope and his inner circle of power-brokers, this chapter aims to highlight the more creative and dynamic components of the Coptic Church's self-institution from below. Understanding the imaginary life of martyrdom as a critical resource for communal accountability is one way to do this.
Collective images of the self are necessary for communal self-transformation. For the theological body politic of the Coptic Church, the chief medium is the Eucharist, which serves as the vehicle of ritual incorporation into the holy community on earth. Martyrs' relics are mimetic representations of Christ's passion and resurrection, mediating the Church's origins through, for example, the "fleshly parts of the beloved" and the "blood of martyrs" from Alexandria of 2011. In moments of tragic violence, today's Copts frequently invoke the old patristic saying, "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." The relics of martyrs, ancient and contemporary, ultimately signify the Church's foundational beginnings in remembering death and resurrection, suffering and triumph. This political theology of communal origins and transformation is what organizes relations of past and present, incorporating new martyrs into a sacred realm of commemoration that encompasses Christ, St. Mark the apostle, and all the glorious martyrs from late antiquity to the future. Relics are the media for instituting shrines and disseminating memory, ordering social relations of authority and transmission; they are the constitutive images of a "polity" of blood (cf. "textual polity," in Messick 1993; Anidjar 2014).
Offering collective images of the self, relics structure capacities for communal self-reflection and evaluation. At each scene of remembering death, the holy bodies of martyrs are the media of visualizing the community as a total whole, from a heavenly viewpoint and from the eschatological standpoint of the resurrection. Relics, in other words, are the visual media of envisioning the space and time of "transcendence," or the abstracted site of communal self-objectification from on high. As scholarly literature on the Protestant semiotics of transcendence has shown (Keane 2007; Engelke 2007; also Pietz 1985, 1987), debates around material expressions of divine presence are centered on social and political questions of agency and value. As we will see in this chapter, in the Orthodox semiotics of transcendence, the visual imaginary of parts and whole activates the social institution of relations between the clergy and laity, as well as between the ancient and contemporary martyrs. Visual acts of remembering death and resurrection are the means of reflecting on social relations of belonging and evaluating the powers of the holy priesthood and their ethical limits. Images like the Eucharist and holy relics embody ritual forms of self-representation that powerfully enable acts of communal self-reflection and self-critique. By reinvoking persons and places of holy suffering, martyrs' relics offer the collective possibility for demanding an account of violence and its proper moral response.
Imaginaries of martyrdom are productive, releasing political forms of agency and potential redress. Parallel to other minority communities who suffer violence, Copts are all too often relegated to the "neolachrymose" slot of eternal persecution. As historian of modern Copts PaulSedra has emphasized (2011), the main scholarly task at hand is to "restore agency" to the Coptic community, against dominant accounts of its passive victimhood. Ethnographies of martyrdom elsewhere have usefully shown how ritual aesthetics of martyr commemoration advance resistance movements (Khalili 2007; Allen 2013), post–civil war reconstruction (Volk 2010) and minoritarian politics of secular pluralism (Tambar 2014). Exploring visual cultures of Sunni and Shi?i martyrdom (cf. Ayoub 1987; Aghaie 2004), this literature also suggests overlapping sensibilities with Orthodox and Catholic cults of martyr veneration in the Arab Middle East. Acts of martyr commemoration thus extend the potential of spanning religious and communal boundaries, directing collective forms of agency toward national and international ends. Notably, Egypt's Christians and Muslims who died as "martyrs of Tahrir Square" are explicitly valued as sacrifices for the sake of national unity and revolution.
For the Coptic community, however, the main object of reordering the terms of political agency is the Coptic Church institution. The pope and a handful of bishops continue to function as the de facto spokespeople for the Coptic community and represent Copts within statist horizons of Christian-Muslim nationhood. Rituals of remembering holy deaths offer the power, from within the terms internal to the Orthodox tradition, to disrupt authoritarian rituals of overlooking violence. Relics mediate the authoritative origins of the church body politic, offering resources for collective self-transformation and setting limits on papal authority, clerical hierarchy, and the church-state entente. At the heart of uniting Christians and Muslims are precisely the terms of mediating communal recognition — especially in moments when events of violence place minoritarian belonging to the nation at risk.
This chapter on the politics of martyrdom and memory proceeds in six parts. In the first, I examine the foundational authority of St. Mark's death and the visual techniques that interlink his bodily locus with imaginary scenes of holy violence. The second part turns to the ritual making of popes and their bodily images, focusing on the material transfer of papal authority from St. Mark to Pope Shenouda via relics. In the third and fourth parts, I pay more detailed attention to the Coptic Church's means of self-institution in its mass incorporation of the laity. To be specific, I delve into the ritual semiotics of clerical-lay relations entailed in the Eucharist and the cinematic aesthetics of envisioning the dynamics of death and resurrection. The chapter closes with a consideration of new martyrs, like the Alexandrian martyrs of 2011, and the ways in which they introduce vistas of communal belonging and intercommunal mediation in Egypt and beyond.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Political Lives of Saints"
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