The Great God Pan Still Lives
Ed Simon reviews Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
by Gerard Russell. Continue Reading →
Tag: coptic christians
Copts in a Revolutionary Age: Egypt’s Last Secularists?
Jared Malsin reports from Cairo on the political choices facing Coptic Christians in today’s Egypt. Continue Reading →
Manufacturing Visions:A Review of "The Virgin, the Copts and Me"
By Abhimanyu Das
Namir Abdel Messeeh’s highly entertaining documentary The Virgin, the Copts and Me is a curious beast, a bit like one of those clever New Yorker articles that start off making you think it’ll be about Batman but end up being about the tax obligations of the 1%. Only, in this case, it’s not entirely clear whether the thematic sleight-of-hand was artistic choice or just lucky accident. Either way, this narrative slipperiness is both what’s interesting and troublesome about this frustrating picture, easy to like but difficult to recommend.
The saga begins with the French-Egyptian filmmaker (the family emigrated to France in 1973), sitting down with his family to watch a fuzzy videotape of an alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary. Further discussion reveals that this is one of a spate of such sightings, experienced mostly by the oft-persecuted Christian Coptic community in Egypt. Interestingly, a few Muslims had claimed to experience these holy visions as well. This curious cultural hook is all Messeeh – a secular skeptic – needs to decide on making a documentary about the phenomenon.
The film’s tendency toward distracting self-referentialism is already front-and-center. Messeeh spends a chunk of time ‘documenting’ his attempts to find a financier and win his family over to the project’s cause. All this is done with great comic flair. We get an early introduction to the most memorable character in the film – his domineering mother Siham who continually expresses doubts about her son’s ability to pull this off. Unfortunately, much of this feels staged. It seems unlikely that Messeeh happened to have an HD camera running at a family gathering during which he is hit by a perfectly blocked creative epiphany. The film is full of what look to be staged scenes, contrived narrative setups and pre-arranged dialogue, raising the question (unintentionally, in my view) of whether this is a documentary at all. Messeeh is in every scene, an unapologetic puppet-master. At every turn, the developments feel arranged as opposed to observed. Continue Reading →
Manufacturing Visions:A Review of “The Virgin, the Copts and Me”
By Abhimanyu Das
Namir Abdel Messeeh’s highly entertaining documentary The Virgin, the Copts and Me is a curious beast, a bit like one of those clever New Yorker articles that start off making you think it’ll be about Batman but end up being about the tax obligations of the 1%. Only, in this case, it’s not entirely clear whether the thematic sleight-of-hand was artistic choice or just lucky accident. Either way, this narrative slipperiness is both what’s interesting and troublesome about this frustrating picture, easy to like but difficult to recommend.
The saga begins with the French-Egyptian filmmaker (the family emigrated to France in 1973), sitting down with his family to watch a fuzzy videotape of an alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary. Further discussion reveals that this is one of a spate of such sightings, experienced mostly by the oft-persecuted Christian Coptic community in Egypt. Interestingly, a few Muslims had claimed to experience these holy visions as well. This curious cultural hook is all Messeeh – a secular skeptic – needs to decide on making a documentary about the phenomenon.
The film’s tendency toward distracting self-referentialism is already front-and-center. Messeeh spends a chunk of time ‘documenting’ his attempts to find a financier and win his family over to the project’s cause. All this is done with great comic flair. We get an early introduction to the most memorable character in the film – his domineering mother Siham who continually expresses doubts about her son’s ability to pull this off. Unfortunately, much of this feels staged. It seems unlikely that Messeeh happened to have an HD camera running at a family gathering during which he is hit by a perfectly blocked creative epiphany. The film is full of what look to be staged scenes, contrived narrative setups and pre-arranged dialogue, raising the question (unintentionally, in my view) of whether this is a documentary at all. Messeeh is in every scene, an unapologetic puppet-master. At every turn, the developments feel arranged as opposed to observed. Continue Reading →
Liberalism Killing the Copts
Reuters reports that Egypt’s Coptic Christians are receiving an unprecedented amount of foreign support; subsequently they fear “a backlash from Muslims who could resent special attention to a minority at a time when all Egyptians are suffering economic hardship and political uncertainty.” Which reminds us of a provocative article by Marc Michael that Al Jazeera posted in November. Of the march by Coptic Christians on October 9th that led to 20 deaths– a march protesting not the Egyptian government but the burning of a building that was slated to become a church–Michael writes:
…this march inscribed itself in a liberal project of identity politics – a politics based around the notion that irreducible differences occur naturally in society, that the interest-groups coalescing around them have specific needs and rights, which the state ought to protect against the tyrannical rule of the selfish majority. To many Third-World ‘minorities’, this type of contemporary Anglo-Saxon liberal thought represents a certain temptation, a flirtation with a distant, spectacular and utopian modernity that happens in Europe or in the United States. Copts are in no way immune to that dangerous attraction, particularly so considering the very high proportion of the Coptic diaspora living in Canada, the US or Europe. It is in that sense that liberalism is killing the Copts: in cheering them to embrace their estrangement from Egyptian society, to value their alienation as an end in itself, and to seek the legal support of the state in establishing their difference as a social fact.
Religious Ghettoization of Egypt
From Marc Michael’s “Is liberalism killing the copts?” at Al Jazeera:
Imperial liberalism not only reinforced lines of fracture in local social fabrics, but often engineered them, by inventing traditions and mythological pasts, linguistic and ethnic groupings. To this day a majority of Copts subscribe to the “Hamitic Hypothesis”: that Copts are a separate race with a separate language, that they are not Arabs but descendants of the pharaohs, the original Afro-Nilotic people of the land; in biblical terms, the accursed progeny of Ham rather than Sham.