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Books by Paul Sedra

Research paper thumbnail of From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Papers by Paul Sedra

Research paper thumbnail of Ecclesiastical Warfare: Patriarch, Presbyterian, and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Asyut

Research paper thumbnail of Copts and the Millet Partnership: The Intra-Communal Dynamics behind Egyptian Sectarianism

Journal of Law and Religion, 2014

The sparse scholarship on the political role of Coptic Christians in modern Egypt almost always t... more The sparse scholarship on the political role of Coptic Christians in modern Egypt almost always takes the Coptic Orthodox Church as a point of departure, assuming that the head of the church, the Coptic patriarch, is not only the spiritual leader of the community but its political leader as well. This article argues that the disproportionate attention afforded to the Coptic Orthodox Church in this scholarship has obscured intra-communal dynamics of the Copts that are essential to an understanding of their political role. Through an analysis of historical struggles between the Coptic clergy and the Coptic laity for influence in Egyptian politics, as well as a particular focus on how these struggles have played out in the arena of personal status law, the article demonstrates that Egyptian politics and Coptic communal dynamics are deeply intertwined, to a degree often disregarded both by Copts and by Egypt analysts.

Research paper thumbnail of Class cleavages and ethnic conflict: Coptic Christian communities in modern Egyptian politics

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 1999

Whereas the political claims of Egyptian Islamists have attracted much attention in Western media... more Whereas the political claims of Egyptian Islamists have attracted much attention in Western media and scholarly circles, only rarely have such circles acknowledged the role played by ethno-religious consciousness among Coptic Christians in Egyptian political life. This article analyzes the development of this consciousness through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the socio-economic roots of ‘Coptist’ political action. Accorded particular attention is the emergence of an explicitly sectarian political discourse among groups of middle-class Copts in the 1970s, and the related spread of ethnic consciousness through the Coptic community at large since that time.

Research paper thumbnail of Imagining an Imperial Race: Egyptology in the Service of Empire

Research paper thumbnail of Writing the History of the Modern Copts: From Victims and Symbols to Actors

History Compass, 2009

Scholars of Egyptian history and politics face a dearth of analytical studies of the modern Copti... more Scholars of Egyptian history and politics face a dearth of analytical studies of the modern Coptic Church and community. This state of affairs is due to various factors of a methodological, theoretical, and practical nature. In practical terms, both the Egyptian state and the Coptic Orthodox Church have discouraged exploration of Coptic identity given the political taboo of sectarianism. In theoretical terms, Edward Said’s Orientalism led to concerns among scholars about overemphasizing faith in their analyses of Middle Eastern history and politics. In methodological terms, modern Coptic historiography remains hobbled by an ‘enlightenment paradigm’ which discounts the political potential and action of subaltern and clerical forces within the community. This article urges a concern with the ways in which these subaltern and clerical forces shaped the Coptic ‘discursive tradition’ in the course of the twentieth century, as a means by which to restore Copts to modern Egyptian historiography, not as victims or symbols, but as actors in their own right.

Research paper thumbnail of Reconstituting the Coptic community amidst revolution

Research paper thumbnail of John Lieder and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethos at Work Among Nineteenth-Century Copts

Journal of Religious History, 2004

The English Church Missionary Society (CMS) dispatched a contingent of missionaries to Egypt in 1... more The English Church Missionary Society (CMS) dispatched a contingent of missionaries to Egypt in 1825. This article analyses the methods and impact of that contingent. The schools that the CMS missionaries introduced are cast not as vehicles of enlightenment — as is frequently the case in mission historiography — but as technologies of power. Specifically, the article recounts how the head of the mission, the Reverend John Lieder, deployed Lancaster schools among the Coptic Christians of Cairo to effect not merely a spiritual, but further, a cultural conversion of this Orthodox community. Lieder, his predecessors, and his contemporaries in the Mediterranean field sought to instil in the Copts the “evangelical ethos” of industry, discipline, and order. The article links this CMS project of cultural conversion to the process of state-building in Egypt. Indeed, Lieder was a pioneer purveyor of technologies of power that would prove indispensable to late-nineteenth-century elites in their efforts to produce, in the subaltern strata of Egyptian society, industrious and disciplined political subjects resigned to their lowly positions in the Egyptian social order.

Research paper thumbnail of Missionaries, Peasants, and the Protection Problem: Negotiating Coptic Reform in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of Schooling for a Modern Coptic Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of Ecclesiastical Warfare: Patriarch, Presbyterian, and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Asyut

Research paper thumbnail of Exposure to the eyes of God: monitorial schools and Evangelicals in early nineteenth‐century England

Paedagogica Historica, 2011

Through a close analysis of the links between nineteenth-century Protestant missionary thought an... more Through a close analysis of the links between nineteenth-century Protestant missionary thought and the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) this article suggests that to distinguish Enlightenment educational and social reform from evangelism is mistaken. Emblematic of the social reform projects which emerged in England as responses to the challenges of the French Revolution and rapid urbanisation, the BFSS was the outgrowth of Joseph Lancaster’s efforts at spreading the method of education he pioneered, the monitorial system, throughout the British Isles and, ultimately, the world. Despite the strong association between the BFSS and various utilitarian thinkers, evangelicals of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England came to view the Society and the monitorial system as means by which to integrate all the peoples of the world into the Lord’s dominion. Becoming part of that dominion entailed subjecting oneself to constant moral scrutiny, and monitorial schools were regarded as a means by which to ensure such self-examination. In short, missionaries seized upon monitorial schools because their aims were parallel to those of educational reformers in the metropole. Where home reformers aimed at the normalisation of the body of English political subjects, the development of the English social body, missionary reformers aimed at the normalisation of the body of God’s children.

Op-Eds and Essays by Paul Sedra

Research paper thumbnail of The Subversive Power of Grief

A reflection on the state-run funeral for the victims of the Butrusiyya Church massacre (11 Decem... more A reflection on the state-run funeral for the victims of the Butrusiyya Church massacre (11 December 2016)

Research paper thumbnail of How Not to Understand Egypt's Sectarianism

Research paper thumbnail of Quick Thoughts: Paul Sedra on the Pope’s Visit to the Middle East

Research paper thumbnail of Quick Thoughts: Paul Sedra on the IS Massacre of Egyptian Copts in Libya

Research paper thumbnail of The Salaita Case and Middle East Studies

Research paper thumbnail of Church-State Relations in Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of The Revolution and History

The January 25 Revolution has made rewriting the history of modern Egypt essential. Under the mil... more The January 25 Revolution has made rewriting the history of modern Egypt essential. Under the military dictatorship, the chief milestones of Egyptian history were 23 July 1952 and 6 October 1973 – the overthrow of the monarchy by the Free Officers and the breach of the Bar Lev Line, respectively. These were milestones made by the Egyptian military. The revolution demands a history oriented not to the victories of the Egyptian military, but to the struggles of the Egyptian people for liberation. A revolution whose bywords were “silmiyya, silmiyya” (“peaceful, peaceful”), demands a history whose focus is not triumph by force of arms, but triumph by force of numbers, argument, and civil disobedience.

Research paper thumbnail of Faten Hamama and the 'Egyptian difference' in film

Research paper thumbnail of From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of Ecclesiastical Warfare: Patriarch, Presbyterian, and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Asyut

Research paper thumbnail of Copts and the Millet Partnership: The Intra-Communal Dynamics behind Egyptian Sectarianism

Journal of Law and Religion, 2014

The sparse scholarship on the political role of Coptic Christians in modern Egypt almost always t... more The sparse scholarship on the political role of Coptic Christians in modern Egypt almost always takes the Coptic Orthodox Church as a point of departure, assuming that the head of the church, the Coptic patriarch, is not only the spiritual leader of the community but its political leader as well. This article argues that the disproportionate attention afforded to the Coptic Orthodox Church in this scholarship has obscured intra-communal dynamics of the Copts that are essential to an understanding of their political role. Through an analysis of historical struggles between the Coptic clergy and the Coptic laity for influence in Egyptian politics, as well as a particular focus on how these struggles have played out in the arena of personal status law, the article demonstrates that Egyptian politics and Coptic communal dynamics are deeply intertwined, to a degree often disregarded both by Copts and by Egypt analysts.

Research paper thumbnail of Class cleavages and ethnic conflict: Coptic Christian communities in modern Egyptian politics

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 1999

Whereas the political claims of Egyptian Islamists have attracted much attention in Western media... more Whereas the political claims of Egyptian Islamists have attracted much attention in Western media and scholarly circles, only rarely have such circles acknowledged the role played by ethno-religious consciousness among Coptic Christians in Egyptian political life. This article analyzes the development of this consciousness through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the socio-economic roots of ‘Coptist’ political action. Accorded particular attention is the emergence of an explicitly sectarian political discourse among groups of middle-class Copts in the 1970s, and the related spread of ethnic consciousness through the Coptic community at large since that time.

Research paper thumbnail of Imagining an Imperial Race: Egyptology in the Service of Empire

Research paper thumbnail of Writing the History of the Modern Copts: From Victims and Symbols to Actors

History Compass, 2009

Scholars of Egyptian history and politics face a dearth of analytical studies of the modern Copti... more Scholars of Egyptian history and politics face a dearth of analytical studies of the modern Coptic Church and community. This state of affairs is due to various factors of a methodological, theoretical, and practical nature. In practical terms, both the Egyptian state and the Coptic Orthodox Church have discouraged exploration of Coptic identity given the political taboo of sectarianism. In theoretical terms, Edward Said’s Orientalism led to concerns among scholars about overemphasizing faith in their analyses of Middle Eastern history and politics. In methodological terms, modern Coptic historiography remains hobbled by an ‘enlightenment paradigm’ which discounts the political potential and action of subaltern and clerical forces within the community. This article urges a concern with the ways in which these subaltern and clerical forces shaped the Coptic ‘discursive tradition’ in the course of the twentieth century, as a means by which to restore Copts to modern Egyptian historiography, not as victims or symbols, but as actors in their own right.

Research paper thumbnail of Reconstituting the Coptic community amidst revolution

Research paper thumbnail of John Lieder and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethos at Work Among Nineteenth-Century Copts

Journal of Religious History, 2004

The English Church Missionary Society (CMS) dispatched a contingent of missionaries to Egypt in 1... more The English Church Missionary Society (CMS) dispatched a contingent of missionaries to Egypt in 1825. This article analyses the methods and impact of that contingent. The schools that the CMS missionaries introduced are cast not as vehicles of enlightenment — as is frequently the case in mission historiography — but as technologies of power. Specifically, the article recounts how the head of the mission, the Reverend John Lieder, deployed Lancaster schools among the Coptic Christians of Cairo to effect not merely a spiritual, but further, a cultural conversion of this Orthodox community. Lieder, his predecessors, and his contemporaries in the Mediterranean field sought to instil in the Copts the “evangelical ethos” of industry, discipline, and order. The article links this CMS project of cultural conversion to the process of state-building in Egypt. Indeed, Lieder was a pioneer purveyor of technologies of power that would prove indispensable to late-nineteenth-century elites in their efforts to produce, in the subaltern strata of Egyptian society, industrious and disciplined political subjects resigned to their lowly positions in the Egyptian social order.

Research paper thumbnail of Missionaries, Peasants, and the Protection Problem: Negotiating Coptic Reform in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of Schooling for a Modern Coptic Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of Ecclesiastical Warfare: Patriarch, Presbyterian, and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Asyut

Research paper thumbnail of Exposure to the eyes of God: monitorial schools and Evangelicals in early nineteenth‐century England

Paedagogica Historica, 2011

Through a close analysis of the links between nineteenth-century Protestant missionary thought an... more Through a close analysis of the links between nineteenth-century Protestant missionary thought and the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) this article suggests that to distinguish Enlightenment educational and social reform from evangelism is mistaken. Emblematic of the social reform projects which emerged in England as responses to the challenges of the French Revolution and rapid urbanisation, the BFSS was the outgrowth of Joseph Lancaster’s efforts at spreading the method of education he pioneered, the monitorial system, throughout the British Isles and, ultimately, the world. Despite the strong association between the BFSS and various utilitarian thinkers, evangelicals of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England came to view the Society and the monitorial system as means by which to integrate all the peoples of the world into the Lord’s dominion. Becoming part of that dominion entailed subjecting oneself to constant moral scrutiny, and monitorial schools were regarded as a means by which to ensure such self-examination. In short, missionaries seized upon monitorial schools because their aims were parallel to those of educational reformers in the metropole. Where home reformers aimed at the normalisation of the body of English political subjects, the development of the English social body, missionary reformers aimed at the normalisation of the body of God’s children.

Research paper thumbnail of The Subversive Power of Grief

A reflection on the state-run funeral for the victims of the Butrusiyya Church massacre (11 Decem... more A reflection on the state-run funeral for the victims of the Butrusiyya Church massacre (11 December 2016)

Research paper thumbnail of How Not to Understand Egypt's Sectarianism

Research paper thumbnail of Quick Thoughts: Paul Sedra on the Pope’s Visit to the Middle East

Research paper thumbnail of Quick Thoughts: Paul Sedra on the IS Massacre of Egyptian Copts in Libya

Research paper thumbnail of The Salaita Case and Middle East Studies

Research paper thumbnail of Church-State Relations in Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of The Revolution and History

The January 25 Revolution has made rewriting the history of modern Egypt essential. Under the mil... more The January 25 Revolution has made rewriting the history of modern Egypt essential. Under the military dictatorship, the chief milestones of Egyptian history were 23 July 1952 and 6 October 1973 – the overthrow of the monarchy by the Free Officers and the breach of the Bar Lev Line, respectively. These were milestones made by the Egyptian military. The revolution demands a history oriented not to the victories of the Egyptian military, but to the struggles of the Egyptian people for liberation. A revolution whose bywords were “silmiyya, silmiyya” (“peaceful, peaceful”), demands a history whose focus is not triumph by force of arms, but triumph by force of numbers, argument, and civil disobedience.

Research paper thumbnail of Faten Hamama and the 'Egyptian difference' in film

Research paper thumbnail of Thinking about Egyptian politics from the bottom up

Arguably, it is in the realm of the informal that most politics actually happens in Egypt, becaus... more Arguably, it is in the realm of the informal that most politics actually happens in Egypt, because the realm of the informal is the realm of ordinary people and their ordinary concerns. It is in the realm of the informal that people negotiate their day-to-day survival. ​In the realm of informal politics, Egyptians have always demonstrated just how adept and resilient they are in coping with the predations of formal politics.

Research paper thumbnail of The ‘sectarianization’ of Egyptian society

Research paper thumbnail of Iraq Through the Lens of 1882

Not unlike the ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign on Baghdad with which the Americans began their assault o... more Not unlike the ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign on Baghdad with which the Americans began their assault on Iraq, the invasion of Egypt began with a brutal bombardment of the port city of Alexandria, undertaken from British ships in the Mediterranean, during which large swaths of the city were leveled. Not unlike the campaign of lies regarding weapons of mass destruction with which the American invasion was justified, the British invasion was in large part precipitated by a campaign of lies regarding Egyptian attacks on Europeans and their interests. Not unlike the ex-post-facto justifications offered for the American invasion, to the effect that Iraq was delivered from dictatorship through Western beneficence and would thenceforth enjoy democratic governance, the British invaders purported to offer Egyptians the opportunity to learn how best to govern themselves by following their invaders’ example.

Research paper thumbnail of ا لأقباط وصراع السلطة على ا لأحوال الشخصية

Research paper thumbnail of Films for the Classroom: Silences of the Palace

Research paper thumbnail of Manoubia and Her Son

Yesterday the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three women-two Liberians and a Yemeni-for, in the... more Yesterday the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three women-two Liberians and a Yemeni-for, in the words of the selection committee, "their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work." While

Research paper thumbnail of Egypt in 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Life or Death: Anxiety About the Urban in 1950s Egyptian Cinema

Life or Death (Haya aw mawt) is a classic of Egyptian cinema, widely interpreted retrospectively ... more Life or Death (Haya aw mawt) is a classic of Egyptian cinema, widely interpreted retrospectively by scholars as an ode to progress, modernity, the nation, and the chief emblem of such, the burgeoning city. Indeed, the film was included in the list of ‘the most important 100 Egyptian films,’ commissioned by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and assembled by Ahmed el-Hadari, Samir Farid, and Kamal Ramzi in 2006. Released in 1954, the film is associated by critics and scholars with the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution, which paved the way for the end of empire in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power, the rule of Egypt by Egyptians – all in all, a spirit of nationalism and civic duty.

This paper suggests that scholars have, in their enthusiasm for the pathbreaking cinema that was emerging in the revolutionary 1950s, neglected the suspicion and ambivalence about the urban that pervade a film like Life or Death. Essentially, in focusing upon the bustling urban life that the film so richly illustrates, scholars have set aside this invocation of death in the title as unimportant or inconsequential. Yet, this is a film much concerned with death. That is to say, this is a film about the potential death of a way of life, a death whose perceived imminence is lamented to no small extent in the film.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Mériam Belli’s An Incurable Past: Nasser’s Egypt Then and Now in Arab Studies Journal 23, 1 (2015), 404-407.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Alan Mikhail’s The Animal in Ottoman Egypt in International Journal of Turkish Studies 22, 1 and 2 (2016), 109-111.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Lucie Ryzova’s The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular Age

Research paper thumbnail of Review of S. S. Hasan’s Christians Versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality

Middle East Journal, 2004

Research paper thumbnail of Scott W. Hibbard’s Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India, and the United States

Review of Middle East Studies, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Vivian Ibrahim’s The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity

Arab Studies Journal, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine. By Laura Robson (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2011) 239 pp. $55.00

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). Pp. 262. <span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mn>35.00</mn><mi>c</mi><mi>l</mi><mi>o</mi><mi>t</mi><mi>h</mi><mo separator="true">,</mo></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">35.00 cloth, </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:0.8889em;vertical-align:-0.1944em;"></span><span class="mord">35.00</span><span class="mord mathnormal">c</span><span class="mord mathnormal" style="margin-right:0.01968em;">l</span><span class="mord mathnormal">o</span><span class="mord mathnormal">t</span><span class="mord mathnormal">h</span><span class="mpunct">,</span></span></span></span>19.95 paper.

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Beth Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014). Pp. 272. $24.95 paper.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Raouf Abbas and Assem El-Dessouky, The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837–1952 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Translated from the Arabic by Amer Mohsen with Mona Zikri. Edited by Peter Gran. Pp. 296. $29.95 cloth

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Nancy L. Stockdale, Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women, 1800–1948 (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2007). Pp. 264. $59.95 cloth

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2009

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Robert Tignor's Egypt: A Short History

Journal of World History, 2012

Research paper thumbnail of Course Syllabus: Egyptian Revolutions Past and Present

Research paper thumbnail of Course Syllabus: Nasserism on Film

SUMMER 2015 Email: pdsedra@sfu.ca Office hours: Tues. and Wed. 12 noon--1 pm This course will int... more SUMMER 2015 Email: pdsedra@sfu.ca Office hours: Tues. and Wed. 12 noon--1 pm This course will introduce students to the most productive period in the history of Egyptian cinema, the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to place the films of the period in their political and social contexts, tracing their development as responses to the Free Officers' revolution of 1952 and Nasser's subsequent rule of the country. The analysis will focus on images of village poverty, colonial violence, family discord, and the subjugation of women. Students will consider the possible links between these images and such state priorities as eradicating 'backwardness' and 'superstition,' pacifying the 'social body,' and consolidating 'modern' forms of subjectivity -among them, the companionate spouse, the productive worker, and the patriotic citizen. Given the uneven state of the literature and the limited availability of film prints, the course aims neither at comprehensiveness nor at theoretical or methodological uniformity.