A minority at the bar: Revisiting the Coptic Christian (in-)visibility

Abstract

How do Coptic Christians make sense of a predominantly negated practice such as drinking and selling alcohol? What do they do when they are forced or voluntarily desire to join alcoholic spaces that are refused by ruling religious and social forces? In this article, I build on the unorthodoxy of beer and liquor as per the hegemonic Coptic Orthodox Church tradition of khidma in Egypt by pointing out to completely overlooked interactions that Coptic Christians have at alcoholic spaces. I argue that experiences of Coptic Christians at a bar complicate how and where Copts strive for a ‘visibility’ (i.e. recognition) in a country of a Muslim majority. Especially with the brutal crackdown on the post-2011 street activism following the 2013 coup, predominantly negated venues of entertainment and fun give us hints to important meanings of agency in the lives of members of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East.

A bar on Christmas Eve

It is Eastern Christmas Eve of 2017 – the 6th of January – as nearly 90% of Christians in Egypt celebrates it. I wanted to escape the service that was held at my Coptic Orthodox neighborhood parish in the district of Shubra in north Cairo. At this parish, I used to be a Sunday Schools teacher for a few years. I used to be a khādim (servant) according to the Coptic Orthodox Church tradition of khidma (service). At this parish, moreover, I initially planned to begin my fieldwork in the following summer. However, for now, I did not want take notes while people attending the Christmas mass and to start the practical part of my doctoral studies. I also did not want to meet those who used to be my students at the Sunday Schools and other friends at the parish. My identity and its affiliated sensibilities urged a belief that there are some places where one would separate from God as well as from the religious rituals and practices that would help Coptic Christians to form contacts with Him. Instead of meeting God and people’s religious lives at the parish, hence, I chose to go to a bar located on the roof of an old hotel in the same neighborhood to drink some beer and to smoke my favorite honey flavor of Shīsha (Hookah).

Eventually, one of the many satellite channels that were screening the mass of the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral was displayed. For the third consecutive year, the congregants at the Cathedral and beyond were waiting for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to join the prayers that are led by the Coptic Patriarch Towadros II. During that night, the bar had around 50 clients, who were both Muslim and Christian men of different age categories. This male-dominated space gives the guests a kind of ‘freedom’ to break the ‘sociability norms’ that regulate the mixed-gender compartment of the bar (van Nieuwkerk, 1992; Ghannam, 2002: 10; De Koning, 2006; Deeb and Harb, 2013). Exchange of insulting words and sexual jokes with a loud voice together with smoking pot and circulation of pornography are just some of the behaviors that take place at the upper section of the bar. This is unlike the lower section, which is called the ‘the family corner’ (rukn al-‘ā’ilāt), and in which single males like myself are not allowed to enter most of the time.

It is approaching 11 in the evening. Mr. Bules, the Coptic Christian manager of the male-only section of the bar, wanted to listen to the Coptic Pope’s Christmas Eve sermon. One of the Christian guests, who was sitting close from my table, and who used to be a colleague of mine at the Sunday Schools when we were young, laughed and told the owner sarcastically: ‘believe me this is not appropriate. It cannot happen (mysh hayenfa‘). It does not fit (mysh lāye’).’ The comment was met by an agreement by some of the clients including myself. ‘It cannot happen’ and ‘it does not fit’ were not because we did not want to see President al-Sisi shaking hands with Pope Towadros, indicating a close political partnership between the institutions of the State and the Church. Although some of the clients of the bar might criticize the visit of al-Sisi to the Cathedral because they would be against any political role played by the Pope in their lives and before the State, this was not the most important problem in this particular context. Rather, we have learned at the Sunday Schools service at our neighborhood parishes since our childhood that the constellation of beer and Jesus cannot come together in one place. We have learned that beer is ‘atharah (stumbling block); that is, a sin that would disturb and prevent the formation of a good relation with the divine. Hence, pressured by the opinions of his guests, the owner of the bar displayed soccer matches and dancing video clips instead of the liturgy.

How do Coptic Christians make sense of a predominantly negated practice such as drinking and selling alcohol at a bar? What do they do when they are forced or voluntarily desire to join alcoholic spaces that are rejected by ruling religious and social forces? In this article, I take the bar debate between Mr. Bules’s screening of the liturgy and the clients’ refusal of this act as my point of departure to investigate other debates and experiences of Coptic Christians in an alcoholic space. Firstly, I refer to a historical debate that took place in 1938, and that attempted to negotiate a place for alcohol in the Coptic Christian Orthodox tradition. Afterwards, I illustrate the continuities of this debate, specifically following the ‘Revival Movement’ of the Coptic Church and its monopoly over the meaning of orthodoxy in the lives of the Copts.

Building on the unorthodoxy of beer and liquor as per the hegemonic Coptic Church tradition of khidma, I point out to completely overlooked interactions that Coptic Christians have in alcoholic spaces. Amid the 2011 uprisings in Egypt – known as the ‘Arab Spring’ – different media and research agencies have manifested a great interest in knowing who the Copts are, and how they should be positioned in relation to their Muslim counterparts. Nevertheless, while many academic writings have significantly emphasized this ‘visibility’ in the course of the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak and the subsequent nationwide street protests, they have failed in discussing what happened in the aftermath of the 2013 coup with the crackdowns on public spaces and the retreat of Copts and all groups out of the streets. In this regard, I argue that the experiences of Coptic Christians in a space that is theologically and socially constructed as ‘rubble’ complicate how and where Copts strive for a ‘visibility’ (i.e. recognition) of their faith and identity in a country of a Muslim majority. Before and after the 2011 uprisings, the struggles of Coptic consumers and traders of beer and wine have been absent from mainstream debates and negotiations around the Coptic positioning in Egypt. I suggest the importance of adding these struggles to the popular sites of activism in which Copts contest the alleged dominant representation of their ‘Copticness’ by the institution of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Beyond the chronology of the ‘Arab Spring’ political upheaval, predominantly negated venues such as bars point to less valued places, yet important, meanings of agency and activism in the lives of members of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East.

Debating alcohol

On the evening of 20 October 1938, a verbal debate was held at a Coptic association in the governorate of Giza called Gam’iyyat Dars al-Kitab al-Mukaddas (The Bible Study Society). The debate was entitled Al-Khamr wa al-Muskyr fi Kanisat Al-Giza al-Qibtiyya (Liquors and Alcohol in the Coptic Church of Giza). It took place between Salib Yusuf Yanni, who was advocating taḥlīl (permitting) the drinking of alcohol among Coptic Christians on one hand, and Zahir Daniyyal al-Ghazzawi, who was against this habit on the other hand. The debaters employed verses from the Bible to strengthen their positions before the audience who would have to vote for a supposed right opinion at the end of the discussion.

Firstly, Salib Yanni told the famous first miracle that Jesus conducted at the wedding at the village of Cana. Based on Yanni’s interpretation of the second chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus did not oppose the act of drinking, since he transformed water into wine after the guests of the wedding had run out of the latter (John 2: 1–12). Moreover, Yanni utilized a verse from St. Paul’s first message to his disciple Timothy to further support his preference: ‘Stop drinking only water and use a little wine instead, because of your stomach and your frequent ailments’ (1 Timothy: 5–23).

Secondly, the counter responses of Zahir El-Ghazzawi were also derived from the Bible and almost from the same stories. El-Ghazzawi noted that the wine Jesus made is similar to the wine he used during the Last Supper. He pointed to what the master of the feast at Cana told the bridegroom: ‘Everyone serves the good wine first…then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.’ For El-Ghazzawi, thus, a ‘good’ wine does not cause people to lose their balance, since the ‘creator of the universe’ made it. Moreover, El-Ghazzawi argued that although St. Paul told Timothy that wine might heal some illnesses, this of course does not mean that wine is always allowed. According to El-Ghazzawi, one should always remember a person’s body is ‘God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in its midst. If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple’ (1 Corinthians 3:16–17).

The document I found at the archives in Cairo does not indicate any further information about the background of the two debaters. It does not tell how the debate ended, or what the final vote was. I would like to emphasize that what happened at Gam’iyyat Dars al-Kitab al-Mukaddas was not unique. Around the same time, there were attempts by many other associations to negotiate the discursive meanings of scripture related not only to alcohol but also to other daily concerns in the lives of the Copts (Ibrahim, 2011). The point was to make the Bible an accessible text for everyone to morally judge her/his own doings. In a similar vein with what anthropologist Gregory Starret (1998) called the ‘objectification’ and the ‘functionalization’ of Islam, the idea was to question how to put the Bible and other theological texts ‘to work’ through effective roles and rules in people’s lives (Sedra, 2009).

Although there were multiple attempts to combine the work of the associations under one umbrella, it was hard to realize this unification due to the number of associations scattered across the country (Abdelrahman, 2004: 144–46). Moreover, the associations had different interests and agendas that were implemented on the limited level of a neighborhood in Cairo and Alexandria or of a village in other governorates in Upper (i.e. south) or Lower (i.e. north) Egypt. Indeed, the geographical and organizational fragmentation of entities such as the Coptic associations is always a problem for those who attempt to homogenize a group of people imagined as sharing an identity, a history, and/or faith. This fragmentation might also be read as a sign of the ‘backwardness’ and ‘ignorance’ of such a group, since it reflects the absence of a clear authority that would take care of producing the orthodox doctrine (Asad, 1986; 1993; 2003).

These pleas set the basis for and motivated the failed unification attempts as well as the subsequent successfulness of the Revival Movement (Iḥya’) of the Coptic Church. During the second half of the 20th century, members of what is known as the Sunday Schools Movement occupied the clerical hierarchy of the Coptic Orthodox Church. They established a centralized geographical plan to guarantee the belonging of each Copt to the parish next to her/his home. Through a network of services and activities called khidma (service), the main purpose of the Movement was to form a client-patron relationship between the entire Coptic Christian community on one hand and the seat of the Coptic Patriarchate in Cairo on the other hand (Van Doorn-Harder, 2017: 17; Van Doorn-Harder and Vogt, 1997; Sedra, 1999; Hasan, 2003; O’Mahony, 2007; Tadros, 2013; Elsässer, 2014).

The Sunday Schools Movement, which started as an association in 1918, has attempted to monopolize the production of religious knowledge among Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. The other small-scale fragmented associations were not able to cope with the support that their counterpart got. Through what political scientist Mariz Tadros (2009) called the ‘political entente’ between the State and the Coptic Church, the stakeholders of the Sunday Schools association reproduced and formulated a close alliance with the Egyptian autocratic systems that followed the 1952 coup. Especially during the long papal period of Patriarch Shenouda III (1971–2012), many theologians and theological writings were marginalized, excluded, and excommunicated. The books and the sermons of Pope Shenouda in addition to the other ones published under his authorization have controlled the religious teachings offered not only at the neighborhood parishes and chapels but also at the other associations.

With respect to the positioning of alcohol in the lives of the Copts specifically, the latter is absolutely prohibited according to many of Pope Shenouda’s sermons and writings. Although Pope Shenouda III passed away some years ago, his legacy has still dominated and defined the mainstream Coptic Christian faith and beliefs. Interestingly, I noticed that in the newest editions of the official book of the Coptic Orthodox Church Eucharist (al-Khulāgī al-Mukaddas), the word khamr (wine) is replaced with the word ‘asīr al-karmah (grape juice) to stress the non-alcoholic nature of the liquid used during the liturgy (San Peter, 2004: 111). Moreover, during my fieldwork, I checked out the educational syllabuses of 35 Coptic Orthodox parishes and 48 Coptic Orthodox associations in the Egyptian cities of Cairo, Alexandria, and Minya. I did not find a single debate similar to the one of Gam’iyyat Dars al-Kitab al-Mukaddas. During my presence as a khādim at one of the neighborhood parishes in Shubra between 2009 and 2013, there were strict instructions to situate the question of alcohol outside the Coptic Orthodox tradition. Talking with children and youth about the possible orthodoxy of alcohol was a non-negotiable matter. Alcohol is a sin and gathering around alcohol is an abomination to God (St. Takla, 2018).

Does the disappearance of talks about alcohol at neighborhood parishes and its rituals mean an ultimate end of such negotiations? How can I study Coptic Christians whose everyday lives encounter alcohol either through consuming, selling, or manufacturing it? Copts still drink at their homes, at weddings, on beaches, and at bars. They still ask each other to buy certain brands of wine or whisky from duty free markets when one of them travels abroad. Such negotiations and their distance from the rules and regulations of the Revival Movement together with the teachings of Pope Shenouda III will guide the rest of this article.

Two Gods, one bar

In the coming sections, I ethnographically delve into how Copts at the bar contest and negotiate the Coptic Orthodox Church prohibition of alcohol. First, I briefly situate such prohibition in wider historical and geographical contexts. As mentioned in the introduction vignette, the bar I visited during my fieldwork is located on the roof of an old hotel in the Shubra neighborhood. Once the clients would enter the gate of the hotel and take the elevator, they would move to a zone ‘invisible’ from the streets. In the eyes of the Egyptian law, the bar in Shubra is a legal space. It is one of the many spaces in Egypt that has a license allowing the consumption of alcohol. Moreover, there are companies in Egypt that produce beer, wine, and alcohol. Most of the Egyptian cities have liquor shops from which Egyptians are allowed to buy their favorite drinks. But when doing so, Egyptians would make sure to keep their purchases in black plastic bags. Especially in Cairene neighborhoods like Shubra, they would not drink in public spaces or be seen drinking beyond the legalized licensed spaces that are hidden either on rooftops or behind closed doors and windows.

The first person I usually met during my visits to the bar in Shubra is the receptionist of the hotel. Sometimes, he would remind me that the bar would only serve non-alcoholic drinks in what are known as ‘the dry nights’ (al-layāly al-nashfa). The latter mainly refer to Islamic holidays and celebrations such as the holy month of Ramadan, the Prophet’s birthday, and the Islamic Year’s Eve. During these days, all the beverage shops and outlets have to remain closed. According to the dominant interpretation of the Islamic Sharia in Egypt, liquor is ḥarām (forbidden). Nevertheless, at certain times of the year, the ḥarām of the Sharia discourse expands to include even the legal alcoholic spaces. Consumers of alcohol would advise each other to purchase a stock of beer and wine. They would search for alternative spaces to drink. Their private households would be the best option. They might also find bars and casinos that would break such regulations through special licenses or by building special underground financial and social networks with the closest police stations.

Indeed, there are legal, societal, and religious ambiguities and dichotomies connected to alcohol in the Egyptian society. Despite of the presence of a huge legal market, which is allowed and administrated by different Egyptian State institutions (for example, the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Industry), and from which many people benefit in economic and leisurely terms, there is always an immoral aspect about such markets. Muslims and Christians at the bar in Shubra, who form relations with alcohol during their everyday lives, are aware that they violate rules prescribed by powerful religious dogmas. Especially during the second half of the 20th century, a lot of restrictions took place to discipline and to lessen the number of public alcoholic spaces (van Nieuwkerk, 1992: 35–9; see also Foda, 2014). The stakeholders of the ‘Islamic Revival’ (al-Saḥwa al-Islamiyya) were mainly the members of the Islamist groups of the Salafist and the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter worked on controlling all the interactions and relationships of one’s everyday life through imposing a certain interpretation of God’s commandments. Drinking alcohol works against the promises of going to heaven and of having an eternal life with the Prophet and his Companions. Moreover, those who consume alcohol have impure bodies, and those who sell alcohol are equally sinful because they help others to disobey God.

Samuli Schielke (2019) suggests dealing with God as an ethnographic object of study, whose power is not fixed, but rather varies according to people’s different experiences (see also Schielke, 2018). I build on Schielke’s invitation to allocate the interactions between two or more humans within a triadic set of relationships that always involve divine commandments. Beyond the secular/religious binary that imagine God through His total absence or presence, the divine commandments are always present everywhere, even in the bar and other ‘sinful’ places. This presence has to be studied through how people differently allocate their relationship with God with respect to other relations. Sometimes, for example, people may choose to submit to God and to the dominant interpretations of the ‘Islamic Revival’ while carrying out their entire daily tasks (Mahmood, 2005). In some other contexts, however, people might belittle or dismiss God’s role during some of their social habits or economic activities. To complicate Schielke’s argument, which mainly investigates Muslims in Egypt, I propose that Copts in general and in the bar in Shubra in particular, have to deal with ‘two Gods’ during their everyday lives due to their minority status.

Firstly, there is the ‘Christian God’, whose commandments are predominantly controlled through the regulations of the Coptic Orthodox Church, as previously mentioned. Secondly, Copts also put into consideration how the ‘Islamic God’ would be positioned with respect to their behavior and interactions. The latter God is more powerful than the Christian one because the majority of the population backs him. The latter is more present in the Egyptian streets. He is more heard and obeyed through the legal and moral commandments of the Egyptian State institutions. The ‘Islamic God’, moreover, might influence what the Christian one would say, or how He would intervene in people’s lives. Even through the institutionalized theological claims that always highlight the differences between the ‘two Gods’, it should be noted that they do not exist in two separable wholes. Despite their different doctrinal foundations, the ‘Revival’ project of Pope Shenouda III ‘appears as the mirror-image of the Salafist and the Muslim Brotherhood shumūliyya (totalitarian) project that aims to expand supposed Islamic norms and behaviors into public as well as private spaces’ (Guirguis, 2016: 74).

Negotiating ‘atharāt

Both the Revivals of the Coptic Church and its Islamic counterpart prohibited alcohol and its gatherings. Whereas it is ḥarām in the Islamic context, the prohibition has another connotation in the Christian one; that is, ‘atharāt (stumbling rock). In his book, Al-Hurūb al-Rūhiyya (Spiritual Warfares), Pope Shenouda III (1992: 24) emphasizes that one should take care of the ‘atharāt that could cause someone to commit sins. Pope Shenouda mentioned two types of ‘atharāt. Firstly, there are the ones that come to us, that impose themselves on us. Secondly, we have the ‘atharāt that people chase out of their free will. The second type, as Pope Shenouda notes, is worse because it stems from internal weaknesses; that is, internal desires and lusts that voluntarily push Copts to be tempted by and defeated before the devil.

For the Revival Movement and the tradition of khidma, the bar belongs to the second type of ‘atharāt. It is a space that holds inappropriate companionships that would not build a good religious life or relationship with God. This is the opinion not only of Pope Shenouda III and his book, but also of my family members and friends, especially when they knew about the theme of this article. During my fieldwork, many of my Coptic acquaintances in Egypt grew surprised, confused and annoyed, when they discovered that the bar will be one of my fieldsites together with other spaces that would definitely embrace ‘atharāt such as casinos, night clubs, brothels, prisons, and coffeehouses. I was met with opposition ranging from harsh critiques to mean sarcasm. I was told many times that these spaces could never be suitable representatives of the Coptic Christians in Egypt.

I will return to the question of what the suitable representation of the Copts means later. For now, I would like to emphasize my interest in and the importance of studying a space that is strongly constructed as ‘rubble’ (Gordillo, 2014). These spaces are commonly imagined to be unable to add any positive value to the religious lives of Copts. They should be kept aside and thrown out because they would lead to nothing useful with respect to the negotiations of the orthodoxy of the Coptic Christian tradition. In the aforementioned book, Pope Shenouda III cites the following verse from the Gospel of Mathew to emphasize the importance of getting rid of the ‘atharāt from one’s life: ‘If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell’ (Mathew 5: 29–30).

The presence of Coptic Christians at the bar constitutes another opinion that troubles the negative description of alcoholic spaces. In contrast to the theological interpretation of Pope Shenouda III and the ‘Revival Movement’, I understood during my fieldwork that bars and other alcoholic spaces might be quite nice venues to trace the continuities of the 1938 debate. Beyond the homogenous understanding of the ‘Revival Movement’ and the controlled theological knowledge at the neighborhood parishes, the clients and workers at the bar stress that negotiations around alcohol still take place within the Coptic community. My interlocutors had different positions regarding how the divine would be placed in an alcoholic space. ‘I don’t see the problem (mysh shāyef mushkelah).’ For example, this was the first answer that I remember from the Christmas Eve when I decided to begin my fieldwork. The manager of the male-only section of the bar, Mr. Bules, said it. It was his reaction to those who refused the screening of the liturgy.

In the bar on Christmas Eve, the Coptic clients sitting at the tables next to me seemed to have a consensus regarding the ‘orthodoxy’ of the tradition of the liturgy on one hand and the ‘unorthodoxy’ of the bar on the other hand. Even with their presence on the ‘unorthodox’ side, keeping this separation is important to define the good religious life from the wrong one. According to religious historian William A. Christian Jr.: ‘Orthodoxy […] after all, like all other great traditions, arose defining itself against what it was not’ (2018: 250). Nevertheless, Mr. Bules reminded his clients that one could not simply draw a clear line between what is ‘orthodox’ and ‘unorthodox’. Even with changing the channel that displays the liturgy, God will be always there. A few months later following the bar incident – in June 2017 – I returned to the bar to drink a couple of glasses of the local Egyptian whisky Auld Stag. It was an opportunity to ask Mr. Bules some questions about the Christmas Eve incident in particular and about his job in general.

Mr. Bules is nearly 50 years old. He began working at the bar some 20 years ago. He told me that his job might not ‘fit into the good religious life’ (mysh shoghlāna salīma belnesba lel dīn). This is because ‘many things happen at the bar that Jesus would not accept.’ Nonetheless, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Bules thought it would be nice to get some baraka (blessing) in his workplace by displaying the prayers of the liturgy. Moreover, when I approached his desk, I found the pictures of 6 Saints stuck on its wooden surface. The icons of St. Mary, St. Mena, St. Anthony, St. George, Archangel Mikhail, and Pope Cyril VI were covered by Mr. Bules’s accounting books, calculator and pens. There was also a small wooden cross on the wall behind the desk. ‘I am searching for anything that could keep a relation with Jesus and the Saints,’ Mr. Bules said. God is there, or at least there are the visual mediations of His holy people.

By the time I met him, Mr. Bules had not gone to his neighborhood parish for a few years. He used to attend the Sunday Schools service when he was young. After finishing his high school, he stopped attending any religious activities or services (i.e. khidma). In the bar on Christmas Eve, it was clear how even the ‘rubble’ might be useful for debating the Coptic Christian tradition. Using the terms of cultural geographer Doreen Massey (1994; 2005), Mr. Bules connected what is predominantly perceived as a ‘dim’ node (i.e. the bar) to a ‘bright’ one (i.e. the liturgy). He tried to imply division between them through the TV screen forming a constellation between what are assumed to be unrelated spaces.

I wonder where I would have known about Mr. Bules’s religious life or his insistence to formulate a relation with the divine, if I had not stumbled upon the bar on Christmas Eve. Through Mr. Bules and other employees at the bar together with their clients, I have started to pay attention to religious lives that take place at alcoholic spaces. These lives are not as visible as the televised Christmas service at the Cathedral, which has been visited by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during the previous few years. Such lives do not gain the same media coverage or academic attention as street demonstrations at which Coptic Christian symbols and faith are seen and heard in a predominantly Islamized state and society. As I will argue in what follows, however, the religious lives at alcoholic spaces and other negated ‘rubble’ are still important to investigate because they give us an idea of what is absent from such visible official events. They refer to missing interactions and relationships that are not exposed when reflecting debates around the positioning of the Coptic minority.

Striving for (in-)visibility

The security checkpoint at the entrance of the hotel that hosts the bar was never functioning. There was never a security guard present next to the gate. The receptionist would check my bag following a church bombing or other terroristic attacks that have frequently hit the Egyptian society during the last few years. Alcoholic spaces are imagined to be potential targets for extremist groups, since they are places at which different kinds of ‘hidden vices’ occur. The laptop and the notebook in my bag were reasons for a usual sarcastic question: ‘Are you going to study at the bar?’ For the consumers, the answer should definitely be a ‘no’. The bar is supposed to be a relaxing setting to forget about the exhaustion of ‘other’ working hours behind its doors.

For those who work at the bar, nonetheless, the latter is an important source of income. I met Romany at the elevator of the hotel during my fieldwork. Romany is a Coptic Christian from the Upper Egyptian city of Minya. He was in his early twenties when I met him in 2017. Romany shares the same background with those who succeed and precede him at this job. He used to spend boring long working hours every day at a very old and small elevator that barely takes 3 passengers. He was happy when his job changed, and he started to serve beer at the bar itself. In another context, Romany never told his parents or his Father of confession in Minya about his job. He says that he works at the elevator of a hotel, but he would never reveal where this elevator takes people. Before coming to Cairo, Romany used to be a khādim at the Sunday Schools: ‘There are no jobs in Minya. Coming to Cairo is the only way to make money. I pray to God to find another job other than the one at the bar. I am afraid people will know about my job. I do not have a problem . . . but it would be a problem for my family members and also for those whom I used to teach at the Sunday Schools . . . I do not want them to change their idea about me.’

In a similar vein as Romany, other Coptic Christians working at the bar have problems with their job. Michael and Atef are two Coptic brothers from Minya, who then planned to get married to two sisters. They do not consider themselves to be ‘real believers’ (mo’minīn bigad) as did Romany. They do not care much about God’s opinion about their presence at the bar. Still, they have to get a clerical marriage at the Church because this is the only accepted wedding ceremony that Copts in Egypt should socially and legally organize. Hence, it would be impossible for Michael and Atef to tell their parents and their tentative parents in law together with the priest that they work as servants at the bar. Michael and Atef are happy with the salary and the tips they get at the bar, but they also wish to find another position somewhere else. ‘There is nothing such as good or bad jobs . . . we earn more money than our friends who work as farmers in Minya or even those who work as taxi or truck drivers’, Atef once told me. He then proceeded by talking about how certain stagnant ‘‘adāt’ (customs) still control how some people differentiate the right from the wrong.

If Mr. Bules did not have a problem to have a place for God in his working place through the pictures of the Saints and the cross, Romany knows that God is not happy with his job. Like the clients who criticized Mr. Bules for screening the liturgy, moreover, Romany imagines that God should not be accompanying him at the bar. Whilst the clients did not want to meet God at a leisurely place where they seek fun and entertainment, Romany found God’s commandments to be missing from his source of income. Furthermore, despite of their different degrees of piety, Romany, Atef and Michael altogether agree that they should differentiate between the relationships they have outside and inside the bar. God, their parents, and their relatives at the neighborhood parishes would never grab a chair and share a glass of wine with the bar clients. At the bar, my Coptic interlocutors do not only carry out negotiations regarding the ‘orthodoxy’ of alcohol, but they also debate what has to be done in case one would have the belief that selling or consuming alcohol is an ‘unorthodox’ act that would never be blessed by a divine baraka. There are also discussions of what would be the case, if one would find nothing religiously wrong about beer or wine, but would still need to hide one’s relationship with such ‘negated’ objects in addition to the ‘negated’ spaces that serve them.

The absence of female clients or employees, where Romany, Atef and Michael are based, might be an adequate response to the above inquiries. Girls and women are not necessarily absent because they believe that drinking is a sin. Although this might be an important reason, the absence can be also because of other moral societal regulations that would force single women to stay away from a space where men exchange insults, sexual jokes, and pornography. Such gendered moral codes, nonetheless, are not present at the ‘family corner’ of the same bar in Shubra where single females and couples are allowed to drink and smoke. Moreover, during my fieldwork, I also visited other mixed-gender alcoholic spaces in Cairo and Alexandria. I had short conversations with Coptic Christian females, who serve and consume liquor. They have very similar stories to their male counterparts. For instance, they would be afraid to post on their social media accounts any pictures or videos that would indicate their presence at such spaces. Furthermore, they would sometimes make sure to work or to have their favorite drinks at bars located far from their households so as not to be seen by their Muslim neighbors and colleagues at work or other Copts whom they know at their neighborhood parishes.

Coptic Orthodox Christianity, as it is the case with many ethno-religious identities and traditions across the world, is not only about one’s faith in Jesus, Mary, or the angels. It is a mode of living a life that involves a set of relationships that one develops between heaven and earth (Orsi, 2005). Among these relations are the ones with the divine of course, but there are also other interconnected interactions with family members and friends. This is in addition to the interactions that one forms at the khidma of the neighborhood parish at which any Coptic Orthodox Christian gets baptized, receives the communion, attends the Sunday Schools classes, meets her/his father of confession, joins trips to religious and non-religious sites, among many other activities and practices. Last but not least, there is also the Islamic society that controls meanings of what is right and wrong in the lives of the people. Therefore, Coptic consumers and traders of alcohol are situated in a sea of conflicting interactions with God, with Muslim and Christian people and with religious and social forces. The challenge is to construct a balance of these interactions; that is, to be able to live different stories at multiple spaces that embrace contradictory interests, desires, pressures and anxieties.

Accordingly, I suggest thinking through the discursive negotiations and debates that are centered on how people differently allocate their everyday relationships, as it is the case with what scholars called the discursive negotiations that are concerned with the ‘true’ religious tradition(s) (Hirschkind, 2006; Luehrmann, 2018). The spatial discursiveness of relationships not only will allow an investigation of what ‘orthodoxy’ is and of how it should be cultivated in people’s everyday lives, but it will also make sense of practices that are predominantly constructed as unorthodox outsides; that is, of what people make out of them, and how people live them. In other words, I am particularly interested in situations and contexts, in which people neither want, are able nor desire to negotiate what constitutes a ‘good orthodox’ religious life. It is true that people like Mr. Bules somehow attempted to challenge the negation of alcohol in Egypt. Nonetheless, the tactics of (in-)visibility at the bar in Shubra and other alcoholic spaces that I visited during my fieldwork also manifest how some of my interlocutors prefer to stay silent about the hegemonic ‘unorthodoxy’ of alcohol during some of their everyday relationships. Whether or not they accept and believe in such ‘unorthodoxy’, it is better for them and for some of their daily interactions not to resist and to remain hidden from any negotiations that seek to find a place for alcohol within the Coptic Orthodox tradition.

Complicating the Coptic activism

Beyond but not disconnected from what happened at the bar on Christmas Eve, displaying the service on satellite channels in general is usually perceived among Copts as a challenge to their minority position in Egypt. Even if the liturgy does not exceed a few hours on the screen, it is a time when the Coptic books, symbols, hymns, sermons and rituals are made visible in public spaces (Iskandar, 2012: 41). This visibility is usually accompanied by a responsibility to proudly and openly talk about one’s relationships that such ‘Copticness’ entails. According to scripture, Copts are required to share and to proudly talk about what they believe in. We read in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mathew: ‘let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven’ (Mathew 5:16).

In another book by Pope Shenouda III called The Spiritual Man (1998), he writes that since God created Man in his image in perfection, the latter should be ‘perfect’ (kāmil) and ‘successful’ (nāgiḥ) in all what she/he does (12–13). Similar to what Jesus did during the Sermon on the Mount, Pope Shenouda emphasized how Copts should be the ‘salt’ of the earth and the ‘light’ of the world. Especially in relation to the their Muslim counterparts, Coptic Christians are required to be successful persons not only in their ‘spiritual’ life (Al-Ḥayāt Al-Rūḥiyya) but also in their ‘practical’ life (Al-Ḥayāt Al-‘Amaliyya) as well. In the same book, Pope Shenouda stressed: ‘not [to] forget that if you are not successful in your life, you will consequently become a stumbling block in any surroundings you live in, whether the family, the church, the service or the work. You will be a stumbling block to people who will ask in amazement: Is that how God’s children are?!’ (177).

The perfection that Pope Shenouda meant in The Spiritual Man (among many other similar books) would be guaranteed when a Copt would follow the ‘orthodoxy’ of the ‘Revival Movement’. However, the Coptic visibility has never been a homogeneous phenomenon. Many scholars from various disciplines have argued about the street demonstrations of Coptic Christians that accompanied and followed the 2011 uprisings in Egypt (Shenoda, 2011; Tadros, 2013; Lukasik, 2016; El-Gendi, 2017). The visibility of Copts in the streets, which were widely covered by all kinds of media, was read as an attempt to negotiate the role of the Coptic Church in the lives of its congregations. Doing so, Coptic protesters turned against not only State institutions but also the Coptic Church. They rejected the representation of Pope Shenouda III and his clerical hierarchy of their needs and demands before the political authorities.

In addition to the street demonstrations, anthropologists Anthony Shenoda (2010; 2012) and Angie Heo (2012; 2013; 2018) have also looked at other aspects of visibility that are not only necessarily situated in the revolutionary moment of 2011, but also still operate in dispute with the ‘entente’ between the state and the Church. The visibility that Shenoda and Heo write about is mainly connected to divine interventions from heaven. For Shenoda, the relationships that devout Copts form with ‘otherworldly beings’ and their material signs such as oil, water, sand, and icons enable them to cultivate a Coptic ‘moral imaginary’ that challenge the demoralization they encounter in Egypt as a religious minority in a country of a Muslim majority. Similarly, Heo investigates the circulation and the mediation of Saints’ apparitions through material pictures but also interrelated ‘heavenly’ lights. For example, Heo discusses ‘how the politics of [Saints’] intercession is distinct from the politics of clerical arbitration [of the Coptic Church] and state citizenship, and how it puts forward a representational order that transcends the marginalizing terms in which Coptic Egyptian belonging continues to cast’ (Heo, 2012: 366).

It seems from existing literature that Coptic Christians are labeled as ‘activists’ only when they become present, and when they shout in the streets or through different media agencies. Moreover, it seems that the Coptic Christian ‘activism’ is a fixed status, through which Copts always seek to obviously and popularly challenge their minority positioning in Egypt. This is in addition to the challenging of their alleged representation by the Coptic Church institution. Through alternative forms of visibility including ones when they are accompanied by divine creatures, there is a prevalent understanding that to be visible is to emancipate from any sort of marginalization of discrimination, and to claim (a moral) victory over the Muslim majority. To be visible, furthermore, is to always provide contesting imaginations of how to live a ‘perfect’ (kāmil) and ‘successful’ (nāgiḥ) life beyond the hegemonic social and religious forces that claim the controlling of the moral and religious codes in the Egyptian society.

Maybe, this is why I did not initially expect to carry out my fieldwork about Coptic Christians and the Coptic Christian tradition at the bar. The moment when Mr. Bules had screened the liturgy disrupted my presupposed symmetry that combines the Coptic identity, faith and tradition on one hand with aspects of visible activism on the other hand. It is true that the Coptic clients at the bar, who criticized Mr. Bules, challenged the Coptic Orthodox Church and the moral regulations of the Egyptian Islamic society through forming interactions with predominantly negated alcoholic objects. Nevertheless, as seen through the stories of Romany, Michael and Atef, these interactions do not need to be always situated at the same place where other locations of Coptic visibility reside. Some Coptic visibilities such as the ones found at the liturgy, a miracle or at a street demonstration might be too ‘bright’, that is, too dominant to reveal other ones. Because of their intimate relations with family members, friends, lovers, and Gods, some agents of dissent might voluntarily restrict their actions from getting visible at some spaces (Kelly, 2019). The fact that some of my Coptic interlocutors at the bar wish to keep their alcoholic interactions invisible from their homes, neighborhoods, and churches does not mean that we should be blind to their stories. The latter hold a lot of rich lifeworlds and relationships that have to be told for their own sake and that add more layers of complexity to what is commonly called the ‘Coptic activism’.

Conclusions with Albert

‘Ustāz Mina, enta henā? Eih elli ḥasal fī-l-doniā? (‘Mr. Mina! Are you here?’ What happened to the universe’?) a 22-year-old Coptic Orthodox Christian called Albert told me with a cold smile. I was Albert’s teacher at the Sunday Schools service in 2011. I did not expect to meet him on that other day during my fieldwork at the bar. I also did not plan that our encounter would take our relationship to a new milieu beyond the nature of our previous relationship. To begin, Albert would not have dared to smoke or drink in front of me when I was his khādim at our neighborhood parish in Shubra. Me too, I would have never been able to go to the bar during that time. This is not because I was not drinking and smoking, but because I would have been afraid to be seen either by my students or their parents. Such ‘invisibility’ is very similar to what brought me to the bar on Christmas Eve, when I had a belief that there are some places where one would separate from God as well as from the religious rituals and practices that would help Coptic Christians to form contacts with Him. However, quoting the Psalms in the Old Testament, ‘Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?’

Beyond the secular/religious binary, God is everywhere, as it is the case with the relationships and interactions that resemble Albert’s as well as my ‘Copticness’. The relationships that Copts develop at their neighborhood parishes including the one with the divine are very essential in the lives of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. Thanks to the ‘Revival Movement’ of the Coptic Church clerical hierarchy and to Pope Shenouda III, it would be impossible to find any Coptic Orthodox Christian who had never visited her/his neighborhood parish for a service or any spiritual gathering. What is at stake here is what Copts do with such relationships, when they go to other places. More importantly for the argument of this article, what do they do with such relationships, when they are forced or voluntarily desire to join alcoholic spaces that are refused by ruling religious and social forces in Egypt, namely the Coptic Church and the Islamized society?

At the beginning, I thought Albert would perceive me as a hypocrite who was teaching him something about the Coptic Orthodox tradition and now acting in a different way. However, later on, after we had some beer and whisky, I decided to give up on the former nature of our relationship. Albert was ‘visible’ about stories that he would never tell me when we were discussing the meaning of the ‘perfect’ and the ‘successful’ Coptic Christian at the Sunday Schools service. Following the 2011 uprisings, scholars have emphasized the alternative modes of Coptic visibility that have challenged the minority position of the Copts in addition to how their needs and demands are usually represented. Moreover, with heavenly miracles or Saints’ apparitions, it has been argued that Copts claim a moral superiority with respect to their Muslim counterparts. Similarly, my encounter with Albert at the bar was a nice chance to develop more understandings of how our relationships with God as well as the ones we have developed at our neighborhood parish can be redefined and revisited. With respect to our drinking and smoking habits, and recalling the Christmas Eve incident, it was interesting to talk about how symbols of our Coptic Christian identity including rituals, sermons and books will be now positioned. By adding a space that for decades has been constructed as ‘rubble’ by mainstream visions of such ‘Copticness’, Albert, like Romany, Atef and Michael, is able to cultivate overlooked, yet important, meanings of agency and activism.

Before we finished our gathering, Albert was sure that I would never tell his parents or his Father of confession at the neighborhood parish that I saw him at the bar, as would have been the case in the past when I was his khādim. His invisibility would remain, since I respected how he wanted to keep his personal Coptic experience at the bar ‘hidden’ from other dominant Coptic ‘visibilities’.