The Invisible Life-worlds of a Coptic Christian

Autor/innen

  • Mina Adel Ibrahim Doctoral Student, University of Gießen

Schlagworte:

(In-)Visibility, Coffeehouse, Prison, Pope Shenouda III, Coptic Orthodox Church, Coptic Christians

Abstract


This essay presents the life-story of a Coptic Christian between the PlayStation lounge, the coffeehouse and the prison. By taking this constellation as a point of departure, I broadly link such a portrait to overlooked contacts between Coptic Christian youth and the clerical hierarchy of the institution of the Coptic Orthodox Church. While attention is usually given to how Copts experience, negotiate and struggle against the various roles of the Church and its tradition of khidma (service), I investigate Coptic youngsters’ lifeworlds when they wish or have to stay invisible from the Coptic Church’s presumptions of representing its congregants.

Autor/innen-Biografie

Mina Adel Ibrahim, Doctoral Student, University of Gießen

Mina Ibrahim is a fourth-year Doctoral Student at the University of Giessen in Germany and The international Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC). His doctoral dissertation ethnographically problematizes the difficulties and the possibilities of living as a good Christian in Egypt. He searches for negated and rejected spaces and contexts in academic and non-academic writings about the lives of the Copts, in an attempt to question the absence of and to find a place for the atheist and sinful among many other similar figures whose weak/ absent faith excludes them from claiming a position within the largest Christian minority in the Middle East.

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2019-12-22

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