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  • The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt by Angie Heo
  • Carolyn M. Ramzy
Heo, Angie. The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt, Oakland: University of California Press, 2018, 294 pages.

Angie Heo's book The Political Lives of Saints deftly threads scholarship across the anthropology of Christianity, Middle East Studies and media theory to highlight how Coptic Christian saints mediate the "interfaith industry of Christian-Muslim relations" in contemporary Egypt (23). In their otherworldly status as mediums between earthly and heavenly realms, Heo examines how Egypt's cult of the saints revolves around a central paradox: in their Orthodox material aesthetics, they can both foster and institute national interfaith unity among their pious believers and Muslim counterparts while simultaneously installing infrastructures of segregation, security and confines of minoritarian belonging for Orthodox Christians. This book is ethnographically grounded in 34 months of field research carried out over multiple trips in a dynamically changing Egypt.

Beginning in 2004, through to the 2011 Arab Uprising, and leading into the revolution's aftermath up to 2015, Heo's ethnography is rich. Her vignettes and interviews take place in various neighbourhoods as well as over denominational, religious and class strata across Cairo and the Delta, reaching also into parts of Sinai and Upper Egypt. Her experiences bring readers into the co-imbrications of Egyptian nationhood and the Coptic Church as they both grapple with territorial dispossession following the 1967 war, anticolonial sentiment beginning in the 1960s, and rising sectarianism beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the present. Her book argues that through the growing tactility of saints' relics, apparitions and icons, Copts have experienced a religious revival that coincides with political repressions and minoritarian regulations by the Orthodox Church and the military-backed Egyptian state. Astutely, Heo also highlights how believers navigate the limits of the church's tenuous entente with the state, paying attention to miracles, apparitions and other holy mediations shared across the porous peripheries of Christianity and Islam in popular religion. In the [End Page 449] end, she concludes that the micropolitics of divine mediations cannot be separated from the Coptic Orthodox Church as an organ of authoritarian rule (14).

The book is organised around three genres of saintly imagination: relics, apparitions and icons. Heo traces saint veneration, visual encounters with the sacred and holy intercessions to their long histories in antiquity as well as modern Egyptian history. How does interacting with the saints, further heightened by their holy and martyr status, create "new problems and possibilities for modern Christian-Muslim coexistence"? Relics, apparition and icons, Heo writes, "offer rich sites for exploring how Orthodox materialities and saint mediations shape the way Christians and Muslims imagine one another" (17).

Heo's conversation about "Relics" (Part 1) begins with the gut-wrenching initiation of "new" martyrs into the Orthodox Church: the funeral of the 24 Copts who died on New Year's Eve in 2011 when a car bomb tore through the Two Saints Church in the delta city of Alexandria. While some scholars tag this incident as one of the sparks that awakened Coptic participation in the 25 January uprising (Iskandar 2013, 5), Heo pays attention to the quotidian ways in which Coptic social imaginaries of martyrdom have long been the basis for Coptic communal belonging and agency. Such narratives normalise the church hierarchy's veneration of the bombing victims' "fleshy parts" as they reached the sixth floor of the church, "anointing the church with the blood of the martyrs" (34). Heo asks, how does the foundational institution of martyrs of the church, remembered and celebrated through the direct encounter with martyrs' bodies, lend power and agency within the internal dynamics of the Orthodox Church? She pays attention to both the communal potentials to limit papal and clerical authority while ushering its members into the church's body politic (43). In other words, Heo looks at power after death and situates a "resurrective agency" (75) from within a Coptic eschatological world view, in which Copts glean power from holy lives and holy deaths.

What happens, then, as these sacred sites exist in borderlands between Egypt's Coptic Christians and Muslims, as saintly mediations...

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