04/12/2019
Read the second piece of a series on Coptic Associations and Parishes by Mina Ibrahim:
"While the first ‘elitist’ association, the Lay Council, mirrored Western/European values of charity and development, newer associations focused on providing assistance to impoverished Copts, as well as contributing to the ‘revival’ of Coptic civilization, heritage, and language. Indeed, the importance of the ‘revival’ was a result of European encounters as well. However, the stakeholders of this revival held a separate agenda that tried to promote a ‘distinctive’ Coptic culture that could be differentiated both from a ‘foreign’ version of Christianity and from a predominantly Islamized Egyptian state and society."
As I wrote in the first part to this essay series, the tram workers who established St. George parish, the second parish in the Shubra neighborhood of Cairo, were successful because of the legal rights that were guaranteed by the 1923 constitution in Egypt. In breaking from a classist environment
