Candace Lukasik, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, 2025).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Candace Lukasik (CL): I first traveled to Egypt in 2007 for an Arabic-language program. During that initial trip, I became well-acquainted with a Coptic Orthodox Christian family in Cairo’s Masakin Sheraton neighborhood. I experienced Orthodox liturgy for the first time with them, and they introduced me to a Coptic lifeworld that drew me to return to Egypt nearly every year since. Throughout the years of travel to and from the country, I also began attending Coptic churches in the United States—from Buffalo, New York, to Hayward, California. Over those years, and most strikingly after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, church dynamics in the United States shifted, and I also noticed intergenerational tensions with new waves of Coptic migrants. While I had initially begun a project on the growth and eventual decimation of Coptic political movements in post-revolutionary Egypt, the renewed importance of Coptic migration to the religious and political life of this transnational community piqued my interest as an anthropologist and as a practitioner of Coptic Orthodox Christianity. 

So, in 2016 I traveled from Washington, DC, to New York to Los Angeles, and eventually Nashville, Tennessee, to choose my primary field sites. During my trip to Washington in June 2016 to attend the organization Coptic Solidarity’s annual conference, I met with the founder and executive director of a Coptic-led NGO who encouraged me to participate in their volunteer program: an opportunity to teach English for three weeks in rural Egypt. On 11 December 2016, a suicide bomber killed twenty-nine people and injured forty-seven at Saint Peter and Saint Paul’s Coptic Orthodox Church (also known as the al-Buṭrusiyya Church), a chapel next to Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo’s al-Abbasiyya district. The bombing set off transnational shockwaves, and many participants in the January-February program from the diaspora withdrew their participation. Only three other women (Coptic and non-Egyptian evangelical) and I took part in the early 2017 volunteer program in Bahjura, Upper Egypt. During the program, almost everyone I encountered in Bahjura noted that they had kin in the United States. One prominent interlocutor in the book—Amin—mentioned that his niece now lives in New Jersey, and that she was able to migrate through the US Diversity Visa Program, or Green Card Lottery. During a subsequent conversation on the subject, Amin explained over lunch one afternoon that while there are certainly issues of Muslim-Christian animosity throughout Egypt, “when Christians go to the [US] embassy, they tell them [they want to travel because of] persecution.” The (dis)connection between these two comments set off my more extensive fieldwork, with guidance from Amin, on the transnational contentions and imperial encounters of minority migration between Bahjura and Jersey City.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

CL: While attending to the rise in violent attacks and religious constraints on Copts in Egypt over the past decade following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Martyrs and Migrants focuses instead on how Copts have worked with respect to Egyptian politics, the socio-economic conditions of rural Upper Egypt, the consequences of the US “War on Terror,” and changes in US presidential administrations and foreign policy priorities to translate their suffering into various forms of religious and political visibility. The book examines the ambiguities of that visibility, especially within the racialized context of the United States’s preoccupation with Islam and terrorism, which has caught Coptic Christians in the apparatuses of anti-terror surveillance even as it offers them a means by which they can emigrate to the United States from Egypt as “persecuted Christians.” 

Journeying back and forth across sites of migration between Egypt and the United States, the books shows the everyday practices and processes that shape transnational Coptic communal formation and belonging as they interface with the tension between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious placement within an American Christian conservative landscape. Coptic migrants relate to each other through their religious tradition as well as their transnational minority condition. Their struggle to grapple with their different minority positions between Egypt and the United States is what articulates their own political praxis and frames their interpellation into a broader US geopolitical frame of international religious freedom advocacy and strategies of counterterrorism. That does not mean that Coptic migrants, positioned within these broader structures of power, are simply conscripts of US empire or fully outside of empire’s grasp. Instead, the case of the Copts offers a window onto how empire shapes transnational, minority communities in the (re)narration of their collective identity and the transformation of their political orientations, racial identification, and religious solidarities.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

CL: I hope scholars, community members, and general audiences will read the book and be drawn in by the stories it retells and the tensions it considers. In general, Martyrs and Migrants argues that local and national considerations of violence and memory are already scaled by transnational and global translations of religious difference. And by rethinking Christianity and US empire through Coptic minority migration, it seeks out a new understanding of how contemporary religious life is uncontainable in either local or national frames within a globalized world of asymmetrical power circuits. Among Copts, the geopolitical refractions of American hegemony through pathways of migration as well as globally mediatized understandings of Christian suffering unfold in the ordinary affects of imperial persecution politics. With the focus of Western Christians, policy makers, and Coptic diasporic communities themselves on the varied experiences of violence against Egyptian Copts, some of those very Copts question the uneven attention on narratives of bloodshed in Egypt. 

What is absent from the entrenched politics of persecution and martyrologies of Christian suffering are the wages and witness of migration that exceed such narratives and representations of perennial religious violence. While both acknowledging and attending to the pervasive discriminations that Christians face in Egypt, many of those Christians also know the dangers—both lethal and less-than-lethal—that lie ahead for them in the United States. While awaiting the hope of showcasing migrant resistance to these imperial formations or the openings up to possibility and production in diaspora is a worthy endeavor, its preference displaces the gaze from the structural flows of destruction and despair that shape the lifeworlds of so many migrants. Martyrs and Migrants traces the destructive forces of migration, attending to how violence and sacrifice translate across national and imperial formations, from Egypt to the United States and back again. While offering the promise of freedom, justice, and witness, migration also wages exile and alienation, a white (bloodless) martyrdom for uncertain futures of prosperity and possibility.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

CL: Moving between post-ISIS Mosul, Iraq, and Detroit, Michigan, I am currently completing fieldwork for my second book project, tentatively titled Somewhere Else: Political Ecologies and Indigenous Sovereignty in Global Assyria. It traces how ecologies of war—in the form of everyday experiences, material effects, and affective resonances of violence—shape religious and political claims of rootedness and stateless sovereignty, and impact upon Christian-Muslim relations locally and globally. Northern Iraq is part of the ancestral Assyrian homeland. Prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the number of Assyrians in Iraq was estimated to be 1.5 million. Today, fewer than 150,000 remain, primarily concentrated in the Nineveh Plain and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Somewhere Else focuses on how mass violence and climate change in the continuing aftermath of war shape social movements of indigenous communities and inflect upon collective memory and transnational mobilization toward non-sovereign futures. In their global claims to indigeneity and demands for economic, environmental, and political reparation, Assyrians have also formed networks with Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. These decolonial narratives of solidarity and kinship frame diasporic humanitarian efforts and international aid strategies that oscillate between the Western Christian gaze and Assyrian indigeneity.

In conversation with Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies, Somewhere Else explores an established tradition of thought that has long critiqued the “secular” as a distinctive formation of power and knowledge. What has received less attention within this tradition is the relationship between the genealogy of the “secular” and the history of colonial settlement. It is against this background that Somewhere Else seeks to stage a conversation about if and how these different trajectories, geographies, and methodological insights can supplement each other, especially in the context of the Middle East. What can the study of the secular say about the increasing recourse to the language of “indigeneity” in a variety of political and legal contexts, globally? Has “indigeneity” become a traveling concept? If so, how do claims to “indigeneity” intersect with the minority concept and religious difference? How do questions of translation (as a secular practice) mediate its applications in various contexts? And what might this tell us about the way the secular mediates different forms of kinship—through land, as well as theology, ecclesiology, and/or collective memory? In tracing the shadows of secularity in the geopolitics of concern over Middle Eastern minority communities like Assyrians in Iraq, the book hopes to show how we may be better able to parse a decolonial approach to the intersections of Christianity and indigeneity in the Middle East, that exceeds Western, neo-colonial instrumentalization.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 2, pages 97 to 101)

Violence and Shared Life

On May 26, 2017, masked gunmen opened fire on a bus filled with Coptic pilgrims traveling from Maghāgha, al-Minyā, Upper Egypt, to the Monastery of Saint Samuel the Confessor. At least twenty-eight were murdered/martyred and at least twenty-two were injured/witnessed. I arrived in Bahjūra an hour after the attack hit Egyptian news cycles and international media. The family I was staying with gathered in the living room, with solemn faces, for tea. Coverage of CTV, a popular Coptic broadcasting network, played in the background. The women of the household had to start getting ready for the wedding we were all set to attend that evening. Churches in the area had immediately sent WhatsApp messages to their congregations informing them that upcoming monastery trips were postponed until further notice. During the wedding, the martyrs of al-Minyā were on the lips of many, and some questioned whether to even allow dancing or music, in honor of the dead. Many of the men drank and danced throughout the night. An older man was visibly intoxicated. One of the sisters whispered in my ear, “People are sad tonight because of al-Minyā.” Later that night, after we returned home, a cousin of the family sat in the living room scrolling through his Facebook. In his late twenties, Ishak expressed his frustration about the way Muslims were relating to the al-Minyā events; he desired a more direct acknowledgment of their martyrical suffering and death. On Facebook, his Muslim friends would comment, “al-baqāʾlillāh” or “innā lillāhi wa inna ilayhi rājiʿūn”—both phrases of consolation. Ishak said sternly, “These phrases are used when someone dies from sickness or gets in a car accident, not for when people are murdered. It’s like you’re adding insult to injury!” 

For a nightcap, we made our way to the rooftop of the building. The conversation centered around al-Minyā, and one of the women interjected: “I think the problem is connected to the pope and his support for the president [Sisi]. When he came out on July 3rd [2013] with Sheikh al-Azhar and Sisi, he was sending a message in support of the deposal of Morsi.” Her sister-in-law replied, “But I think he [the pope] had to do so. The message of July 3rd was that Muslims and Christians are both supporting the deposal of Morsi.” Another family member responded, “But this is why it is so dangerous, because the Islamists use this as a reason to kill Copts.” An uncle retorted, “We’ve been here for 2,017 years, and they’ve only been here for 1,400 years. Who are the original inhabitants of this country [mīn aṣl al-balad]?” The following day, a friend and I made our way to a local church to meet with a priest. Sitting in his office, he asked us, “Did you see what happened?” Abouna was referring to the al-Minyā incident. He continued, “Of course, many people are emigrating, with the state of the country and this persecution [iḍṭhād]!”

Yet other Copts from Bahjūra insisted that the narrative of persecution does not encompass all aspects of life. Even despite the horrors of the al-Minyā incident, Coptic interlocutors in Bahjūra emphasized that discrimination [tamyīz] was not only directed against Christians by Muslims in Egypt. Rather, discrimination also occurred between Chris tians, based on class divisions [ṭabaqāt]. “It’s not just Christians and Muslims,” a young pharmacist insisted. “Al-Minyā is a political incident, and it will continue to occur because those terrorists [irhābyīn] attacking are hitting Sisi’s weak spot—Christians. They have supported him. So targeting them is like targeting Sisi.” Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt are not solely demarcated by persecution politics, or the framing of sectarian relations by conflict and cooperation (as a perpetual waiting for the next incident of violence to erupt). Rather, the ambiguities of intercommunal tension and shared life offer a different way to think about the politics of migration beyond a binary of socioeconomic factors and forced displacement and dispossession.

The oscillation between a politics of friendship and conflict defines Muslim-Christian relations in an Upper Egyptian village like Bahjūra, where in one instance a Muslim mother might tell her child, “Don’t eat in the Christian area [Shig al-Naṣāra] because they’ll poison you,” and in another she might take her child to the church for the Saint George festival every November to receive blessings, or baraka.

In June 2017, I was walking through Bahjūra, again, with Amin (who opened this chapter). As we began to walk, I noticed that a falafel restaurant at the end of the street was open and serving food. I peeked inside and saw that there was a “There is no god except Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger” decorative portrait, indicating that the place was most likely owned by Muslims. I was perplexed, given that it was Ramadan and in places like Cairo, cafés open during the day have been forcibly shut down by Egyptian police. As we walked further, I noticed that, on the predominantly Muslim street, there was also a sheesha shop open for business, with customers drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. I became even more perplexed. I inquired about these scenes to Amin. “Things are different here in the village,” he said. “I would say only about 50 percent of Muslims fast during Ramadan.” I then noted to Amin that in Cairo, the police would come and shut down these businesses themselves if they were open. He responded, “We don’t have anything of the sort [maʿandinash al-kalām da]. We have a shared life together [al-hayat al-mushtarika]. We decide what is permissible and what is not.”

What are some practical implications for an ethics within the framework of local difference as a classed communalism? Shared life entails a collective frame of the everyday—in its common conditions of electrical outages, road (dis)repair, sweltering weather in the summer months and frost on the dirt pathways in winter, and in the affective communion of landscape and historical presence. Minority experiences of discrimination and violence are also part of this collective frame, but they are negotiated intercommunally (although the state intervenes in such negotiations as well) for a common flourishing in a place like Bahjūra.

There are intersecting scales in the above scene with Amin. Class difference—as channeled through geographic difference from the centrality of the Egyptian state in Cairo—unfolds how locality molds relationality with the other, which also can spill over into disagreement as well as violence. In violent spillover, those forms of negative relationality scale upwards to national, transnational, and imperial frames, when violence against “the Copts” melts the Christians of Bahjūra away from their Muslim neighbors, those they depend on (like the relationship between Jackleen and Ahmed) and those they despise.

Migration circuits have exacerbated this dynamic, straining the continuation of a collective frame, as Christians leave and return to/ from the United States with new frames of religious difference. In the summer of 2021, I returned to Bahjūra and had lunch one July afternoon with Jackleen and the rest of the Ayoub family. Over post-lunch tea, Jackleen described how, when her mother visited London, she rode a taxi with a Pakistani driver. Along the way, the driver asked her whether she was Muslim. Her mother responded with an emphatic “No!” After recounting the short anecdote, she asked me, “Why do they allow all of these Muslims into England and America? My sister in Florida says that they are taking over whole neighborhoods near her. You think that you’d be able to escape them after leaving Egypt!” The abstraction of “Muslims” from Jackleen’s everyday encounters and friendships with Muslims—at the local school, shopping with colleagues in Najʿ Ḥammādī, or calling old classmates on the phone and talking for hours about family life and death—in this retelling gestures to imagining the outside of Egypt through the reconfiguration of religious difference.

Shared life for someone like Amin is upended in its translations in migration enabled by empire (determining the flows of people to where and by what means). Amin voiced his frustrations with these flows during one of our many post-dinner conversations: “Coptic people in the diaspora don’t understand everyday life in Egypt, and especially Upper Egypt. They have their own image in their minds as to what life is like here, especially in the village—that there is religious persecution nonstop. But the reality is that here, in Egypt, Copts have to deal with the messiness and the humiliation [bahdala] of the everyday, living in poverty, without jobs or a future.” Although religious difference and sectarian violence condition intercommunal relations even in places like Bahjūra, other factors such as class also shape persecuted positionalities and (im)possibilities of repair. An “ethical thematization” of religious difference in Egypt includes an intersectional approach to precarity. Put simply, Coptic precarity is also dependent upon class and economic difference, and contextualized by geographic difference. As economic opportunities dwindle in Egypt, especially in the south, migration to places like the United States, where relatives speak of Christian flourishing and the American Dream, often becomes the solution to broader structural disparities at the intersection of religious identity and poverty.