By Saba Imtiaz

It is a quiet, wintry day in Herat, and the sons of Haji Sultan Hamidy are busy at work. There’s banter and cups of tea, visitors popping into Hamidy’s store to say hello, and a young helper is told to dust off the most familiar item in the store: hand blown glass.

There are piles of it, heaped up in boxes and on shelves, molded into cups and goblets, jars and tumblers. The aquamarine colors come to life as the dust is cleaned off. Khalid Hamidy, Haji Sultan Hamidy’s son, is all smiles and hellos, as he tosses a box of hand blown glass items into the air to show off how well it’s packed.

The elder Hamidy isn’t in the store on this day, having traveled to India for medical treatment. But his sons are continuing the family trade in his absence, taking pride in the traditions associated with it that are now being forgotten.

For seventy years, Haji Sultan Hamidy and his family have been making hand blown glass objects. Generations of Hamidy’s family, his son Khalid Hamidy says, have taken up the work. As an insurgency movement against the Communist government and Russian troops engulfed the country in the 1980s, Hamidy decided to dedicate the glasses to the memories of those fallen in war.

A decade ago, the elder Hamidy explained the ‘secret’ behind the glass to Christina Lamb, a correspondent for the UK’s Sunday Times: “Each glass is individually made,” Sultan Hamidy said at the time. “We used to say a line of poetry for each one so that it would have its own soul. You see them there in the grains of sand trapped in the glass. Then when my first son Rahim was killed by the dushman [Russians] in 1979 I whispered his name into the glass as I blew it over the flame; Then we did the same every time a son or brother or neighbor was made shaheed [martyr] but we could not keep up – you see how many glass pieces we have made but there were hundreds, thousands of dead.”

This quiet act of remembering the dead found its way to the bereaved families. “The major commanders would often come and they would take these glasses to the families whose sons had died,” Hamidy’s son, Khalid, told me when I visited the store in December.

“It is an amazing thing that this glass is all over Afghanistan now,” he said, comparing it to a national tradition of sorts.

But he admits that this ritual no longer exists.

Now Hamidy’s sons also run a small stall on the Herat airbase, selling the hand-blown glass to foreign troops serving in Afghanistan. Sales at the Herat shop have also dropped, even though more expensive copies of the glass are sold in Kabul’s antique and handicraft shops. “We make four to five hundred glasses a week,” Khalid says. “And we sell maybe four to five in a week. About five or six years ago, we would sell five to 10,000 glasses a year.”

The Hamidy’s continue to produce the glass to sell to the foreign troops and to stock their own store in Kabul. There are a few old family photos in the store of Haji Sultan Hamidy, whose photo is printed on the business cards that the Hamidy sons eagerly pass on to customers. Three people work in the store, but there aren’t any customers – not for the glass, or the jewelry and collectibles, the old Soviet currency and antique helmets that fill the Hamidy’s store. Khalid recalls, with a tinge of wistfulness, that about a decade ago a Frenchman placed an order for 10,000 glasses, which he then sold around the world in return for donations to the “poor people of Afghanistan.”

“That was the last big order,” he says.

Hand-blown glass at the Hamidy’s store in Herat. Photo by Saba Imtiaz. All rights reserved.

The Hamidy family’s remembrances of an earlier conflict in Afghanistan stand in stark parallel to the lack of remembrances of the current battles in the country. While Afghanistan has been mired in conflict and war for several decades now, there is little now to remember those killed in the most recent war in Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom, mounted by the U.S. and foreign troops after Sept. 11, 2001.

A transitional justice plan envisaged memorial sites and a war museum but these never came to fruition. So memories and remembrances exist in the form of anecdotes, but no one is buying the glass, as Khalid Hamidy tells me, to remember those who have been killed since 2001. As is the case in every city that has seen sustained bombings over the years, people in Kabul point out landmarks that have been bombed—once, twice, three times, more times than they can remember—and streets where it was once unsafe to travel.

Portraits of Ahmed Shah Massoud—the resistance fighter from the Northern Alliance who was killed in 2001—hang from fortified public buildings that glisten with new paint. But plans to build a memorial to Massoud have been scuttled. “I believe they got to the stage of commissioning a sculpture in the roundabout that now bears his name, a public space, but it absolutely couldn’t get through,” Michael Semple, former Deputy to the EU Special Representative for Afghanistan, told the Revealer by Skype.

After over a decade of war, do only the blast walls, concrete and sandbags hold the memories of those killed?

Perhaps memorialization is easier when the battle lines were far clearer, as they were in the 1970s and 1980s: then it was the Communists and the Soviets against Afghan fighters, known as the mujahideen. It was a war supported by the U.S., a fight that was exalted in the foreign press. But the conflict that ensued—of former Afghan fighters battling with each other, the takeover by the Afghan Taliban and the post-9/11 war by the U.S. and allied forces to oust the Taliban government—doesn’t have that same degree of clarity. This is, perhaps, reflected in the lack of memorials to those killed since 2001, while there are markers to the wars predating it.

Semple recalls the “first minor memorial” dating to the Kerala massacre in Afghanistan’s Kunar province in the spring of 1979. “For me [the massacre] holds a great significance for its part in laying the foundation of this bitter, bitter conflict. The mass summary execution of civilians was a deadly example of early Communist era revolutionary excesses,” he told the Revealer. “The first minor memorial was simply a walled garden enclosing the mound which contains a communal grave from the massacre. It is thus a cemetery dedicated to victims of the massacre and is located in the village – what I would call citizens’ space. More recently, one of the provincial governors built a small concrete ‘minar’ (pillar) as a memorial to the victims. This is located in the gubernatorial compound – government space.” Semple noted that “perhaps one of the reasons the Kerala massacre can be memorialized is that the episode is now seen as politically straightforward, a long-gone brutal communist government vs. civilians. The politics of post-1992 inter-mujahideen conflict is more difficult because some of the protagonists are still around.”

“War memorials reflect a nation’s desire to portray stability after crisis,” Manan Ahmed, a historian of South Asia told the Revealer in an email interview. “They showcase triumph or portray adversity but the message to the citizen is that the Nation has persevered, that it has endured. Hence, after 9.11, there was such intense desire to immediately begin the process of memorialization by building the new WTC [World Trade Center].”

The idea of memorialization may also emerge from the fact that the “war” has no clear winners. There is no ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner hanging on the streets of Afghanistan; many Afghans and foreigners question what the war achieved after all. That moment of clarity—as  Ahmed puts it, the “perseverance” of the nation—has not arrived for Afghanistan as yet.

This may be why the only memories that exist in Afghanistan relate to the war that was clearer in its purpose and achievements: the war against the Soviets. That seems to be the driving theme behind the Jihad Museum in Herat.

A large sign proclaims why it was built: “to preserve and appreciate the attempts, sacrifices and memorials of the rightful Mujahideen […] so that our next generation may visit this historic and remarkable memorial building and will remember it for the rest of their lives.”

The “Jihad Museum”—a brainchild of Ismail Khan, a former mujahideen commander and governor of Herat province—is hoping to preserve memories of the 1980s. But it doesn’t just serve as a memorial site; it’s also as a way to cement the reputation of men like Ismail Khan on the battlefield, and in Afghanistan’s governance. Tanks rest innocuously on the lawn of the museum. The exterior is designed like a shrine, the walls inlaid with traditional blue tiles inscribed with poetry.

Diorama at Herat’s Jihad Museum. Photo by Saba Imtiaz. All rights reserved.

It’s a memorial to the war that plagued Afghanistan for a decade, a war that only springs to memory when it pops up in a Tom Hanks movie or a rerun of a Rambo installment. At the museum, glass cases hold meticulously labeled “artifacts”: “.82 mm, anti-tank bullet, fire from shoulder, made in China”, “mortar bullet, fire from cannon, made in Soviet Union”, “P2 anti-tank mine, made in Pakistan”. The curator and co-founder of the museum Syed Abdul Wahab Qatali leads visitors through the exhibits. The glass cases give way to a gallery of portraits of martyrs, painted from images and memory and lit with fluorescent bulbs.

But the museum’s biggest attraction isn’t the tanks on the lawns or the Kalashnikovs displayed in the cases. It’s the surreal 3D model reproduction of scenes of battle set in Herat against a backdrop of Herat city, a sight that is far more powerful than grainy images of the war that are sold as postcards in the streets. A guide points out models of Afghan intelligence agents arresting a man. There’s an axe-wielding men standing victoriously over the body of a fallen soldier, tanks rolling through the streets, a burqa clad woman cheering fighters from a house rooftop, a man carrying an injured fighter on his back, a woman—presumably shown to be dead—lying in the rubble of a house, designed in such vivid detail that it features ripped Suzani curtains. Signs spell out the scenes: “Subject: Place where Mujahidin defend against the Perod government for 14 years and Targhondi street is the exit Wat (sic) of Soviet union soldiers from Afghanistan.”

Other rooms in the museum house stacks of images of mujahideen leaders, photos of those killed, and images of war commanders. Images of Russian soldiers presumed missing during the war hang on one wall. A visitor at the museum – a tall, bearded man wearing sunglasses – points to one of the black-and-white photos. “This is me,” he says. The man is Bakhretdin Chakimov—now known as Sheikh Abdullah—presumed dead for 33 years until he was discovered living in Herat last year. Abdullah says he is advising the museum on the Soviet-era remnants exhibited there, and wanders off to look at more war memorabilia with a group of visitors. Chakimov’s presence underscores why it is important to remember wars: it is not just for the sake of a country’s history, but also for personal stories as it fits into the backdrop of the war in the 1980s.

But not everyone in Afghanistan has heard of the Jihad Museum’s attempts to memorialize the war, including Akbar Agha, a veteran of the Afghan jihad in the 1980s who went on to become a key Afghan Taliban leader. Agha says he did not believe in the idea of recording these events for posterity in the past, and is still vacillating on it now, even though he has recently authored his memoirs.

The reluctance to record feats on the battlefield also came from the rank and file, Agha says. “A foreign journalist wanted to cover a mujahideen front and all of the mujahideen were very angry [at this],” he tells me, during an interview at his residence in Kabul. The commanders had to explain why the journalist was there.

In Afghanistan, there were attempts to record the events of the 1980s, but Agha says he scuttled one such move. “At the end of the 1980s, there was a big shura [joint meeting] in eastern Afghanistan attended by [Jalaluddin] Haqqani and very senior people. It was a big gathering and it was meant to be photographed,” he recalls. “But I opposed it and got other people to oppose it too.”

“People didn’t like it because they wanted to carry out pure jihad. If you start talking about it, you boast about it and take away from it [the spirit],” Agha said.

Diorama at Herat’s Jihad Museum. Photo by Saba Imtiaz. All rights reserved.

Semple and Ahmed, the historian, disagree with this perspective. According to Ahmed, “I do not think attitudes to Jihad etc. are behind the non-presence [of memorials]. From friends and visitors, I have heard of many Soviet tank carcasses which were left prominently as visual reminders of that war. These “temporary” memorials function just as well, absent a politically stable country. Hence, for Afghanistan most prominently, that state of stability has never arrived. To build a monument or a memorial, you need a political and economic will.”

Semple, who has researched grave sites in Afghanistan, notes that one of the things that struck him in Afghanistan was the lack of protected graves. One village in Kunduz Province has been renamed Qatl-e-Aam, or Massacre village, in memory of a bloody assault conducted by Soviet forces in 1984. “Every single person now living there can talk you through the massacre, showing compound by compound, who was killed where,” Semple said. “Rags of colored cloth fluttering on flimsy poles in back gardens and melon fields mark some of the places where the village’s martyrs fell. But there is nothing solid. It will all pass with the next generation.”

There may just be an easier explanation than delving into the idea of religious motivation: Agha, who hasn’t visited the Jihad Museum in Herat, declares that people in Herat had the money to spend on building war memorials. “In Kandahar (where Agha led fighters), we were so poor,” he says. “All of the money was spent on guns, ammunition, tanks and we were occupied with battles. There is no evidence because we didn’t spend money on photos.”

The Hamidy family’s glass-blown tumblers and jars may be this evocative evidence. The traditions may have been muddled with the discourse on war, but Haji Sultan Hamidy’s store continues to occupy a space in Herat; and for those who take the aquamarine objects home, they serve as a subtle reminder of a war that once killed hundreds.

Saba Imtiaz is a freelance journalist in Pakistan and the author of ‘Karachi, You’re Killing Me!’ (Random House India, 2014) and No Team of Angels (First Draft Publishing, forthcoming). She reports on politics, culture, human rights and religion and is currently working on a book about the conflict in Karachi. Her work is available on her website, http://sabaimtiaz.com and she can be contacted at saba.imtiaz@gmail.com.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Afghanistan: Memories of Glass appeared first on The Revealer.

By Maurice Chammah

Two years after they began, the Egyptian revolutionary uprisings of early 2011 would have been an easy, ripe subject for a documentary film; the riveting images of crowds running and tear gas and fists raised, demands made and met, a dictator of three decades crumbling before the empowered masses.

On the other hand, the politics of Egypt’s last several years would provide a vexing topic; the numerous competing protagonists, the bureaucratic complexity, the subtle historical influences of every twist and turn, the moral compromises made by every participant.

The Oscar-nominated film ‘The Square,’ which premiered at Sundance a year ago and on Netflix last month, basks in a celebration of the secular-minded activists who became the dominant voice of the 2011 uprisings. Chief among them is Ahmed Hassan, a wiry, boyish speechmaker who exults in his movement’s triumphs and despairs when things turn sour. Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, who partially grew up in Egypt, lingers on his impassioned pleas. “When we were united we brought down the dictator,” he tells a crowd at Tahrir Square at one point. “How do we succeed now? By uniting once again.”

As a chronicle of political enthusiasm, ‘The Square’ succeeds gorgeously. But it falls prey to much of the tunnel vision that marked the activists’ own transition from stardom to irrelevance. The activists tried to speak for a highly religious public, failing to understand the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and more fundamentalist Islamists like the Salafi movement. By not engaging with these groups, they paved the way for the military elite, also a primarily secular group, to divide and conquer. Noujaim herself identifies strongly with the secular, and mostly wealthy revolutionary protagonists — like her, they speak English and identify with American cultural norms — and it’s tempting to see the film’s blind spots as her own discomforts with the religious realities of her country.

Her main character Ahmed, the son of an illiterate street vendor in one of Cairo’s poorer neighborhoods, who recalls selling lemons in order to pay for his education. You can tell that Noujaim made a conscious decision not to focus her film solely around the wealthier, more cosmopolitan activists that constantly pepper their speech with English, though her secondary character is Khalid Abdalla, the British-born actor who starred in United 93 and The Kite Runner. He flew in when the revolution broke out, so although his passion is authentic, his stakes are chosen ones.

While Ahmed throws rocks and gets shot, Khalid posts violent clips to YouTube with his silver MacBook. He would make for an awkward lead in a film about desperation, but he bonds with Ahmed and other Egyptians, speaking for them in perfect English to Anderson Cooper and other international news outlets. It’s difficult to imagine how differently the revolution would have looked in a country without this class of individual (and it was Mubarak, ironically enough, who was largely responsible for promoting that class through institutions like the American University in Cairo, which his wife and son attended).

Although neither Khalid nor Ahmed articulate much of a vision for the Egypt they’d like to see emerge from the revolution, there is an unspoken secularism that ties these two young men together. Many young men of a lower class background in Egypt are pious Muslims, but you never see Ahmed enter a mosque or bow in prayer. Certainly Khalid never does so.

This sets both characters apart from the film’s third protagonist, Magdy Ashour. He is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, though he criticizes the group as often as he defends it. We’re told he went to prison multiple times for his involvement in the Brotherhood and his family gets some kind of support from them, but Magdy consistently agrees with Khalid and Ahmed when they complain about how the Brotherhood has sold them out for power while using Tahrir Square as a political bargaining chip. “Honestly I’m upset about their political tactics and gains. They should not be here for a political agenda or gains,” Khalid says. Ahmed’s voiceover lowers to a whisper as he describes how “they left us alone in the square to get beaten up, arrested, to die alone.” What he doesn’t say is that, by then, most Egyptians agreed with the Brotherhood that the continued presence of protesters at Tahrir was more a nuisance than a necessity. Gallup polls found that while more than 83% of Egyptians had supported ousting Mubarak after the revolution, by November 2011, 85% believed continued protests were bad for the country.

The Square could have been a film about the difficulties of translating a revolution into politics, especially in a country where Islamism remains in limbo—officially repressed but unofficially popular. Certainly some of the most subtle and tragic statements made by the film’s characters are about the problem of politics after a revolution. “If you want to play politics, you have to compromise,” Khalid laments in a rare moment of self-reflection, more than halfway through the film. “And we’re not good at this at all.”

“All of the politicians are failures,” Ahmed exclaims, walking alone in an early morning dreamscape, a blurry edged camera frame following him through the eerily empty streets. It is difficult to tell if Noujaim is making an intentional decision here, but the effect is to remind us that these revolutionaries have little sense of a real past or future, just an empty, righteous present, a street in which to shout.

Noujaim has responded to critics who say the film doesn’t capture Egypt’s complicated political reality by saying that she wanted to focus on her subjects and their perspectives, in the end choosing to make a tightly-focused portrait of idealism and disappointment. She succeeds in this. The problem is that the characters she chooses to focus upon have little of substance to say about their country.

The unspoken secularism guiding Noujaim’s lens leads the film into an inconsistent view of the Brotherhood — they are individual human beings, as evidenced by Magdy, but also a “fascist” movement — and an incoherent one of the military, who is celebrated when they kick out Mubarak and Morsi and hated when they run protesters over with their vehicles and lob American-made tear gas into their crowds.

Magdy is by far the most compelling character, torn between the edicts handed down by Brotherhood elders, under pressure to provide for his five children (nobody in this film, it seems, has a job to get back to). He is torn as Egypt is torn. We watch as he berates his own son for having joined a Brotherhood attack on protesters. A woman in his family accuses him of abandoning his revolutionary friends. “There is a fog in this country,” is all Magdy can say in response. We watch him comfort his daughter, who cries as she mourns that the revolution changed so little. He smiles weakly. “These are the gains of the revolution,” he says with a pained smile. “She’s filled with tears.”

Magdy’s experience captures far more of Egypt’s internal contradictions — how to incorporate Islam into Egyptian political life, how to preserve political will throughout decades of oppression and official banishment, how to stay true to yourself and provide for a family — than those of Khalid or Ahmed. He should have been the main character, and it’s unfortunate that Noujaim could not film him interacting directly with his Brotherhood superiors. (Senior members of the Brotherhood are never on camera, and though this may not be her fault, it feels like a telling omission).

But Magdy can’t be the main character. His lifestyle is too distant from that of Noujaim’s target audience. His beard and sense of political obligation is too alienating. And aside from Magdy, Noujaim can’t find a way to humanize the massive segment of Egyptian society that finds much of its daily meaning in Islam. We’re half an hour into the film before we hear the call to prayer, in a country where the call to prayer is an ever-present background to daily life. When we do hear it, the sound heralds sinister images. We see thousands bowing in prayer. Men with big beards and white robes are walking towards the camera. Later on, the secular characters compare their situation to Iran’s revolution, suggesting a collective sense of relief that the country isn’t ruled by mullahs.

President Mohamed Morsi’s failed rule, which lasted a year and in no way represented Iranian theocracy, is mostly glossed over as Ahmed stares sickeningly at the Islamist president delivering a speech. He delivers one of his own:

“What is a revolution? Revolution is a culture of a people. You give them ownership of their freedom. We introduced a culture of protesting. Now they can oppose the ruler, whoever they are. If we predict what’s next, the army is coming. Let’s not fool each other. But do you think the army will act in the same way it did?

Ahmed, just as much as the director, is searching for some greater sense of success from the rubble of a violent political chess game he doesn’t understand. After Egypt’s newest leader, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, announces Morsi’s ouster, Ahmed excitedly tells us, “Morsi has fallen. So did the army and Mubarak.” Except that El-Sisi is the army. Ahmed, like many revolutionaries about the Brotherhood’s religious agenda, sold them out, creating a kind of symmetry with the way the Brotherhood went behind their back to make deals with the military early on.

It shines a new light on the most devastating statement in the entire film, made by a military officer. Noujaim impressively gets a camera next to him in a car driving down a busy street. He is asked whether the military protected the revolution. “We didn’t protect the revolution,” he says. “We made it happen. You kids don’t know anything.”

You kids.

Maurice Chammah is a writer and musician in Austin, Texas who studied journalism in Egypt as a Fulbright student, 2011-2012. More about him at http://www.mauricechammah.com. He writes regularly for The Revealer.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post The Secular Square appeared first on The Revealer.

Nailah Winkfield (R), mother of Jahi McMath, and Martin Winkfield arrive at the U.S. District Courthouse for a settlement conference in Oakland, California, January 3, 2014. (REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach)

By Ann Neumann 

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 KJV

It is the thing with feathers. It is the only thing left in Pandora’s box, still captive after mingling with all the evils of the world and despite curiosity’s near-liberation. It is a mineral the color of spring leaves. It is unseen, yet it springs eternal. Along with faith, it is second only to charity. It is the silver lining of the dark, encroaching apocalypse. It is what radicalized the Blues. Patience and experience are its handmaids; chance and miracle, its bedfellows.*

It, of course, is hope, attendant to every utterance of bad news, particularly the medical kind. It is hope, however irrational, that produces the “placebo effect,” the stabilization of an ill patient when given pills that “don’t contain any active ingredients.”

But what is hope? Can we assign a value to it? How does it work, particularly in regard to medical situations? Philosopher Adrienne M. Martin writes in her new book, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology, that hope, according to St. Paul, is considered “among the three Christian theological virtues: hope, faith, and charity.” She goes on to say that “acceptance of the claim that hope is a virtue extends far beyond the reach of Christian doctrine. This is no doubt, due to the widely held belief that hope has a special sustaining power.”

But is hope always a virtue? I’d offer that the answer depends on what is being hoped for. Is hope for something impossible a virtue?  For this answer, I think we would ethically have to account for the realm of impossible and the costs of that hope. There are particular medical situations that demonstrate the lack of virtue (or questionable ethics) of hoping for a medical impossibility.

It is hope, unnamed, that Dr. Sandeep Jauhar defends in his recent New York Times article, “When Doctors Need to Lie.”** A father begs Jauhar not to tell his distraught son that the young man has heart failure. “‘It would mean a lot to me if you could go back in and tell him he’s going to be all right,’ the father pleaded.” Jauhar does because, “Above all, physicians must do no harm,” and he sees truth-telling as immediately harmful to the son. It’s an act reminiscent of old-school medical paternalism, Jauhar tell us, quoting the American Medical Association’s code of ethics which once stated, “that physicians had a ‘sacred duty’ to ‘avoid all things which have a tendency to discourage the patient and depress his spirits.’” His hope. Over the next few days, Jauhar gently eased the young man into the truth of his diagnosis.

In his second example of when a doctor needs to lie, Jauhar intubates a man who is no longer conscious, despite the patient’s previously stated request that he not be intubated. Jauhar writes:

He had a rocky course. The bleeding in his lungs continued for several days, requiring large blood transfusions, but it eventually stopped. He had protracted fevers. After a few days, his condition improved. A week after that, the breathing tube was removed.

The procedure saves the man’s life and he later thanks Jauhar. But it’s an alarming account, one that lacks the necessary details. How ill was the man, how old, how much did he and his family suffer, how much longer did he ultimately live? (Don’t miss the hundreds of condemning comments at The New York Times’ site. All I can say is, I’m glad Jauhar won’t find himself the keeper of my spirits.)

Jauhar goes against the predominant ethics regarding patients’ informed consent and autonomy — the right of patients to be told about the benefits and risks of all medical procedures and to make their own medical decisions accordingly. But he’s probably in line with predominant practice; patient autonomy is hard to recognize and enforce in a host of ways. How much does a patient understand about medical practice? Do they believe what a doctor tells them? These are just some of the valid questions we ought to ask in the face of medical crisis. These complications are outlined in the seminal 2009 book Principles of Biomedical Ethics, by Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress which outlines the ethics of autonomy and informed consent:

The weighing of risks in the context of a person’s subjective beliefs, fears, and hopes is not an expert skill, and information provided to patients and subjects sometimes needs to be freed from the entrenched values and goals of medical professionals…. Professional standards in medicine are fashioned for medical judgments, but decisions for or against medical care, which are nonmedical decisions, are rightly the province of the patient.

What Jauhar fails to address is the rampant overtreatment currently prevalent in medicine. From ineffective mammograms to painful hip replacements, from pacemakers to respirators, Americans are often less benefitted by painful treatments, particularly later in life, than they or their doctors had hoped before treatment. But, were those same patients clearly informed about what the procedure entailed and what its likely outcome would be, they might not have agreed to it. Writes Katy Butler in a heartbreaking article*** about her father’s long, slow death: “According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get.”

There is clearly a financial cost to such extended treatment when recovery or cure are not possible. A cost that, many bioethicists argue, could be better spent on those whose lives can be saved. For good reason large segments of the population fear that their lives are considered less valuable than others, so claims on behalf of the “most vulnerable” make ethical sense. But whom do we consider the most vulnerable?

There’s another cost that I think must also be weighed here, and that is the emotional and physical suffering of the patient and their family. If Jauhar’s intubated patient died a month after the procedure, can we say Jauhar made the best decision? Despite the wishes of his patient?

**

There is something quite important to be learned from Jauhar’s defense of lying** to patients: patient autonomy isn’t always enough. Or, rather, it is too much. From the experience of my own father’s death and from subsequent years as a hospice volunteer, I’ve seen patients look for definitive answers from others when faced with medical crisis. They want an authority to tell them what to do, whether it is a knowledgeable family member or a trusted doctor. Independent decision-making, in other words, can isolate a sick patient, robbing them of the support of a community.

Doctors don’t want to deliver a terminal diagnosis any more than patients want to receive one. When a desperate patient presses for answers, it’s often easier for a doctor to “couch his words in hope,” writes Virginia Morris in Talking About Death. It’s hard to know what is more damaging to a patient, the truth or the hope of one more experimental treatment… even if it has less than 5% efficacy. Hope can give the patient options, a reason to fight through pain and suffering. Hope can give a family a stay from grief, but it can also cause a patient to accept further treatments for the sake of their loved ones. Hope can give a doctor an out, a way to avoid being death’s messenger. For this reason and more, accepting hope as an unquestionable virtue can sometimes cause patients, who have no curative options, only more pain and suffering.

**

Is there such a thing as false hope? This is the primary question I’ve had on my mind since December when the heartbreaking case of thirteen year old Jahi McMath blanketed national media. McMath had entered Children’s Hospital Oakland, in California, for an operation to end sleep apnea. The operation proved fatal when, three days later, McMath hemorrhaged enough blood to stop her breathing. Doctors determined that she was brain dead and were preparing to remove her respirator when McMath’s parents’ refused to let them do so.

Brain death has long been the accepted medical definition of death. It means that oxygen is no longer reaching the patient’s brain; not even the brain stem (as with persistent vegetative state patients) is functional. Yet, as another Beauchamp book, Ethical Issues in Death and Dying, co-edited with Robert M. Veatch in 1996, notes, some, like McMath’s parents…

recognize this choice as a moral, religious, or philosophical one, not one that can be made solely on the basis of scientific evidence. It appears that a small, but significant minority will continue to hold that an individual with a beating heart is still alive even if that heart is maintained mechanically and there is no brain function.

Clearly, from commentary surrounding the case, McMath’s parents are among a small minority of Americans who do not count brain death as final death. The significance of this minority is evident in the aftermath of the case. Nailah Winkfield, Jahi’s mother, was granted permission to move her daughter to another facility after Children’s Hospital Oakland issued a death certificate for Jahi.

A few days before the move, the Terri Schindler Schiavo Life & Hope Network, disclosed that they had been working in secret with Winkfield to find an appropriate facility and to raise funds. The Network was founded by the parents and siblings of Terri Schiavo, a persistent vegetative state patient who died in 2005 after an extended and highly publicized court battle determined that her feeding tube should be removed, according to her husband’s request. The Schindler’s are radical in their belief that the courts ordered the death of Terri Schiavo, that she was severely disabled. In taking up the cause of Jahi McMath, they signaled their commitment to an outdated definition of death that considers only the heart, even if that heart is mechanically operated. The family is currently raising funds for a facility to house patients like Schiavo and McMath, presumably without the threat of death certificates. For years they have been compiling a list of doctors and facilities sympathetic to their cause.

But it’s the Life & Hope Network’s use of hope that should draw our attention. Unless a persistent vegetative state diagnosis is incorrect there is no hope of recovery for a patient. Some brain activity may be present, most often those functions controlled in part by the brain stem, such as sleep-wake cycles and yawning. In the case of Jahi, brain death was confirmed by more than one doctor. McMath had no brain activity whatsoever.

The brain can’t regenerate itself, it can’t heal. Yet on February 19th, Nailah Winkfield posted her first update on her Facebook page, “Keep Jahi McMath on Life Support” (which has 23,600 likes) since Jahi’s removal from Children’s Hospital. Winkfield’s letter read:

I have been surrounded by the love, support and prayers of so many kind people. Despite what people say about my daughter being dead and how I must be ignorant not to get that, I can tell you that she is much better physically since she has left Children’s Hospital and I see changes that give me hope.

Winkfield goes on to use hope three more times in the letter: “I love Jahi and where there is love, there is hope” (a quote that echoes, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” a quote attributed to Terri Schiavo by the Schindlers and used as a tagline on the Life & Hope Network website); “some [people who have contacted me] have given me hope”; and most chillingly, “Hopefully my daughter can change some of the ways brain death is viewed in today’s society. I think she already has.”

Just as the definition of death is questioned by Jahi’s mother and the Schindlers, so too is the definition of life. Despite a death certificate, is Jahi alive? Was Terri Schiavo alive before her feeding tube was removed? In an article for the Washington Times, Bobby Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s brother and director of the Life & Hope Network, wrote, “We respond because that is our mission — to provide aid, comfort and support for vulnerable persons, and to speak truth to power. No one faces more risk in today’s health care system than our medically vulnerable.”

Does hope for a miracle justify the resources that are now being used for Jahi’s “life support” and care? The rhetoric of those who hope for miracles make this vital conversation very difficult to have (what is truth? power? who is vulnerable?). As the McMath case shows, considering all hope a virtue that must be protected or accommodated has significant ramifications–for patients who have simulacrum lives projected onto them; for families who are kept from grieving by the machine-assisted prolongation of their loved one’s vital functions; for doctors who must balance the emotional and medical needs of patients; and for society, confused by terminology it doesn’t understand but that it must collectively pay for. Hoping for something impossible may be a virtue but, in the realm of medicine, perhaps it is not humane.

 ***

*Emily Dickinson. Pandora’s jar. Beryl. Romans 8:24. Springs eternal, I Corinthians 13:13. After the Apocalypse. Cornell West. Romans 5:4, Meghan Hope Pacyna.

**In defense of Jauhar’s defense, he likely had no say in what his op-ed was titled.

***Butler has expanded her article, “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” into a book about futile care, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, published in September, 2013.

 ***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

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Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann is currently writing a book about a good death.

The post A Special Sustaining Power appeared first on The Revealer.

In the slickly produced, “Beat It” style video for his 1993 song “The Resurrection Rap,” the once-popular Christian contemporary muscian Carman recasts the narrative of the passion as a brawl between theologically inclined street gangs. His Jesus is white, unshaven and wears a leather jacket with a blue bandana, the signifying accessory of his “crew.” At the climax of the song an all black gang, implicitly led by the Devil, beats Jesus to death with knives, chains and nun-chucks. They toss his body in a dumpster.

The media scholar Heather Hendershot, in her 2004 volume Shaking the World for Jesus, devotes several lucid chapters to the rise and transformation of Christian Contemporary Music (C.C.M.) in the latter half of the twentieth century. Naturally, she touches on Carman — as do her subjects. “I try to avoid Carman like the plague,” one unnamed professional in the Christian music industry told Hendershot. “I think he’s a heretic… His whole thing… I think it borders on prostitution of the gospel, quite frankly.”

Last month, when I reviewed Carman’s music video collection The Standard, I concluded with a throwing up of hands. Whatever message Carman was trying to transmit had been hopelessly garbled, I said, by its medium of transmission. Interestingly, Hendershot’s correspondents in C.C.M. agree with this sentiment, albeit on theological grounds. It’s tempting to end the conversation there: Carman, whatever his final intentions, simply failed to entertain or uplift. As an artist he was, at best, a clown and, at worst, a prostitute. So, why keep talking about him?

The answer is simple, and injurious to my critical vanity. Whatever my opinion of Carman’s comprehensibility, his work has certainly communicated with its intended audience on a massive scale. When “The Resurrection Rap” was released, Carman’s donation-supported stage shows were commanding national and international audiences in excess of 50,000. Over the course of his career, he’s moved ten million albums. Billboard magazine, in 1990, named him “Contemporary Christian Artist of the Year.” What’s more, C.C.M. producer Cindy Montano, in her interview with Hendershot, noted that Carman’s work ignites a religious spark in its audience. After Carman T.V. specials, Montano said, people often call into the network “seeking salvation, wanting someone to pray with them… Carman’s videos are very effective at touching people.”

Montano was speaking of Carman’s music videos — but works such as The Standard weren’t his only releases in the VHS format. In the early 1990s, at the height of his career, the singer’s Carman began a monthly “video club,” called “Time2,” whose members received a monthly VHS dispatch featuring new music videos, tape of live C.C.M. performances, interviews on evangelical topics, ministry from Carman himself, and, as one advertisement for the series put it, “[comedy] sketches with an apparent purpose.” These tapes, running a highly-televisable thirty-minutes each, play like a gaudy, early-nineties riff on the ramshackle 1944 radio-magazine The Orson Welles Almanac, which was an attempt by Welles to merge broad comedy, serious drama and political comment into a showy half-hour capable of selling Mobil gasoline. Critics at the time were quick to point out that Welles, whatever his talents, was no Jack Benny. Carman, in turn, is no Orson Welles.

“Time2” is a mess. The comedy fails to land, the interviews play like shrill monologues and the split-second editing employed throughout makes even straightforward segments nearly incomprehensible. Where the club succeeds, however, is in the clarity of its intent. Each episode articulates a proper evangelical “response” to a relevant issue, using a variety of sequences and tones to deliver an unwavering didactic message. In so doing, I believe, the series lays bare Carman’s appeal — and the features of his work which either embarrass or inspire, depending on your point of view.

The episode “Faith with Reason,” provides a representative example. On this videotape, Carman promises to address the idea of the scientific and historical “accuracy” of the biblical text, with his position being that direct evidence — while nice — is of secondary concern. Towards this end, “Time2’s” regular “Buzz” feature is devoted to attacking the material culture of dirt-bike and dune-buggy enthusiasts, implicitly because their fanaticism is unproductively worldly. Following a performance from the C.C.M. artist Cindy Morgon, the theme is again picked up in a comedy sketch featuring two redneck caricatures sharing a porch and discussing “belief” over a deafening soundtrack of canned birdcalls. One of them “believes” only in things he can see — including wallpaper and pickles. The other, a Christian, takes these pronouncements in stride for four excruciating, mirthless minutes. In the end, afraid that its audience might miss the point, the “Time2” provides an onscreen quotation of John 20:29: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.”

The latter half of the tape is dominated by Carman. First, the musician flashily appears on “Time2‘s” Saturday Night Live-like main stage to interview an author of popular Christian apologetics, making sure to provide the requisite talk show plug.

An unrelated C.C.M. video follows, preceding the climactic moment when Carman takes the stage alone to minister directly to his viewers. “Don’t follow what you hear or what you see or what you experience,” he says, over a score of weeping pianos. “Follow what’s already there in God’s revelation to mankind.” Biblical quotations are helpfully presented throughout by colorful, frame-filling graphics.

As in Carman’s music videos, a series of obvious cross-pressures are at work in “Time2.” Television is probably the most visible, given the series’ focus on dividing itself into segments of three to five minutes in length, complete with simulated commercial breaks. Along with this format comes an attempt to be entertaining in a familiar, televised way — hence “Time2‘s” eclectic mix of talk show, sketch comedy and musical performance. Often this approach muddles “Time2’s” religious message, as in the segment on desert sports from “Faith with Reason.” In this sequence, loud rock music plays over scenes of leaping dirt-bikes and sand-spitting dune-buggies, glorifying the supposedly “material” world the segment is ultimately meant to attack. The world outside of evangelical culture can be fun to look at, “Time2” acknowledges, but it is also a domain of spiritual threat.

These two stances toward the non-evangelical are played out prominently in “Time2’s” choice of episode topics.

Each month, for the most part, the club devoted its time to articulating the proper evangelical “response” to a contemporary topic of religious, social or political interest. Two of the entries I managed to track down, “A New Age” and “Psychics: The Counterfeit Connection” explicitly dismiss the spiritual claims of practitioners in non-evangelical traditions.

Psychics, Carman says, exist in an area of “profound spiritual darkness,” a zone made all the more dangerous by its omnipresence in “secular” pop-culture. Throughout this episode of “Time2,” seemingly independent artifacts such as Ouija boards, psychic hotline commercials and roleplaying games are woven into a singular demonic conspiracy bent on the seduction and death of the evangelical audience.

“A New Age,” an episode that finds similar malevolence in “Star Wars,” crystal healing, the recycling movement and “relative morality,” carries a particularly paranoid message. In one sequence of interviews, a number of evangelicals describe a conspiracy to indoctrinate children in “new age” practices through public education. Johanna Michelson, a reoccurring “Time2” expert on the occult, argues vehemently that the tainting of public education is simply the first step in a secretive plot that aims to create an irreligious one-world government, necessitating a future where “Christianity will be the enemy of the superstate.” This apocalyptic pronouncement is presented without comment or counter-argument. In “Time2,” such a scenario is the logical outcome of a culture where religious doctrines have become disturbingly fluid — one sequence, late in the episode, shows a car bumper gaining and losing political stickers over the passage of time. The effect is both humorous and chilling — in “Time2’s” conception of the world, such everyday sights are evidence for the proactive reality of evil.

This paranoid stance helps explain Carman’s engagement with popular culture as a whole. While the musician assumes the aesthetics of pop, quoting from Michael Jackson and Nirvana in his music videos and aping a variety of television forms in “Time2,” this act of assumption is predicated on the necessity of divorcing such stylistic forms from whatever “secular” content they might contain. The status of this project, even among evangelicals, is by no means uncontroversial. The Revered Jimmy Swaggart, for instance, once famously argued that using the aesthetics of rock n’ roll to convey a Christian message was like “giving a drug addict methadone.” From his point of view, the format of secular popular culture was inherently corrupt. Carman, implicitly, takes the opposite position.

While “Time2” reveals that Carman views the “secular” world as deeply threatening to evangelicals, it also proposes a cultural landscape where such threat has been expunged. When Carman quotes from “Beat It” in his “Resurrection Rap” retelling of the passion, he is actively creating a world where all the aesthetic pleasure of Jackson’s product is ideologically vacated, the resulting void neatly filled with clear evangelism. There is nothing wrong, Carman seems to say, with enjoying the look and feel of non-evangelical pop — these elements, in and of themselves, are meaningless. In a world where evangelism is the only acceptable content, Carman would be the king of pop.

Carman exists, however, on our world — and within the material subculture of evangelical film and music. Hendershot, in Shaking the World for Jesus, carefully explores the nature of this space, arguing that growths in evangelical education and affluence since the mid-twentieth century have rendered it profoundly unsettled. Even as Carman doubled down on open didacticism and a healthy paranoia towards “secular” ideology in “Time2,” his contemporaries began to push more nuanced, ambiguous and conversational approaches to faith. In the field of C.C.M., for example, the most popular artists at the turn of the last century were those whose music could “cross over,” finding airtime on such “secular” venues as the cable channels M.T.V. and V.H.1. This passage necessitates a certain amount of subtlety in regards to a musician’s evangelical message — it must be present for those who know what to look for, and invisible to the larger, non-evangelical audience the artist wishes to reach. Carman is rarely subtle, and his faith in the invisible is, ironically, never invisible itself. “Time2,” and Carman’s work as a whole, deliver an openly evangelical message with a maximum of flash and expended capitol. This, Hendershot argues, makes Carman the “most evangelical in theory and the least evangelical in practice” of any contemporary Christian musician. He preaches, exclusively, to the choir.

The antipathy towards Carman expressed by Hendershot’s contacts in the C.C.M. industry makes perfect sense in this context. For them, a certain amount of submission to the aesthetics of non-evangelical pop is seen as necessary for success — maybe even hip. Carman, on the other hand, creates a world in his videos wherein pop aesthetics are made to submit themselves, totally, to evangelism.

Last month, I spoke of the science-fictional occultism of the VHS format. “Time2,” and Carman’s works as a whole, are a perfect example. They’ve fallen to earth through a tear in space-time, a portal to another universe. In their place of origin, Carman is not “the Christian Michael Jackson,” but is, instead, a wholly novel cultural force who fulfills the role of Jackson within a fundamentally altered system of culture. In this world, everything is evangelical. Evangelical pop is simply “pop.” No submissions, substitutions or alterations are required.

VHS tapes are products of a different time, the unknown of not-quite twenty years ago. Even when they were new, such tapes were artifacts — small documents, speaking out of turn, imagining a world where the dominant cultural discourses have been displaced. To those without such imperial aims, evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike, Carman will always come off tasteless. To his core audience, his “subscribers,” however, things like “Time2” must look at least a shade millennial.

 ***

Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. 

The post Carman, Part 2 appeared first on The Revealer.

Sunlight comes through the stained glass windows of Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo on February 10, 2014.
(Photo by Jared Malsin)

By Jared Malsin

On July 3, 2013, after three days of vast protests against Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, the country’s Republican Guard took the president and his aides into custody. Jubilant crowds gathered in Tahrir Square while thousands of Morsi’s supporters flooded another public square a few kilometers away. Military forces began to deploy in the streets of Cairo. Then, on state television, a dramatic press conference: the country’s armed forces chief, General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, announcing the end of Morsi’s rule.

Appearing alongside Sisi was a set of leaders representing the broad coalition against Morsi: youth protest leaders, liberal politicians, Salafi leaders, Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, and finally, Tawadros II, the 118th Pope of Alexandria and leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church. The pope is also the spiritual leader of the Middle East’s largest Christian community, ten percent of Egypt’s population.

Copts joined the demonstrations against Morsi in large numbers. They were Copts who felt that the one-year-old Islamist regime had failed to protect them from attacks by extremists and had pursued a sectarian agenda. Much like the January 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, Copts’ participation in the June 30 protests had little to do with the institutional church. In fact, a recent, as yet unpublished study carried out by researcher Mariz Tadros of the UK-based Institute for Development Studies found that there was no evidence to support claims that the Church did anything to mobilize protesters.

But the pope’s appearance in the July 3 news conference marked a shift for Tawadros, who, after being elected in 2012, had preached the importance of separating religion from politics. “If religion enters politics, it [religion] becomes polluted,” the pope had said, shaking his head during a televised interview. “And this applies to any religion.”

After the coup, the military-led interim government launched a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamist groups, and later, on political dissent in general. In August, government security forces dispersed protest camps organized by Morsi supporters, killing hundreds and arresting more than 1,000 others in the deadliest incident of political violence in Egypt’s recent history. Islamist extremists, who in an outburst of sectarianism blamed Copts for the coup, responded by attacking police and also Coptic institutions, homes, and businesses, including dozens of Churches, particularly in Upper Egypt. At least 42 Orthodox, Coptic, and Protestant churches were attacked. Four Christians died in sectarian attacks.

Even if they were uneasy with the Church’s public role in backing the coup, most Copts supported Morsi’s removal. However, the Church’s more recent forays into politics have been a source of deep contention. In January, the church made the rare step of urging Christians to vote  “yes” in a referendum on a new constitution drafted under the military-backed government. Priests spoke of the new charter’s virtues. Pope Tawadros also appeared in a video stating that a “yes” vote would bring “blessings and welfare.” Egypt’s top state newspaper, Al-Ahram, also published a handwritten letter from the pope calling for an affirmative vote.

In the three years since Egypt’s 2011 revolution, nearly every Egyptian institution—governmental, religious, and otherwise—has faced an emboldened citizenry schooled in the art of protest and insisting on the need for reform. The Coptic Church, an ancient institution that traces its history to Saint Mark, is no different. Egyptian Copts, are more openly expressing discontent with church policies, including its historically close ties with the Egyptian state, and are demanding recognition as equal citizens whose identity is not defined by their religion.

“The new pope gave us the impression that he wanted to get out of the political equation,” said Mina Thabet, a founding member of the Maspero Youth Union, a leading Coptic activist group. “But when we got to the June 30 revolution. The church became part of the political equation again.”

“I am a citizen. I will defend the civility of the country because I will defend my own interests. But these people [the Church] will not defend my interests. They will defend their own interests,” he said.

In late January, military chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, the charismatic general who led the coup against Morsi, received an endorsement from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), Egypt’s highest military body, for a potential presidential run. Though the church did not directly address the possibility of a Sisi candidacy, Pope Tawadros nodded approval, sending Sisi a telegram congratulating him on receiving the military’s political support.

The future of the church’s relations with the state is yet to be defined, but for some politically active Copts, the institution’s recent forays into the political realm raise the specter of the Mubarak-era collaboration between the church and the authoritarian state.

“The church somehow supported Hosni Mubarak’s regime,” said Mina Fayek, a blogger who closely follows Coptic affairs. “The church was afraid of that change. ‘We know Hosni Mubarak. We don’t want a rapid change.’”

“The people in the church—I believe it’s a minority—who want to go back to the Mubarak situation. It’s impossible for them to do so,” said Fayek. “The barrier of fear has been broken, whether from the state or from religious authorities or the patronizing narrative of the elders.”

Collaboration and confrontation: Church and state since 1952

The history of church-state relations since the founding of the modern Egyptian republic in 1952 is generally a story of cooperation interrupted by moments of confrontation. President Gamal Abdel Nasser weakened Coptic elites (primarily through land reform) and strengthened the role of the pope as the main political representative of the Copts. Nasser granted Pope Kyrollos IV political concessions (for example Nasser submitted lists of nominees to his political party for the pope’s approval) in return for unwavering political support.

Church-state relations shifted following Nasser’s death in 1970 and, soon after, Kyrollos’ death in 1971. Nasser’s successor, President Sadat, angered Copts by pursuing a program of Islamization (for example, amending the constitution to cite Islamic law as “the principle source of legislation”), and gave Islamists a freer hand to operate as a counterweight to secular opposition groups. Moreover, the new pope, Shenouda III, engaged in a more confrontational style of politics. In March 1980, following a wave of sectarian attacks, Shenouda cancelled Easter celebrations and withdrew to his monastery to protest what the Church saw as a passive government response to the violence. In retaliation, the government placed the pope under house arrest.

President Hosni Mubarak only lifted Pope Shenouda’s house arrest in 1985, marking a new phase of cooperation between the church and the government. Shenouda shifted to a policy of non-confrontation with the government and a channel of communication between the pope and the president was restored. Shenouda also threw the institutional support of the church behind Mubarak, for example urging Christians to vote for Mubarak when he was campaigning for a fifth term in the 2005 election. When Mubarak was elected with more than 88 percent of the vote, the Holy Synod celebrated by having all churches across the country ring their bells.

The implicit agreement between the church and Mubarak’s state rested in part on the assumption that the state would protect Copts from sectarian violence. In fact, under Mubarak relations with the Copts were managed by the State Security Investigations Service, a powerful intelligence agency notorious for its record of torturing detainees.

On face, the Church and the Coptic community at large might appear to be natural allies of the state in the fight against a common enemy of Islamist militancy. But over the years the “securitization” of state relations with the Copts failed, sometimes disastrously, to prevent sectarian attacks and to arrest and try those for responsible for attacks after they took place. Meanwhile, the security state overseen by Mubarak was not exactly a diverse institution, with virtually no Coptic officials in the upper ranks of the military and security forces.

The entente between church and state began to fray in the last years of the Mubarak era, beginning with a crisis over the wife of a priest who attempted to convert to Islam in an apparent attempt to leave an unhappy marriage. Shenouda again confronted the state, withdrawing the church’s support for Mubarak’s party in the 2007 Shura Council election.

A rise in sectarian attacks in the late Mubarak era also added to the tensions between church and state, culminating with the bombing of the Two Saints Church in Alexandria on January 1, 2011 which killed 23 people. For some, the attack disproved definitively the notion that cooperation between the church and the authoritarian state could provide security for Christians. The bombing marked a low point, not just for Copts but for Egyptian society as a whole. It was the darkest hour before the uprising that would end Mubarak’s government.

A man attends a religious service inside Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo on February 10, 2014.
(Photo by Jared Malsin)

Copts in a revolutionary age

January 27, 2011, was a night of fervent anticipation in Egypt. Two days earlier, the largest street protests in recent memory had completely overturned previous notions of what was politically possible in the country. Earlier that month, protesters in Tunisia had forced dictator Zine El Abedine Ben Ali to flee. Egyptian activists called for mass mobilization on January 28, a Friday of Rage. In households and cafes accross the country Egyptians argued with one another: Who would march the next day? Who would stay at home?

In Giza, across the Nile from Cairo’s city center, an engineering student named Mina Nageeb attended a meeting in a nondescript room at his local Coptic church. A well-known church official cautioned the parishioners against protesting: “Tomorrow will be a bad day,” he said. “You could be attacked. It’s better to stay home and pray for Egypt.”

Nageeb shot back at the church official. “You have no right to tell us what to do. The regime is corrupt and you’re protecting the regime!”

“I’m not protecting the regime, I’m trying to protect my children,” Nageeb remembers the official saying. “I don’t want to hold a funeral the next day for one of my children.”

The next day, massive demonstrations shook the country. By the time the sun set on the Friday of Rage, the police had retreated after long hours of fighting with protesters. Demonstrators occupied Tahrir Square and the headquarters of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was in flames. Nageeb himself was forced to stay home by his parents, but the following day, he left on the pretext of attending one of his classes at Cairo University and instead went to Tahrir.

In spite of the official discouragement of the Church, Copts participated in Egypt’s January 2011 revolution in large numbers. As any one of those Coptic protesters will tell you, they participated not as Christians but as Egyptian citizens. They participated, in fact in order to resist a state that deals with Copts not as ordinary citizens, but people whose citizenship is qualified by their religion and mediated through the institution of the church.  Ishak Ibrahim, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a top human rights group, says the state employed the church as a way of containing Coptic protest and keeping Coptic society bounded. Under Mubarak especially, he said, the state “dealt with the Copts not as citizens, but instead dealt with them through the church.”

The 2011 revolution produced an upsurge in political activism throughout Egyptian society, and Copts were no exception. Coptic activism outside the confines of the church reached an all time high, coalescing around groups like the Maspero Youth Union, which organized demonstrations outside the state TV and radio building (called Maspero) in Cairo demanding that the government do more to protect Copts from sectarian violence and treat Christians as equal citizens.

One such demonstration against sectarian violence, on October 9, 2011, became the most violent confrontation to date between Copts and the state. Soldiers fired on demonstrators and military vehicles careened into the crowds. In the end, some 27 demonstrators were shot or crushed to death. The massacre hardened many Coptic attitudes against the state, and for many also laid bare the intentions of the military vis-à-vis the Coptic community. Maspero, a building originally named after the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, soon became synonymous with a massacre.  The horrific scenes of protesters with bodies and skulls crushed by military vehicles also meant that Maspero was remembered as a turning point in Egypt’s long revolution: an outright massacre of civilian protesters by the military that, in the initial days of the uprising, had been seen as a protector of the revolution.

For newly emboldened Coptic activists, the January uprising and the Maspero massacre reinforced the importance of activism outside the auspices of the institutional church. “There were no front lines and a dignified fight,” says Sally Toma, quoted by the independent Egyptian news site Mada Masr. “There was a march of women, children and those believing Egypt is theirs at last, and must fight even the church for their rights as citizens.”“The January 25 revolution gave people hope that if you stop and say ‘enough,’ you can make a change,” said Mina Thabet, a founding member of the Maspero Youth Union. “It encouraged people to not be silent about their rights again, if they are violated by anyone. If the church violates their rights, they’ll go against the church.”

Coptic Egyptians continued to mobilize under both the government of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that took power from Mubarak and under Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president. Many Copts felt the Islamist-backed 2012 Constitution did not truly guarantee religious freedom. Meanwhile, sectarian attacks continued to escalate, culminating in an assault on the Coptic cathedral in Cairo in April 2013. As the violence worsened, Morsi did nothing to dismantle the sectarian-tinged policies of the old regime. “Part of the problem with Morsi,” says Ishak Ibrahim of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “Was that he dealt with Copts in the same way as Mubarak,” reproducing a sectarian logic of rule.

Egypt’s last secularists

Mariz Tadros, a research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies and an expert on Coptic politics characterizes the relations between the church under Pope Shenouda and the Egyptian state under Mubarak as an “entente.” It was a tacit agreement in which the church cooperated with the security apparatus and lent political support to Mubarak’s government. In return, the state granted the church leeway to manage Copts’ social affairs (for example marriage and divorce) and also fought to protect Christians from Islamist militants. In the end the state failed to deliver security and the pope reduced his support for Mubarak, but the entente, as an overall structure, persisted until Mubarak’s downfall.

In the wake of Morsi’s removal, with an interim military-led government ruling Egypt, the nature of church-state ties is less clear. “There is an open line of communication,” says Tadros, “But I wouldn’t call that an entente. An entente is the kind of deal where in return for church support the government will provide A, B, C, and D, and I don’t see that as emerging yet.”

Whatever the future shape of relations, the church will face a Coptic laity unafraid to openly criticize the church. Disputes over the church’s political role have sparked a furious debate on social media and at least one protest in front of the Coptic cathedral in Cairo’s Abaseyya district.

“Your father might be a priest and you still criticize the Church. That’s how deep it got,” said blogger Mina Fayek. “These people love the church, love the pope. They don’t want to see him in that situation. Therefore they’re expressing displeasure with these stances. This is one change the revolution made: it breaks taboos.”

Activist complaints about the Church’s political stances have recently focused on the pope’s pronouncements about the constitution and about Sisi, but there are other sources of controversy centering on the Church’s conservative stances on social issues such as marriage and divorce. Egyptian law permits divorce but the Church forbids it, meaning that a Christian can be divorced in the eyes of the law but unable to remarry. The issue has even been a source of friction between the church and state institutions like the judiciary.

Church officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the church’s political stances. In a brief phone conversation, Coptic bishop Anba Ermia, an assistant to the pope, said only that the church is “working to build our country, Egypt, to complete what we began on June 30.”

Both the constitution drafted by an Islamist-dominated committee under Morsi and the recently adopted constitution drafted under the military-led government delegated significant power over matters of marriage, divorce, and family to religious institutions like the Church and Al Azhar, the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam. In fact, some Coptic activists view their contention with the Church as part of a struggle to reduce the power of religious authorities in general.

“Al Azhar and the Church are religious institutions. They don’t want a civil country. They want a religious country because they want more power,” said Mina Thabet of the Maspero Youth Union.

Copts’ demands for a separation of religion from politics stem both from a longstanding suspicion of political Islam and concern about the dangers of the church’s political involvement. So adamant are Coptic activists about the need for total secularization of politics that their position can seem unrealistic. Such activists are, in a sense, Egypt’s most staunch secularists, demanding a total withdrawal of religious institutions from politics that has no precedent in any country, much less in Egypt, a country whose powerful religious institutions have long histories of political involvement.

Activists’ objections to the Church’s political involvement point to thorny and deeply complex questions about the blurry boundaries between religion and politics.  But even though their position may seem unrealistic, young Copts’ objections are both genuine and internally consistent. Many such activists are using the same discourse of secularism they employed in the struggle against Morsi to denounce the pope’s friendly gestures toward the new regime. “It’s not fair to tell the Brotherhood or Salafis or others not to be involved in politics and smile at the church when they interfere with politics,” said Mina Nageeb.

Though the future of church-state relations is far from certain, Coptic activists and analysts agree that any return to the collaboration that existed under Mubarak and Shenouda would be both harmful and unlikely to go without fierce protest from the highly politicized laity.

“Any future political order where, if we see any kind of reinstatement of the politics that we saw during pope Shenouda’s era, namely, collaborating with the state and eliminating any independent Coptic civil society will be detrimental for citizenship on two fronts,” says Tadros. “It will be detrimental for citizenship in terms of citizens demanding their entitlements directly, and it will be detrimental for the church as well in terms of being forced in a political position that is not always to the benefit of the Coptic laity.”

With the government pursuing its vast crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, sectarian rhetoric and violence is persisting, and with it a sense of fear anxiety among ordinary Copts. Large numbers of Copts are fleeing the country for the perceived safety of places Europe, North America, and Australia (although the exact scale of the exodus is unknown as the government has not released definitive figures). Though not s mya total elimination of the Christian population (as occurred with the flight of Iraq’s Christians in the carnage following the 2003 US invasion), the Coptic struggle for equal citizenship looks increasingly like a struggle for survival.

***

Jared Malsin is a journalist based in Cairo. He has contributed to TIME, VICE, The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. He tweets at @jmalsin.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Copts in a Revolutionary Age: Egypt’s Last Secularists? appeared first on The Revealer.

From the website of www.ohiolife.org.

By Kathryn Joyce

Ohio Right to Life, a key force behind some of the country’s most strategic anti-abortion legislation, wants to reform adoption. The group is behind a new bill that passed the Ohio state House in January and is under debate in the Senate, designed to make adoption “better.”

At first glance, it’s easy to imagine why. Adoption reform is a hot national topic this year, after stories have flooded the media about international adoption fraud in countries from Guatemala to the Democratic Republic of Congo; a Supreme Court custody battle that pitted a U.S. Indian father and veteran against wealthy, white adoptive parents; scandals of adoptee abuse and murder and the phenomenon of under-the-table adoptee “re-homing“; and even, this month, the unprecedented indictment of four adoption agency staff accused of paying for children in Ethiopia. The Oscar-nominated movie Philomena has highlighted the abusive domestic adoption practices that took place in countries like Ireland and the U.S., when unmarried mothers were sent to maternity homes and coerced into relinquishing their newborns. And the federal government is currently preparing to debate an adoption policy bill that critics say is an attempt to save an international adoption industry that’s going bankrupt in the wake of continuing corruption scandals. Adoption reform discussions are everywhere.

But none of that is what Ohio Right to Life (ORTL) had in mind when they wrote their “adoption reform” bill. By making adoption “better,” the group didn’t mean more ethical or more transparent, but rather easier for prospective adoptive parents—or “better, cheaper and faster,” in the words of the bill’s author, ORTL President Mike Gonidakis. Gonidakis’ bill would reduce adoption wait times from one year to two months, would give adoptive families a state tax break of $10,000 (in addition to existing federal tax credits of around $13,000); would require that all payments for pregnant women’s living expenses be routed through adoption agencies or attorneys, rather than letting women handle their bills themselves; and would reduce by 75% the time that putative fathers have to register with a state agency to be notified of an impending adoption, which allows them to object. Under the bill, putative fathers—meaning those not married to a child’s mother—would have just seven days to put their name on Ohio’s Putative Father Registry, instead of the current 30, event though, as one Ohio man documented, it’s already nearly impossible to access the registry.

All the provisions are aimed, Ohio Right to Life says, at increasing the number of babies available for would-be parents to adopt since, as Gonidakis told the New York Times, “There are so many families waiting to adopt.”

What all this has to do with religion is a long story. As I wrote about extensively in my 2013 book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption, the last decade has witnessed the rise of a robust evangelical adoption movement that mobilized around child adoption—domestic, foster or international adoption—as a uniquely Christian imperative. The motivations of the movement were several. In response to claims of a worldwide “orphan crisis” that had allegedly left hundreds of millions of children parentless, Christian leaders urged their followers and congregations to adopt, as a way of living out the biblical mandate to care for “widows and orphans” (though as it would turn out, most of those alleged orphans have parents). Some theologians described adoption as a “Great Commission” activity that follows the Bible’s call to evangelize the nations, and an opportunity for Christians to introduce new children to Christ. Others focused on how earthly, “horizontal” adoption of children mirrored the spiritual, “vertical” adoption of Christians by God.

But an older motivation was abortion, and the idea that anti-abortion advocates could more convincingly claim to be “whole life” by not just opposing abortion, but by opening their homes to unwanted children. The notion of adoption as an abortion alternative has become so prevalent that Democratic politicians regularly talk about increasing adoption as a way to offset support for abortion rights.

That position has become so standard that, in his testimony to Ohio’s General Assembly, ORTL’s Gonidakis declared that “Adoption legislation should always be crafted to discourage abortion,” as though this was an uncontested truth. Elaborating to a reporter at the Columbus Dispatch, Gonidakis made clear that he thinks the reverse is true as well: that creating a climate hostile to abortion rights will translate to more adoptions. “We have made a significant impact, abortion clinics are closing … in our evolution, we believe the next step is adoption,” he said. “More adoptions will lead to less abortions. More women will see opportunities to have their child and keep their child or place their child for adoption.”

From the Facebook page of Ohio Right to Life.

The only problem is, adoptions have not been forthcoming, at least not in the numbers that Right to Life groups would like to see. In the last four decades, which witnessed the legalization of abortion and the growing acceptance of single parenthood, healthy newborn babies simply aren’t being relinquished for adoption at the rates they were during the era of compulsory maternity home internment for unmarried mothers. Overall, the number of babies relinquished by never-married white women has fallen from around 19% in 1972 to less than 2% today. (Rates of relinquishment for black U.S. women remain statistically low.)

Studies show that this is not so much the result of women choosing abortion over adoption, but rather women now are more empowered to parent alone. But the open arms of the pro-life movement have not been content to wait for the smaller numbers of women who do seek to relinquish. As I’ve written about in The Nation, crisis pregnancy centers—non-medical anti-abortion clinics that aim to talk women out of having abortions, sometimes through deception—often lean heavily on their pregnant clients to consider adoption, arguing that single parenthood is “not God’s plan for the family.” Anti-abortion extremists like Flip Benham, head of Operation Save America (an Operation Rescue splinter group), partner with religious ministries that claim adoption is “the only WIN-WIN solution a young teen mother can really make.” And conservative policy organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family’s lobbying arm in DC, have commissioned multiple market research reports dedicated to the challenge of getting crisis pregnancy centers to produce more adoptions—largely by training counselors to present adoption as a means of unmarried mothers’ redemption, and women who relinquish as more mature and loving than those who “selfishly” insist on parenting. More recently, crisis pregnancy groups that conduct outreach in high schools have gone so far as to claim that all children born to single mothers are automatically orphans (since the Bible defines orphans as “fatherless children”) who would be better off adopted.

This focus on numbers gets at a deeper motivation behind the push to increase adoptions. Just as domestic adoption rates fell in recent decades, so too are international adoptions declining. In fact, according to some adoption proponents, they’re falling off an “adoption cliff”: a reference to the fact that the number of children coming into the U.S. for adoption has decreased by nearly two-thirds in the past decade, from a peak of 23,000 in 2004 to a projected 7,000 for 2013 (official State Department figures for last year have not yet been released). But the demand from adoptive parents hasn’t fallen with it, and the industry increasingly finds itself facing a supply and demand problem. Some conservative commentators have responded with alarm, worrying that we’re in “the Last Days of Adoption.” And adoption agencies have gone out of business without enough adoptions to finance their overhead. Internationally, industry lobbyists are seeking to address this by proposing laws that could bring the numbers back up.

Now, in Ohio, we’re seeing them do the same, shored up by testimony of adoption as a divine calling, as advocates testifying in support of the bill reflected they had “felt the call by God to adopt,” or called their children’s birthmothers “angels on earth.”

But how Ohio’s bill will accomplish the stated goal of facilitating more adoptions is something of a mystery, unless they anticipate a boom of adoptions by defrauding biological fathers of the chance to claim custody. As Rampe Thomas of Ohio’s Choice Network told the Columbus Dispatch, “I’m not sure how a bill that is solely focused on making things better for adoptive families will make more women want to choose adoption.”

Marley Greiner, an actual adoption reform advocate who’s long written about corruption in the industry, agreed, writing in the Columbus Free Press that Ohio Right to Life seems not to understand that “creating a climate of adoption” by restricting abortion is unlikely to increase relinquishment rates.

What ORTL fails to note, and every adoption reformer knows, is that there is little relationship between abortion and adoption. After a brief downturn in adoption after Roe, adoption numbers settled and remain steady. The stigma of unmarried pregnancy and motherhood has plummeted and nearly all unmarried mothers keep their children. Women who have abortions don’t want to be pregnant; those who place babies for adoption either can’t or don’t want to parent.

…Ohio Right to Life, either by design or ignorance, has co-opted adoption reform for its anti-abortion agenda, but fails to show how its bill relates to that agenda. Instead of setting realistic adoption goals such as streamlining foster care placement, capping adoption fees and increasing funds for child/mother welfare services and foster care placement, it’s creating imaginary children for thwarted potential adoptive parents.

The absence of foster care from the bill, as Greiner notes, was telling, given that’s one area that could use more adoptive parent interest. But it wasn’t an accident, as Greiner continues, reporting that when a member of Ohio’s House Committee on Health and Aging brought up foster care, bill sponsor Rep. Jim Buchy tersely replied, “That’s obviously a different issue.”

Where the bill goes from here is uncertain. On February 26, Gonidakis testified against the Senate’s version of the bill, since it didn’t include his proposed restrictions on putative fathers’ rights. Without limiting fathers’ rights, Gonidakis warned that potential adoptive families would be scared away from the process, and stressed-out pregnant women might decide to abort rather than relinquish for adoption. They’re unlikely threats, in both cases, but illustrative of how one-sided the debate over the bill has been, representing the interests of one party to the “adoption triad” alone.

It’s not just Ohio though. In 2012, Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman, a Republican, introduced legislation that would officially label single parenthood a risk factor for child abuse, and in his promotion of the bill, he lamented that too few out-of-wedlock births had resulted in adoption. In Texas last June, a Senator named Eddie Lucio proposed a bill calling for women who were seeking abortions to undergo three hours of directive adoption counseling—something that is at odds with the neutral, nondirective options counseling suggested by industry best practice.

History shows what can happen when there’s a powerful industry motivated to increase adoption numbers by increasing the number of relinquishments. From the maternity homes of Ireland to the “paper orphanages” facilitating fraudulent adoptions from Ethiopia to U.S. crisis pregnancy centers, efforts to obtain more adoptable children tend to come at the expense of protecting children’s and families’ rights. The answer to that is not an ideological co-option of the language of adoption reform, but the thing itself.

***

Kathryn Joyce is the author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. 

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