By Abhimanyu Das

Namir Abdel Messeeh’s highly entertaining documentary The Virgin, the Copts and Me is a curious beast, a bit like one of those clever New Yorker articles that start off making you think it’ll be about Batman but end up being about the tax obligations of the 1%. Only, in this case, it’s not entirely clear whether the thematic sleight-of-hand was artistic choice or just lucky accident. Either way, this narrative slipperiness is both what’s interesting and troublesome about this frustrating picture, easy to like but difficult to recommend.

The saga begins with the French-Egyptian filmmaker (the family emigrated to France in 1973), sitting down with his family to watch a fuzzy videotape of an alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary. Further discussion reveals that this is one of a spate of such sightings, experienced mostly by the oft-persecuted Christian Coptic community in Egypt. Interestingly, a few Muslims had claimed to experience these holy visions as well. This curious cultural hook is all Messeeh – a secular skeptic – needs to decide on making a documentary about the phenomenon.

The film’s tendency toward distracting self-referentialism is already front-and-center. Messeeh spends a chunk of time ‘documenting’ his attempts to find a financier and win his family over to the project’s cause. All this is done with great comic flair. We get an early introduction to the most memorable character in the film – his domineering mother Siham who continually expresses doubts about her son’s ability to pull this off. Unfortunately, much of this feels staged. It seems unlikely that Messeeh happened to have an HD camera running at a family gathering during which he is hit by a perfectly blocked creative epiphany. The film is full of what look to be staged scenes, contrived narrative setups and pre-arranged dialogue, raising the question (unintentionally, in my view) of whether this is a documentary at all. Messeeh is in every scene, an unapologetic puppet-master. At every turn, the developments feel arranged as opposed to observed.

The latest issue of Cultural Anthropology features an article by Revealer writer Yasmin Moll (read the entire issue here) titled, “Building the New Egypt: Islamic Televangelists, Revolutionary Ethics, and ‘Productive’ Citizenship.”  (You can read Yasmin’s article and the entire issue here.  You can read Yasmin’s articles for The Revealer here.)

From Khaled Fahmy’s article, “Women, Revolution, and Army” in the Egyptian Independent:

Ibrahim [Samira Ibrahim, Egyptian woman who successfully sued the army for "subjecting her to a 'virginity test'"] may not be aware that the humiliating virginity test she was subjected to last March in the Hykestep military prison was not the first of its kind in Egypt’s modern history. In 1832, a “School of Midwives” was established in the Azbakeya district to teach a select number of girls the basics of medical science. Graduates of that school were appointed as paramedics in police stations to do what we now call “forensic” work. In addition to identifying causes of deaths, they also conducted virginity tests on girls whose male relatives had brought them to the police stations to ascertain their virginity.

Police records of hundreds of such tests are kept in the Egyptian National Archives. They contain menial statements such as “found not a virgin,” “her hymen has been removed completely” and “she has been used before.”

(h/t Marilyn Young)

Worth the Wait: It may have taken 1,500 years but the Talmud finally has an index.
Early Adopters: I’ve long said that religion and porn are the two first groups to adopt new technologies. In “Christianity and the Future of the Book” at The New Atlantis Alan Jacobs writes, “Religious communities have been the inventors, the popularizers, or the preservers of technologies.” (Jacobs doesn’t say anything about porn, alas.)
The Vatican has released its annual report on deaths of mission workers around the world. South America and Africa are highest on the list of dangerous continents.
Red Kettle Menace: The Salvation Army does great work but tis the season to hear more about their prayer-for-assistance policies, in this instance, regarding same-sex couples. (TR friend and co-conspirator Diane Winston has written about the Salvation Army in Red Hot and Righteous: the Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. Hear her talk about it here, in a 2009 interview with NPR.)

Reuters reports that Egypt’s Coptic Christians are receiving an unprecedented amount of foreign support; subsequently they fear “a backlash from Muslims who could resent special attention to a minority at a time when all Egyptians are suffering economic hardship and political uncertainty.”  Which reminds us of a provocative article by Marc Michael that Al Jazeera posted in November.  Of the march by Coptic Christians on October 9th that led to 20 deaths– a march protesting not the Egyptian government but the burning of a building that was slated to become a church–Michael writes:

…this march inscribed itself in a liberal project of identity politics – a politics based around the notion that irreducible differences occur naturally in society, that the interest-groups coalescing around them have specific needs and rights, which the state ought to protect against the tyrannical rule of the selfish majority. To many Third-World ‘minorities’, this type of contemporary Anglo-Saxon liberal thought represents a certain temptation, a flirtation with a distant, spectacular and utopian modernity that happens in Europe or in the United States. Copts are in no way immune to that dangerous attraction, particularly so considering the very high proportion of the Coptic diaspora living in Canada, the US or Europe. It is in that sense that liberalism is killing the Copts: in cheering them to embrace their estrangement from Egyptian society, to value their alienation as an end in itself, and to seek the legal support of the state in establishing their difference as a social fact.

Media in the West love the narrative that godless, Communist Russia eventually fell to the relentless, holy hand of capitalism (to be specific, the one at the end of Ronald Reagan’s right arm).  Now that communism is gone, lookee there!  Russians are flocking to view Our Lady’s Belt.

Visitors are required, because of the outrageously long lines, to wait an average of 26 hours to see the “cincture” of the Virgin Mary, on display thanks to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Perhaps a sign that communism is gone: it is reported by impatient visitors that a separate line exists for VIPs.  And then there’s the marketing.  RT writes:

Ironically, a tiny piece of the same holy belt is on permanent display at another Moscow cathedral, just a few hundred meters away from Christ the Savior.

Perhaps a sign that communism is not forgotten: the church had to adjust the display of the belt to more swiftly move visitors by it.  Their new flow of veneration sounds like the one used in Lenin’s tomb: keep the worshipers in order and shuffle them efficiently past the relic.

New York Judge Jed S. Rakoff told the Securities and Exchange Commission not spare the rod with Citigroup.

From Fox News, a lengthy story on Al-Qaida’s impersonation of Christian missionaries in Africa.  So last century!

Kamran Pasha at Illume reminds us that women have been playing dominant roles in Islam for a long time.

Minority Rights are a “Special Privilege;” Next to Newt’s Godliness; Tebowing the Spotlight; Catholic Attitude; Because Your Military Rulers Said So; The Sui Juris of Citizenship

From Marc Michael’s “Is liberalism killing the copts?” at Al Jazeera:

Imperial liberalism not only reinforced lines of fracture in local social fabrics, but often engineered them, by inventing traditions and mythological pasts, linguistic and ethnic groupings. To this day a majority of Copts subscribe to the “Hamitic Hypothesis”: that Copts are a separate race with a separate language, that they are not Arabs but descendants of the pharaohs, the original Afro-Nilotic people of the land; in biblical terms, the accursed progeny of Ham rather than Sham.

Amy Levin: What would Muslim drag look like? Something like this? Yesterday, the AHA Foundation shared a link on their twitter account to an article titled “Egyptian Women’s Group Calls on Men to Try the Veil.” Aliaa El Mahdy, an Egyptian university student, created a facebook page called “Resounding Cries,” which asks Egyptian men to post photos of themselves donning the hijab (Muslim veil). Since the launch of the page on November 1^st, dozens of Egyptian men have heeded the call. Mahdy feels that it is unjust that only women are required to wear the hijab, which reflects the unequal status of women in Islam.

Yasmin Moll, a Ph.D. student in socio-cultural anthropology at NYU, has been our woman in Cairo, reporting what she saw during and after the protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year reign.  I asked Yasmin last week what she thought of George Friedman’s analysis of the events.  Friedman, editor and CEO of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a Texas-based global intelligence service, writes in “Egypt: The Distance Between Enthusiasm and Reality“:

What we see is that while Mubarak is gone, the military regime in which he served has dramatically increased its power.