What this work is for
am a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Claremont Graduate University, concentrating in Coptic Studies. My work moves between the academy and the Church — a dissertation on the Copto-Arabic Synaxarium, translations of theological and liturgical texts, scholarly editing, and a sustained practice of Coptic liturgical music on the oud. What ties all of this together is a conviction that the texts of the Coptic Church are best read under the light that produced them, and that the scholar who reads them most accurately is the one who has also prayed them. What follows is how I came to that conviction.
My first teacher of this tradition was my mother. Before I was in any church classroom or any liturgical chorus, I was at home in Asyut with her, and she was the one who taught me. She would walk me through the saints of the day from the Synaxarium at breakfast. She would quiz me on the responses of the Divine Liturgy. She fasted beside me and explained, as we went, what the fasting was for. This was long before I had the words to describe what was happening, and long before I could have told you that it was anything other than the ordinary shape of a day in our house.
I was baptized at the Monastery of St. Mary, Muharraq, on the feast of Fr. Mikhail al-Behiery. I am named in a church that has been tracking names since the fourth century. I did not come to the Coptic tradition as a researcher; I was placed inside it by people who love it, in a place that has held it for a very long time, and I was raised to take it seriously as my own.
I learned the liturgy first as music. The Coptic Church has one of the oldest continuously sung liturgies in Christianity; its hymns carry theology in their modes and rhythms before they carry it in their words. Long before I could read, I could sing. My mother sang with me. The chorus sang around me. Pieces of the feasts lodged in me as melodies — the Palm Sunday hymns, the Paschal lamentations, the Marian doxologies — and only later did I come to understand what the melodies were saying. To this day I find that I know theology first by how it sounds.
On June 14, 2010, when I was eight, I was ordained a chanter. In the Coptic Church, this means the church formally entrusts you with a piece of its liturgy. You stand in the chorus and you sing; you learn the hymns in the modes they belong to; you follow the feasts through the year. The ordination is modest in ceremony and serious in what it asks of you. I received it in Egypt, in the context that produced it.
Eight months later, in February 2011, we immigrated to California. The Arab Spring had begun. We left under the conditions that leaving happens under, and we landed in San Ramon, with my mother’s family, and began a different kind of life. I want to be specific about what that kind of move usually does to a person in my position. The Coptic Church has its long history in Egypt — its liturgies, its saints, its manuscripts, its schools of commentary. When a family leaves, the tradition does not travel with them automatically. It has to be carried. In many Coptic-American families I know, the carrying did not fully happen, and for reasons that are no one’s fault: the new context is demanding, the language of the liturgy is not the language of the school day, the feast days fall on work days, the Synaxarium is read in the church but not in the home. What was ambient in Egypt becomes episodic in America. This is the shape of most of the diaspora.
My mother refused that shape. She kept teaching me at home after we moved. She kept the fasts, the feasts, the morning prayers, the Synaxarium readings. She drove me to vespers when money was tight and she had no particular resources to make the trip — vespers, which almost nothing external compels you to attend, which happens on a weekday evening, which costs gas and time and the kind of ordinary stamina that is easier to spend on almost anything else. She did it anyway. She drove me to music, too — to school concerts and to church choirs — because she understood, I think before I did, that keeping me inside the music was one of the ways of keeping me inside the tradition. She would not let the geography decide what I would inherit. My debt to her is total, and it is the single most important fact about how I read these texts now. I am not someone studying the Coptic tradition from outside its living transmission. I was kept inside it by deliberate effort across a move that has decontextualized a great many people — and because of that, I can see from the inside what is lost when that decontextualization happens, and what is still there when it does not.
The music grew with me. I took up the oud — the pear-shaped lute that sits at the heart of Middle Eastern classical music — and began learning to translate the melodic world of Coptic hymnody into its strings. Coptic oud is not the same as Coptic liturgical music: the oud is not a native instrument of the liturgy, and the hymns in their proper setting are sung without accompaniment. What the oud allows is something different — a way of carrying the melodic heritage of the church into concert halls, into museums, into ceremonies of secular and academic life, and doing so without severing the music from the tradition that produced it. I have played for His Holiness Pope Tawadros II at a gathering of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt. I have played at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among the Baroque European portrait busts. I have played at my own college graduation. The instrument is the same. The formation underneath is the same. What changes is the audience — and changing the audience without changing the integrity of what is played is itself a kind of argument about what this music can do.
Logos Youth Forum, Egypt · 2022
New York · 2023
2024
When I came to the academic study of the same material later, I noticed something I had not been able to name before. Much of what modern scholarship does with a tradition like this one is to lift its texts out of the liturgy and the community that produced them, translate them into the categories of a discipline, and examine them there. Something is gained. A great deal is lost. A Synaxarium read as a reference book is not the text a community reads aloud each morning. A patristic treatise studied outside the rule of prayer that produced it is not the treatise as it actually exists. A hymn analyzed as a literary object, outside the chorus and the mode and the feast, is not the hymn as it actually sounds. The texts of the Coptic Church have been lit from one angle in modern scholarship for a long time, and the angle is not enough.
My work is an argument for reading these texts under the light that produced them. This is not a retreat from rigor; it is a claim that rigor applied to a liturgical tradition means taking the liturgy seriously as part of what the texts are. Because of how I was raised, I read the Synaxarium first as something that is said aloud before dawn, and only second as a document to be collated and dated. I read the patristic corpus first as material of prayer, and only second as material of argument. I hear a hymn first as music, and only second as text. The scholarly work I do is an attempt to put those registers of attention back in contact, so that what the academy studies and what the church lives and what the choir sings are not three different things.
In practice this takes several forms at once. I translate theological and liturgical texts from the Coptic and Arabic traditions: so far this has included Pope Shenouda III’s The Release of the Spirit, the Coptic Psalter and Agpeya, the devotional writings of St. Pope Kyrillos VI, and other work currently in progress. I do manuscript work — collation, critical edition, the slow labor of making texts citable. I work on Coptic liturgical music as both a practitioner and a scholar; my Coptic Hymnal, compiled from the repertoire of the church, is one fruit of that work. I serve as Assistant Managing Editor of the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, which is one of the few standing references our field has in English. And I write my dissertation, which is an argument about the Copto-Arabic Synaxarium that I will not rehearse here, because it is still being argued.
I have had serious teachers. Prof. Tammi J. Schneider directs my doctoral work at Claremont Graduate University. Hany N. Takla, through the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society, has shaped my manuscript training since early in my graduate career. The books carry forewords and prefaces from scholars and clergy I respect — Rev. Dr. Tim Vivian, Metropolitan Serapion, Bishop Kyrillos — and I mention this not as a credential but because the work I do is done inside a conversation, not alone. Five books are in print or under contract. The field is small enough that this feels less like productivity than like trying to keep up with what still needs doing.
The dissertation is my central academic commitment for the next several years. Translation, manuscript work, and musical work will continue beside it. I also mean, as I can, to write here: short essays, reading notes, occasional reflections on the texts I keep returning to. Some of those will appear in the Writings section of this site as they are finished. If you are a scholar or a serious reader who wants to follow a specific strand of the work, the Research page is where to start. If you are looking for the books themselves, Publications has them.
I hold a B.S. in Leadership Studies from California State University, Stanislaus (2024), and I am a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Claremont Graduate University, concentrating in Coptic Studies.