That Knowledge May Flow: Coptic Intellectuals and the Making of Public Knowledge in Late Ottoman Egypt, ca. 1850-1900

Abstract

Scholars have long debated the social and institutional conditions that shaped inter-communal relations in the late Ottoman Empire. While earlier scholarship emphasized the segmentation of religious communities into separate spheres or “millets,” more recent studies have complicated this model by examining the quotidian interactions of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others in contact zones such as bathhouses, marketplaces, and courts. This dissertation shifts the focus to knowledge as a site of inter-communal exchange and boundary-making, focusing on the emergence of Coptic intellectuals in late Ottoman Egypt between 1850-1900. By exploring the production, circulation, and reception of knowledge within and across communal lines, the study argues that knowledge flows offer unexplored insight into everyday negotiations of religious difference and communal belonging. It addresses two related gaps in the literature. First, the changing status of Copts from non-Muslim subjects (so-called dhimmīs) to co-citizens remains understudied, even though it was central to the making of the Egyptian body politic. Second, the growing literature on the Arab Renaissance or "Nahḍa" has yet to engage with the contributions of minority intellectuals such as the Copts, whose writings are essential to understanding how reform materialized across the religiously heterogeneous empire. By positioning Copts as active participants in the Nahḍa, this dissertation contends that the transformation of the Egyptian public sphere into a space of collective debate and political imagination was contingent, on the one hand, on the increased circulation and production of knowledge across religious boundaries; and on the other, on the integration of minority intellectuals and their traditions into a shared knowledge economy. An emergent culture of “public knowledge”—neither fully secular nor wholly religious—fostered new forms of civic participation that brought Copts and Muslims together within the framework of a shared homeland (waṭan). Coptic scholars, publishers, teachers, and clergy were central to reshaping both the terms of public discourse and the boundaries of intellectual authority. In five chapters, this dissertation explores the contributions of Coptic intelligentsia in official institutions, local associations, print media, and the built environment. It draws on a wide array of previously unexamined sources, including family archives, manuscripts, early-printed books, petitions, and missionary records. The grassroots perspectives afforded by these sources call for a fuller integration of minority archives into the study of Middle Eastern history and, by extension, a reconceptualization of the role of minorities and their knowledge networks in the canon of Arabic intellectual history.