Dr. Candace Lukasik is an assistant professor of Religion and faculty affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her research focuses on the transnational politics of migration, violence, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas. Her first book, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, forthcoming March 2025) examines how American theopolitical imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom in migration. Professor Lukasik completed her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley.
This interview was conducted with Dr. Matthew Anderson, executive editor for Dialogue Across Borders, in May 2023 and updated in July 2024.
How did you first pursue research in Egypt?
I first traveled to Egypt in 2007 for an Arabic language program. During that initial trip, I became well acquainted with a Coptic Orthodox family that I was staying with in the Masākin Sheraton district in Cairo. With them, I attended Orthodox liturgy for the first time and they introduced me to what I would describe as a Coptic lifeworld in Egypt that really shaped the way that I have approached Egypt over the years, as a kind of a spiritual landscape. Throughout years of traveling to and from Egypt, from 2007 until the present day, I also began attending Coptic liturgy in Buffalo, New York, where I'm originally from. During my doctoral studies at UC Berkeley, I attended a Coptic church there in Hayward, California. And the reason I mention that is because, over those years, since I started going in 2007 until today, and really most strikingly after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, church dynamics in the US have shifted dramatically. I noticed that there were intergenerational tensions associated with new migration waves.
I had initially begun a project in Egypt on the growth and eventual decimation of Coptic political movements like the Maspero Youth Union, as well as citizenship education at the Youth Bishopric in the Coptic Orthodox Church. But the growing importance of Coptic migration, both to religious and political life for Copts, really interested me both as an anthropologist and as a practitioner of Coptic Orthodoxy myself. All that said, when I began doing the research for my forthcoming book, I started thinking seriously about field sites in 2016, so I traveled to Washington DC, New York, LA and Nashville, Tennessee. I worked with Coptic bishops both in New York and New Jersey who allowed me to do the research that I did, as well as in Egypt, where I initially worked in a village near Nagʿ Ḥammādī, about six hours south of Cairo.
The way in which I started working in that area of Upper Egypt was connected to a conference I attended in the summer of 2016 - the Coptic Solidarity Conference that happens every year. At that conference in the summer of 2016, I met Nermīn Riyāḍ, who is the founder and the head of Coptic Orphans in the US. They have a "serve to learn" program that they do for diaspora Copts who go back to Egypt and serve. They have a variety of different programs, but she encouraged me to do the English language program. And this is what introduced me to the village that I worked in and have very strong connections to now, which is Bahjūra near Nagʿ Ḥammādī. It was the folks that I met there that connected me to this broader question about the transnational politics of migration for Copts. More specifically, one of the people that I became very close with, I'll just say that his name is Amīn, talked a lot about people leaving the village through the Green Card lottery. He would explain how there are certainly issues of animosity between Muslims and Christians in Egypt, but, and I quote him, over a lunch one day he said, “When Christians go to the US Embassy, they tell them that they want to travel because of persecution.” And I thought that was really interesting, because there's obviously a disconnect there in terms of how the immigration process normally operates. Most Copts are not typically going to the US Embassy to claim asylum as a Christian in Egypt, but even in Egypt there is a perception that they often do. And people like Amīn, who understand that there are Muslim and Christian tensions, also understand how this perception can be instrumentalized in certain ways. So, there are just different layers to this process and how it is perceived. And that's what really fascinated me and kind of brought me to the work that I'm doing today.
Could you tell us more about the village you worked in?
It's called Bahjūra, which literally means “abandoned.” It is related to the Arabic word hijra. It's such a beautiful village. There's a mythology to the village that several centuries ago there was a big fire that took place which led to a large part of the community leaving. The village then was called Mahjūra, which also means the “deserted” village. That eventually turned into Bahjūra. And that idea of abandonment is very clear, even today. But there are different layers of abandonment or migration that are structured in the village’s landscape itself. And then another fun fact is that George al-Bahjūrī, a very famous Egyptian Coptic painter, is from that village as well.
