DSR Lecture Series: “Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt”

Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt explains why the state’s authority to decide what is and is not religion/religious remains desirable among marginalized communities even as an interdisciplinary scholarship has long argued that state regulation inhibits religious flourishing. Examining the claims-making practices of Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahá’ís in Egypt before and after the 2011 uprising, Oraby shows that minorities who mobilize state adjudicative institutions, including those who challenge state agents or decisions, seek to expand state definitions of law and religion in ways that include their difference and reinforce majoritarianism. Their activism encourages a rethinking of how membership as enshrined in public law coheres with membership rules specific to religious communities. Importantly, as Oraby argues, that coherence does not result from the state remaking communities in its image but reflects preexisting and mutually reinforcing norms.

About the speaker

Mona Oraby is Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University. Since 2017, she has served as editor of The Immanent Frame, a digital publication of the Social Science Research Council that advances scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere, broadly construed. A scholar with multidisciplinary and multimodal research interests, she is the author of Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2024) and coauthor of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022).