19-min. podcast episode. Arabic is Nashville’s third most-spoken language, and around 80% of its speakers are Coptic Christians. Unlike members of almost every other U.S. Coptic community, most of Nashville’s Copts are working-class people. Yet most of these working-class Egyptian Christians are invisible to most other Nashville residents.
This invisibility is disempowering and deliberate. Competing and flattening narratives from liberals and conservatives and even many U.S. Coptic Orthodox clergy members tend to discourage Nashville’s working-class Copts from organizing and from participating in mutual aid.
Above: Lydia Yousief (left) and Keria Nashed
Enter Elmahaba Center, an independent Coptic community organization founded in 2019 by Lydia Yousief. It serves all of Nashville’s Arabic-speaking immigrants, refugees, and their children—and anyone else in town who asks for help. Elmahaba offers mutual aid, tutoring, college prep classes, art classes, civic engagement, case management, livestream informational sessions for new immigrants, Arabic and English classes, and an oral history project. Elmahaba Center also creates and sponsors art and cultural events around Nashville. (Because they’re Middle Tennessee’s only Arabic community organization, the’ll create and sponsor other programs as needs arise.)
Elmahaba Center is unique because of its focus on an unserved community—the Arabic-speaking working class. Learn how Elmahaba Center navigates false and deficient narratives to support Coptic and Muslim working-class solidarity, often against the wishes of the workers’ religious clerics. Learn how Elmahaba’s leadership does so by living out a vibrant Coptic Orthodox faith.
Above: the Elmahaba Center van, chock full of diapers.
You’ll hear from Lydia, from two volunteers (well, three, counting me), and from Anthropology Professor Candace Lukasik, who has written about Elmahaba’s work in her recent book Martyrs and Migrants. You’ll hear parishoners singing in a Nashville Coptic Orthodox Church and volunteers talking about their work as they hand out diapers to Nashville’s young Arabic-speaking families.
My thanks to Keria Nashed and Lydia for meeting with me and to Lydia for being my guide to the liturgy during my visit to Nashville’s St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.
Above: part of the narthex entryway of St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.
