Improvising the Baptismal Grammar: Liturgical Defiance and Intercommunal Boundaries in Medieval and Contemporary Coptic Rites

This paper examines two relatively underexplored Coptic Orthodox rites—the contemporary exorcism sessions held in monasteries and churches across Egypt, and the medieval “Rite of the Jar,” developed for the readmission of Copts who had converted to Islam or entered into sexual relationships with Muslims. Although separated by centuries and diverging ritual formats, both rites emerge as improvisational extensions of the baptismal liturgy and constitute liturgical responses to the porous and at times fraught boundaries between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. I argue that each rite not only reaffirms Christian identity within a minoritized Islamic context, but also performs a theological reassertion of communal sovereignty through liturgical grammar. Both rites thus stand as ritualized acts of defiance—against Islamic hegemony, against the marginalization of Coptic presence in public discourse, and, crucially, against the Coptic Church’s own historical tendencies to contain liturgy as a hidden transcript.

The first case study explores the now widespread phenomenon of weekly exorcism sessions, prominently performed by figures such as Fr. Makary Younan and Fr. Samaan Ibrahim. These events attract overflowing audiences from across Egypt, with a conspicuous and growing Muslim attendance. Drawing on James C. Scott’s theory of the hidden transcript, I propose to read these rites as moments in which the Coptic Church pushes its liturgical discourse from the shadows of ecclesial interiority into the public sphere—transforming liturgy from a veiled assertion of identity into an embodied and confrontational proclamation of Christ’s divinity before those who may deny it. The ritual performance of exorcism draws deeply from baptismal motifs: exsufflation, the use of holy oil, the thrice-repeated naming of the Trinity, and the physical renunciation of demonic power. Yet unlike the baptismal rite, where the initiate’s saintly name marks entrance into the hope of resurrected life, here the priest demands the name of the demon—a reversal that not only enacts power over the possessing force but symbolically reclaims the individual from mimetic social violence, as theorized by James Williams and Bruce Morrill. These sessions thus collapse the boundaries between healing and proclamation, pastoral care and theological warfare. They become liturgical acts of resistance not only against the symbolic order of dhimmitude but also against the internal ecclesial impulse to shield liturgy from public life.

In contrast, the medieval “Rite of the Jar” enacts liturgical boundary maintenance at the moment of communal return. Dating from at least the fourteenth century and preserved in bilingual Bohairic-Arabic manuscripts, this rite was used for the reconciliation of those who had converted to Islam or transgressed sexual boundaries with Muslims. While excluded from the printed liturgical books of the Coptic Church, its structure echoes that of the Eucharistic liturgy—complete with readings, an epiclesis, a Lord’s Prayer, and a final ablution with water poured in the form of a cross. Yet, the rite deliberately avoids baptismal motifs, refusing to rebaptize the penitent, and instead invokes a return to the “original baptism.” This delicate negotiation of ecclesial reintegration without sacramental redundancy bespeaks a sophisticated theological anthropology and an institutional desire to preserve the continuity of Christian identity despite rupture.

The Rite of the Jar names the “evil beliefs of the Hagarenes” explicitly and frames conversion or sexual contact with Muslims as a defilement not only of the individual body but of the social body—the ecclesia. Here, the body becomes the site upon which intercommunal relations are inscribed and contested. As Thomas Sizgorich and Milka Levy-Rubin have shown, early Muslim legal and theological discourses sought to stabilize communal boundaries through both sartorial and social regulations (ghiyār), designed to humiliate non-Muslim populations while preserving Islamic supremacy. The Coptic response, encoded in the Rite of the Jar, mirrors these boundary-setting impulses, but inflects them through sacramental logics. The penitent’s body is ritually washed, re-clothed, and re-named—restoring them not simply to faith but to a reordered social cosmos. This is, as Frederick Barth might suggest, a performance of ethnic boundary maintenance enacted not through violence but through a ritualized narrative of repentance and return.

Crucially, both the Rite of the Jar and contemporary exorcisms resist reductive readings as reactive or derivative practices. Rather, they constitute moments of liturgical creativity and ecclesial improvisation. They both articulate and enact a baptismal grammar—sometimes inverted, sometimes deferred—that responds to the complexities of interfaith contact, minority identity, and theological presence in a hegemonically Islamic society. Whereas the Rite of the Jar patrols boundaries by reabsorbing the “errant” body into ecclesial order, contemporary exorcisms project Christian identity outward, claiming space in an often exclusionary religious landscape. In both cases, the rites operate not merely as sacral performances but as theological declarations—declaring, through water and oil, word and gesture, the enduring agency of a liturgical tradition that refuses silence.