Contracting Coptic-Muslim Marriage in Egypt: Class, Gender, and Clerical Mediation in the Administrative Management of Religious “Crossings”

In 2011, amid the political upheavals that followed the January 25 uprising, Yara and Abir, both Coptic women in their twenties, married Muslim men.¹ Yara got to know Mustafa as they meandered through protests and sit-ins in Cairo’s squares, finding their political voice among the shifting activist alliances and repeated revolutionary mobilizations in the wake of Mubarak’s forced abdication. Both educated Cairenes from well-to-do suburbs, they connected through a shared commitment to left-leaning revolutionary politics and a passion for community service and the arts.² Abir, whose marriage became subject to public controversy around the same time, met Yasin in late