S.S. Hasan is an independent scholar and the author of Enemy in the Promised Land. She has reported on Israel and Egypt for The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard University, she was later an Associate of Harvard's Center of Middle Eastern Studies, where she completed the writing of this book.

"Hasan's candid and well-researched work is an important contribution to understanding the church in today's Egypt."-- International Bulletin of Missionary Research

"Hasan provides the best possible introduction to the experience of religious minorities in the contemporary Arab world: an insightful and illuminating analysis of the internal politics of the Coptic community in Egypt. The reconstruction of Coptic identity over the last half century, in response to growing Islamic hostility, makes a fascinating story."--Michael Walzer, Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study

"Hasan once again explores the complexities of religion and modernity, this time through a thorough and provocative examination of the twentieth century reform movement within the Egyptian Coptic Church. In simultaneously locating the impulse to reform in an internal dynamic within Coptic history and society and in the wider social change in the largely Muslim society of Egypt, Hasan provides a comprehensive and accessible history of the modern Coptic Church and its role in Egyptian society. In that historical interpretation, Hasan embeds a subtle and intriguing contribution to the larger, more general literature on religion in the modern world--a literature that has too long ignored the experience of the Christian communities of the Middle East. This book deserves a wide audience, not only among readers who want to understand modern Egypt but those who want to comprehend the many ways in which religious beliefs and institutions respond to modernity."--Lisa Anderson, Columbia University