Elmahaba Center’s story is larger than what can be captured, but let me start with two moments:
First is a moment of a priest named Abouna Mikhail Attiya. He’d come from Egypt—with no lick of English—to “solve the youth crisis” in Nashville. Our reputation as a community had already spread in the early 2000s as a community dealing with drugs, crime, and corruption, and so in came Abouna Mikhail—tall, donning an already white beard, and thick, square-like glasses. Quickly, he became well-known, leaping between the two Coptic Orthodox churches in Nashville as well as servicing the youth outside church spaces. He gave Nashville a new dream: a community center—a space outside of religious Coptic sects (i.e. Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic) and outside of church structures. Land was purchased, but when Abouna returned to Egypt, the land was sold and the idea of a dream faded.
The second is a moment in a Somali-owned coffee shop outside of Millwood, the African immigrants’ and refugees’ ghetto. Veronica Nashed and I sat at a booth with a Somali chai and some sambusas. We were both children during that time when Abouna was here in Nashville. Then, there were two priests and two churches. Now, there are nine established churches and three community churches (i.e. Coptic Orthodox communities renting space from Protestant churches) with thirteen priests and two consecrated sisters serving. Within a decade and a half of Abouna Mikhail’s arrival and service, the community had more than quadrupled. Moreover, after the 2011 revolution and the unrest that followed in Egypt, Copts were coming to Nashville, not through the visa lottery, but rather with refugee and asylum status. The situation had changed drastically.
We thought of three pillars that would define our mission—our core—alongside our name, Elmahaba, meaning “unconditional love” in Arabic. We believe that Nashville’s Coptic communities—Orthodox and more—have internalized self-images of backwardness from our surroundings: from the thousands who wake up at 4 am to take the bus to Tyson Chicken Factory and are asked, “Y’all celebrate Ramadan, right?”; to the thousands that built Opryland Resorts before and after the flooding and are constantly being racialized as the “other”; to the thousands who work in Nashville International Airport, yet cannot travel to see their families; to the tens of thousands of Coptic students who are pushed through Metro Nashville schools, through unsafe environments, and live in overpoliced communities; to the thousands of Coptic refugees and immigrants who are denied healthcare and belonging in a society because they do not speak English; to the thousands of Copts themselves who claim Nashville as backward, as gang-infested, as poor.
We want to challenge these narratives, and we challenge them through our Instagram and Facebook posts, through our podcast, and through our oral history project. More fundamentally, an outward response is the least of what we do, what we can do, for a mostly working-class, southern Egyptian, non-English speaking, thriving communities. For our efforts, we also looked internally and started with the youth, offering an alternate and not Coptic-exclusive space for belonging, conversation, and mutuality through our ACT classes and tutoring sessions. Although we do not have our own space, our programming is growing to include adults as well, hoping to reach a holistic family apparatus of support. In January of 2020, we begin adult informational sessions on immigration and sponsorship, job applications, homeownership, car maintenance and buying, driver’s license testing, local political awareness, and starting a small business. The ultimate goal, then, isn’t just the narrative of ourselves, but of the community that we are and will be for the next generation.
Our belief is that the culture we make—whether brought from Egypt, retained in the US, or created in the US—is profoundly influential to the communities we form and live in, for these are the communities that will care for us.
Then, we hope to carry Abouna Mikhail’s dream of a space beyond our own cloisters, of an intersectional and dynamic belonging, of a generational history and presence beyond today.
To support our dream, you can sustain us by becoming a member via patreon.com/elmahabacenter or donate one-time through paypal.me/elmahabacenter.
Lydia Yousief is the director of Elmahaba Center in Antioch, Tennessee. She has a master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, and a few of her favorite things are fateer, Oum Kalthoum, and green tea.
