The Liturgy of St. Basil is sung in the Coptic language, directly descended from the language of the pharaohs, and the melodies are also thought to have their roots in ancient Egypt. This set of four audio CDs has been produced to accompany the major publication The Coptic Orthodox Liturgy of St. Basil with Complete Musical Transcription (AUC Press, 1998), which provides fascinating documentation of this ancient tradition. The three-hour liturgy is part of a unique musical tradition transmitted orally through some twenty centuries by generations of singers in Egypt’s ancient Coptic Orthodox Church, and still used today. For these CDs, the liturgy was sung by Sadek Attallah, chief cantor of the Institute of Coptic Studies, Cairo, and recorded at the Institute of Coptic Studies under the supervision of Dr. Ragheb Moftah. This unique set of recordings will be of great value to Copts around the world, as well as to musicologists, ethnologists, and students of religious traditions. Also available from the AUC Press: The Coptic Orthodox Liturgy of St. Basil with Complete Musical Transcription Compiled by Ragheb Moftah Music transcription by Margit Toth Text edited by Martha Roy

As the world grapples with issues of religious fanaticism, extremist politics, and rampant violence that seek justification in either “religious” or “secular” discourses, women who claim Islam as a vehicle for individual and social change are often either regarded as pious subjects who subscribe to an ideology that denies them many modern freedoms, or as feminist subjects who seek empowerment only through rejecting religion and adopting secularist discourses. Yet in actuality Muslim women whose activism is grounded in Islam draw equally on principles associated with secularism. Here Sherine Hafez focuses on women’s Islamic activism in Egypt to challenge these binary representations of religious versus secular subjectivities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork within a women’s Islamic movement in Cairo, Hafez analyzes the ways in which women who participate in Islamic activism narrate their selfhood, articulate their desires, and embody discourses in which the boundaries are blurred between the religious and the secular.