Imagine a Coptic Egyptian Community Center in the middle of a southern state in the United States with services such as a clinic and a lawyer on the top floor, Arabic-speaking restaurant and business owners on the bottom floor, and a plaza that is decorated to celebrate Egyptian culture. This is the vision Lydia Yousief has for ‘Elmahaba’ in Nashville, Tennessee. According to the 2016 U.S. Census, there were 181,000 Egyptians in the U.S., however, the number is believed to be much higher. Unlike the upper and middle-class Coptic communities in New York, Washington DC, and the Los Angeles area, Tennessee has a majority working-class community. Egypt is estimated to be around 10 to 15 percent Christian and 85 to 90 percent Muslim, but in Nashville, over 90 percent of Egyptians are Coptic Christian. Nashville, the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee, is home to what some call “Little Minya”, a minority community composed of thousands of Egyptian Copts, largely from the Upper Egyptian city of Minya with approximately 50 percent of its population being Coptic Christians. In this community, most people work in the hotel industry and in…
Elmahaba Center: Uniting Coptic Egyptians in Nashville’s Little Minya
April 1, 2021
