In Zeitoun the Virgin Mary appeared to Christians and Muslims alike (I)

In Zeitoun, a district of Cairo in Egypt, on the night of April 2, 1968, a Muslim bus mechanic called Farouk Mohammed Atwa, who worked across the street from the church of Saint Demiana, saw a luminous woman on the dome of the church, kneeling in front of the cross.

For several weeks, the apparitions of the White Lady continued and the crowd of onlookers reached up to 250,000 people, creating impressive traffic jams. Muslims in large numbers, reciting verses from the Koran, rubbed shoulders with Christians singing Coptic hymns. The crowd climbed on the roofs and terraces and crowded the street. Women and children stayed up all night, showing incredible physical resistance.

The day after the first apparitions of the Lady, Farouk Mohammed Atwa went to the hospital to have one of his fingers amputated due to gangrene; to the surgeon's surprise, he was completely healed!

By refraining from any explicit message, the Virgin wanted to deliver a sign accessible to all Egyptians— Muslims and Christians, Orthodox, Catholics or Protestants—believers and non-believers. Her apparitions seemed to bless the ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue.

Many also saw it as an encouragement to peace (Zeitoun in Arabic means "olives," and the olive tree, since the Virgin sometimes held an olive branch, is a symbol of peace), after the terrible Six-Day War (1967) which engulfed the Middle East and caused humiliation to the Arab world. Following the capture of Jerusalem by the Israelis, it became impossible for the Copts to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

It is this last interpretation that Jehan Sadat, the widow of the assassinated Egyptian president, stated in her autobiography entitled A Woman of Egypt where she puts these words in the mouth of Our Lady of Zeitoun: "People of Egypt, I know that you will no longer be able to come and see me in Jerusalem; so I came to see you in Cairo."

The Marie de Nazareth team

Zeitoun