Shock Warning

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ahmed Ali hated Christians. He also hated Jews, as the Holy Qu’ran instructed him to do, but there were precious few Jews in Egypt anymore. Most of them had fled to Israel or America long ago, their way made safe by the traitors Sadat and Mubarak, curse them both. The Coming could not be effected until the war against the Little Satan and the Great Satan was fully effected and, as the mullahs preached every Friday in the mosque, that day was coming. It was the religious duty of every one of the Believers to hasten it. Sunni or Shia, that was one article of faith on which both sides of the schism could agree.

It was nearing sundown. Ahmed Ali suppressed a small chuckle as he passed the Coptic Christian cathedral of Zeitoun. He had seen real cathedrals, visiting his relatives in Paris — great structures of stone, with rose windows and flying buttresses and other architectural marvels of which the Arab world could only dream. In fact, the last time he had seen that branch of the family was outside the whore’s temple the Christians called Notre Dame, a blasphemous structure adorned and ornamented with idolatrous statues, a synagogue of sin, as befit this bastard of the Jew religion. When the Cleansing finally came, this filth would all be swept away in Allah’s purifying rain of fire.

True, some of the great mosques were on a par with what the savage Europeans had wrought a millennium ago. But, as Ahmed Ali had to admit, many of the holiest places in the ummah were merely converted cathedrals, such as the mosque at St. Sophia in Istanbul, or what had once been the Great Mosque of Cordoba in al-Andalus — a former Christian cathedral that had reverted back to its infidel origins after the unfortunate Reconquista. Someday, Notre Dame — the Cathedral of Our Lady — would be converted as well, since it was named after Her. Maryam.

They would get it back. Islam would get it all back — not only Spain, but France as well (that conquest was well advanced, with no Charles Martel in sight), and the Low Countries and even Britain. They would turn the West’s weaknesses against it — the fetish for “tolerance,” the falling birthrate, the lack of will. In the dar al-Harb, Islam had both the will, which derived from the sacred scriptures, and the way: All a Believer had to do was get to Italy from North Africa, and the rest of the European Union lay spread open like a virgin on her wedding night.

But, for the moment, Ahmed Ali was stuck here, in el-Zeitoun, the olive. There was nothing about this district of Cairo to recommend it. Those who knew of it tended to be infidels, drawn here by the apparition of Holy Maryam in the sixties. Millions had seen her figure, the woman mentioned many more times in the holy Qu’ran than in the Christian Bible, and of course mentioned not at all in the Jewish Torah. Millions of holy Muslims and Christians and tourists and other infidels had flocked to the domed church, to witness the miracle, including Abdul Nasser, the last leader of Egypt not in league with the Jews or the Americans.

Few of the infidel Christians knew of the Muslim devotion to Maryam. There were no fewer than thirty-four references to her in the word of Allah, and an entire sura was named after her. As the Prophet said in one hadith: “Every child is touched by the devil as soon as he is born and this contact makes him cry. Excepted are Mary and her Son.” She was the one pure woman, who gave birth to the second greatest of all Muslims: Issa ibn Maryam. Jesus, son of Maryam.

Although tensions had been high between the small Christian community, resident in Egypt practically since the time of Christ, and the dominant Muslims, Ahmed Ali had often thought of the Zeitoun miracle. The story was told by every family in the district, Muslim and Christian alike, and Ali suspected that those who claimed to have witnessed the holy sight greatly outnumbered the entire population of the capital city at the time. How Maryam herself had appeared, high on the church’s dome, day after day, for more than a year. How the blind, the lame, the halt, and the cancer-ridden were cured. Millions saw her, photographed her. The Orthodox Church under Pope Kyrillos VI had confirmed the validity of the miracle. There could be no doubt.

Which was why, as he trudged home on this cool evening, it was almost not a surprise when he looked up at one of the church’s five domes — one at each corner, each standing nine meters high, and a great central dome, twelve meters above the ground, one meter for each of the holy apostles — and saw her. After all, the church was named for her, and if only a minority of Coptic Christians worshipped there, the building was still deserving of some respect for its name alone.

Ahmet Ali stopped. Cairo was a teeming city, but at this moment it was as if he were alone in the great metropolis. In every direction, the minarets stretched into the distance, proof of the rightness of the Prophet’s holy vision. Everything that had come before — the pharaohs, the Greeks, the Turks, the British — was as nothing among the sands of time. Many were the miracles witnessed here, near the sacred Nile; the history of humanity itself was writ here, not large, for the sands ultimately swept everything away, the desert consuming all. Everything, that was, except Islam.

It was the motion that first caught his eye. At first, in the fading of the light, the glow had eluded him, and all he saw out of the corner of one eye was something moving back and forth, atop the highest dome. Then, as his sight adjusted, he saw the silhouette — the outline of a chaste female body, gleaming white and crowned by a halo. It was just as he had seen it in the photographs from half a century ago. Only this time, the image was moving.

Corporeal, and yet not corporeal. He could not see through the figure — all was a dazzling whiteness — and yet it moved through space effortlessly, like a projection. Later, Ahmed Ali would remember small birdlike figures around the central apparition, pulsating images that swooped and hovered protectively around the sainted head. But not now.

Now, all he could do was watch. He was not sure what to expect. Was he dreaming? Was he perhaps dead? Had Allah summarily delivered him to the oasis at which the virgins awaited him, Ahmed Ali, named after the Prophet’s own kin, a good and decent man who had tried all his life to be true to the precepts of the holy faith? At great expense to himself and his poor family, he had even made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and had worshipped at the Grand Mosque, the Masjid al-Haram that sheltered the sacred Kaaba, toward which all Muslims bowed and prayed five times a day. It was yet his dream to worship at the Dome of the Rock in al-Quds, and maybe even journey all the way to infidel Iran, to the holy well at Jamkaran, just in case. Ahmed Ali was among the most pious of men.

But now, all this had flown from his mind. For there She was, the Holy Mother, the most blessed of women, as even the Prophet had said. The Immaculate Conception, untouched by sin.

Now he became aware that a crowd had gathered around him. He was no longer alone in the great city, but just one man among many. And yet it was deadly silent, as if no one were there — or, rather, as if each individual were, alone, there, alone with the holy visitor.

Soon enough the reporters and camera crews arrived, jostling their way forward through the crowd, setting up to get their shots. Ahmet Ali had no idea whether the apparition would permit herself to be revealed on film, but it was at this moment that he remembered his cell phone. He took it from his pocket and began taking pictures as well.

He could see the image clearly as he framed it in the viewfinder. These phones were most likely the work of the devil, but with them he could talk to his family all over the world — in London and in Michigan and even his brother in the Philippines. They might not believe him if he just told them what he was seeing—“Ahmed Ali,” they would say, “surely these are hallucinations. Purify yourself and go to the imam for guidance”—but with this evidence, what could they say?

She was moving now, moving along the top of the large dome. If he looked hard, looked through the radiant light streaming from her body, he thought he could make out another image, perhaps that of a small child. But he could not really tell.

The street in front of the church was nearly silent. Traffic had long since stopped and even the incessant honking of Cairo traffic had receded as a kind of calm radiated out from the center. Ahmed Ali took his eyes off the Lady for a moment to steal a glance at his fellow witnesses. Their faces were rapt, aglow. He wondered if he looked like them.

How long he stood there he could not tell. It was quite dark now and the brilliance of the light was even more striking. It was beginning to hurt his eyes. He had to look away. He looked away….

And then, with a flash, she was gone. The light winked out, and all was darkness.

For many moments, nobody said a word. A few murmurs, some half-mouthed prayers in several languages. Some of the infidel women made the sign of the cross.

And then a low sound rippled through the crowd, like a great moan, but one born not out of pain but from joy. It swelled, other voices joining until it became a mighty chorus. Many of those in the crowd fell to their knees as it burst forth, divinely summoned, from a thousand throats:

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

And that’s when the trouble began.

No one knew who threw the first rock, whether it was a Muslim or a Christian. But one rock led to more rocks, and pieces of paving stone, and then pipes and other metal objects. A full-scale riot broke out as Muslims attacked the Christians, and Christians attacked the Muslims. And Ahmed Ali was in the middle of it all.

When the fighting started, he snapped out of his reverie and began throwing punches in all directions. There was something liberating about physical combat and, after the spirituality of the apparition, it seemed only right to indulge in the profane joy of violence.

Then the fires started. The Cairo police stayed well away from the melee for as long as they could and then they, too, waded in, truncheons flying. One unit deployed a water cannon; another opened fire on the mob. Tourists screamed and ran and died. Flames consumed some of the buildings.

Despite the police, the riot quickly spread to other areas of the city, and then to other cities in Egypt. Long-simmering animosities that had been kept under control by the previous regime caught fire and exploded.

The Copts suffered the most. They made up about 10 percent of the Egyptian population, and had been resident in the land since A.D. 42, but over the course of the next three days many of their churches were burned, their houses destroyed, their lives ruined.

Only the Church of St. Mary was, miraculously, relatively unscathed.

When the riot was finally put down, two hundred fifty-six people had been killed and millions of dollars in property damage had been done. Egypt was a tinderbox, just waiting for the next match to explode once more.