Suchergebnisse

The attempt to put into words what is fundamentally a visual experience confronts this
reviewer with an enormous challenge. Being neither artist nor art critic, I must approach the task
through my lens as friend and long-time admirer of Gazbia Hassan Sirry, one of Egypt's
leading modern artists, whose varied and innovative artistic career spans more than fifty years.
Perhaps in this way I can create a context within which this book can be read, appreciated, and, I
hope, used by those scholars who are interested in the dialectic between art and society, artist and
social transformation.

In the early days of April, 1968, ten months after the Six-Day War, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo there occurred an event that for several months became the focus of attention not only for thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds but also hundreds of foreigners, members of the international press, resident scholars and diplomats, representatives of Western Christianity and the perennial tourists. This event, known locally as the Apparition of Zeitoun, involves the alleged multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitoun. The Copts are an Egyptian Christian minority who are descendants of the original Egyptian population at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and who were never converted to Islam.