• Finding the Saint
  At the beginning of 1989 God had laid it on the heart of Father Simaan to look for the body of St Simaan the Tanner. His whereabouts at the time of the miracle of moving the Muqattam Mountain in the tenth century were a mystery. After the miracle, the people drifted back to their homes, and it would have been true to Simaan's self-effacing character if he had melted into the crowd. Patriarch Abraam himself was unable to find him and a rumour spread that he had thrown himself under the mountain, to escape worldly adulation.
  Yet this was highly unlikely, since only the Patriarch knew of St Simaan's role on the day of the miracle and promised to keep it a secret until after St Simaan's death. In fact, Patriarch Abraam himself died the same year that the miracle took place, in 979. Eventually Father Simaan discovered that the Copts had buried the tenth patriarch, Yo'annas, next to St Simaan in the cemetery of Al-Habash in Old Cairo.! They did the same with Patriarch Gabriel in 1378.
  That meant that Father Simaan could narrow down the site of the burial to a specific part of Old Cairo. Specialists who were working on restoring St Mary's Church, in the correct area for the cemetery, then discovered a skeleton 1 meter below the southern wall. The bones evidently belonged to a person small of stature, with a head balding in front. It seems likely that the skeleton is that of St Simaan as it bears a great similarity to an icon found in the Hanging Church that shows St Simaan and Patriarch Abraam together.
  Buried near the skeleton the restorers found a clay pot that was over one thousand years old. This supports the dating of the skeleton. On 11 July 1992, the Copts celebrated the life of St Simaan the Tanner in Muqattam. That day, they brought some of his mortal remains in solemn procession to the church that bears his name. They installed the clay pot in the same compartment where they laid their saint's remains to rest.
  The return of the body of the one who prayed to move the mountain to the people of the mountain, proved to be a potent symbol of faith. Visitors to Muqattam dared to hope that God would work as powerfully in their time as he had done in St Simaan's.
• Signs and Wonders
  Many people would kiss the glass case where St Simaan's bones lay, wrapped in their cylinder of velvet. Clearly they hoped for some special blessing. Yet today's Father Simaan sees signs and miracles as given by God for his purposes, not to satisfy the whims of the human will. 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts' (Zechariah 4.6). When God acts in power, the greatest miracle he can do is to win the soul back to Christ. Healing or raising the sick is a sign to encourage the ministry of believers. 'Whoever believes in me, will do the things that I am doing, and even greater things' (John 14.12).
  Building on the promises of God, Father Simaan and his team asked God to fulfill them. The secret was prayer; for it was faith that had moved that mountain. For this very reason they lived on that mountain, the mountain of prayer and faith, expecting to experience miracles. Just as Christ moved the mountain in the past, so he could move powerfully in the present: 'Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever' (Hebrews 13.8).
  One example of this was Sobhy, a building worker who experienced both the miracle of grace, and the miracle of healing. He repented and turned to Christ after listening to a cassette tape from the Muqattam ministry. Tears came to his eyes and God began to deal with him. After being drawn to follow Christ, in 1991 Sobhy found the opportunity to serve him by working on a church on the mountain.
  Sobhy takes up the story: 'One day I went up on the scaffolding to put into position a triangular-shaped stone. I did this and then the concrete surround gave way, shaking the scaffolding I was standing on from top to bottom. I fell off, and as I was falling I completely lost consciousness.'
  They rushed Sobhy to hospital in Heliopolis, with blood flowing out of his mouth and nose. The first X-rays showed that he had a fracture of the skull, complicated by an extradural haematoma. This is a blood clot between the coverings (meninges) of the brain and the skull. There were also signs of increased pressure on the brain (intra-cranial tension), such as vomiting and continued loss of consciousness. A neurological specialist who saw Sobhy recommended an operation to evacuate the blood clot. Without the operation, he would die of pressure on the brain.
  Sobhy commented: 'There was going to be a dangerous life-or-death operation. Abuna [Father Simaan] prayed for me for three hours until my breath came back into my lungs.'2
  After praying for Sobhy, Father Simaan felt God was saying, 'I will cure him'. Sobhy would not need an operation after all. Tests run on the second day could find no more signs of pressure increasing on the brain. Further X-rays showed that the brain was free of the blood clot and that the fracture in the skull had healed. Sobhy is now in excellent health and enjoying life to the full.
  Another miracle followed an accident involving a girl hit by a huge stone. An orthopedic doctor saw the X-ray, which showed damage to the second and third vertebrae of the spine. He recommended an operation and the parents decided to go ahead with it. When it was all over the surgeon told them that their daughter was paraplegic. She couldn't move her legs and was doubly incontinent.
  The distraught parents brought the girl to Father Simaan for prayer. She can now move about and is no longer incontinent. Her spine, which had been badly bent by the impact of the rock, is now perfectly straight.
  In 1991-2 the work-force turned their attention to a chamber right inside the original cavern, which had about 140,000 tons of rock in it. This project received some help from Tear Fund in England in addition to local support. Out of the rock took shape the conference hall of St Mark, which can hold 2,000 people. Just to one side of it was a space which Father Simaan began to use as his prayer room. He prefers it to the original hole under the rock that is no longer private enough, being near the entrance to the site of the retreat centre.
  While this project was going on, a man called Magdy came to work at the retreat centre building site on Muqattam. On his very first day they assigned him to work on building a fountain. To do this he had to move blocks of stone from high up the mountain down to the bottom
  Not knowing his way around, he put his foot in the wrong place and fell from the cliff above the retreat centre, a drop of 13 or 14 meters.
  Father Simaan immediately contacted his son-in-law, Dr Samweel Labeeb, who at the time was in his private clinic. He rushed to the scene. A first glance showed that the fall had fractured the man's skull, his thigh bone (femur) and the bones of his lower arm (radius and ulna). This was Dr Samweel's provisional diagnosis, but there was no opportunity to do an X-ray: 'When I arrived, I found Father Simaan praying, just touching Magdy and asking him what was wrong with him. I heard very loud cries [sic] of cracking, as if his bones were connecting again, connecting and connecting, and then he began to look up, and began to move, as if nothing had happened at all ... ' And his reaction to this phenomenon? 'We have nothing like that in medicine. It's the power of the Lord.'3
• Teaching and Training
  Father Simaan did not promote trusting in 'the power of the Lord' among the zeballeen without also developing the mind. He doesn't subscribe to the idea that if God's Spirit works, there is no need to think: 'we eliminate ignorance: the whole aim is to overcome ignorance and the people learn - learn to read and write, learn to live, learn to read the Holy Bible.' Father Simaan and his pastoral team believe in fighting ignorance with all the resources at their disposal, but at first these were all too few. They had taken the first step of faith in the direction of educating the local children in 1975. Then Farahat's wife Su'aad had opened a tiny school of one class, containing two girls and three boys. It began to grow gradually, but lacked funding.
  In 1986 a stranger was driving down the main road that goes past the Muqattam district. Although he was used to the unpredictable nature of Cairo traffic, he hit a rubbish cart. The impact threw a girl traveling in the cart on to the side of the road. The driver immediately got out of his car, attended to the girl - who wasn't badly hurt - and asked her where she lived. She directed him and he took her home. When he saw what conditions were like in the zeballeen area, it was a real eye-opener for him.
  This newcomer turned out to be executive director of the Patmos Foundation, based in Helsinki, Finland. He tried to find out for the girl's sake what her community needed most, and the project he hit upon was a school. The Patmos Foundation then decided to build it and provide all the equipment, textbooks and exercise books.
  They planned the building to form part of an enclosure around the church below the mountain. By the time it opened in 1993,400 boys and girls were enrolled in general education classes. The building had five storeys to begin with, but the school eventually added a sixth level, and the number of pupils grew to around 500.
  A reception department for pastoral care and instruction of children aged three to six helped them get used to being at school. Some families were without identity cards or official papers, so their children did not legally exist. This partly explains why they were not at government schools, but the higher profile of the newly built church school drew the government's attention to their plight. Within two or three years of its opening, the zeballeen found they could also get their children into government schools.
  The role of the church school was to 'raise the children up out of the rubbish heap' - both spiritually and materially, Once they learnt to read and write they would then get help in reading the Bible. This was the priority. The secondary aim was to help them improve their standard of living.
  The school includes a department for pastoral care and instruction of the deaf and dumb. There is also a department for the elimination of illiteracy, which can take children too old for regular school. This equips both boys and girls to read the Bible and join vocational training classes. Vocational training includes classes for domestic science, sewing, knitting and commercial fabric work for girls and for carpentry, ironwork, electrician's work and leatherwork for boys.
  For the older children vocational training is combined with spiritual training. The aim is that while they learn a craft, they also bond with the church, on the principle that 'those who bond with the church come to know God'. The aim is to strengthen each child's relationship with the Lord. Every week the younger children get a full 'spiritual day' that includes storytelling, Christian films and singing.
• Disaster at Dawn
  The opening of the school in 1993 was a great step forward for the community, yet the year ended with a stark reminder that other facilities were still lacking. At dawn on Tuesday, 14 December 1993, a landslide catapulted a section of the Muqattam Mountain down on to zeballeen homes.
  Father Simaan and his workers immediately contacted the Patriarch, and he came to share the people's anguish. One twelve-year-old boy, Azaz, had been spending the night with his grandparents. When he arrived home, he found his mother and father, and all five brothers and sisters, crushed to death. The grief and chaos moved the Patriarch to tears. Yet he kept his wits about him and was quick to organize practical help. At least Azaz had his grandparents to turn to - they took him under their wing. Many families were now facing the winter with no home. So the Patriarch sent in food, clothing and blankets and setup financial help for survivors to build their homes again.
  Despite all the rescue efforts, the final death toll was at least forty people. Medical help did not reach the injured quickly enough, because there was nothing available locally for the poor - only some private clinics for the rich. None of these would take in-patients, and the nearest hospital was AI-Hoseyn, 5 kilometers away. It stood near AI-Azhar University, a training centre for Muslim missionaries. The people who ran the hospital were Muslim fundamentalists, who are forbidden by their religion to touch pigs. Since the zeballeen kept pigs they called them 'pig-people', and they were nearly as reluctant to look after the 'pig-people' as they were to touch pigs.
• The St Simaan Patmos Hospital
  In fact the building of a hospital for Manshiyat Nasir was already under way, again with help from the Patmos Foundation. In 1993 a Finnish lady who was a field director for Patmos came and spoke with Dr Samweel, Father Simaan's son-in-law. She wanted to know if he would like to start a hospital. Next the executive director came. He handed Dr Samweel a blank sheet of paper and a pen, and asked, 'What are the things you would like to have in the hospital?" So Dr Samweel wrote down what he needed contacted Finland, and the next day they told him they had agreed to all the equipment he asked for. Everyone was delighted.
  They planned the hospital, like the school, to form part of an enclosure around the church below the mountain down in the populated area. While the work on the hospital got under way, up on the mountain the conference hall that had been taking shape since 1991-2 was nearing completion. Beneath it was the Church of St Mark, which opened for worship in 1994.
  On 12 April 1994 the Finnish ambassador, also Finnish Minister of Development and International Cooperation, came with the Patriarch to open the St Simaan Patmos Hospital. The zeballeen had done all they could to clean up the streets. They had covered them with sand and put up decorations everywhere. As the motorcade came by, doves were released in front of it; and when it came to a halt, the crowds around the Patriarch's car were so pressing that he couldn't get out of it for a quarter of an hour!
  The Patriarch, the ambassador and other VIPs were shown around the new hospital building attached to the church below the mountain. They saw the out-patient clinics equipped with a laboratory for medical analysis, a diagnostic X -ray unit, and a theatre for major operations. As is usually the practice in a charitable institution in Egypt, there were both first- and second-class wards for in-patients. The patients in the first-class wards would pay more to help subsidize those who could not afford the full cost of treatment. The care of all patients was to be supervised by a team of specialist doctors.
• The Mountain Amphitheatre
  They then went up to 'the cavern' on the Muqattam Mountain. Again, the crowds were so pressing that entry through the main gates was impossible. Instead, the Patriarch and his entourage were let in through the connecting entrance of the Church of St Mark.
  They emerged into a vast auditorium. It took the same name as the humble church that had been built there in 1986. Since then they had been gradually widening the mountain site of the original 'cavern' church - it had been a very simple structure when it opened in 1986. Now it covered an area of 10,000 square meters. They had gouged a great limestone amphitheatre out of the cliff face. Its deep beige walls were shot through at irregular intervals with lighter, sandy-colored strata. The roof soared up 20 meters or more before opening out on to the sky.
  The Patriarch and his entourage found themselves standing on a semi-circular platform in the heart of the great cavern, which acted as a focus for preaching and leading worship. The seating in front of them was fixed on semicircular steps that radiated upwards away from the stage, making it look like a Roman theatre or a stadium. Since many meetings would be held in the evening, each step was sheathed in polished wooden bleachers fitted with foot-level lighting. The congregation rose in terraced ranks up to the cave mouth, where they sat etched against the stars.
  To the congregation on the highest level, the visitors on the stage appeared as tiny figures. But they were not looking down but up, towards a gantry built out from the rock overhanging the stage into the centre of the auditorium. Suspended from it was a giant screen from which upwards of 12,000 spectators could follow the picture and voice of the Patriarch. What a transition from the early days of the church!
  One visitor described the effect of this projection on the worship:
  I noticed above the stage a giant TV screen on which was projected the faces of the celebrants so that their words could be better heard. When the liturgy was finished, a band and a singing group came on stage and we started into songs in modern Arabic. Then, would you believe, we were getting computer projection of the songs on the TV Screen {sic}. I could see the operator using his mouse and finding the words of each next song before it came full size on the screen. The people sang from their hearts.
  Everyone was there: old, young, men, women, rich, poor. It was their place! It was modern! It was ancient! It was splendid! It was right on top of one of the poorest parts of Cairo.4
  In his speech, the Patriarch commented: 'The presence of a very great number of people in this place is a very beautiful thing, but what is more lovely is that God should be in you and yourselves committed to God.'5
  Father Simaan himself went through a reconsecration to God's service that same year. The Patriarch ministered to him what the Cop tic Orthodox Church calls the 'grace of the qomseya'. This means the empowerment to be responsible for a group of priests. The title of 'Qomos' comes from the Greek word hegumenos or 'leader'.6 The Patriarch gave Father Simaan this title in recognition of the fact that he was no longer a lone priest. He was now the most senior member of a team ministry. In June 1990 the Patriarch had ordained three other priests to serve in the area, two of whom had been assigned to the Church of St Simaan the Tanner: Father Boula Shawqy and Father Abraam Fahmy.
  The Patriarch completed the ordained ministry team in June 1995 by adding a fifth priest, Father Rushdy. All this reflected the growth of the ministry on the mountain, which was by now one of the most active mission centers in the Middle East.
  The church that met in the great auditorium was set to become the largest worshipping congregation in Egypt and perhaps in the whole of the Middle East. It is the main focus for the fascination of the Muqattam Mountain, intimately connected with the charisma of Father Simaan. Like his hero of the tenth century, St Simaan, Father Simaan is short in physical stature yet carries a good deal of spiritual authority. Father Simaan was to be the main speaker at most of the spiritual meetings held in this hall. Each week he spoke to the people in a mixture of homely colloquial language and the classical Arabic in which the Bible is printed. Many of his talks found their way on to cassette tapes, which his hearers would buy and play often.7
• NOTES:
1. See 'How the Body of St Samaan the Tanner was Discovered' in Anon., The Biography of St Samaan, pp. 95-102 (esp. p. 96).
2. Source: magazine programme fan En Alleman, EO Television, Holland, 1995.
3. See note 2.
4. Houston, T., 'No Little People'.
5. Ibrahim, Qomos S., The Pope Loves Them, p. 39.
6. Parry, E. G., Some Ancient and Younger Churches, p. 6.
7. See Jenkins, S., 'Faith to Move Mountains', p. 12.

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