They view it as a plague of Egypt.
For centuries, Mount Sinai has been a mecca for worshippers and tourists hoping to experience traditional Bedouin culture. Now, the sacred holy site — revered among Jews, Christians and Muslims alike — is under threat from a new luxury development that locals fear “disfigures” the region.
Dubbed the Great Transfiguration Project, the state-sponsored tourism campaign aims to erect five hotels, hundreds of villas, a 1.4-acre visitors’ center and a shopping complex in and around St. Catherine Protectorate, New Lines Magazine reported.
The monumental undertaking, which is slated for a 2026 completion, is being billed by the Egyptian government as a “gift to the entire world and all religions,” the BBC reported.
Cultural preservationists disagree. “I call it the Grand Disfiguration Project,” John Grainger, the former manager of a European Union project to develop the area, told New Lines Magazine.
Locals fear that the development will cause irreparable damage to the world-renowned landmark, which is described in the both the Bible and Quran as the site of multiple momentous events, including Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and where he communed with the Burning Bush.
The remote desert locale is also home to 6th century St. Catherine’s Monastery, the world’s oldest continuously-functioning monastery, where Christian relics are housed.
It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002.
Most vulnerable are perhaps the Bedouin Jebeleya tribe (whose name literally means “people of the mountain” in Arabic), who have guarded the monastery for centuries and now serve as tour guides.
While the GTP has been billed as a move to promote sustainable tourism while preserving the region’s heritage, experts say it’s been imposed on the Bedouin against their will. The Sinai tribespeople have already had their homes and tourist camps destroyed sans compensation, while some were forced to exhume corpses from the local cemetery so a new parking lot could be put in.
“This is not development as the Jebeleya see it or asked for it, but how it looks when imposed top-down to serve the interests of outsiders over those of the local community,” Ben Hoffler, a British travel writer who has worked closely with the Bedouin, told the BBC. “It’s a world they have always chosen to remain detached from, to whose construction they did not consent, and one that will change their place in their homeland forever.”
He also feared that the new resorts would likely only employ Nile Valley Egyptians instead of the Sinai tribespeople.
To make matters worse, those that do speak up are allegedly clamped down upon by an intricate and omnipresent Egyptian security network.
“If they say anything about it, they get a knock on the door [from Egyptian security services],” said Hoffler, a former resident of St. Catherine. “The secret police in St. Catherine monitor everything so closely — phone calls, we’ve had spyware on telephones. They follow people literally in the street. I’ve been followed many times.”
In fact, Greece is the only foreign power that’s vocally opposed the project, namely due to their affiliation with the St. Catherine Monastery.
The Greco-Egyptian tiff ramped up in May after an Egyptian court ruled that the monastery sat on state land and that the organization was only “entitled to use” the land on which it lies as well as the archaeological religious sites surrounding it.
Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens, head of the Church of Greece, was inflamed over the ruling.
“The monastery’s property is being seized and expropriated,” he declared in a statement. “This spiritual beacon of Orthodoxy and Hellenism is now facing an existential threat.”
Fortunately, following some diplomatic meetings, Greece and Egypt jointly announced the protection of St Catherine’s Greek Orthodox identity and cultural heritage.