Under the ancient shade

For the last couple of weeks, my friend Rebekah and I have been walking through the mountainous territory of the Jebeliya Bedouin, one of eight tribes here in Egypt’s southern Sinaï. Our guide, Ahmed el Sinaweyy, a gentle and devout young man, diligently pauses our hike during the day to say his prayers while we silently sit and wait. His innate knowledge of this land has taken us far off the beaten path and high into these orange, boulder-strewn mountains, where at night we rest in ancient Bedouin gardens beneath the pomegranate leaves.

This area once boasted four hundred of these fruit orchards, their surplus traded with neighboring tribes and coastal merchants. However, the arrival of cheaper Nile imports has undermined local businesses, leaving only thirty today. Hidden, walled, and secretive, these karm, as they are locally known, seem to embody the very essence of the word 'garden.'

During the day, Ahmed takes joy in showing us the best places to extract smoky quartz, which he digs out with his pocketknife—a popular side hustle around here. As we walk, he likes to talk about traditions, explaining why clothes are left atop the graves of the deceased and how courtship was conducted in the olden days. Eventually confiding in us his hopes of finding a proper Bedouin wife.

 “It’s a hard life,” he admits. “Not many women are willing to live this way anymore.”

Ahmed, I conclude, is a romantic.

It's just the two of us as we climb up the ridge to reach a good viewpoint from where we can overlook the desert. This is as far as we can go, for the vastness stretching out before us belongs to the Al Algegat.

Looking back we get a good view of the progress of the Great Transfiguration, an initiative launched by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2020, aiming to transform Saint Catherine's—a monastery founded in 527 AD that uniquely embraces Christianity, Islam, and Judaism at the site where Moses is believed to have seen the burning bush—into a global destination for spiritual tourism.

"It makes me sad," Ahmed says as we gaze over the construction of hotels and infrastructure. "They are harming our environment; our life is tied to this land. For us, this is not progress. But what can we do about it?"

As the day begins to end and we step into the comfortable shade of yet another karm, I am reminded why, across religions, gardens are often depicted as paradises of eternal delight—though these offer only a temporary haven from the world beyond their walls.