Mount Sinai Resort Plans Face Backlash From Religious Leaders

Religious leaders are criticizing Egypt’s plans to develop a luxury resort at the traditional site of Mount Sinai.

“I call it the Grand Disfiguration Project,” said John Grainger, former manager of a European Union project to develop the area, told the BBC.

Five hotels, hundreds of villas, a visitors center, a shopping complex, cable car and airport expansion are under construction around the site, which is revered by Christians and Jews. The project is part of Egypt’s attempts to revive its flagging tourism industry, which has been in the doldrums in recent years.

The development, which began in 2021, is said to be against the wishes of the local Bedouin tribe. Locals have been forced to move relatives’ bodies from a graveyard so it could be paved over as a parking lot. The Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine sits at the bottom of Mount Horeb, where Moses received the tablets of the law, and is part of the broader Greek Orthodox tradition, according to UNESCO World Heritage.

“The project will provide all tourism and recreational services for visitors, promote the development of the town of St. Catherine and its surrounding areas while preserving the environmental, visual and heritage character of the pristine nature and provide accommodation for those working on St. Catherine’s projects,” Sherif el-Sherbiny, Egypt’s housing minister, said last year.

Archbishop Ieronymos II of Athens, the current head of the Church of Greece, denounced the project. “The monastery’s property is being seized and expropriated,” he said. “This spiritual beacon of Orthodoxy and Hellenism is now facing an existential threat.”

Members of the Jebeleya tribe, also known as the Guardians of St. Catherine’s Monastery, told the BBC that their homes and camps were demolished with minimal compensation, while some received nothing at all. Ben Hoffler, a British travel writer working with Sinai tribes, said an urban world is being built.

“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,” he said. “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.”

Scholarly research and archaeological evidence now point to modern northern Saudi Arabia as the likely site of Mount Sinai.

–Dwight Widaman