Al-Ahram Weekly | Chronicles | Sinai: old problems revisited

The uniqueness of the Sinai has rendered the peninsula as important to Egyptians in times of peace as it has been in times of war. Professor Yunan Labib Rizk relates the importance the Egyptian people have always attached to the Sinai

Whoever it was that described Egypt as an enormous oasis in the midst of an expansive desert was correct. Egypt is essentially a verdant strip of fertile land perched between the Eastern Desert and the Sinai, and the Great Sahara to the West. In contrast to the Nile Valley and the Delta, those "desolate" expanses are peopled only by scattered Bedouin tribes. Or at least that is how they appear to most travellers who catch only narrow glimpses through their train or car windows. The more adventurous, such as explorers keen to probe the less trodden terrain, scholars bent on studying the land and its people, and government officials dispatched from Cairo with the tasks of maintaining security, overseeing the affairs of the tribes and collecting taxes, have another story to tell.

Of these areas, the Sinai stands apart and enjoys a special place in the collective Egyptian consciousness. Through the Sinai came most of the migrations into Egypt and through it, too, went the campaigns to build Egypt's eastern empire, from the time of Ramses II to the beginning of the modern era under Muhammad Ali. It was also from that direction that loomed the greatest perils to the people of the Nile Valley, from the invasion of the Hyksos in pharaonic times through the German- Turkish assault on the Suez Canal during World War I to the tripartite invasion of 1956 followed by the Israeli occupation of the Sinai in 1967.

Following the departure of the Israelis in 1982 and then the liberation of the last inch of soil in Taba in 1988, Egypt strove to connect the Sinai more securely to the Nile Valley. Its route to this was two-fold. On the one hand it developed the peninsula for tourism, founding a string of resorts extending from Taba in the north to Sharm El-Sheikh in the south. On the other hand, it extended the waters of the Nile into the Sinai through the Salam Canal, thereby enabling extensive land reclamation and cultivation and the construction of new villages capable of absorbing thousands of people fleeing the overcrowded conditions of the Nile Valley. In short, the point was to transform Sinai from a gateway into a settled community.

The importance that the Egyptian people have always attached to the Sinai has evinced itself on the official and academic levels. Illustrative of the former are two reports produced by the Shura Council on the development of the Sinai, the first produced in 1990 by the Committee for the Development of Industrial Production and Energy and the second, the combined work of several committees, entitled "The National Project for the Development of the Sinai."

The academic interest has produced a wealth of studies. Notable among these are Gamal Hamdan's The Sinai in Strategy, Policy and Geography (1993) and Nagat Suleiman's master's thesis, The Sinai Peninsula in the 19th Century. In addition to these recent works, the National Library and the National Archives brought to national attention two major earlier works. The first of these is Naoum Shuqeir's The Ancient and Modern History and the Geography of the Sinai, originally published in 1916 and reproduced by Ahmed Zakariya in 2005. The second, which was also reproduced in 2005 by the Centre of Egyptian Contemporary History, is The Sinai in Modern History: 1869-1917, by Sabri Ahmed El-Adl. This latter work proved an invaluable resource for this episode of the Diwan due to its extensive information on the Sinai tribes.

Unfortunately, all these governmental and scholastic endeavours have not been fully successful in achieving their desired aims. Potent evidence of this is to be found in the terrorist bombings of tourist sites in Sharm El-Sheikh and Taba, a tragedy rendered all the more horrible upon the discovery that the perpetrators belonged to some of the Sinai tribes. Although it is clear that the perpetrators had been subjected to various forms of brainwashing at home or abroad, we should not deceive ourselves into believing that brainwashing alone was responsible for driving them to these suicide attacks.

One cause for resentment may have been the failure to extend the agricultural development of the Sinai to the social development of the peninsula. Instead of making the reclaimed land around the Salam Canal available to the people of the Sinai and training them to farm it, thereby furnishing them with new skills and sources of livelihood, farmers were brought in from the Delta and Upper Egypt. Moreover, it was not as though there were no previous experiences to draw from. Following the construction of the Ismailiya Canal, tribal chiefs from the Sinai were handed large tracts of land to put under cultivation, thereby enabling these tribes to settle and their members to integrate into the economic, social and political life of sedentary Egypt.

The same applies to the tourist projects along the Sinai shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. Obviously, Egypt has gained greatly from these important sources of revenue and opportunities for employment. However, the people of the Sinai reaped at best only a trickle of these benefits. Few were those who had the training or expertise necessary for the jobs that opened in hotel management and service, which were subsequently filled by the appropriately qualified personnel from Cairo and Alexandria. As for janitorial and similar tasks, the customarily proud tribes of the Sinai would have deemed these too menial.

In light of the foregoing, how much deeper then would be their rancor when they compared the luxury and opulence of those resorts to their own austerity and hardship. Nor would they have taken well to the types of personal liberties exhibited by the foreign visitors to these beaches. That many of these, moreover, were Israelis and, therefore, a painful reminder of the Zionist occupation, would have facilitated the task of those bent on recruiting Sinai youths to carry out their horrific designs. Finally, the heavy security measures needed to safeguard these beach resorts naturally had to extend to the adjacent areas inland, which deprived the tribal leaders of their long-cherished independence and much of their traditional authority.

SABRI EL-ADL PROVIDED US with a detailed socio- economic demographic map of the Sinai at the turn of the 20th century. The northern strip of the peninsula, which has always been a major trade artery and receives the highest levels of rainfall, was the most densely populated and the most prosperous. Then, the further one proceeds southwards the more sparse the land becomes in population and in resources. El-Adl divides the people of the Sinai into three major groups. The northerners, aided by higher rainfall and numerous wells, were the most sedentary. "Al-Arish is the largest urbanised centre in the Sinai," he writes. "Indeed, Al-Arish is the largest desert city in the whole of Egypt. Its population consists of two major groups: the Arishis and the Fawakhiris, both of which are made up of several tribes. Between Al-Arish and Rafah one finds the largest and wealthiest of the Sinai tribes: the Ramailat and the Sawarka. To the west, between Al-Arish and the Suez Canal, reside the tribes known as the Barqita Bedouins which, in fact, are manor branches of the tribes known by the same name in the Sharqiya and Qalioubiya provinces."

The second group was situated in central Sinai, which had its administrative centre in Nakhl, which had long been a major staging point on the overland pilgrimage route until the route fell out of service in 1885. The most important tribes located in this area were the Tayaha, the Tarabin, the Lahyawat and the Huweitat. El-Adl informs us that in the 19th century the first two of these warred with northern Sawarka and succeeded in expanding their territory to the latter's expense. The Huweitat were based near the Gulf of Aqaba while the Lahyawat were based to the east of the Tayaha near the village of Kantala.

The third group was situated in the south, the poorest of the three areas, with its administrative centre in Al-Tur. The "Tura" as these people were called, were made up of numerous tribes the most important of which were the Sawalha, the Qararsha and the Gabaliya, so called because they lived in the mountainous areas of Mt Sinai and St Catherine's Monastery. Another source corroborates El-Adl's assessment of the region. In November 1934, the Al-Ahram correspondent in Al-Arish described the southern Sinai as "an impoverished land, entirely devoid of agriculture or livestock". He adds that the Sinai Mining and the Jabal Asmar companies had constructed small urban developments to accommodate their workers. Apart from these, the area was inhabited by "a motley collection of Bedouins who work in transport".

El-Adl notes that although northern and central Sinai were much better off economically than the south, their circumstances sharply deteriorated in the latter quarter of the 19th century. The primary reason for this was the construction of the Suez Canal. It was this waterway that brought the end of the Sinai stretch of the overland pilgrimage route as henceforward pilgrims from North Africa could complete the rest of their journey by sea from Suez. The change in course, naturally, deprived the people of central Sinai from a major source of income.

The canal also created a physical barrier between the Sinai and the rest of Egypt. One of the consequences of this was that the customs posts that were once located in Al-Arish were transferred to Qantara in the Suez Canal Zone, thereby depriving the northern tribes of the income that they had traditionally, if illicitly, gained from smuggled goods. To make matters worse, many important commercial centres along the northern Sinai route to the Levant fell into disuse with the construction of the railway linking Qanater and Rafah. As a result, the Al-Arish tribes had little to fall back on apart from their limited means of agriculture and shepherding. Still, some of the more enterprising converted a portion of their fields to the cultivation of narcotic plants, an activity they could engage in with virtual impunity due to the weak control of central authorities over these parts. Whether due to lack of resources or other considerations, the government depended primarily on tribal leaders for the maintenance of law and order.

This situation altered dramatically following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the presence of British forces in the Suez Canal Zone. Then, following the declaration of a British protectorate over Palestine in 1922, the peninsula found itself hemmed in by British military authorities on both sides. This situation persisted until the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which brought the beginning of the end of the British military presence in the canal zone. Before then, however, Egyptians grew anxious over the fate of the Sinai under British control. The sentiment was expressed in Al-Ahram of 17 September 1930 under the headlines: "The Sinai railway belongs to Egypt. The Sinai does not belong to the railway. Sinai: a vital limb of the Egyptian political and economic body."

What occasioned these angry headlines and the lengthy article that accompanied it was the recent revelation that the British were negotiating with the Egyptian government over moving the beginning of the Sinai railway from Qantara to Port Fouad. In the opinion of the newspaper, this was the strangest demand ever made in the history of the railroad, "not because it was Egyptians who volunteered to construct it or because the materials for the line were provided from the warehouses of the Egyptian Railway Authority, but because the railway has been made the property of the British military authorities. Had the British acted justly and properly, as soon as the Great War was over, they would have recognised this railroad as Egypt's right and restored it to the control of the Egyptian Railway Authority."

This same article aired a view that we doubt had caught the attention of many historians. At a time when the Empire upon which the sun never set was boasting the communications that linked various parts of its far-flung possessions, such as the Cape-to-Cairo railroad, one project remained unmentioned. In the opinion of Al-Ahram, the British intended that the Sinai railroad be part of the similar endeavour that began in Karachi, passed through Iran, Iraq and Palestine and ended in Port Said.

Another article, appearing on 29 September, voices similar concerns, as is evident from the headline: "To whom does the Sinai desert belong, Egypt or Palestine?" The British had no desire to extend Egyptian law over the Sinai, resting their case on a royal decree issued by the Egyptian khedive in 1911, conferring authority on councils of tribal elders to govern their people in accordance with their recognised customs. As a result of these traditions, the newspaper added, the people of the society remained entrenched in their Bedouin lifestyle.

With regard to the ownership of the Sinai, the author confesses that he felt compelled to ask this question because the Qantara-Rafah railway was the property of the British military authorities. Although this line was located on Egyptian territory, the Egyptian government had no control whatsoever over it, which, in turn, affected its control over the Sinai itself. He illustrated his point through several examples.

At times of locust infestations, Egyptian agricultural pest controllers had the greatest difficulties reaching locations in the Sinai. "Their daily trails testifies to the fact that the railway line, with all its administrators, controllers and employees, is outside the bounds of Egyptian authority." The author observes that, at first glance, an exception was made for "a handful of Egyptian policemen who board at Rafah in order to inspect the passengers' passports and immunisation certificates." However, upon closer inspection, one realises that even passport control was "under the supervision of the British police serving in the European Public Security Department of the Ministry of Interior". The conclusion: "Egyptian authorities have no authority whatsoever in that vast desert."

More telling was the case of fresh Nile water which the Egyptian government had supplied to the Sinai. "As a recent news report informed readers, the military authorities had extended their control and power over potable water sources in the Sinai. Now this, along with the Sinai railway, they have handed over, in their name rather than in the name of the Egyptian government, to the authority of the government of Palestine." It was then learned that the potable water in the Sinai had not been purified. "So, the Egyptian government asked the Palestinian government to address the situation. Although the latter assured the former that it would do what was necessary, the Egyptian Water Authority felt that was insufficient, to which the Palestine government responded that it had done more than enough." The author concluded: "It defies belief that one government could treat another so shabbily over a matter of immediate concern to the latter and of no concern to the former whatsoever."

AS NOTED EARLIER tribal chiefs in the Sinai enjoyed considerable autonomy. They were legally responsible for the conduct of the members of their individual tribes and councils of tribal elders would regulate intertribal affairs. At the peak of this hierarchy was the "Sheikh of Sheikhs" who was responsible for the public security of the entire peninsula, in which capacity he had considerable authority over all Sinai tribes.

Sabri El-Adl provides ample information about this order. Tribal chiefs were chosen on the basis of the consensus of the members of their tribes. If a tribe was discontented with the selection of a certain sheikh, they had the right to appeal to central authorities for a replacement. However, a sheikh could also petition to be absolved of his duties if he felt that his subjects were dissatisfied with his leadership. In the late 19th century, the sheikh of the Aradat tendered his resignation in this manner on the grounds that the Bedouins under his authority refused to obey his orders. However, there were definite bounds to the tribal autonomy. The government had the power to dismiss tribal leaders found guilty on charges of impugning their honour. In addition, as of 1885, the government officially adopted the policy of taking hostages from the families of suspected criminals in order to force them to hand over the suspects.

In 1906, following a territorial dispute over the Sinai between the Egyptian and Ottoman governments, Egypt's eastern border was officially established. Because of the recent disturbances in that border area, martial law was declared in the Sinai, in accordance with which tribal elders and others involved in the disruption were prosecuted before military tribunals. On the other hand, tribal elders were accorded the same privileges as village mayors in the Nile Delta and the hostage-taking policy of 1885 was officially abolished. From now on, the principle that the individual rather than his family or tribe was accountable under law for his offences applied to the people of the Sinai as it did to the rest of the Egyptian people.

The central authorities made themselves felt in the Sinai in other ways, some of which the tribes not only resented but also actively resisted. When in 1881 the Ministry of War issued orders to have a census taken of all Sinai youths over the age of 20 and eligible for the draft, many took to the mountains or even fled to Syria. Evidently, the government learned its lesson. The following year it issued a decree exempting all Bedouins, not just in the Sinai but elsewhere in Egypt, from military conscription and corvée labour.

Nor did the Sinai tribes take kindly to various taxes and tithes. Their attitude was explained by their representative to parliament, Tolson Abdel-Shafi, in the course of his advocacy of a bill on the matter. His proposal, published in Al-Ahram of 4 April 1930, covered familiar ground but also revealed some new information.

His fellow parliamentary representatives would already have known that the Sinai was, as Abdel-Shafi put it, "a vast desert of sand, whose inhabitants have scant sources of livelihood. A few days a year they plant some barley, which is their only food, and a barely noticeable amount of wheat, and that only if the soil is generous... For the most part the nature of the soil and the lack of irrigation are sufficient proof that agriculture is virtually non-existent, especially in the event of insufficient rainfall."

On the other hand, they may have been surprised to learn that Al-Arish and the surrounding areas had long been officially exempted from taxes on their land and their palm trees. "That the inhabitants of these parts are Bedouins who have never grown accustomed to abiding by such taxes was another reason for this exemption in addition to their general state of destitution and the poor fertility of their land."

The Sinai MP told the chamber that the tax exemptions continued until the Sinai Border Authority imposed a tax of 10 per cent of the value of their crops. Even then, however, the governor of the Sinai had to plead for an exemption year after year because of the poor yields and the hardship of the people.

Another grievance pertained to quail hunting. In the season of these birds' migration to Egypt, the northern Sinai Bedouins habitually set up nets to capture them. Eventually the Border Authority intervened in this source of income as well, determining that the Bedouins had to obtain a quail hunting licence, the cost of which was calculated on the basis of the land area upon which they set up their nets. The authority also prohibited quail hunting after 1 September on the grounds that after this date the birds returned northwards to breed. Abdel-Shafi maintained that not only did this policy deprive the Bedouins of a source of livelihood, but it also resulted in huge numbers of dead birds floating off the Sinai's northern coast.

After outlining the Bedouins' grievances, Abdel-Shafi asked parliament to, firstly, abolish the agricultural tithe and, secondly, to lift restrictions on quail hunting and reduce the cost of a hunting licence to LE1. Neither Al-Ahram nor any other source informs us whether the Sinai MP's proposal was adopted. What we do know is that the economic life of the Sinai has changed dramatically. Certainly, barley cultivation and quail hunting are of marginal economic value. In all events, quail-breeding farms have long since supplanted the practice of netting the birds.

Al-Ahram: A Diwan of contemporary life (619)

Sinai: old problems revisited