World Tour: Preserving an ancient monastery

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

Right now, Egypt is trying to renovate the area around one of the oldest monasteries in the world. But critics say the government is doing much more than that.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

AP, FATHER JUSTIN: The first monks came here at the end of the third, the beginning of the fourth century.

MARY MUNCY: A Greek Orthodox monk calling himself Justin Sinaites is standing outside of St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt. According to some Christian traditions, the monastery is built on the Biblical site of Mount Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

JUSTIN: The monastery has never been destroyed and never been abandoned in all of its history.

Right now, the monastery is inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks.

JUSTIN: The monastery library has 3,300 manuscripts in the old collection, approximately 1,000 manuscripts in the new finds and perhaps another thousand manuscripts in the archives which also contain both Arabic and Ottoman scrolls.

The monastery’s collection of records is one of the oldest and most complete in the world.

MARIAM WAHBA: And it rivals even that of the Vatican's.

Mariam Wahba is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

WAHBA: While the Vatican's may be larger in time span, it the Vatican's is actually interrupted at certain points, whereas the St Catherine's Monastery transcript collection is uninterrupted for the totality of time that it has existed and functioned.

But Wahba says recently the Egyptian government has shut down work to study and digitize those manuscripts and has not allowed any scholars access to the monastery’s library in several years.

WAHBA: No reason was given other than you cannot continue the digitization project.

Wahba thinks the government is trying to slowly squeeze control of the monastery away from Christians.

In 2021, Egypt began a country-wide project to revitalize its tourist industry after the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of that work has been to add hotels and services for tourists on the Sinai Peninsula, where the monastery sits. Over the past four years, there has been a lot of back and forth between locals trying to protect the region's natural beauty and the government trying to bring in tourist dollars.

The fight escalated in May, when an Egyptian court ruled that St. Catherine’s Monastery lies on state land, and thus the state can control the monastery itself and the gardens and guest houses around the property.

After the ruling, World Heritage Watch asked UNESCO to add the monastery and surrounding land to its list of endangered sites, and the head of the Church of Greece said the measure threatens religious freedom in a majority-Muslim country. Wahba agrees.

WAHBA: If the Egyptian state feels so empowered as to start infringing upon a monastery with so much history, so much international standing and backing, really no in no religious institution is safe.

But not everyone sees the move as discrimination. Michael Jones works with Church leadership development in Egypt.

JONES: It's not because Egypt is a Muslim country and the monastery is a Christian monastery. Of course, it's because of this promising plan the government is working on.

He thinks the renovations will be good for the village around the monastery.

JONES: Life is very primitive. Services are very primitive. So the Egyptian government decided to invest into making this spot a, what they called a “land for all religions.”

He says the monks are still in control of the monastery’s manuscripts, but because of its own internal struggles, they’re not allowing researchers in. Over the past few weeks, the archbishop of the monastery excommunicated some monks after they challenged his leadership.

From Jones' perspective, the government could be doing better. Egypt’s president generally speaks positively about Christianity. But local authorities often don’t help harassed or attacked Christians.

But Jones says the government isn’t the biggest problem for Christians.

JONES: The main issue is Christians live in a country with a majority of Muslims, many of whom consider Christians as infidels.

Egypt is home to the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. That’s about 15 million people in a country of over 100 million, and those 15 million represent about half of all of the Christians in the Middle East.

JONES: Discrimination is a part of our daily life. It's something that we live with. We expect to happen.

Things like people with obviously Christian names not getting proper treatment at the hospital, or getting poor grades from a radical Muslim professor. and much worse. Jones says it’s not every Muslim, but there are enough.

JONES: It's like the Egyptian soil is infected by fanaticism against Christians because of the existence of a large number of fanatic Muslims in Egypt.

Back at St. Catherines, both Christians and Muslims want to preserve the sites around the monastery, the struggle is over who controls it going forward.

In the short term, analyst Mariam Wahba says the United States provides military funding to the Egyptian state and could use that as leverage to incentivise the government to preserve the monastery’s traditional independence. But changing individual minds is much harder.

WAHBA: I think it's little pieces of the puzzle that can be tackled one by one, as opposed to an overhaul of a system that has existed and is entrenched in the way that Egyptian society and the Egyptian government functions.

In the meantime, Michael Jones asks for believers around the world to pray.

JONES: Pray for perseverance, for Christians to stand strong for the faith, to not compromise the biblical teachings in a society that might not be friendly.

That’s this week’s World Tour, I’m Mary Muncy.

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