Under the Carob Tree
We all lay cozily, shoulder to shoulder, on a mix of thin mattresses and sleeping bags. Rawy and I were stuffed in one sleeping bag right in the middle. I could hear him softly snoring into my arm already. Sina was in another to my left and Amina to my right. To Amina’s right, Mariam, my sister-in-law, flanked our band. Cole was on the opposite end closest to the massive rock that would’ve shielded us from Katrin’s crispy cold had it been winter. But it wasn’t winter. It was June. And we were all sleeping under Mariam’s favorite carob tree in Doctor Ahmed’s garden in St.Catherine (Katrin/كاترين), Sinai.
**
It was the Sunday right after Salah’s wedding. Weeks ago, Mariam and I planned our trip. Mariam has been going there for around ten years, rented a house, and had plenty of Bedouin friends. So she was the Katrin connoisseur. Ahmed – my brother and her husband – unfortunately couldn’t make it this time. It was just her and Za’tar (زعتر) (codename for yet-to-be born baby). Mariam’s 7 months pregnant. On my end, it was the whole gang: me, the three kiddos, and Cole. With minimal hesitation on whether we were going to postpone the trip so Ahmed could join, we decided to just go for it and maybe aim for a redo in a couple of weeks.
So, after deflating some air from the car tires to accommodate for Katrin’s more bumpy terrain, Mariam and I tag-teamed the 5-hour drive East in Suzy – her trusted yellow Suzuki.
We spent the first night at her place in Tufaha (تفاحة). By midmorning the next day, Youssef, our guide and Mariam’s dear friend, met us in his new-to-him Toyota truck. It had A LOT of character and didn’t reliably turn back on, but we were all pretty thrilled about it. We loaded the kids up and after a few quick errands were unloading them at the trailhead.
The hike down to Doctor Ahmed’s garden in Wadi Telah valley (وادي طلاح) wasn’t long – about a two hour hike, despite Mariam and Ahmed’s conviction that it is actually only 45 minutes. Either way, with kids it took longer. But it was lovely. We would pause under the reluctant shade of a generous tree and Youssef would whip out his compact kettle and tiny cups and make us yummy tea. Often with herbs he would pick from a bush around the corner.
When we arrived, our backpacks and food had already been dropped off by the camel. We were greeted by Ali and Ahmed - Youssef and Doctor Ahmed’s helpers. They led us to the latter’s ‘areesha (عريشة), a breezy shaded room furnished with nothing but kelim (كليم) with a fire pit as the centerpiece. It’s where people hang out, drink tea, and share meals during the heat of the day or sleep at night. Doctor Ahmed himself joined us shortly after in his unusual (to me) yellow shemagh (شماغ) and wide warm smile. Skinny and agile in both body and mind, he did not look his 70+ years.
His garden and other gardens in Sinai don’t look like what I think of as gardens in Viroqua Wisconsin. It’s not a defined uniform plot where people plant their corn, carrots, or basil amidst a sea of grass. From what I’ve seen, a garden in Sinai is mostly trees: pomegranate, fig, carob, olive. Herb bushes and grapevines. And they’re all planted in the bosom of rocky desert terrain. So there’s no other lush greenery webbing the disparate patches of foliage. Its beauty is miraculous in a rare and ancient sort of way.
Doctor Ahmed is a phenomenon in this part of Sinai. More of a legend. I’ve heard of him plenty from Mariam but had only met him once a few years earlier when we went on the same hike with Ahmed and stayed at Ouda’s ‘areesha instead, which was maybe 10-minutes away. He is an herb wizard and that is where the title of “doctor” comes from I think. He not only knows the different medicinal values of all the desert herbs, but more importantly, he concocts different medicinal mixtures. People visit him for help with cancer and other serious ailments that have confounded modern doctors. And he fixes them. And his knowledge-seekers are not just local. They sometimes come from Saudi and elsewhere.
Doctor Ahmed’s practice is not a job, but a way of life. It’s one he’s inherited from his father and grandfather before him. And it’s one that he’s trying to pass on to his lineage and other Sinai Bedouins. But is unfortunately not finding a lot of traction. It’s one of his many grievances about his waning Bedouin heritage. He draws a distinction between the Nile-dwellers and the abundance that comes with their stationary life and the desert-dwelling nomads and their itinerant existence. He talks about how Bedouins’ possessions used to be minimal: tea kettle, kelim, a few changes of clothing and you’re set. I understand him to say that as some of that Nile abundance trickled down to Sinai, Bedouins started getting more dependent on it. And in the process, lost their way of life. Or at least a lot of it. They don’t grow their own food as much or raise their own goats to the same scale or know how to make their own cheese and milk from these goats. Because they can now just buy it from a store. And all the store things come from Cairo and other parts of Egypt. If the government decides to block the road to Sinai, he can continue living as is because he doesn’t rely on what comes in from the outside. But most Bedouins today can’t.
It’s like our own Egyptian microcosm of how neoliberalism has divided the world into centers and largely dependent peripheries. We make similar complaints in Cairo about the puniness of our local industries, about being so dependent on imports and tourism and how that warps our economy and with it our lives. Feeds the consumerist mega mall era that is now such a prominent feature of New Cairo. To my ears, it also sounds like complaints made by Trump supporters who have also been negatively affected by the job loss that came with exporting certain manufacturing industries abroad. Different disaffected classes in different countries voicing different maladies. But the root cause is the same. I think.
Anyways, back to Doctor Ahmed. I asked him what he thought of all the government development projects in Sinai like establishing poultry farms in the South. He said that in principle it’s welcome but it’s all still on paper. We talked about Argany and his peculiar relationship with the government. He said something is not right there and that what starts off shady grows on crooked.
Doctor Ahmed is something of a polymath. His knowledge is not limited to medicinal herb use but includes inventing ways of distilling syrups from unlikely fruit like carob. Well-versed in history and politics despite his geographical remoteness. He met with Mubarak and I think he said even Sadat before him. To my slight surprise, he’s a major fan of Sadat, despite the latter being the cause of the economic and social opening that was a key cause of the erosion of the Bedouin culture the way he describes it. But we didn’t talk much about that aspect of Sadat’s reign. More the fact that Sinai never would have returned to Egypt without him. He says Israel always needs war to exist and Sadat denied it that in a way that, at the time, was novel and forced Israel to pivot. And he got Sinai back. The only annexed territory to be returned after 1967.
Like other topics, he got very animated talking about Palestine. Never losing his sunny smile and good-naturedness. I couldn’t quite peg his bottom-line alignment, which is frankly a good thing. But I was curious to hear his thoughts on this. I’ve found that often people living through, or in close proximity to, a trauma have different perspectives than others more distant.
Like other Bedouins I heard contemplating their relationship with Israelis, his reflections weren’t vitriolic. I asked about Israeli tourism in Sinai and whether he had any feelings about it. He said so what if Jews come to Sinai. I gave my own feelings as an example making a distinction between say Russian Jews and Israeli Jews, saying that I have no conflicting feelings about the former but feel like the latter shouldn’t be as welcome. But then I said I understand that many Bedouin livelihoods depend on their tourism so it was easier for me to make that statement than it would be for them. I’m not sure if he agreed with my reasoning here since he seemed critical of relying exclusively on tourism as the modern Bedouin means of survival.
He talked about how under occupation, the Bedouins lived cordially with the settlers. I asked him about a story I heard from ‘Amreyya – the female counterpart to Doctor Ahmed that I had briefly met last year when we stopped by her ‘areesha partway through a longer hike. She had also lived under the occupation and remembers going into labor and had some complication and an Israeli helicopter transported her to a hospital in Tel Aviv. He confirmed the story. He said that if you don’t think about governments and politics, people can get along fine.
I asked him if he thought Israelis treated Palestinians the same way. He said no. Palestinians are different. Their existence posed an existential threat to the Israelis. But then in the same breath he also said, so what if Jews came and lived on Palestinian land. Jews always lived amongst us. So did Christians.
True, I thought. But it wasn’t the Jews that lived amongst us that started this. It was other Jews who lived elsewhere and were harmed by other people. Even then, maybe it would’ve been fine if they just immigrated to Palestine and assimilated. Like we do today. But they sought to replace and not integrate. And they used violence and deception. And were backed by powers who benefited from ousting them and planting a thorn in the region. I said as much, and he agreed.
We talked about how Israel approaches the Bedouins in the Naqab versus the Egyptian government in Sinai. Israel has its Desert Reconnaissance Battalion or Bedouin Battalion unit while Sinai Bedouins are not allowed to join the police or military. After Sinai was occupied by Israel for some 10 plus years, the Egyptian government often treated them with suspicion, despite the fact that Bedouin intel and cooperation during the October war (1973) was pivotal for its success. I asked him if allowing Bedouins to join the police/military would be a welcome development. He said yes. I asked if he thought the government’s greenlighting Argany’s Bedouin militants to fight off ISIS and other Islamist militants in Northern Sinai was the government de facto piloting such a development. He reverted to his mistrust of shifty foundations.
The conversation went on for hours sometimes shifting abruptly between Israel and the US’ offensive against Iran, the differences between North and South Sinai’s economy and politics, Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood support in Sinai, ISIS and the rise of Islamic militants after Morsi’s ouster. The thread would sometimes get interrupted by Rawy and Sina getting into some mischief. But over the next couple of days, we would pick it up again over tea or a meal.
Our last night there, he came down from his little house a little way up the mountain with little bottles of some black syrup. It was carob molasses. Other Bedouins make it too but, according to Mariam, his is better. Less bitter. Carob molasses is rare and expensive and apparently has loads of nutritional benefits. According to Doctor Ahmed, it’s mostly made in Israel and Lebanon. He told us he learned it by accident one time when an Israeli family was visiting. A little boy pointed at one of the fallen carob fruits and said “honey” in Hebrew, but his mom quickly hushed him. Doctor Ahmed speaks Hebrew so he understood but was politely dismissed when he asked. Later, he overheard the parents debating whether they should tell him or not. Eventually, they did and that’s how he learned to make carob molasses. He gave each person a bottle so my family got 5, something I didn’t initially understand when I asked if I could buy more to gift to friends back home. He said yes and next morning he gave Mariam and I a large bottle for us to split and refused to take any money.
**
We ended our trip with a shorter but steeper hike back to town and visited the monastery – a first for me. It was charming and felt very Greek. We even got a tour of their library because Youssef knew one the priests and got to see ancient manuscripts in Greek and Arabic. Most of the priests there are Greek but the one who gave the tour was American. We sealed the visit with a little soft serve ice cream on our way out. Then Mariam and I snoozed a little at her place before we were back on the road to Cairo. All three kids were already zonked before we even made it out of town.
thanks for sharing your traveling stories.