The Burning Bush: The Struggle for Sinai’s Soul

This essay offers a historical and geopolitical reflection on the Middle East’s enduring instability, particularly focusing on regions often overlooked in mainstream narratives. It resists simplification in favor of contextual depth, exploring the spiritual and political stakes that shape our present through forgotten legacies and contested future.Reading the Middle Eastern press, whether in Arabic or English, one might conclude that the Islamic State is in decline.

It has taken over three years for Daesh’s territorial control to seriously recede, reduced—at least in theory—to a few residual pockets scattered between Iraq, Syria, the Turkish borderlands, and the outskirts of Jordan.

The Western Coalition, allied on a purely geo-tactical basis with the Russian Federation’s armed forces, managed—until the 2022 rupture between NATO, the West, and Russia—to contain and retake land that the temporary “Caliphate” had seized from states shaped by century-old negotiations led primarily by the French and British imperial powers. But can one truly speak of an Iraqi victory? That remains premature. As of 2025, the situation in the Nineveh Plain is catastrophic. The Middle East is locked in a long-term crisis, undergoing restructuring after economic and colonial decisions that have lost all justification. We are no longer in the era of the Treaty of Versailles. The year 1945 is far behind us. The agreements reached at Yalta are unraveling.

The erosion of Islamic State territory and its supposed near-disappearance are more mirage than reality.
Nothing suggests that the group has vanished or been erased from the historical and theological space of a complex Islam—a primal zone of spiritual and doctrinal tension that continues to shake the Fertile Crescent. This region bridges tribal relations with resilient structures that have withstood centuries of conflict, migration, and the rise and fall of intertwined identities.

Afghanistan remains the focal point of potential assaults. It serves as a formidable and impregnable ‘eagle’s nest.’ This central continental area continues to fracture surrounding regions, down to Kashmir, Himalayan Sino-Chinese conflicts…

In contrast, the Arabian Peninsula is undergoing a slow gestation of structural transformation for the decades ahead.

Flanked by prosperous petro-monarchies birthed from Anglo-oil partnerships, Saudi Arabia is caught between modernization drives, the persistence of severe archaisms, and the contested stewardship of Islam’s holiest sites. Corruption, omnipresent across the region, is difficult to gauge, as it emerges and operates through antagonistic principles—between genuine piety and an innate human tendency to exploit contradiction.

Yemen, a fragmented state with shifting borders, is currently paying a steep price, erasing an entity once shaped by British colonialism. Often labeled the poorest country in the Middle East, its deep history marks it as a vital crossroads of populations and fertile cultural exchanges. Today, Yemen is ravaged by internal tribal wars—now tragically normalized—and, amid horrifying poverty, it attacks Israel in support of Iran, via the Houthi movement.

Historically, the land of the Sabeans was a cultural and economic bridge between Arabia and Ethiopia.

The Romans dubbed it Arabia Felix—“Happy Arabia”—in contrast to the desert interior. In Jewish memory, Yemen was home to the Himyarite Kingdom, a place where Talmudic schools once flourished, and Jewish merchants played a key role in tribal diplomacy. Its history is steeped in cycles of violent conflict: from the suppression of pre-Islamic polytheism to conversions to Judaism, followed by struggles to impose Christianity (brought from Ethiopia and later countered by Persian influence in the late 6th century).

One must not forget that the Arabian Peninsula was long a Christian land—home to Syriac Orthodox (“Jacobite”) and Assyrian (“Nestorian”) communities, with many prestigious metropolitan sees, all lost due to internal conflict and a moral incapacity to overcome sectarian divisions.

In modern times, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen emerged with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

In the early 20th century, the region was arbitrarily divided between the Ottomans and the British Crown, leading to a century of turmoil: the creation of Marxist South Yemen (Aden) in 1967, and the reunification of North and South Yemen in 1990. The Soviet collapse echoes in Yemen’s strategic coastlines, a land marked by a rich and chaotic destiny.

The war between Shiite Houthis and Al-Qaeda—and the influx of Daesh from Iraq—has paradoxically benefited the Islamic State through ripple effects. This conflict now extends toward Israel, reflecting a broader Islamic struggle against nations perceived as obstructing Muslim expansion. It is not enough to decry “Islamism.” Islam, a deeply monotheistic faith, takes the long view, as one sultan reportedly told Napoleon: “You say forty centuries look down on you? Islam is built on patience outside of time.”

Today, only about fifty Jews remain in Yemen (some 200 were airlifted to Israel in a 2016 military operation). Roughly 40,000 Christians—mostly Anglicans and Catholics—also reside there.

Northern Yemen is predominantly Shiite, while southern regions like Aden and Hadhramaut are Sunni.

Yemen has long influenced North African migrations, including Berber and other tribes of Cyrenaica.

To the north, the Sinai Peninsula has always been tied to Egypt, from the earliest antiquity. It is the first Asian segment of (Western) Arabia, extending into the Fertile Crescent—Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—commanding the Strait of Tiran and bordering modern Saudi Arabia.

Sinai belonged to the Ottoman Empire until 1906, when Britain seized both it and Egypt.

Sinai’s prestige stems from its unique geography.

Known in Arabic and Coptic as the “Land of Turquoise,” it was a key corridor for ancient migrations from southern Africa, Zanzibar (linked to India), Indo-European peoples, the Hyksos, Persians, and others. This crucial northern route complements southern Arabian connections through Yemen.

It has always been a refuge (e.g., the Exodus, the life of Moses), a trade artery, and a site of slave traffic (as in the story of Joseph, Genesis 37). Rich in oases and dramatic mountains, it became a place of mystical significance in monotheistic revelation.

Since 2000, the 21st century has revived ancient traditions of plunder—now transformed into terrorism.

Initially driven by impoverished Bedouins, attacks escalated into deadly assaults on tourist hubs like Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab, and Taba. Bedouin tribes—naturally transborder—now engage in drug trafficking and routinely abduct refugees (from Eritrea, central and eastern Africa, and beyond) attempting to reach Israel or Europe.

A dangerous axis runs from Port Said and Ismailia along the Sinai’s western coast, up to the Gaza Strip, particularly around Rafah and southern Israel (Negev), a hotspot for terrorist infiltration from Gaza.

Sinai is multicultural and multifaith, shaped by waves of change.

The revival of Orthodox Churches is marked by the Russian presence—bungalows, hotels, pilgrims, and tourists drawn to the area’s natural beauty.

St. Catherine’s Monastery is the oldest continuously operating library in the world. Its full name is “Greek Orthodox Holy Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai,” believed to be located on the very site of the Burning Bush. Ironically, Hebrew—the language in which God spoke to the Jewish people—is no longer spoken there, though Orthodox liturgy typically includes a usual reading from the Gospel of John in Hebrew in the Paschal Night.

Founded by Emperor Justinian I in 565, the site was first visited by Empress Helena (builder of the Holy Sepulchre). The pilgrim Egeria mentioned nearby monasteries in the 4th century. The Prophet Muhammad himself stayed at the monastery, appreciated the monks, and issued the Ashtiname, a Charter of Protection that still guarantees its safety.

The monastery considers itself an autocephalous Church with patriarchal status, though the Patriarchate of Jerusalem claims jurisdiction. Its current archbishop, Damianos, is consecrated by the Jerusalem Patriarch and regularly visited during Easter. The journey from Jerusalem to Sinai takes eight hours by road.

Though hermits were expelled during the 7th-century Islamic expansion, the monastery endured, preserving ancient Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman manuscripts.

Remarkably, the monastery was spared during the Crusades, ushering in a fruitful period of interreligious contact.

It was absorbed into the Ottoman realm in 1517 but continued its Byzantine traditions uninterrupted. In the 17th century, it expanded to Heraklion (Crete, under Venetian rule), Romania, Russia, Georgia, Asia Minor, and even India, founding schools and educational institutes.

St. John Climacus, the “Sinaitic” monk and author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, once led the monastery. Gregory of Sinai, key to the spread of Hesychasm into Slavic lands, also stayed there. This spirituality intersected with Hasidic thought from the 17th to 20th centuries across Bessarabia, Ukraine, Romania, and Russia.

Islamic and Coptic Orthodox presences in Sinai are comparatively recent.

There are two Coptic dioceses (Al Arish in the North and Al Tor in the South). The Romanian Orthodox Church even appointed a bishop titled “of Mount Sinai,” though Jerusalem does not recognize this.

Sinai remains a high-traffic region, with mountainous and cavernous terrain offering refuge and facilitating illegal activity—drug trafficking, refugee smuggling, and easy cross-border movement from Yemen.

On December 17, 2017, Egypt announced the reopening of the monastery’s great library. Yet in May 2025, an Egyptian court ruled that the monks must vacate the site, which would become a state-run museum. This has alarmed Greek-speaking churches. Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem has responded cautiously, with experienced prudence in a region where nothing is ever truly final.

Meanwhile, Daesh (aka ISIL/ISIS) continues to find local support and training grounds, as Egypt struggles to protect its own citizens—Muslim and Christian alike.

In recent years, ISIS has claimed attacks on Russian airliners flying tourists and pilgrims to Sinai.

Russian monks rotate through the region, offering spiritual guidance to seekers who combine religious pilgrimage with scuba diving in the Red Sea’s paradise-like waters. Comfortable bungalows, supplied directly from Russia and Ukraine, offer affordable spiritual retreats.