ST. CATHERINE’S, Sinai — Over the past two years, 62 of Sinai’s most outlawed yet professional opium growers have turned their red-flowered fields into plantations of medicinal herbs. Their idol was Ahmed Saleh, the turban-wearing descendant of the Jabaleyya tribe that has been guarding St. Catherine’s Monastery for more than 1600 years.
Saleh, a 38-year-old tribesman who dropped out of elementary school but speaks, reads and writes English and German besides his native Arabic, grew up collecting mountainous herbs as a part of his Bedouin traditions. Almost a decade ago, instead of just boiling herbs for simple medicinal use, he excelled in developing further sophisticated combinations of Sinai’s 472 medicinal herbs, which include 19 endemic and 42 severely endangered herbs.