For fourteen centuries the community at Sinai survived by holding a piece of paper from whoever was in charge. That method has now run into a modern legal system, which does not recognise the category.
The old arrangement
The monastery's security never rested on walls alone. It rested on repeated, documented grants of protection from Muslim rulers, a practice attested continuously, with the Pasha of Egypt annually reaffirming the community's protections through the Ottoman centuries. A mosque stands inside the monastery walls, which is not a curiosity but part of the same arrangement.
The tradition attaches all of this to the Ashtiname, a charter of protection ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad with Ali as scribe and traditionally dated to 623. The monastery holds certified copies and says the original was taken by Selim I in 1517.
The scholarly position should be stated plainly and without sneering. The document's authenticity has been questioned since the nineteenth century: the witness list is problematic and classical Islamic sources do not refer to such a charter. A minority of scholars argue for authenticity on the basis of its wide textual replication; most critical work treats the surviving text as later. What is not in doubt is the protection itself. The charter may be a later formalisation of a real and long-honoured practice, which is a different thing from a forgery and a different thing from a relic of the Prophet.
The manuscripts
The library is the most important collection of early Christian manuscripts outside the Vatican, and the source of the most-argued-about acquisition in the history of biblical scholarship.
Constantin von Tischendorf took 43 leaves of what is now the Codex Sinaiticus in 1844 and obtained the remainder in 1859 under Russian imperial patronage. His account, that the leaves were destined for burning, is his own and is not independently corroborated, and the monastery has disputed the circumstances ever since. The manuscript passed to the British Museum by sale from the Soviet government in 1933 and is now divided between four institutions, the monastery among them. A further cache of manuscripts was found walled up in a tower in 1975.
The 2025 ruling
On 28 May 2025 Egypt's Ismailia Court of Appeal delivered a judgment in a long-running dispute between the South Sinai Governorate and the Church of Sinai. It held that:
- the Egyptian state owns the monastery and its lands, which are public domain and an antiquity in law
- the monks hold usufruct and religious possession rights only, over limited areas
- monks were to vacate certain agricultural lands
- affiliation with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate confers no legal privileges in Egypt
The judgment made no reference to the Ashtiname, and none to the site's World Heritage inscription.
The diplomatic consequence was immediate. Greece raised it at head-of-government level and received assurances that the monastery's religious character would be preserved; Greece subsequently legislated to recognise the monastery as a Greek public legal entity. A further appeal and a negotiated settlement were both outstanding in mid-2026, with a draft agreement offering the community perpetual free use of the buildings inside the walls while confirming that it owns none of it.
The underlying question is old and is not really about Sinai. A monastic community that has occupied a site since the sixth century holds it by a kind of right that predates, and does not translate into, the language of registered title. When a modern state asks who owns it, there is no answer in the documents that the state is equipped to accept.