FIRAN VALLEY, Sinai — The most powerful leaders of the tribes across the Sinai Peninsula drove their four-wheelers through the Firan Valley to give President Mohammed Morsi and his government one last chance. The gathering of dozens of widely feared Bedouin kingpins at a summit on April 5 represented a unanimous, unprecedented threat to Egypt’s first democratically elected president.

The summit leaders pitched their tent in front of the Seven Girls Monastery. Women and sometimes children carried empty cooking gas canisters from as far as five miles deep in the mountainous terrain and left them along the 15-mile road connecting St. Catherine’s Monastery and the summit. Having tied their money to the containers' metal handles, they hoped that the state-owned gas company’s distribution truck would pass before sunset so they could carry a full, 77-pound tank home for dinner.

Cooking gas, infrastructure and unemployment were among the dozens of complaints amplified by loudspeakers from inside the tent, but the deteriorating relationship between the heavily armed tribal community and President Morsi’s executive bodies, especially the security apparatus, were foremost.

Before the summit kickoff, Ahmed el-Herish, the most powerful sheikh of the Qararsha tribe, which controls the Firan Valley, led the assembled in Friday prayers. At the summit, el-Herish mockingly said, “I asked Reform why she never came to Sinai. She told me, ‘Government officials never allowed me to.’”