The Cairene garbage collectors (the Zabbalin) settled on the Muqattam slopes in 1970. Soon they attracted the attention of different actors involved in development and religious mission: Egyptian engineers, a French Catholic Sister and the most central character of this story, Father Samʿān, who started a mission among the Zabbalin in 1974.

This preacher founded several churches, today known as the Monastery of Saint Simon the Tanner, a complex of seven churches carved in the Muqattam walls. Through his charismatic style of preaching and his public exorcisms symbolically staging the struggle between Christianity and Islam, Samʿān has become a figurehead of his church.

Gaétan Du Roy has engaged into a historical and long-term ethnographic inquiry into the lasting influence of this figure on the religious practices and the sense of community of the Zabbalin for his book which won the First-Book-Award of the Chaire d'étude du Fait religieux of the Paris Institute of Political Studies.