Fellah

 ( Egyptian Farmers ) 

A fellah ( ; feminine فَلَّاحَة ; plural fellaheen or fellahin, فلاحين, ) is a local farmer, usually a farmer or Agriculture laborer in the Middle East and North Africa. The word derives from the Arabic language word for "ploughman" or "tiller".

Due to a continuity in beliefs and lifestyle with that of the , the fellahin of Egypt have been described as the "true" Egyptians.

---

Origins and usage "Fellahin", throughout the Middle East in the Islamic periods, referred to native villagers and farmers.

(2026). 9780863722905, Garnet & Ithaca Press. . ISBN 9780863722905

It is translated as "" or "".

Nur Masalha (2026). 9781842776230, Zed Books. . ISBN 9781842776230

Fellahin were distinguished from the effendi (land-owning class),Warwick P. N. Tyler, State Lands and Rural Development in mandatory Palestine, 1920–1948, Sussex Academic Press, 2001, p. 13 although the fellahin in this region might be , smallholders, or live in a village that owned the land communally.Hillel Cohen, , University of California Press, 2008, p. 32Sandra Marlene Sufian, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920–1947, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 57 Others applied the term fellahin only to landless workers.Michael Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society, I. B. Tauris, 1996, p. 13

---

In Egypt The Fellahin are rural villagers indigenous to Egypt, whose agricultural methods may have contributed to the rise of Ancient Egypt. The Fellahin are mostly Muslims who live in the Nile Valley.

After the Muslim conquest, the rulers called the common masses of farmers fellahin because they worked in agriculture and due to their connection to their lands.

The Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge, wrote with regard to the Egyptian fellah: "...no amount of alien blood has so far succeeded in destroying the fundamental characteristics, both physical and mental, of the 'dweller of the Nile mud,' i.e. the fellah, or tiller of the ground who is today what he has ever been."

He would rephrase stating, "the physical type of the Egyptian fellah is exactly what it was in the earliest dynasties. percentage of fellahin in Egypt was much higher than it is now in the early 20th century, before large numbers migrated into urban towns and cities. In 1927, anthropologist Winifred Blackman, author of The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, conducted ethnographic research on the life of Upper Egyptian farmers and concluded that there were observable continuities between the cultural and religious beliefs and practices of the fellahin and those of ancient Egyptians.

In 2005, they comprised some 60 percent of the total Egyptian population.

---

In the Levant In the Levant, specifically in Palestine, Jordan and Hauran, the term fellahin was used to refer to the majority of the countryside. The term fallah was also applied to native people from several regions in the North Africa and the Middle East, also including those of Cyprus.

---

In Dobruja During the nineteenth century, some Muslim Fellah families from Ottoman Syria settled in Dobruja, a region now divided between Bulgaria and Romania, then part of the Ottoman Empire. They fully intermingled with the Turkish people and Tatars, and were Turkified.

==Gallery==

---

See also

• Copts, Egyptian Christian Orthodox
• Peasant

---

External links

• Egypt's forgotten fellahin

Post Comment