The great majority of Egyptians are fellaheen, i.e. peasants or people living
in rural areas, for whom the Nile valley has always signified the domain of life
and the desert that of death. For them, the people of the desert are not Egyp-
tians. They call the Bedouin ’arab, using a term that has negative connotations
for them. Such an unfavourable perception is reciprocated by the Bedouin, e.g.
by those living on Sinai or along the country’s north-western coast.
Like other peoples all over the world, Egyptians have complex identities.
According to a given situation they can stress one or other facet. However,
they always differentiate between the rural fellaheen (singular fellah) and the
people of the madina, i.e. the town, the latter being associated with madan-
iyya, i.e. civilization. Urban people further define their identity according to
the town they belong to; e.g. a masrawi is a man from Cairo (masr = Cairo),
an iskandarani a man from Alexandria. Egyptians also differentiate region-
ally, between the people of Lower Egypt (see Illustration 13), who are called
baharwa (singular bahrawi), and the Upper Egyptians, who are called sa’ayda
(singular sa’idi) and considered by the baharwa as slow of understanding, tradi-
tion bound and less developed. The geographical border of the sa’iid (south)
has been pushed further southward owing to the impact of the urban sprawl
around Greater Cairo since the mid-twentieth century. Today the dialect
border lies at about 200 km south of the country’s capital in El-Minya Govern