Fellah

Origins and usage

"Fellahin", throughout the Middle East in the Islamic periods, referred to native villagers and farmers. It is translated as "peasants" or "farmers". Fellahin were distinguished from the effendi (land-owning class), although the fellahin in this region might be tenant farmers, smallholders, or live in a village that owned the land communally. Others applied the term fellahin only to landless workers.

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.

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

Main article: Dobrujan Arabs

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 Turks and Tatars, and were Turkified.

Gallery

File:Egypt, Fellahin in the Fields, Cairo.jpg|Fellahin with hoes in the fields near Cairo File:Egypt, Plowmen and Team, Cairo.jpg|Egyptian fellahin using a traditional agricultural plow

References

References

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