Egypt

Core values & worldview

If you want to understand an Egyptian, start with time. Few peoples live so casually among so much history. A Cairo family may picnic by the pyramids, pray in a mosque built by a Mamluk sultan and shop in a street laid out by the Fatimids a thousand years ago.^•

Naguib Mahfouz, accepting the Nobel Prize in 1988, called himself the son of a “happy marriage” between a seven-thousand-year-old Pharaonic civilisation and a fourteen-hundred-year-old Islamic one. That double inheritance, plus the Coptic and the Arab, is the background hum of Egyptian identity.^•

That history helps explain a few things you will often notice.

Pride, and a sense of centrality. Egyptians call their country Umm al-Dunya, “the mother of the world”. Cairo was for a century the Arab world’s Hollywood, publishing house and political capital, and many Egyptians feel, gently or fiercely, that Egypt is the natural leader of the Arabs, even as oil wealth has moved influence to the Gulf.^•

Faith as daily language. Insha’allah (“God willing”), al-hamdu lillah (“praise God”) and ya rabb (“O Lord”) punctuate conversation for Muslims and Christians alike. Religion matters a great deal to most Egyptians: in Pew’s 2013 survey, 74% of Egyptian Muslims said they wanted sharia to be the official law, though people disagree widely about what that would mean in practice.^•

Family before everything. The family, often three generations and a web of cousins, is the safety net, the marriage bureau and the job centre. Many young people live with their parents until marriage, and getting married, with the apartment, furniture and gold it requires, is a major family project.^•

Humour as survival. The Egyptian joke, the nukta, is admired across the Arab world. People have joked about their rulers since at least the Mamluks, and political jokes flourished under Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. Laughter is how many Egyptians make hardship bearable and puncture the powerful without saying anything that could get them in trouble.^•

Dignity, karama. The word ran through Nasser’s speeches and the chants of 2011. Being treated with respect, by officials, police and foreigners, is a deep need for a people who have often been ruled by others and by their own heavy-handed state.^•

Daily life & customs

Egypt is crowded and young. The population passed 108 million in 2025, and most of it lives along the Nile Valley and Delta, much of it in Greater Cairo.^•

Daily life is loud, social and lived on the street: the ahwa (coffee house) with its backgammon and shisha, the corner kiosk, the microbus, the call to prayer from many minarets at once, and the church bells of Coptic neighbourhoods.^•

Food is generous and cheap at its base: ful (stewed fava beans) and ta’miya (Egyptian falafel, made with fava beans) for breakfast, koshari for lunch, molokhia (a green, slippery soup) at home, and subsidised aish baladi flatbread at every meal. Aish means both “bread” and “life”, and the price of bread is one of the most sensitive political questions in the country; when Sadat tried to cut subsidies in January 1977, riots forced him to reverse course within days.^•

The calendar has two rhythms. Muslims fast in Ramadan, when streets fill with lanterns and families gather for iftar and the big Ramadan TV series, and celebrate the two Eids. Copts keep long fasts of their own and celebrate Christmas on 7 January, now a national holiday. Both join in Sham el-Nessim, a spring festival of picnics, coloured eggs and salted fish that goes back to pharaonic times.^•

Hospitality is a point of honour. Expect to be offered tea, then food, then more food, and to have your first refusal politely ignored. Weddings are huge, noisy affairs, and the funeral aza’ (condolence gathering) brings the whole neighbourhood.^•

Football is a national passion and a social divider: you are either Ahly or Zamalek, the two great Cairo clubs. Ultras fan groups played a visible role in the 2011 uprising, and in 2012 at least 72 Ahly fans were killed in a stadium riot in Port Said, a tragedy many Egyptians still remember.^•

Wounds & sensitivities

Being ruled by others. For roughly two thousand years, from the Persians and Greeks to the Ottomans and British, Egypt was usually governed by foreigners; Nasser was often described as the first native Egyptian to rule the country since the pharaohs. The British occupation of 1882, the hanging of villagers after the Dinshaway incident in 1906 and the Anglo-French-Israeli attack of 1956 are remembered as humiliations. Lectures from Western countries about how Egypt should be run can touch that nerve.^•

1967. The Six-Day War, the Naksa (“setback”), was a national trauma: Sinai lost in days, the air force destroyed on the ground, thousands dead, and the pan-Arab dream broken. The crossing of the Suez Canal on 6 October 1973 is celebrated as the moment pride was restored, and “6 October” is the name of a city, a bridge and a national holiday.^•

Israel and Palestine. Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, and the treaty has held, but most Egyptians never warmed to it. Sympathy for the Palestinians runs deep, and normal social or cultural ties with Israelis are still widely seen as taboo.^•

The broken promise of 2011. For many Egyptians, especially those who were young in Tahrir Square, the revolution is a wound: hope, then the bloodshed of 2011–13, including the killing of at least 817 people at the Rabaa sit-in in August 2013 by Human Rights Watch’s count, then a new authoritarianism. Others remember 2011–13 as chaos and are grateful for order. Both feelings are raw, and many people prefer not to talk politics with strangers at all.^•

Copts’ fear and grief. Coptic Christians have endured repeated attacks: on churches and villages in Upper Egypt, at Maspero in Cairo in 2011, in the Islamic State’s bombings of churches in 2016–17, and the beheading of Egyptian Copts in Libya in 2015. Many Copts feel like second-class citizens, especially on church building and in senior posts, while many Muslims insist that the two are “one fabric”. Both statements contain truth.^•

Poverty and the cost of living. Repeated devaluations of the pound since 2016 have hit the middle class and the poor hard. Jokes about Egypt being “cheap” or “dirty” land badly with people who are working very hard just to keep up.^•

Modern attitudes

Wary of politics. After the upheavals of 2011–13 and the crackdown that followed, open political talk has become risky, and many people have retreated into family, work and faith. Pollsters find it hard to measure real opinion in such conditions, so beware anyone who tells you confidently what “Egyptians think” about their government.^•

Religious and socially conservative, with variety. Most Egyptians are devout and socially conservative, on sexuality, family and modesty above all, and the headscarf is worn by a large majority of Muslim women. At the same time Cairo and Alexandria have a lively, cosmopolitan, often secular-minded middle class, and Egyptian cinema and TV have long poked fun at hypocrisy and religious bigotry.^•

Nile first. Few issues unite Egyptians like the Nile. Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is widely seen as an existential threat, and many Egyptians feel the world has not taken that seriously.^•

Looking abroad. Millions of Egyptians have worked in the Gulf since the oil boom of the 1970s, and their remittances keep families afloat. Many young graduates dream of emigrating. Gulf customs and conservative religious styles came home with returning workers, a change older Egyptians sometimes regret.^•

Not all Egyptians are the same

Muslims and Copts. The great majority are Sunni Muslims; Christians, mostly Coptic Orthodox with smaller Catholic and Protestant churches, are about 5% by Pew’s estimate and 10% or more by the church’s. There are also small Shia and Baha’i communities, which face discrimination, and a once-thriving Jewish community that has almost vanished since the 1950s.^•

Cairo and the provinces. Cairenes and Alexandrians are urban and fast-talking. Sa’idis, from Upper Egypt in the south, have a reputation, the butt of affectionate jokes, for toughness, honour and clan loyalty, and their region is poorer and more traditional. The Delta fallahin (farmers) are the old agrarian heart of the country.^•

Nubians, Bedouin and Siwans. Nubians in the far south lost their villages under Lake Nasser when the High Dam was built and still campaign for the right to return. Bedouin in Sinai and the Western Desert, and the Amazigh-speaking people of Siwa, have their own cultures and often feel neglected by Cairo.^•

Class. The gap between gated-compound Cairo and the vast informal districts where perhaps most Cairenes live is enormous. English- or French-educated elites, the striving middle class and the urban poor can feel like different countries.^•

Politics. Some Egyptians revere Nasser; others mourn the liberal monarchy before 1952. Some backed the Muslim Brotherhood; others celebrated its fall in 2013. Many have simply given up on politics. Don’t assume.^•

Generations. Grandparents may remember Nasser’s speeches and Umm Kulthum’s concerts; parents grew up under Mubarak’s long stasis; the young, who make up most of the population, grew up with smartphones, 2011, and mahraganat.^•

Meeting someone

Conversation starters

• Food. Ask where to find the best koshari or ful, or what their mother cooks for Eid. You may get an invitation.
• Football. Ahly or Zamalek? And Mohamed Salah is a safe source of shared joy.
• Films, songs and comedians. Old black-and-white films, Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Adel Imam’s comedies and the latest Ramadan series are all good openings.^•
  • Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt — Walter Armbrust, Cambridge University Press (1996)
  • The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century — Virginia Danielson, University of Chicago Press (1997)
• Their hometown. Egyptians love to explain what makes Alexandria, Upper Egypt or their Delta village different from Cairo.
• Jokes. Laugh at theirs, and don’t be afraid to be laughed at a little.

Topics to approach carefully

• Current politics and the president. Criticism can carry real risks for people inside Egypt. Let them lead, and don’t press.^•
  • All According to Plan: The Rab'a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt — Human Rights Watch (2014)
• 2011 and 2013. For some it was a revolution and a massacre; for others a rescue from chaos. Listen before you take a side.^•
  • Egypt in a Time of Revolution: Contentious Politics and the Arab Spring — Neil Ketchley, Cambridge University Press (2017)
• Religion, and Muslim–Christian relations. Don’t assume a person’s religion from their name or looks, and avoid debating which faith is right.^•
  • Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality — S. S. Hasan, Oxford University Press (2003)
• Israel. Most Egyptians oppose normal ties with Israel, whatever the treaty says.^•
  • The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World — Avi Shlaim, W. W. Norton (2014)
• “Who built the pyramids?” Fringe theories that someone other than ancient Egyptians built them, or that modern Egyptians are unrelated to the ancients, are deeply insulting.^•
  • The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt — Toby Wilkinson, Bloomsbury (2010)

Common misconceptions

• “Egyptians are Arabs, nothing more” or “Egyptians are not Arabs.” Both are oversimplified. Most Egyptians speak Arabic and see themselves as part of the Arab world, but many also feel a distinct Egyptian identity rooted in the Nile and the pharaohs. Debates about which comes first have run for a century.^•
  • Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation-State — Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., Westview Press (2004)
  • The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books (2009)
• “Egypt is all desert and pyramids.” Most Egyptians are urban and live in a green, crowded river valley; Cairo is a vast modern metropolis.^•
  • Egypt — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• “All Egyptians are Muslim.” Egypt has the largest Christian community in the Middle East.^•
  • How many Christians are there in Egypt? — Pew Research Center (2011)
• “Egyptians are just like their government.” Many Egyptians have strong private views about their rulers and keep them private for good reason.
• “Ancient Egypt was built by slaves.” The workers’ villages found at Giza suggest the pyramids were built by organised, fed and housed labour gangs, not the enslaved masses of film legend.^•
  • The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt — Ian Shaw (ed.), Oxford University Press (2000)
  • The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt — Toby Wilkinson, Bloomsbury (2010)