PEOPLE AND SOCIETY
The population of Egypt is 70,712,345 (2002 estimate). The people live almost exclusively in the Nile Valley, the Nile Delta, the Suez Canal region, and the northern coastal region of the Sinai Peninsula. There are small communities in the oases of the Libyan Desert and in the oil-drilling and mining towns of the Arabian Desert. There is also a small population of nomadic Bedouins. Egypt’s overall population density is 71 persons per sq km (184 per sq mi), but the population density in the inhabited portions of the country, which make up less than 5 percent of its land area, is 1,900 persons per sq km (4,900 per sq mi).

The population growth rate, which was about 2.5 percent per year in the 1980s, declined steadily in the 1990s as the country’s birth rate fell. In 2002 the rate of population growth was 1.66 percent. The birth rate was 24 per 1,000 persons, and the death rate was 8 per 1,000 persons.

For most of Egypt’s history, the majority of the population was rural and agricultural. In the second half of the 20th century, limited availability of agricultural land prompted peasants to migrate to the cities in search of work. By 2000, 45 percent of the population lived in urban areas.

Ethnic Groups

The ancestors of the Egyptians include many races and ethnic groups, but the present-day population is relatively uniform in terms of language and religion. Most Egyptians are descendants of the ancient Egyptians, a people who originated in northeastern Africa. Some 4,000 Arab horsemen invaded Egypt in 641 and eventually conquered it for Islam. From that time, there was significant Arab migration and intermarriage between Arabs and the indigenous population. Traits of other invading peoples, especially the Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans, are also found in present-day Egyptians. The Mamluks, rulers of Egypt between the 13th and 16th centuries, were of Turkic and Circassian origins. They also intermarried with the indigenous population, especially with its elite ranks.

A separate indigenous group, the Nubians, historically lived in northern Sudan and southern Egypt. Hundreds of their ancestral villages were flooded by the formation of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam. Today the Nubian population is concentrated in Aswan and Cairo. The government does not recognize the Nubians as an ethnic minority.

Also living in Egypt are small numbers of Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Syrian Christians, and Jews. Their numbers declined sharply as a result of emigration after the Suez Crisis of 1956, when rising Egyptian nationalism made them feel unwelcome. Many of those who remained in the country intermarried with indigenous Muslims or Christians.

Social Structure
For most of Egypt’s history its society was agrarian. Large landowners growing primarily cotton and sugar constituted Egypt's dominant social class from the 1830s until 1952, when the government enacted a land reform. Before the land reform, about 2,000 large landowners, including the king, owned about 20 percent of all agricultural land, while more than 2 million lesser owners owned about 13 percent. Millions of peasants owned no land at all. The land reform limited the amount of agricultural land that individuals and families could own; limits were lowered further in 1961 and 1969. These measures broke the social and political power of the large landowning class.

About 260,000 hectares (about 650,000 acres) of agricultural land were redistributed as a result of the land reform. However, not enough land was redistributed to allow all peasant families that wished to do so to support themselves by farming. Consequently, large numbers of peasants migrated from rural villages to Cairo and other cities. Many found jobs in the cities, particularly in industries and services, which were growing rapidly as a result of the government’s major industrialization programs of the 1950s and 1960s. During this period the government nationalized and expanded existing banking, textile, and other industries and established many new, large-scale, modern industries. These developments expanded the ranks of the urban wageworkers. However, many former peasants remained underemployed or marginally employed in jobs that were not steady or did not pay cash wages.

Beginning in 1973, large numbers of peasants, as well as urban workers and professionals, migrated to Saudi Arabia, Libya, and other oil-exporting countries to work for wages as much as six times higher than they could earn in Egypt. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), many peasants migrated to Iraq and took farm jobs, replacing Iraqis who had left to fight in the war.

Both trends—migration from the countryside to the cities and working abroad—continued in the 1990s. By the mid-1990s only 40 percent of the labor force was engaged in the traditional occupations of farming, herding, and fishing. An estimated 2.5 million Egyptians worked abroad at any given time.

Ways of Life
Two major socioeconomic groupings exist in Egypt. One grouping consists of a wealthy elite and a Western-educated upper middle class. The other grouping, which includes the vast majority of all Egyptians, is made up of peasants and the urban lower middle class and working class. There are great differences in clothing, diet, and consumer habits between the two groupings.

In the 1970s the government introduced economic liberalization policies known as the open door (infitah in Arabic). These policies greatly expanded the numbers of middle-class professionals (importers, financiers, commercial agents, and various kinds of middlemen) with connections to foreign capital and foreign culture. These professionals are major consumers of imported luxury cars, European fashions, and European and American films and music. The lifestyle of the old, wealthy elite is similar.

The wealth, lifestyle, and foreign cultural orientation of the old elite and the newly rich contrast sharply with the poverty of the vast majority of the population. Most Egyptians cannot afford, and in some cases do not want, much of what they see advertised on television, in the newspapers, and on urban billboards, or glorified in Western television serials.

Both major groupings enjoy a few of the same aspects of popular culture. These include soccer, the popular music of legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, and the comic films of actor ‘Adil Imam.

In the past, women from peasant and poor urban families worked in the fields or in the shops of their families, while women from the elite and the middle class remained at home as a symbol that the male head of the household was wealthy enough to support the family without its women working outside the home. Today maintaining a middle-class lifestyle usually requires married women to work for wages. Many wear headscarves as a way of asserting that they remain good Muslim women despite working outside the home.

The most popular items of Egyptian cuisine are flatbread, boiled or deep-fried fava beans, kushari (a dish combining pasta, lentils, and onions), and fresh fruits and vegetables. Tea and coffee are the most popular beverages and are essential components of social and business visits. Wealthier Egyptians frequently eat European food, especially French cuisine.

Social Issues
Egypt’s most serious social issues are poverty and overpopulation. There are few wealthy people and many poor people. When adjusted for inflation, the incomes of peasants and working people rose only modestly between the mid-1970s and the end of the 20th century. Overpopulation has strained the physical infrastructure—including roads, sewer systems, water supply, and utility lines—and social service networks of Cairo and other cities. Middle-class housing is expensive and difficult to find. Violent crimes, relatively rare until the late 20th century, have increased as urban life has become more difficult.

Social Services
Employees of the government and of state-owned enterprises receive substantial social benefits, including health care, a pension, and unemployment insurance. Large private firms also may provide such benefits. Smaller privately owned firms are not required to do so, and most do not. Egypt has no system of income support for the poor. Under the open door policy, which aimed at encouraging private enterprise and loosening state controls on the economy, government subsidies that lowered the prices of basic consumer goods were radically cut. As a result, the prices of these goods rose considerably. However, bread sold in poorer neighborhoods is still subsidized.

ARTS
Egypt has long been a center of Arabic and Islamic literature, architecture, and decorative arts. Performances of epic poetry, murals depicting the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Sufi (Islamic mystic) singing and dancing (see Sufism), and other expressions of popular culture are all part of Egypt’s artistic heritage. In the pre-modern period, the country’s elite supported artists who worked in formal Islamic styles that tended to be austere and centered on Arabic calligraphy. In the modern period many elements of European-style art, literature, and cinema have been incorporated into Egyptian cultural life.

Literature
The Nahda, a renaissance of Arabic literary culture that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was centered in Egypt. At that time many Christian journalists from Syria immigrated to Cairo and founded several newspapers and magazines, which disseminated modern concepts of science, society, and culture. Arabic short stories first appeared in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Zaynab (1914), by Egyptian writer Muhammad Husayn Haykal, is often erroneously considered to be the first Arabic novel.

Other leading Egyptian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries include Taha Husayn, known for his autobiography al-Ayyam (The Days, 3 volumes, 1925-1967); Yusuf Idris, considered the master of the Arabic short story and also a noted dramatist; Naguib Mahfouz, a celebrated novelist and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature; and Sonallah Ibrahim, who has experimented boldly with the novel form. Tawfiq al-Hakim, whose novel The Return of the Spirit (1933) was a favorite of Gamal Abdel Nasser, is known for both fiction and dramatic writing.

Art and Architecture
Islamic norms prohibit the representation of people and animals in art. As a result, Egyptian Islamic art relies heavily on Arabic calligraphy and abstract arabesque designs. The Fatimid era (969-1171) and the Mamluk era (1250-1517) were especially rich in architectural monuments, many of which remain standing in Cairo today. The principal surviving monuments of the Fatimid era are Al-Azhar mosque and the city’s northern gates. The grandest monument of the Mamluk period is the madrasa (Islamic school) of Sultan Hasan. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mahmud Mukhtar, who ignored the Islamic prohibitions, became a well-known and highly respected sculptor and a leading figure in the emergence of modern Egyptian plastic arts. His statue Egypt Awakening (1928) is an icon of nationalist cultural modernism. Twentieth-century architect Hasan Fathy became known for promoting elements of traditional peasant design. Among his better-known public buildings is the mosque in Gurna, a village near Luxor in Upper Egypt.

Music and Dance
Sayyid Darwish, who composed musicals, operas, and popular songs, was the leading figure in Egyptian music in the early 20th century. Other prominent musical figures of the 20th century were female singers Umm Kulthum and Layla Murad, composer and singer Muhammad Abd ‘al-Wahhab, and singer Abd al-Halim Hafiz. Umm Kulthum was the leading lady of Egyptian (and Arab) song in the 20th century. Layla Murad, often considered the second greatest female Egyptian singer of the 20th century, was also a movie star. Muhammad Abd ‘al-Wahhab was the leading male vocalist of the 20th century, while Abd al-Halim Hafiz was especially popular with younger audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. The national dance company, the Reda Dance Troupe, specializes in modern adaptations of folkloric dances. Belly dancing is popular among all classes and is performed in a variety of settings ranging from nightclubs to family celebrations.

Theater and Film
The first modern Arabic plays were performed in Cairo in the 1870s. Leading 20th-century dramatists include Mahmud Taymur, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris, and Nu`man`Ashur. Egypt has been the center of film production in the Arab world since the 1930s. The best-known director, Youssef Chahine, made his reputation in the 1950s and 1960s with nationalist works of social realism such as Bab al-Hadid (1958, also released as Central Station and Gare centrale) and Al-Ard (1969, The Land).

Libraries and Museums
The Egyptian Museum, in Cairo, houses the world’s largest collection of ancient Egyptian art, including the treasures from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The Museum of Islamic Art, also in Cairo, has a rich collection of illuminated Qur'ans (Korans), wood carvings, pottery, and other Islamic artifacts. Cairo's Coptic Museum has an especially fine collection of textiles made by Copts. The Greco-Roman Museum, housing collections of art from the periods when Egypt was under Greek and, later, Roman rule, is located in Alexandria. The Egyptian National Library and the Al-Azhar University Library, both in Cairo, house major collections of Arabic manuscripts.