fellah

Some of the fellahin who ventured out beyond the borders of the village were never seen again.

When many fellahin were killed in Joulis during the war, Abu Ghanim fought a brave fight and somehow survived.

Land reform, though not as sweeping as promised, brought some benefit to the fellahin. The opening of free universities in the 1960s seemed to promise an escape from poverty and the limitations of a rigidly traditional social hierarchy.

Other developments in the 1970s placed Upper Egypt's fellahin under increasing pressures.

Most of its membership, he notes, "originally came from the fellahin."(39) While the Gama'a held the Cairo regime responsible for betraying Egypt's Islamic values and saw the solution as an Islamic state under Shari'a, it was also determined to alter power relationships in the south.

In each region an identifiable sub-group - the peasant/Indians of Chiapas and the fellahin of Upper Egypt - traditionally occupied the base of the socioeconomic pyramid and was perceived as inherently inferior by the higher social orders.

Neither the Mexican Revolution nor the Nasserist experience radically altered the overall social, political and economic marginalization of Chiapas' rural peasantry or the Upper Egypt's fellahin. Locally and nationally, the relative social, political and economic status of each remained much as it had been in the past.

Upper Egyptian fellahin also benefited from Nasser's educational policies and, after the early 1970s, from opportunities to work abroad.

During the same period, Upper Egypt's fellahin faced reduced possibilities of engaging in migratory labor as the oil economies of the Gulf contracted.