- published: 13 Sep 2014
- views: 358077
Fellah (Arabic: فلاح, fallāḥ) (plural Fellaheen or Fellahin, فلاحين, fallāḥīn) is a peasant, farmer or agricultural laborer in the Middle East and North Africa. The word derives from the Arabic word for ploughman or tiller.
Fellahin was the term used throughout the Middle East in the Ottoman period and later to refer to villagers and farmers.Nur Masalha translates it as "peasants". They were distinguished from the effendi, or, landowning 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. The term fallahin applied to Christian, Druze and Muslim villagers. The term fallah was applied to people from several regions in the Middle East, including those of Egypt and Cyprus.
Comprising 60% of the Egyptian population, the fellahin lead humble lives and continue to live in mud-brick houses like their ancient ancestors. Their percentage was much higher in the early 20th century, before the large influx of Egyptian fellahin into urban towns and cities. In 1927, anthropologist Winifred Blackman, author of The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, conducted ethnographic research on the life of Upper Egyptian farmers and concluded that there were observable continuities between the cultural and religious beliefs and practices of the fellahin and those of ancient Egyptians.
Akli Yahiatene is an Algerian singer, born in 1933 at Aït-Mendes near Boghni (wilaya of Tizi-Ouzou) in Algeria. He emigrated to France in the 1950s, where he worked in Citroën plants and supported the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN), for which he was put in jail several times where he composed many songs. His popularity lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s.