Egypt

Arab, Egyptian generalJPIMB

Population

67,150,000

Language

Arabic, Egyptian

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Greater Cairo, Alexandria, the Nile Delta and the Canal cities, and the north coast; Upper Egypt's Muslims are a separate group (Sa'idis)

Egyptian Arabs are the Muslim people of Cairo, Alexandria, the Nile Delta and the Canal cities, about 67 million, three Egyptians in five. They descend from the ancient Egyptians, who took up Arabic and Islam after the 7th-century Arab conquest, and their Cairene Arabic is the most widely understood dialect in the Arab world through Egyptian films, songs and television. Most are Sunni Muslims, and Cairo's Al-Azhar, founded in 970, is the oldest seat of Sunni learning; yet popular religion is Sufi at heart, and the moulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta draws crowds of millions each October. Farming families of the Delta (fellahin), Cairo's crowded informal districts and a hard-pressed urban middle class make up a people living through high inflation, with tens of thousands of young men leaving each year for the Gulf, Libya and Europe.

Arab, Saidi - MuslimJPIMBGRN

Population

27,600,000

Language

Arabic, Sa'idi

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Upper Egypt (the Sa'id): the Nile Valley governorates of Fayoum, Beni Suef, Minya, Asyut, Sohag, Qena, Luxor and Aswan

The Sa'idis are the Muslim people of Upper Egypt, about 28 million in the Nile Valley from Fayoum and Beni Suef to Aswan, nearly a third of Egypt. They speak Sa'idi Arabic, with its hard g and old vocabulary, and live by a clan and honour code that still produces blood feuds settled by handing over a burial shroud. Tahtib stick dancing, rababa poets singing the Hilali epic and the moulids of saints such as Abu al-Hajjaj, whose mosque sits inside Luxor temple, mark their festivals. Upper Egypt is the country's poorest region, and millions of Sa'idis have moved north to Cairo and Alexandria or abroad to the Gulf for work. They live beside the Saidi Copts, who share their dialect and customs but not their faith.

Egyptian, CopticJPIMB

Population

~6,240,000 (Copts outside Upper Egypt; national total ~11.0 million)

Language

Arabic, Egyptian

Religion

Christianity - Coptic Orthodox (Oriental Orthodox)

Location

Greater Cairo (Shubra, Old Cairo, Mokattam, Heliopolis, Giza), Alexandria, the Delta cities and the Canal cities; Copts of Upper Egypt are a separate group

The Coptic Egyptians are the Christians of Cairo, Alexandria, the Delta and the Canal cities, about 6.2 million people who speak Egyptian Arabic and belong mostly to the Coptic Orthodox Church, the church of Saint Mark and the oldest in Africa. With the Copts of Upper Egypt they make up about a tenth of Egypt, the largest Christian community in the Middle East. Many are city families who moved north from Upper Egypt over the past century, from Shubra's shopkeepers and professionals to the Zabbaleen garbage collectors of Mokattam, whose cave church seats thousands. Their year runs on the Coptic calendar and its long fasts, and Coptic Christmas on 7 January is a national holiday. Suicide bombings of churches in Cairo, Alexandria and Tanta in 2016-2017 killed more than 70 worshippers, and Copts remain under-represented in public life.

Arab, Saidi - CopticJPDiscovery

Population

~4,700,000 (3.9-5.5 million)

Language

Arabic, Sa'idi

Religion

Christianity

Location

Upper Egypt (the Sa'id): Minya, Asyut and Sohag above all, also Beni Suef, Qena, Luxor, Fayoum and Aswan

The Saidi Copts are the Christians of Upper Egypt, about 4.7 million people who speak the Sa'idi Arabic of their Muslim neighbours and belong mostly to the Coptic Orthodox Church. Upper Egypt has the highest Christian shares in the country, about a quarter of Minya and nearly a third of Asyut, and many towns and villages there have been Christian since late antiquity. They share their neighbours' clans, honour code and farming life but marry within the church, and many wear a small cross tattooed on the wrist. Each August hundreds of thousands camp at the cliff monasteries of Durunka and Gabal al-Tayr and at Deir al-Muharraq for the feast of the Virgin. Upper Egypt is also where most of Egypt's sectarian attacks on Christians take place, especially in Minya.

Bedouin, Ali AwladJPIMB

Population

600,000

Language

Arabic, Libyan

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Matrouh governorate from Salloum to El Alamein; Alexandria's western districts (Amriya, Burg al-Arab), Beheira, Giza and Fayoum

The Awlad Ali are the Bedouin confederation of Egypt's Western Desert, about 600,000 people living along the Mediterranean coast from the Libyan border at Salloum to the western edge of Alexandria. Driven out of Cyrenaica by a war with the Obeidat tribe in the late 19th century, they settled the coastal steppe of Matrouh, where they still speak an eastern Libyan Bedouin dialect and call themselves Arabs, apart from the Egyptians of the Nile. Their short sung poems, the ghinnawa, let women and young men voice love and grief that their strict code of honour otherwise forbids. Once herders and caravan traders, most now live in towns and farm figs and olives in the coastal wadis, trade across the border with Libya, or work in the resorts and state projects reshaping the coast, which at Ras el-Hekma and Dabaa have moved thousands of families off their land.

Bedouin, LevantineJPIMBGRN

Population

600,000

Language

Arabic, Eastern Egyptian Bedawi

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

North and South Sinai; the Eastern Desert (Red Sea and Aswan governorates, to the Halayeb-Shalateen triangle); Canal-zone fringes of Ismailia and Suez

Egypt's Bedouin of the east are some two dozen Arabic-speaking tribes of the Sinai Peninsula and the Eastern Desert, about 400,000 in Sinai and 200,000 more in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. In North Sinai the Sawarka, Rumaylat, Tarabin and other tribes lived through a decade of insurgency and military campaigns that razed the border town of Rafah and displaced as many as 150,000 people, many of whom are still waiting to go home. In the granite mountains of South Sinai the Muzayna, Aleiqat, Sawalha and Jabaliya live from tourism, guiding and walled mountain orchards, and the Jabaliya have served Saint Catherine's Monastery for fourteen centuries. Further south, the Ababda of the Eastern Desert, camel traders who claim descent from a companion of the Prophet, now mine gold by hand in the wadis near the Sudanese border. All keep tribal law, fierce hospitality and a strong sense of being 'Arab', set apart from the farmers of the Nile Valley.

Nubian, ArabizedJPGRN

Population

~200,000-270,000

Language

Arabic, Egyptian

Religion

Islam

Location

Arab and Arabic-speaking villages of Nasr al-Nuba (Kom Ombo district) and Aswan; Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal cities

The Arabized Nubians are Egyptian Nubians whose families now speak only Egyptian Arabic yet still call themselves Nubian and belong to Nubian village associations and clubs. They include the Arabic-speaking villages that lay between the Kunuz and the Fadicca in old Nubia, and the many Kunuz and Fadicca families who lost their Nubian language after the 1963-64 resettlement or after generations in Cairo and Alexandria, where Nubian men long worked as cooks, doormen and household staff. The small Magyarab clan near Aswan, who trace their line to a Hungarian officer of the Ottoman conquest of 1517, are among them. Weddings with tar-drum songs, painted village houses and shared grief over the homeland drowned by the Aswan High Dam keep them Nubian even without the language.

Nubian, Fedicca-MohasJPIMB

Population

~70,000-110,000

Language

Nobiin

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Fadicca villages of Nasr al-Nuba (Kom Ombo district, Aswan); Aswan city; Cairo and Alexandria; a few villages near Abu Simbel

The Fedicca-Mohas Nubians are the Nubians of Egypt's far south who still speak Nobiin, a Nile Nubian language descended from Old Nubian, the written language of the medieval Christian kingdoms of the middle Nile. Their old villages between Korosko and the Sudanese border lie under Lake Nasser, and in 1963-64 they were moved to about seventeen replacement villages east of Kom Ombo that keep the old names, such as Ibrim, Getta, Ballana and Adindan. Nobiin is still the language of home and village song, and village youth speak it well, while children in Cairo and Alexandria increasingly grow up with Arabic only. Sudanese Nobiin speakers, Halfawi and Mahas, who settled in Egypt long ago or fled Sudan's war since 2023, share their language and many of their families.

Beja, BisharinJPIMB

Population

88,000

Language

Bedawiyet

Religion

Islam

Location

Halaib triangle (Shalateen, Abu Ramad, Halaib) in Red Sea Governorate; Aswan Governorate (Daraw, Aswan city, Khor Abu Subeira, Wadi Allaqi); the desert between

The Bisharin are the Beja of Egypt: a Cushitic-speaking camel-herding tribe of the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, whose grazing lands run south across the Sudanese border. They speak Bedawiyet among themselves and Arabic with outsiders, which sets them apart from every Arabic-speaking people of Egypt, including the Ababda who share their desert. Most live around Shalateen, Abu Ramad and Halaib in the far southeast and in Aswan's eastern villages and camel-market towns such as Daraw, many of them now settled in government housing while others still move with their herds through wadis such as Wadi Allaqi. Guests are welcomed with jabana, coffee roasted over coals and spiced with ginger, and feast days with selat, mutton grilled on heated basalt stones.

ZabbaleenDiscovery

Population

~50,000-70,000

Language

Egyptian Arabic

Religion

Christianity (Coptic Orthodox)

Location

Seven settlements around Greater Cairo: Mokattam village (Manshiyat Nasser), Ezbet al-Nakhl, Ain al-Sira, Tora, Moatamadia, Helwan, al-Bargil

The Zabbaleen are the families, most of them Coptic Christians from the villages of Asyut in Upper Egypt, who have collected and recycled Cairo's household waste since the 1940s. About 50,000-70,000 live in seven settlements around the capital, the largest being Mokattam village, the 'Garbage City' below the Mokattam cliffs, where families sort waste on the ground floors of their homes and recycle some 80% of what they collect. Other Egyptians shun them for their trade, the name itself means 'garbage people', and families have long married among themselves. Their church, the Monastery of St. Simon the Tanner, is carved into the cliff and seats about 20,000. In 2009 the government had their pigs, which ate the organic waste, slaughtered, and in 2026 they were still fighting for a place in the city's new recycling systems.

Baharia, WahatiJP

Population

35,000

Language

Arabic, Eastern Egyptian Bedawi

Religion

Islam

Location

Bahariya Oasis, Western Desert, Giza Governorate: El Bawiti and Qasr, Mandisha, Zabu, Aguz, Harra, El Heiz

The Wahati are the native people of Bahariya Oasis, a green depression in Egypt's Western Desert about 370 km southwest of Cairo, roughly 35,000 people in El Bawiti and a string of villages among the palm groves. They descend from the oasis's ancient inhabitants, Bedouin from the Libyan side and settlers from the Nile Valley, and speak an oasis Arabic of their own, though television is pulling it towards Cairo's. The oasis was Christian into the Middle Ages and is now wholly Muslim; its Greco-Roman past lies under their fields, in the Valley of the Golden Mummies found in 1996. Wahati weddings ring with the simsimiyya lyre, flutes and drums, and women wear the striped embroidered magaddil dress. Since the road and the iron mines of the 1970s, dates, olives and tourism to the White and Black Deserts have tied them ever closer to the Nile Valley.

Nubian, KunuzJPGRN

Population

35,000

Language

Mattokki

Religion

Islam

Location

West-bank villages of Aswan (Gharb Soheil, Hesa, Anakato, Elephantine) and the Kunuz villages of Nasr al-Nuba near Kom Ombo; older speakers in Cairo and Alexandria

The Kunuz are the northernmost Nubians of Egypt, whose villages once lined the Nile south of Aswan, and the last speakers of Kenzi (Mattokki), a Nile Nubian language found nowhere else. When the Aswan High Dam flooded their land in 1963-64, most were moved to seventeen replacement villages near Kom Ombo, while the villages on Aswan's west bank, such as Gharb Soheil, Hesa and Anakato, stayed on the river, and there Kenzi is still heard every day. Kenzi is now spoken mostly by adults, and many younger Kunuz have grown up speaking only Arabic. The painted courtyard houses of Gharb Soheil, now a favourite with visitors, keep the look of old Nubia alive.

Amazigh, SiwaJPIMB

Population

26,000

Language

Siwi

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Siwa Oasis (Siwa town and Shali, Aghurmi and the oasis villages) and Qara (Gara) Oasis, Matrouh Governorate

The Siwi are the easternmost Amazigh (Berber) people in Africa, about 26,000 people living in Siwa Oasis and the small oasis of Qara, deep in Egypt's Western Desert some 50 km from the Libyan border. Among themselves they speak Siwi, an unwritten Berber language that no school teaches and the state does not recognise, and with outsiders Arabic. Their date palms and olives grow around some two hundred springs, beneath the ruined salt-and-mud town of Shali and the hill of Aghurmi, where Alexander the Great consulted the Oracle of Amun. Siwan society is made of about ten tribes, and each autumn the whole oasis climbs Jabal Dakrur for three days of the Siyaha feast, sharing one meal to renew the peace made between its eastern and western tribes in the 19th century.

ArmenianJPIMBGRN

Population

~6,000 (3,000-10,000)

Language

Armenian

Religion

Christianity - Armenian Apostolic

Location

Cairo (Heliopolis, downtown), Alexandria

Egypt's Armenians are a Christian community of generations, most of them Egyptian citizens, whose families came as merchants and officials under Muhammad Ali and as survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide; Nubar Pasha, Egypt's first prime minister, was Armenian, and the Armenian General Benevolent Union was founded in Cairo in 1906. About 6,000 remain, down from some 40,000 before the 1950s nationalizations drove families abroad, and they speak Western Armenian at home and Arabic outside it. Life centres on Apostolic, Catholic and Evangelical churches in Cairo and Alexandria, the Kalousdian-Nubarian school in Heliopolis, sports and cultural clubs and the newspapers Housaper and Arev. Armenian jewellers are still a byword in Cairo, and khorovats grilled meat with lavash bread is served at community feasts.

Jewish, Egyptian-speaking (Egypt)JPIMB

Population

~6-10

Language

Arabic, Egyptian

Religion

Judaism

Location

Cairo (Sha'ar Hashamayim synagogue, Adly Street) and Alexandria (Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue)

Egyptian Jews are the last members of a community that numbered 75,000 to 80,000 in 1948 and helped shape modern Egypt's banking, department stores, cinema and music. Between six and ten remain, most of them elderly women in Cairo and Alexandria, led by Magda Haroun, the daughter of a Jewish Egyptian patriot who refused to leave. The community was driven out in waves after the 1948 war, the 1956 Suez crisis, when families were given days to leave with one suitcase, and the 1967 war, when Jewish men were interned and then expelled. Its Jewish Community Council still holds Cairo's Sha'ar Hashamayim synagogue, built in 1905 in the style of an ancient Egyptian temple, and the Bassatine cemetery, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the world. Holiday prayers are held only when Jews from abroad come to make up the quorum of ten men.

Arab, SudaneseJPIMBGRN

Population

~1,000,000 (800,000-1,500,000)

Language

Arabic, Sudanese

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Greater Cairo (Faisal and al-Masaha in Giza, Ain Shams, Nasr City, Maadi, 6th of October City), 10th of Ramadan City, Alexandria, Aswan

Sudanese have lived in Egypt for as long as the two countries have shared the Nile: traders, students, soldiers and workers settled in Cairo, Alexandria and Aswan through the twentieth century, and each of Sudan's civil wars sent more north. The war that broke out in April 2023 brought about 1.5 million people, most of them families from Khartoum and al-Jazira; after the army retook Khartoum in 2025 hundreds of thousands went home by train to Aswan and bus across the border, and roughly a million Sudanese remain. Most speak Sudanese Arabic and are Sunni Muslims with roots in the Sufi brotherhoods, and Nubians, Beja, Darfuris such as the Masalit and Zaghawa, Nuba and a small number of Christians live among them. In Giza's Faisal district and in Ain Shams, Sudanese restaurants serve ful and kisra, women in bright tobes run henna parlours from their flats, and evenings end over spiced jabana coffee.

Arab, Syrian (Muslim traditions)JPIMBGRNDiscovery

Population

~400,000 (300,000-470,000)

Language

Standard Arabic

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Greater Cairo (6th of October City, Sheikh Zayed, Haram, Faisal, Nasr City, Obour), Alexandria, Damietta, 10th of Ramadan

Syrians in Egypt, roughly 400,000 people, are city dwellers who came mostly between 2012 and 2014, fleeing the war, and were never placed in camps. Their centre is 6th of October City west of Cairo, where a strip of Syrian shops, sweet makers and shawarma grills is known as Little Damascus, and Syrian workshops have become part of Egypt's textile, furniture and food trades. The fall of Syria's old government in December 2024 sent only a few tens of thousands home; most stay, while tighter residency checks, arrests of those without permits and rising prices have made life less settled than in earlier years. Most are Sunni Muslims from Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and Daraa, with a small Christian minority that worships in Egypt's Orthodox and Catholic churches.

Arab, YemeniJPIMBGRN

Population

~100,000 (80,000-150,000)

Language

Arabic, Ta'izzi-Adeni

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Giza (Dokki, Mohandessin, Agouza, Faisal, Haram), 6th of October City, Sheikh Zayed, New Cairo, Alexandria

Yemenis have studied and sought medical care in Cairo since the 1960s, when Egyptian troops fought for the republic in Yemen's civil war, and the war that began in 2015 turned many patients, students and their families into long-term residents. About 100,000 Yemenis live in Egypt, most of them on Cairo's west bank in Giza's Dokki, Mohandessin and Faisal districts, where Yemeni restaurants serve mandi and mathbahi and shop signs carry Yemeni names. They come from every part of Yemen, from Aden and Taiz to the northern highlands and Hadramawt, and are mostly Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, with a Zaydi minority from the north. Wealthier families have bought flats and invested in property and food businesses, while poorer ones struggle to renew residence permits, and the closure of the Yemeni community schools in 2025 sent over 6,000 children looking for places in Egyptian schools.

Arab, GazanIMBDiscovery

Population

~90,000 (80,000-100,000)

Language

apc

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Greater Cairo (Nasr City, New Cairo / Fifth Settlement, Heliopolis, Maadi, Giza), with patients in North Sinai and Delta hospitals

About 90,000 Gazans who escaped the war that began in October 2023 live in Egypt, most of them in rented flats in Cairo's eastern districts. Many paid brokers thousands of dollars a head to cross at Rafah before Israel took the crossing in May 2024; others came as wounded patients with a companion. They hold only short visitor permits, not residency or refugee status, so children study online through Palestinian schooling, adults struggle to find legal work and savings run out. Since the Rafah crossing partly reopened in February 2026 only a few thousand have gone back, past long waiting lists and Israeli screening, and Cairo grassroots groups of Gazan and Egyptian volunteers supply clothes, meals, rent and counselling. Nearly all are Sunni Muslims.

Arab, PalestinianJPIMBGRN

Population

~80,000 (55,000-110,000)

Language

Levantine Arabic

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Greater Cairo (Ain Shams, al-Waily, Nasr City), Sharqia (Faqus, al-Qanayat, Abu Fadel / Fadel Island), Qalyubia, Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailia, al-Arish

Palestinians settled in Egypt before 2023, about 80,000 people, descend mostly from refugees of 1948 and 1967 and from Gazans who came to study and work while Egypt ran the Gaza Strip. Most have never been given Egyptian citizenship: they renew residence permits every few years, pay foreigners' school fees and may own only one home, so a Palestinian travel document marks them out among neighbours who share their faith and much of their dialect. Many families still keep the deeds and keys of homes lost in 1948, and farming villages of Sharqia such as Fadel Island have kept Palestinian clans together for three generations. Nearly all are Sunni Muslims; children of Egyptian mothers have been able to claim Egyptian nationality since 2011, and many still call themselves Palestinian.

South SudaneseDiscovery

Population

63,000

Language

Various (Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Zande, Shilluk); Arabic as lingua franca

Religion

Christianity

Location

Greater Cairo (Ain Shams, Arba'a wa Nuss, Maadi, Abbassia, 6th of October City), Alexandria, university towns

South Sudanese have come to Cairo for half a century: students on Egyptian scholarships, and refugees from the long civil war between north and south Sudan who made the churches of Cairo their meeting places. About 63,000 live in Egypt today, some 57,000 refugees and asylum seekers, more than twice the number before 2023, when the war in Sudan drove southerners living in Khartoum north, and about 6,000 university and college students. Most are Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk, with Bari, Zande and other peoples of Equatoria, and most are Christians, Catholic, Anglican or Presbyterian, with old beliefs in ancestors and the spirits of the herds still alive among the elders. Sunday services in Cairo's Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches, sung in Arabic, English and their own languages, are the centre of community life, and the churches run the schools, clinics and aid that hold it together.

Tigray, TigrinyaJP

Population

~31,000 (26,000-36,000)

Language

Tigrinya

Religion

Christianity - Tewahedo Orthodox

Location

Greater Cairo (Ard el-Lewa, Nasr City, Faisal, 6th of October City), Alexandria

Tigrinya speakers are one of the largest African communities in Egypt. Most are Eritrean highlanders who fled their country's open-ended national service, crossing first into Sudan and then reaching Egypt, many after war came to Khartoum in 2023; a smaller number are Tigrayans from northern Ethiopia. In Ard el-Lewa, a crowded Giza neighbourhood, Tigrinya is heard in the streets, shops sell injera and wedding dresses, and a community-run school teaches children in Tigrinya, Arabic and English. Their Orthodox Tewahedo faith, with its Ge'ez liturgy and long fasts, ties them to Egypt's Coptic Church, which for centuries sent their church its archbishop. Since January 2026 thousands of Eritreans have been arrested over lapsed residence permits, and some have been deported to Eritrea.

IndonesianJPDiscovery

Population

~22,000 (est. 20,000-24,000)

Language

Indonesian

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Cairo: Nasr City (Hay al-Asyir, Hay Sabi'), Darrasa and al-Husayn near the Al-Azhar Mosque, Madinat al-Bu'uth; embassy in Garden City

About 22,000 Indonesians live in Egypt, nearly all of them students of Al-Azhar University, which has drawn students from the Indonesian archipelago for more than a century and now counts them as its largest group of foreign students. Known at home as Masisir, most are graduates of Indonesia's pesantren boarding schools who come for degrees in Islamic law, theology, Quran and Arabic, intending to return as teachers, preachers and religious scholars. They live in shared flats in Nasr City's tenth district and in the old lanes around the Al-Azhar Mosque, organised by home province in family associations that meet new arrivals and find them rooms, and in a national student union. Shafi'i Sunni Muslims, many from Nahdlatul Ulama or Muhammadiyah homes, they keep up Indonesian piety and customs, from tahlilan prayer gatherings to the 17 August Independence Day celebration at the embassy.

SomaliJPIMBGRN

Population

~16,000 (est. 15,000-20,000)

Language

Somali

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Greater Cairo: Nasr City (Hay el-Ashr, Saqr Quresh, Hay el-Tasa', Hay el-Sabia), 6th of October City, Maadi, Ard al-Liwa

Somalis have come to Egypt since their state collapsed in 1991, making theirs one of Cairo's oldest African refugee communities. Most live in Hay el-Ashr, the Tenth District of Nasr City, where a half-square-mile cluster of Somali cafes, tailors, a grocery, a barber and a community centre gives the streets around Swissry A and B a Somali face. Alongside refugees waiting years for resettlement live students at Al-Azhar and Egyptian universities and families who spent years in Europe or North America and moved to Cairo, often settling in 6th of October City. Men work for hawala money-transfer firms and in cafes, and the community centre teaches children Somali so they do not lose their language in Arabic-medium schools. They are Shafi'i Sunni Muslims, and no Somali church is known in Egypt.

Han Chinese, MandarinJPIMBGRN

Population

~13,000 (est. 9,000-19,000)

Language

Mandarin Chinese

Religion

Ethnoreligion - Chinese Folk Religion

Location

Cairo (Abbasiya, Nasr City, Maadi, New Cairo), the New Administrative Capital, Ain Sokhna (TEDA Suez zone), Alexandria

About 13,000 Han Chinese live in Egypt, most of them brought in the last decade by China's building and investment drive. Engineers and labourers raise the towers of the New Administrative Capital in the desert east of Cairo, managers and technicians run the more than 200 Chinese factories of the TEDA industrial zone at Ain Sokhna on the Gulf of Suez, and traders from Zhejiang and Fujian sell clothes, phones and household goods. In Cairo they live in Maadi and Nasr City and around Ahmed Saeed Street in Abbasiya, where noodle shops and Chinese groceries serve both Chinese and Egyptian customers. Most hold no religion, with Buddhist, folk-religion and Christian minorities, and many stay only for a contract of a few years before going home.

Arab, MoroccanJPIMBGRN

Population

~9,000-10,000

Language

Arabic, Moroccan

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Cairo and Giza, a few in Alexandria

Moroccans in Egypt are a community of about 9,000 to 10,000, and almost all of them are women married to Egyptian men, raising Egyptian children in Cairo households. Their own association, the League of the Moroccan Community Residing in Egypt, says nearly all its members are such wives, and it campaigns against unregistered 'urfi' marriages, which leave many Moroccan women without rights to support, inheritance or their children's papers when a marriage ends. At home they keep Moroccan Darija, couscous and mint tea, while their husbands' families and the street speak Egyptian Arabic. Their Maliki Islam with its Sufi lodges sits easily in Egypt, where Moroccan pilgrims, scholars and saints such as Ahmad al-Badawi of Tanta, born in Fez, settled for centuries, though Moroccan women also face an Egyptian stereotype that links them with magic.

MalayJPGRN

Population

~6,000-11,000 (est.; 11,600 Malaysian students counted in 2019)

Language

Malay (individual language)

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Cairo (Nasr City, near Al-Azhar); medical faculties in Tanta, Mansoura, Zagazig and Alexandria; embassy in Maadi

Several thousand Malaysians, nearly all of them Malay students, live in Egypt, continuing a link that began in the 1920s, when young Malays at Al-Azhar carried the reformist ideas of Cairo's Islamic modernists back to Malaya. Most study Islamic law, theology and Arabic at Al-Azhar in Cairo, while others train as doctors, dentists and pharmacists at the medical faculties of Delta cities such as Tanta, Mansoura and Zagazig, whose degrees Malaysia recognises. They live in rented flats and in student houses run by Malaysia's states, and belong to a Malay student federation that traces its roots to the 1920s and to state-based associations. Shafi'i Sunni Muslims, they keep Malay cooking and Hari Raya open houses alive far from home.

TurkJPIMBGRNDiscovery

Population

~6,000 (est. 5,000-8,000)

Language

Turkish

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Cairo and Alexandria; Turkish factories in 10th of Ramadan City, Sadat City, Ismailia and the Suez Canal Economic Zone

Turks in Egypt today are a community of about 6,000 Turkish citizens: managers, engineers and technicians of the some 1,700 Turkish companies, including about 200 textile, garment and chemical factories that moved production to Egypt's industrial cities, along with diplomats, traders, teachers and their families in Cairo and Alexandria. Their numbers fell after the 2013 break between the two governments and have grown again since relations were restored in 2021-2023, as rising costs at home pushed Turkish clothing makers to 10th of Ramadan City, Sadat City and the Suez Canal zone. They speak Turkish at home, keep Hanafi Sunni Islam and gather around the embassy, the Alexandria consulate and the Yunus Emre Institute, which teaches Turkish to thousands of Egyptians. They live among the legacy of four centuries of Ottoman rule: Egyptian Arabic is full of Turkish words such as pasha and bey, and many Egyptian families descend from Ottoman officials, soldiers and Cretan Muslims, though those descendants now speak Arabic and call themselves Egyptians.

HindiJPGRNDiscovery

Population

5,700

Language

Hindi

Religion

Hinduism

Location

Greater Cairo (Maadi, Heliopolis, New Cairo, Nasr City), Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailia and the Suez Canal industrial zones

Indians in Egypt are a small community of about 5,700, mostly managers, engineers and professionals posted by the fifty or so Indian companies that make chemicals, carbon black, textiles and denim in Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal zone, with their families and about 400 students. Hindi is their common language, but the community also includes Malayalis, Tamils, Telugus and Gujarati-speaking Dawoodi Bohras, whose Shia faith traces back to Fatimid Cairo and who have restored and kept the city's thousand-year-old Al-Hakim mosque since the 1970s. Most are Hindus, who have no temple in Egypt and celebrate Diwali at the embassy's India House or by the pyramids at the Mena House hotel; some 275 Indian Muslims study at Al-Azhar, and Keralite Christians join Cairo's English-language churches.

FrenchJPGRNDiscovery

Population

~4,000-7,000

Language

French

Religion

Christianity - Roman Catholicism

Location

Cairo (Maadi, Zamalek, New Cairo, Heliopolis), Alexandria, Hurghada and the Red Sea resorts, Luxor

Between 4,000 and 7,000 French people live in Egypt, out of some 7,600 French citizens registered with the consulate in Cairo at the end of 2025, about half of whom are Egyptians who also hold French nationality. The French tie to Egypt is old: Napoleon's expedition of 1798 founded modern Egyptology, a French engineer built the Suez Canal, and French was the language of Egypt's cosmopolitan elite until the 1950s. Today's residents are teachers, diplomats, archaeologists, business staff, retirees and dive instructors, living mostly in Cairo's Maadi and Zamalek, with smaller groups in Alexandria, Luxor and on the Red Sea coast. The Lycée français du Caire and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, founded in 1880, anchor community life, while dozens of French-language schools teach mainly Egyptian children. Most French residents are secular or Catholic in name.

GreekJPGRN

Population

~3,800-5,000

Language

Modern Greek (1453-)

Religion

Christianity - Eastern Orthodox

Location

Cairo (Heliopolis, Hamzaoui), Alexandria (Chatby), Port Said and the Suez Canal cities

About 4,000 Greeks still live in Egypt, the remnant of a community that numbered well over 100,000 in the early 20th century and shaped Alexandria's cotton trade, banking, food industry and literature, from the poet Constantine Cavafy to the singer Demis Roussos. Most left in the 1950s and 1960s after the Suez war and Nasser's nationalisations; those who stayed are mainly Egyptiote families born in Egypt over several generations, who mostly hold Greek citizenship, joined by a few business people, teachers and clergy from Greece. Community life centres on the Greek Communities of Cairo and Alexandria, with their schools, homes for the elderly and the Greek hospital in Cairo, and on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, one of the ancient patriarchates of Christianity, which now leads a church across Africa. The community is ageing, its schools teach a few hundred pupils, and many younger members marry Egyptians or emigrate.

Filipino, TagalogJPGRN

Population

~2,300-4,000

Language

Tagalog

Religion

Christianity - Roman Catholicism

Location

Greater Cairo (Maadi, Zamalek, Heliopolis, New Cairo; students in Nasr City near Al-Azhar) and Alexandria

Filipinos in Egypt are a small community of a few thousand, about 85% of them women: domestic and other workers in the affluent districts of Cairo, Filipinas married to Egyptians who are raising Egyptian families, and around 300 Muslim students from Mindanao at Al-Azhar University. The first Filipinos came in the 1950s as Muslim scholarship students; workers followed from the 1990s, many arriving on tourist visas because Egypt issues no work visas for foreign household help, which leaves them undocumented and outside the labour law. Most are Catholic and worship at the English Masses of Cairo's old Latin parishes, as the country has no Filipino chaplaincy, while the students return home to teach in Mindanao's madrasas. Community life is small and informal: a handful of clubs of married Filipinas, the students' association and gatherings at the embassy, where an Independence Day town hall in 2025 drew about 400 people.

Algerian, Arabic-speakingJPIMBGRN

Population

~3,000 (2,000-5,000)

Language

Arabic, Algerian

Religion

Islam - Sunni

Location

Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia and other cities

Algerians in Egypt are a small community of about 3,000, most of them Algerian women married to Egyptian men, with their children, students at Al-Azhar and Egyptian universities, and diplomats and a few business people. They live mainly in Cairo, with smaller groups in Alexandria and Ismailia. They speak Algerian Arabic, often mixed with French, among themselves and Egyptian Arabic with their in-laws and neighbours, and keep the Maliki Sunni Islam and couscous-centred family meals of home. The football rivalry of 2009, when Algerians in Cairo were attacked after a World Cup qualifier and many students went home, still marks how Algerians and Egyptians see each other.

ThaiJPGRNDiscovery

Population

~3,000 (est. 2,800-3,500)

Language

Thai

Religion

Buddhism - Theravada

Location

Cairo: Nasr City, the Al-Azhar quarter and Madinat al-Bu'uth; a few in other university cities

About 3,000 Thais live in Egypt, nearly all of them Muslim students at Al-Azhar and other Egyptian universities. Most come from Thailand's far south, where most Muslims speak Patani Malay at home and Thai at school, and they spend years in Cairo learning Arabic, Islamic law and the Quran on Al-Azhar scholarships or their families' savings. The Thai Students' Association in Cairo, active since the mid-1950s and under royal patronage, runs a student centre, meets new arrivals and organises study circles, sports and festivals. Many graduates return to teach in the Islamic schools and mosques of southern Thailand.