Arab, Egyptian general

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.

Egyptian Arabs in Bahrain are a community of about 25,000 Muslim professionals and their families, part of some 27,600 Egyptians in the kingdom. Unlike the mostly single Asian labour force, they are typically educated families: in 2016 more Egyptians lived in Bahrain on family visas than on work permits, and a third of Egyptian workers were teachers. Egyptians have long staffed Bahrain's schools and also work as doctors, engineers and accountants. Their Egyptian colloquial Arabic, familiar from film and television, lets them blend easily into Arabic-speaking workplaces, while the Coptic Christians among the Egyptians worship in their own church in Manama.

Egyptians in Israel are a small, little-seen community of men who came for work from the late 1960s and in greater numbers after the 1979 peace treaty, many of them after meeting Arab Israeli women in the 1990s, when tourism between the two countries peaked. Nearly all married into Muslim or Christian Arab families and live in Arab towns such as Nazareth and Tayibe, where their children grow up as Arab Israelis speaking Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew. Roughly 6,000 to 12,000 live in Israel; most are Sunni Muslims, with a Christian minority. They live with divided loyalties: Egypt regards Israeli citizenship as betrayal and has stripped some of them of Egyptian nationality, so visits home need security permits and can leave them waiting months to return.

Egyptians are Jordan's largest group of foreign workers, about 636,000 at the last census and more than half of all migrant labour, almost all of them men from rural Upper and Lower Egypt who have come since the 1970s. They pick tomatoes and cucumbers in the sweltering Jordan Valley, carry bricks on Amman's building sites and staff bakeries, cafes and petrol stations, sending most of what they earn home. Many live in crowded rooms or farm shacks, tied to a single sponsor and often in debt to brokers who sell work permits for up to 3,000 dinars. About one in twenty are Coptic Christians, who worship at the Coptic church in Amman's Abdali district, while the rest are Sunni Muslims.

Egyptians are Kuwait's largest Arab expatriate community and its second-largest foreign nationality after Indians: about 667,000 at the end of 2025, of whom some 600,000 are Sunni Muslims. They have come since the 1950s, when Egyptian teachers, judges, doctors and engineers helped build Kuwait's schools, courts and ministries, and today they range from those professionals to hundreds of thousands of construction workers, drivers, shop assistants, accountants and building watchmen. Nearly a quarter of everyone working in Kuwait's private sector is Egyptian. Their Cairo dialect, familiar to every Kuwaiti from film and television, lets them blend into Arabic-speaking workplaces, yet most live as single men in shared flats in Hawalli, Khaitan and Jleeb al-Shuyoukh, sending money home to villages in the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt.

Egyptians in Lebanon are a community of men who come alone to work: about 12,000 to 20,000, more than nine in ten of them male, filling jobs Lebanese no longer want as building concierges, petrol-station attendants, bakers, cleaners, farm hands and kitchen workers. Most are Sunni Muslims from the villages of the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt who live in basement rooms of the apartment blocks they guard and send most of their pay home. Their Cairene-sounding Arabic, familiar to every Lebanese from Egyptian films and songs, marks them out at once, and Egyptian coffee shops and Friday gatherings in the Metn and Beirut keep them connected. Their number fell sharply after Lebanon's 2019 financial collapse, and in April 2026 Egypt and Lebanon agreed to regularise the many workers who had entered on tourist visas.

Egyptians are one of Libya's three largest migrant communities: about 160,000 Muslim Egyptians in 2026, beside a smaller Coptic Christian minority, nearly all of them men who work in construction, farming, fishing, bakeries and small shops while their families stay at home. Most come from the villages of Upper Egypt (Minya, Asyut, Sohag, Beni Suef, Fayoum) and the Nile Delta, and they are split almost evenly between the east, where Benghazi and the farms of the Green Mountain lie a day's drive from the border at Salloum, and the west around Tripoli and Misrata. The community has risen and fallen with politics for fifty years: hundreds of thousands worked in Qadhafi's Libya, mass expulsions came in 1976, 1985 and after 2011, and since 2025 a national deportation campaign has sent thousands home. Egyptian Arabic, which every Libyan knows from Egyptian films and television, and a shared Sunni faith make them the most familiar of foreign workers, yet many live without papers and some use Libya as the starting point for the sea crossing to Italy and Greece.

About 1,500 Egyptians live in Morocco, most of them in Casablanca, the business capital, with smaller numbers in Rabat, Tangier and Marrakech. They are the second-largest Middle Eastern nationality in the country after the Syrians, drawn above all by work in Casablanca. Their Cairene Arabic is the one Arab dialect most Moroccans understand, from decades of Egyptian films, television series and songs, though Egyptians in turn struggle with Moroccan Darija. About one in ten Egyptians is a Coptic Christian, but Morocco has no Coptic church. The embassy in Rabat, which moved into a new building in 2022, gathers the community for meetings with the ambassador.

Egyptian Arabs in Oman are a community of roughly 50,000 to 60,000 Muslim professionals and their families, part of some 60,000 to 65,000 Egyptians in the sultanate. They arrived with Oman's modern state: when Sultan Qaboos began building schools in 1970 there were almost no Omani teachers, and Egyptian teachers, followed by doctors, engineers and lawyers, were sent to cities, mountain villages and desert towns alike. Many Omanis over forty learned to read, count and pray from an Egyptian teacher, and the Egyptian dialect of films and television is understood everywhere. Today they still teach in schools and universities and work in hospitals, engineering firms and offices, keeping their own school in Al Ansab and a community club in Muscat, while Coptic Christians among the Egyptians worship in their own church.

Egyptians are Qatar's largest Arab expatriate community, about 250,000 to 350,000 people, of whom some 280,000 are Sunni Muslims. Egyptian teachers, judges and civil servants helped build Qatar's schools and ministries from the 1950s, and today Egyptians work as teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants and journalists as well as drivers, salesmen and technicians. Their Cairo dialect, known to every Qatari from Egyptian film and television, makes them at home in Arabic-speaking workplaces, and many families send their children to the Egyptian Language School in Abu Hamour. They stayed through the 2017-2021 rupture between Cairo and Doha, when Egypt closed its embassy and the community feared mass expulsion.

Egyptian Muslims are the largest Arab community in Saudi Arabia after the Yemenis, about 1.35 million of the nearly 1.5 million Egyptians living in the kingdom. Nubians from Aswan and Bedouin from Sinai and the deserts are among them. They have come in numbers since the oil boom of the 1970s, and today they are the teachers, doctors, pharmacists, engineers and accountants Saudis meet every day, as well as builders, drivers and shop workers. Families of professionals send their children to Egyptian-curriculum schools in Riyadh, Jeddah and the Eastern Province, while single labourers share rooms and send most of their pay home, some 8 billion dollars a year. Saudization quotas now reserve pharmacy, law, private teaching and other professions for Saudis, and many Egyptians have seen their contracts end.

Egyptians in Türkiye are a young community that grew out of the 2013 military takeover in Egypt, when thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members, supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi, opposition journalists and their families fled to Istanbul. They were joined by students, doctors, engineers, business people and workers in Istanbul's clothing workshops, and settled in the western districts of Başakşehir, Şirinevler and Bahçelievler. In exile they built their own world: the Rabia Association, named after the Cairo square where the 2013 sit-in was crushed, Egyptian opposition television channels, schools, restaurants and a federation of more than twenty associations. Since Türkiye and Egypt made peace in 2021-2024, the opposition channels have stopped or moved abroad and many prominent exiles have left for London and elsewhere, while others have taken Turkish citizenship.

Egyptian Muslims are one of the largest Arab communities in the United Arab Emirates, perhaps half a million to nearly a million people, whose presence goes back to the federation's founding in 1971, when Egyptian teachers, judges, doctors and engineers helped staff the new state's schools and ministries. Today they work in every field from construction and oil and gas to banking, medicine, media and call centres, and most live in the apartment districts of Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman. Their Cairene dialect, familiar to every Arab from Egyptian films, carries their humour and pride in home cities like Alexandria and Port Said, and older men gather in Egyptian-run coffee shops over backgammon and football while koshari restaurants spread across the cities. The community has grown with Egypt's economic crisis since 2016, and its remittances keep many families at home afloat.