Nubian, Arabized

The Arabized Nubians are Egyptian Nubians who speak Egyptian Arabic as their only language but still call themselves Nubian. Old Egyptian Nubia, flooded by the Aswan High Dam, had three sections: the Kenzi-speaking Kunuz in the north, the Nobiin-speaking Fadicca in the south, and between them about 40 km of Arabic-speaking villages (five to eight by different counts), mostly of the Ulayqat, Arab families who settled among the Nubians centuries ago, shared their villages, dress and customs, and were resettled with them in 1963-64. Since resettlement and generations of migration to Cairo and Alexandria, many Kunuz and Fadicca families have also lost the Nubian language while keeping Nubian village ties, weddings, songs and the claim to the flooded homeland. Some Nubians and outsiders see the Ulayqat as Arabs rather than Nubians; most accounts of Egyptian Nubia count them as one of its three sections. The Magyarab, a clan near Aswan who trace their descent to a Hungarian officer of the Ottoman conquest of 1517, are among the Arabic-speaking Nubians.

Arabized Nubians share the culture of the other Nubians: painted courtyard houses in the villages, multi-day weddings with henna nights and tar-drum songs (often still sung in Nubian even by those who no longer speak it), food built on flatbreads, stews and dates, and strong village solidarity. In Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal cities, where Nubian men long worked as cooks, doormen and household staff before moving into government, army and professional jobs, life is organised around Nubian clubs and village associations (more than 40 in Alexandria alone) that run weddings, funerals and festivals. Many young urban Nubians are now learning a Nubian language as a mark of identity.

Sunni Muslims. Practice in the cities follows mainstream Egyptian Sunni Islam; in the Aswan villages older customs persist, such as visits to saints' tombs, rites at the Nile at births and weddings, protective amulets and spirit-possession ceremonies among women. Sufi orders have followers, and religious life is tightly bound to family and village.

The full Bible, the Jesus Film and many audio and video resources exist in Egyptian Arabic, their only language, so language is no barrier. The barriers are social: Nubian identity is bound up with Islam and with close family networks, and Egypt's Christians are Copts with little contact with Nubians. No outreach aimed at Nubians and no fellowship of Nubian believers is known.

Egypt's 2014 Constitution included Article 236, guaranteeing Nubians' right to return to ancestral lands and develop them within ten years. The deadline expired in 2024 without implementation. Instead, Presidential Decree 444 (2014) designated seventeen ancestral Nubian villages as military zones, and Decree 355 (2016) allocated return lands to private investors. When Nubians organized a peaceful protest march with traditional tambourines in Aswan in 2017, twenty-four were arrested. Activist Gamal Sorour died in custody. Human rights organizations including the Committee for Justice and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies have called the government's inaction a violation of its constitutional obligations.

The construction of the Aswan High Dam required the flooding of all Nubian territory within Egypt. Approximately 50,000 Nubians from 44 villages along a 350-kilometer stretch of the Nile were forcibly relocated to purpose-built resettlement communities around Kom Ombo, 50 km north of Aswan. The replacement housing bore no resemblance to the spacious, brightly decorated riverside homes Nubians had inhabited for generations. Entire communities were broken apart, agricultural land was replaced with unfamiliar terrain, and access to the Nile itself was lost. The displacement remains the central grievance of the Nubian community and the driving force behind the right-of-return movement.

The Magyarab ('tribe of the Magyars', from Magyar and the Nubian ending -ab) are a clan of Arabic-speaking Nubians near Aswan and, before Lake Nasser, around Wadi Halfa in Sudan. Their tradition traces them to Ibrahim el-Magyar, an officer from Buda in the army of Sultan Selim I that conquered Egypt in 1517, who married a Nubian woman; the five sons of his son Ali founded the clan's lines. Europeans first heard of them in 1935, when the Hungarian explorer Laszlo Almasy and Hansjoachim von der Esch met them in Nubia and noted words they took for Hungarian. They speak Arabic, look and live like their Nubian neighbours, and number perhaps 3,000-5,000 in Egypt (about 7,000 with Sudan by a 1997 Hungarian account; other figures run higher); about 400 live in Cairo. They have belonged to the World Federation of Hungarians since 1992 and are visited from time to time by Hungarian travellers and journalists.