| Top row (left to right) Mustafa Lutfi el-Manfaluti • Abbas el-Akkad • Sheikh Mohamed Siddiq El-Minshawi • Youssef Wahbi • Amal Donkol Middle row (left to right) Hoda Shaarawi • Gamal Abdel Nasser • Gamal El-Ghitani • Abdulbasit Abdussamad • Abdel Rahman el-Abnudi Bottom row (left to right) Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy • Taha Hussein • Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria • Rifa'a el-Tahtawi • Ramesses III |
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| ca. 21 million (2008) | |||||||||
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Mainly: Islam, Coptic Orthodox Christianity and a very small minority of Bahá'ís.[1] |
A Sa'idi (Arabic: صعيدي) is a person from Upper Egypt (Arabic: صعيد Sa'id).[2]
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The word literally means "from Sa'id" (i.e. Upper Egypt), and can also refer to a form of music originating there,[3] or to the dialect spoken by Sa'idis. The word Sa'id in Arabic means "level", "plain", "surface", and can also have the added sense of "ascending". The suffix "-i" denotes the adjective.
Although Upper Egypt has 60 percent of Egypt's land area, it contains only 17 percent of its population.[4] Until the Aswan High Dam was built, Sa'idis were less apt to suffer from waterborne diseases such as bilharzia than Delta peasants. Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser were of Sa'idi extraction.
Sa'idis and their dialect are the subject of numerous Egyptian ethnic jokes. They are popularly assumed to be rural simpletons, physically stronger and more clever than other Egyptians. An example of such stereotyping is the box office hit Ṣa‘īdi fil-Gama‘a al-Amrikiya ("A Sa'idi in the American University", i.e. the American University in Cairo) (1998) starring Mohamed Henedi,[5] which depicts the Saidi character as a clever and smart capable of joining the American University in Cairo in a government scholarship because he excelled all his colleagues in high school.
The region has a large Coptic population and a rich Coptic history. For instance, Sahidic was the leading Coptic dialect in the pre-Islamic period. In the last few decades the high proportion of Copts in Upper Egypt has enabled some Christians to hold prominent political posts there. For instance, Qena Governorate is currently headed by a Coptic governor.