Traveling from al-Minya, Egypt, north to Cairo by train in the mid-1980s, an observer could not help but notice the large numbers of women and children working in the lush agricultural plots adjacent to the railroad tracks. In fact, throughout the northern Sa⊂id and the Delta, too, women seemed to have taken over the fields. Furthermore, upon arriving at the Agriculture Ministry in Giza, a listener frequently overheard remarks referring to the “alarming” rise in the feminization of Egyptian agriculture. Yet Egyptian farm women have always lent a hand to agricultural production. So what, in recent years, has generated such a large-scale “invasion” of women into men's jobs? Particularly in light of the strict segregation of women from men, and their seclusion in the privacy of the home, what has brought about this public display of women?

Metaphors of the evil eye (sahir) are interpreted as posing a threat to the Muslim Arab Rubāṭāb1 of the Sudan. A common situation in which these metaphors are used is when the speaker (saḥḥār) attempts to cast or “shoot” a sahir metaphor at persons or objects by comparing them to something else. A victim may then try to counteract the shot by uttering protective invocations. The victim's later account of the event in which the evil eye was cast upon him will include subsequent misfortunes and perhaps justifications for personal failure. For example, a sahhār likened someone eating a green onion to somebody speaking into a microphone. The man threw away the onion, cursed the sahhār, and complained thereafter that his hand had never been the same. The audience evaluates the metaphors. Good comparisons evoke much laughter. “He is really evil,” or “He killed him,” are often pronounced by the audience both in appreciation of the theoretical powers of the metaphor shooter and in anticipation of the harm that may come in the shot's wake. The audience later reports the interaction as a joke or legend.

One of the central issues in the debate on the transformative impact of European economic expansion on agricultural structures in the Ottoman Empire concerns the formation of large agricultural estates. It has been argued that the growing demand for raw materials on the world market fostered efforts at the integration of small landholdings into larger units of production and an increasing commercialization of agricultural produce. This commercializaiton coincided with a tendency toward crop specializaiton and a regional differentitation between the rural areas.