The Blood-Feud Tradition in Egypt

Paper Summary:

The Egyptian blood-feud, or vendetta, is a cultural tradition that has survived throughout the centuries, despite its modern-day criminalization. This paper shows that the vendetta was originally developed as a form of justice, but it soon developed into a disastrous tradition, which keeps animosity alive between families over the generations and which threatens the security and lives of members of a community.

From the Paper:

"As Wessel reports, the blood feud tradition is responsible for one-third of all the murders that occur in Egypt per year. This figure gives us a glimpse into the truly problematic nature of this cultural tradition. Within the context of Upper Egypt, the problem does not simply rest upon the fact that the tradition acts as a complete undermining of the laws and institutions of civilized societies, or that it jeopardizes the life and welfare of entire extended families for virtually unidentifiable reasons (unidentifiable in the sense that in some case, the origins of the feud have been lost in history and are unknown), but that it is a waste of life and a significant contribution to the nation's overall crime figures."

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