Egyptians are currently suffering from a grinding economic crisis, hefty inflation, a breakdown of security and widespread terrorist attacks. Despite these trying times, the most watched clips on YouTube are of Oriental dance (as raqs sharqi is often translated).
In just one recent month, a video by the Egyptian-Armenian dancer Safinaz was viewed by Egyptians more than four million times. The Lebanese star Haifa Wehbe’s dance video got more than 10 million hits. Oriental dance evidently provides light relief from the general state of tension, but there is more to it.
Oriental dance has always been controversial in Egyptian culture. Egyptians love belly dancing, as it is commonly known in the West. Tahia Carioca, a legendary belly dancer, declared to the newspaper Al Hayat in 1994, “Go to any wedding party and once the music starts up, you’ll see all the girls in the family suddenly get to their feet and dance like crazy.”
But people do not hold Oriental dance in high regard because they equate its suggestiveness with vulgarity and loose living. To call someone the “son of a belly dancer” is an insult.
The tradition of disdaining Oriental dance has a long pedigree. In the “Description de l’Égypte,” written by French scholars following Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, dancers were described as “women with no training or decorum, and of their dance movements nothing more obscene can be imagined.”
That prospect seemed less troubling to the writer Gustave Flaubert, who toured Egypt in 1849-50 and was enchanted by a dancer named Kuchuk-Hanem (a Turkish name meaning “the little lady”). He admired her as “a tall creature, more pale of complexion than the Arabs.” The American writer George William Curtis, who visited Egypt at around the same time and also fell in love with her, described the dancer as “a bud no longer, yet a flower not too fully blown.”
So what is the secret of this mythical allure? The Palestinian-American academic and author of “Orientalism” Edward Said, writing in Al Hayat, contrasted Western ballet, which “is all about elevation, lightness, the defiance of the body’s weight,” with Eastern dance, which “shows the dancer planting herself more and more solidly in the earth, digging into it almost.” He noted how the latter suggested “a sequence of horizontal pleasures,” but “also paradoxically conveyed the kind of elusiveness and grace that cannot be pinned down on a flat surface.”
One suspects that few fans are so finely attuned to the aesthetic considerations, but is Oriental dance more than mere titillation?
Andrea Deagon, an associate professor of classics at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, has practiced Oriental dance since she was 17. Oriental dance is liberating for women, Dr. Deagon argues: a form of self-expression in movement that voices what is, in Egyptian society, an otherwise unutterable truth about the pleasures of the body. And it is because Oriental dance poses a challenge to a religiosity that sees any form of display as an act of impurity that it has always been misunderstood and associated with dishonor.
That is precisely what makes it a subversive art: The dancer who shakes off the shackles of the patriarchal order strikes fear into the hearts of religious conservatives, and may even pose a threat to tyranny. Hence its periodic repression.
In 1834, Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali, took steps to preserve, as he saw it, Egypt’s morals by ordering the arrest and exile to Upper Egypt of all belly dancers and prostitutes. He also imposed a punishment of 50 lashes on any woman who danced in the street.
In the 1960s, under the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the government department responsible for supervision and censorship of the arts ordered that “Oriental dance is not permitted to show the following: lying on the back, lying on the ground in a vulgar fashion so as to excite, or making rapid movements in such a way as to cause excitement. The thighs are not to be fully open while on the ground. There are to be no wobbling up and down movements.” The dancers must have had a good laugh when they heard of the regulations, which, impossible to adhere to, would have entailed a career change.
The Nasserite state made great efforts to preserve Oriental dance as a sanitized form of folklore, removing it from the realm of the sensual. In 1961, Nasser placed the Reda Dance Troupe under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. The Troupe, which included the aristocratic Farida Fahmy, danced all over the world, winning medals and prizes, but Egyptians — for all their admiration of the Reda Troupe — still clung to the earthier Oriental dance they knew and loved.
Even today, Oriental dance may be performed in Egypt only with a government permit. An officer of the “morality police” can arrest a dancer for wearing a costume that shows more of her body than the law allows, or because she has danced in a manner deemed too provocative.
A certain hypocrisy pertains. While the government has cracked down on dancers in the name of public morality, it has not hesitated to use them for its own political purposes. After the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, the American secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, was engaged in the “shuttle diplomacy” that eventually led to the 1979 Camp David Accords. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry was always sure to book Mr. Kissinger’s favorite dancer, Nagwa Fouad, for a private performance during his stays in Cairo.
Just as the Egyptian state has double standards when dealing with Oriental dance, so does the rest of society. The conservative Egyptian who looks down on dancers has no problem buying a costume for his wife so that she can dance for him. Provided belly dancing takes place within a conjugal setting, he considers such behavior licit.
Will Egyptians’ attitudes toward dancers ever change? They have more pressing concerns for the moment: bringing about democracy, electing a government that respects human rights and providing a decent living for the millions living in poverty. But I look forward to a new Egypt where belly dancing will have evolved into an art form, without the connotations of immoral conduct that still surround it today.
In a real democracy, there is a place for every citizen, belly dancers included. Until then, Egyptians are sure to continue to be enthusiastic consumers of Oriental dance — but with scant respect for the dancers.
Alaa Al Aswany is the author of the novel The Yacoubian Building and other books. This article was translated by Russell Harris from the Arabic.