When Egypt Goes to the Beach

I paused for a second as I packed for a last-minute break on Egypt’s North Coast, known as Sahel in Arabic. Should I take my bikini? Or a one-piece? Or what?

I hadn’t been to the beach in Egypt for years and was unsure of what now passed for acceptable attire. The pendulum of social mores here has swung in a resolutely conservative direction over the past three decades, and perhaps its most visible impact has been the trend toward veils and an obsession with women’s “modesty.” As a young adult, I myself wore the hijab for nine years, covering everything except for my face and hands.

As a child in the ’70s, the idea of a seaside dress code never entered my head. When I was growing up, my middle-class family, like many others, decamped to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria for relief from Cairo’s unbearable summers.

Some of my happiest memories are of Alexandria evenings spent eating candy made sticky by the day’s heat, together with my younger brother and my aunt, who, just four years my senior, was more like a sister. In between ruining our teeth, we would tease one another by poking the spots of our shoulders burned from hours in the sun.

For years, my family was haunted by the memory of the sea’s fluorescent blue and the fine white sand after we left Cairo in 1975 for London, where my parents earned doctorates in medicine on a government scholarship. The forbidding gray of the English Channel and the stony beaches of Britain’s South Coast were meager compensation.

When Egypt Goes to the BeachI have moved back and forth to Egypt several times since then; my most recent return began in 2013. My unscientific survey of Egyptian beach culture today has taught me that as Alexandria grew more crowded and dilapidated, the well heeled moved west — summering in villas built farther along the coast that maintained their access to a pristine shoreline.

For a more bohemian crowd, southern Sinai has become the destination of choice, where beach huts offer an affordable alternative to hotels, and smoking hashish is an acceptable recreation. For the party crowd, Gouna, a resort town built around an artificial lagoon, has become a Red Sea favorite in recent years.

The anarchist in me enjoys trips to southern Sinai in summer or winter. In January 2015, I spent a freezing night camping under the stars so that I could watch a fabled camel race that took place soon after sunrise and brought out the Bedouin tribes and their prized camels. I’d visited Gouna in 1999, long before it became the party central it is today.

But I had never been back to Sahel, in the north. I’d learned to associate it with a kind of elitism and wealth I was not keen to observe up close. But this year, in need of a break, I gratefully accepted a friend’s invitation to spend a few days in Sahel. And that’s how I found myself there, awakened by the sound of an imam in the nearby mosque barking his way through the Friday sermon. I didn’t mind; I was going to the beach.

We stayed in a gated community where a relative owned an apartment and the beach was best. If you own an apartment there, you can access the beach free, but a few exclusive beaches charge a fee. My friend wanted to show me one of the best, so we bought tickets and there it all was: the blue water and the white sand.

The cabana boys laid out chaise longues for us. My goal: to achieve the burned shoulders of my childhood summers in Alexandria. And to observe.

We were soon joined on the beach by a group of five young Egyptian women dressed in shorts and T-shirts, who decamped next to us, spreading their towels. From their bags, they pulled two bottles of vodka.

They spent most of the time under beach umbrellas, smoking and drinking. When they finally went for a swim, it was in one-piece swimsuits.

About an hour after their arrival, a cabana boy set up seats under an umbrella for a couple and their toddler. The father disrobed into shorts, while the mother wore a burkini, a black full-body swimsuit, topped off with a pink head scarf.

Nearby were three women who arrived in summer dresses. Eventually, these were discarded when they went down to the water in hot-pink and orange bikinis.

That night, my friend and I went out to a club. We arrived at 1 a.m., only to discover we were unfashionably early and virtually on our own. But by 3 a.m., the place was packed. Just then, the D.J. turned off the music.

It was time for the adhan, the call to prayer at dawn. Apparently, the local Bedouin tribe demanded that the club respect the muezzin’s cry. When he was done, the D.J. came back on to tell us that our treat that night was a performance by Egypt’s most famous belly dancer, Safinar.

Most famous, or perhaps most notorious. The Egypt-based Armenian dancer, who also goes by the name Safinaz, was sentenced last year to six months in prison and fined about $2,000 for “insulting the national flag” — she had worn its colors on a dancing costume.

As soon as Safinar came on, she was mobbed by clubgoers. So many people were trying to take selfies with her that we could hardly see any of the performance. Frustrated, we decided to leave, and spent most of the ride home discussing the impact of foreign belly dancers on Egyptian dancers — another popular belly dancer is Ukrainian.

I voiced my concern that Eurocentric notions of beauty discriminate against local dancers. Added to which, the prevailing moral climate is more lax for European women. That all makes life harder for Egyptian dancers who already face a conservative backlash.

On the beaches of my childhood, bikinis now are unheard-of. On the beaches in Gouna I’ve been to, burkinis are unheard-of. Yet here, in Sahel, we all had a place. Egypt with all its contradictions and incongruities was embodied there on the beach, sitting shoulder to shoulder next to the soothing aquamarine waters of the Mediterranean.

Mona Eltahawy is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, and a contributing opinion writer.

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