My Run-In with the Egyptian “Belly Dance Police”

At the time it was happening, it wasn’t funny, but now I look back on the day I almost got deported and laugh. I mean, who would have thought that belly dancing on a Nile cruise could land you in jail and get you kicked out of Egypt?  Do Egyptian authorities really have nothing better to do than arrest foreign belly dancers? 

It happened like this. After auditioning on the Nile Memphis last August, the management scheduled me to perform five nights a week (I negotiated hard to get two days off!) Sometimes I performed two shows a night, sometimes six. It all depended on how many reservations and sails the boat had. After doing this regularly for two months, one of the Egyptian belly dancers who previously worked there full-time grew resentful that she was now only dancing on my days off. But instead of coming to the boat to check out her competition and understand why she had been replaced, she tried to terminate my dance career. With me gone, she figured she would reclaim her position on the boat. So she called what I like to refer to as the belly dance police (mosannafaat in Arabic), and reported me for dancing without working papers.

Though I had already been contracted at the Semiramis Hotel two months earlier, the infamous hotel manager cancelled my papers after I made it clear I wasn’t going to indulge his desires. But even if my papers remained valid, it still would have been illegal for me to perform anywhere else on a daily basis except the Semiramis. 

So, when I exited the stage one Thursday evening after finishing the first part of my show, I was surprised to find two belly dance police officers waiting for me in my changing room on the bottom deck of the boat. Contrary to the friendly, hospitable nature of Egyptians to which I had become accustomed, the officers were hostile. They were interrogating me as if I had just committed murder, and they would not let me change out of my belly dance costume into my clothes. I didn’t understand this at the time, but they wanted to bring me to the police precinct wearing my costume to prove that I violated yet another law—the one that requires dancers to cover their stomachs with fabric. Any type of fabric, even if it is transparent. (This is how Egyptian authorities fool themselves into thinking they’ve paid homage to Islamic values of female modesty). And here I stood, wearing the sexiest belly dance costume I owned. Not only was my stomach uncovered, but the skirt featured all kinds of sexy stripper-like cutouts on the thighs.

Here I was, guilty on two counts—dancing without working papers, and not covering my stomach. For the first time in a long while, I just stood there, not knowing what to do with myself. And then, out of nowhere, my keyboard player, Magid, (who was also the band leader and my personal talent manager), charged into the door of the changing room ready to fight. He had seen the officers roaming around the boat lobby through the glass doors while we were doing our first set, and knew exactly what they were after. So he left the rest of the band and the tanoura dancer with no music to rescue me from the fate that awaited me—arrest and deportation.  

I was scared. Though Magid was on my side, I had never seen someone shout so rabidly at police officers the way he did. This can’t be good, I thought. I instinctively screamed at him not to punch the police, because that was where his antics were leading. And that would only land the both of us in jail. Magid replied by telling me to go to the bathroom and change into my clothes.  I promptly obeyed, even though the police had instructed me otherwise. Quite frankly, Magid was more intimidating than the officers at this point. No sooner had I obeyed him than he demanded I wrap my costume in a garbage bag and toss it in the Nile. “Wait, what?!” I shrieked.  “Throw my costume in the Nile? What for?” “So they can’t take it with them to the precinct and prove that the costume doesn’t have a stomach covering,” he answered.  “But that’s illegal,” I retorted. “That’s tampering with evidence.” “So what?” he asked.  “If you do this, the officers will have to prove that you were wearing this costume and that I threw it in the Nile. They won’t be able to prove it.  It will be their word against ours.” 

Magid was right. Not in a legal way, but in an Egyptian ‘might is right’ way… in a ‘this is how we prevent you from being deported’ way. Luckily for me, things didn’t escalate to that level. And I got to keep my costume. Magid’s fearless (and frightening) demeanor did the trick. The boat management also calmed the officers down while I changed into my clothes, promising they would not allow me to work again until my contract was approved. The funny part is that after all the commotion, the officers admitted they watched the first part of my show through the glass doors and that they were impressed. They even said I danced better than the Egyptian dancer who reported me. “I know,” Magid said. “This is why we’ve been hiring her this whole time.” 

The officers apologized for the drama they had caused and promised they would not report me. They did have one request, though. I was to appear at their headquarters first thing Sunday morning to be lectured about the wrongness of belly dancing without papers. Of course, I obliged. I showed up at the mosannafaat building in Downtown Cairo and listened to what they had to say. All the while, I couldn’t help but think of all the real problems that plagued Egypt—things like rampant poverty, their joke of a medical system, and terrorism. One thing was certain. Solving those issues would require Egypt getting its priorities straight.