My Secret Life as a Belly Dancer in Cairo

This might sound strange, but here in Cairo, I lead a secret life. I’m not a spy or having an affair or doing anything nefarious. I’m just a belly dancer. However, I make great efforts to hide this from people.When Egyptians ask me what I’m doing in Cairo, I tell them I’m writing a book about Egyptian art. I keep things vague, but not untrue. I am, after all, writing a book, and its subject is belly dancing, which is an Egyptian art. Never do I mention that I’m a practitioner of this art, however. Doing so would unleash a series of unfavorable consequences, not the least of which is being thought of as a whore.

You might be thinking, So what? Sticks and stones will hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me. Unfortunately, this is true only to the extent that I won’t be stoned for being a belly dancer. But I might…oh, I don’t know… get kicked out of my apartment.

Oddly enough, this is exactly what happened to me last year (in fact today marks the one-year anniversary of my eviction!). My landlord kicked me out of my apartment upon learning that I was a belly dancer.

This is what transpired. In September of 2009, I was apartment hunting for the fifth time in one year. (Yes, you read that correctly.) After weeks of searching, I finally found the perfect flat in a middle-class area called Doqqi, not too far from Downtown. The flat was on the fourth floor. It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large reception area, and an extra room that could be converted into a dance studio. Most importantly, the price was right. I told the real estate agent that I would rent this apartment and would like to sign a lease with the landlord. The landlord, the agent informed me, was living in Kuwait, but his sister Wiam would act on his behalf. So I met with Wiam and her two young sons a day later.

My meeting with Wiam was cordial enough. We made it through all the forced pleasantries that usually characterize interactions between Egyptians and foreigners. But then she popped the question. THAT question. “What are you doing here in Cairo?” (Mind you, Wiam had just made a point of saying that she was very religious, and that her whole family was conservative.) “I… um…I’m writing a book about Egyptian art,” I blurted. “Oh, so you attend the American University in Cairo?” she asked. “Um… I guess you could say that,” I answered, hoping my countenance wouldn’t betray my guilty conscience. And then, we signed a six-month lease.

Fast forward two months. I’m hired to belly dance at the Paradise Hotel in a city called Ras Sidr. It’s a three-hour drive from Cairo. Upon arrival, I did my usual 45-minute show with three costume changes. I think it was the first time the hotel hired a foreign belly dancer, and the audience was loving every minute of it—they were clapping, cheering, whistling, and even screaming and throwing roses at me. I left the stage feeling so good about myself…

…until two young boys approached me as I was walking to the changing room. “Excuse me,” they said. “Aren’t you the girl who lives at 22 Doqqi Street?” “WHY YES I!—…am. Wait, how do you know that?!” I asked. “Because our mother is Wiam,” they replied. “She was sitting inside with us watching you dance. She said you dance really well.”

The boys’ words fell upon me like an avalanche of dung. Fresh, hot, Egyptian donkey dung. The joy that I experienced just two seconds before seeing them completely evaporated. Just my luck, I thought. Wiam catches me belly dancing in a random hotel three hours away from Cairo, and now she’ll tell her brother, who will surely evict me from the apartment.

Sure enough, my thoughts materialized. Mohamed came back to Cairo from Kuwait in March of the following year, and the first thing he did was inform me that he would be doubling the rent. When I said I would not be able to pay the increase, he said rather sharply that I must have lots of money being a belly dancer and all.

So that’s what this is about, I said. You’re uncomfortable renting your apartment out to a belly dancer. He admitted that I was correct—that he did not want a dancer living in his flat because he and his family were “people of God.”

There are a couple of reasons for this way of thinking. In Egypt and the wider Muslim world, public belly dancing is considered a sin. It is not art. This is because Islam, which is the dominant religion in Egypt, places a very high premium on female modesty. It teaches that a woman’s beauty must be reserved for her husband and her husband alone. Displaying hair and skin in the presence of men, therefore, is sinful. As such, the belly dancer (ra’assa in Arabic) is no more than a lowly whore. She flouts Islamic mores by entertaining strange men with half-naked wiggles and jiggles.

The second reason is that belly dancing is synonymous with prostitution. Historically, some Egyptian belly dancers doubled as sex workers. It is thought they most likely used their performance venues to collect customers, including French and British soldiers stationed in Cairo. This behavior became so widespread and problematic that Muhammad Ali, the founder of what is considered “modern Egypt” (1805 to 1848), famously banished all the belly dancers (awaalim) from Cairo—apparently, the dancers were spreading venereal disease amongst the soldiers. Apparently.  

Though I had been aware of this reality since I started belly dancing in New York, I had adopted a “not my problem” attitude toward it. Now that I live in Egypt, however, it has certainly become my problem. This is why I try my best to conceal the fact that I’m a belly dancer. I keep my makeup to a minimum when traveling to and from work. I wrap my sequined Saidi sticks in a black garbage bag, and I play the music low when I practice dance in my apartment. Barring acts of God such as the one I just narrated, these measures are usually sufficient.

Nevertheless, my secret manages to escape from time to time. In fact, more often than not, people find out that I’m a belly dancer. One week after I moved into my next apartment, for example, the entire building learned of my work. That was due to accidentally locking myself out of my apartment and subsequently asking a neighbor to climb into my apartment via our connecting balconies to let me in. To do this, he would have to find the key in one of my purses and unlock the door. Unfortunately, he was unable to find the key in any of my bags, so he turned them upside down and emptied their contents. Out flew the key from one of the bags, along with more than forty photos of me in my belly dance costumes.

Ta-da! My neighbor was newly privy to my secret. No, he didn’t have the authority to kick me out of my flat. But in Egypt, when one person knows something, the whole country knows.

Indeed, it wasn’t long before the bawabeen (doormen) started looking at me funny as I entered and left the building. They also started scrutinizing all the men my two female Canadian roommates brought up to our apartment. At one point, they even threatened to call the police on me for having male visitors. In Egypt-think, this is the equivalent to starting a whorehouse. (Amazingly, unmarried mixed-gender households are technically legal in Egypt, however Islamic sentiments vis-à-vis gender segregation always trump legal technicalities.)

As difficult as things have been for me, Egyptian belly dancers have it worse. Not only must they hide their lives from landlords and neighbors, but they have to contend with their families as well; most Egyptians would never accept their daughter/sister/mother working as a belly dancer. My heart goes out to these women. It is only by working as dancers that these unskilled women escape the merciless clutch of Egyptian poverty. But it costs them their dignity. What I’ve learned through my interviews with dozens of ordinary Egyptian belly dancers is that they believe dancing is sinful (haram) and want to quit once they’ve saved enough money to live comfortably. In that respect, their conflict is not just societal, it is internal. It is one that I, as a citizen of the secular West, do not struggle with.