Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  The sudden veil-takings all tended to follow the same pattern. A famous woman performer would appear on the popular television program of Sheik Mohamed Sharawi, Egypt’s equivalent of a televangelist. There she would denounce her former career as un-Islamic, take a veil from the aged sheik and put it on, with his blessing.

  Cynical Egyptians believed the Saudis funded a special expense account for Sharawi to buy up women artists. “If it isn’t for the money, why do it on television? Why not do it in private, with Allah for their witness?” asked Nawal Saadawi, Egypt’s most outspoken feminist.

  The newly veiled women certainly seemed to have plenty of cash. One of the first to veil, Shams al-Barudi, had spent a fortune buying the copyright to films in which she had appeared scantily dressed, including one particularly daring bathtub scene in which she’d appeared almost nude. She was determined, she said, that the films should never be shown again. She declined to comment on the source of the money she was using to buy the rights to her old films, but gossip in the Cairo movie business said it had been provided by a prominent clergyman.

  Nawal Saadawi cynically pointed out that many of the women were past their prime as actresses or dancers anyway. “They know they’re soon going to have to retire, so why not go out in a blaze of publicity? You’ve heard the joke on the streets: people are saying that these dancers were happy to make their fortune from sin in their youth. Now, in their old age, they want to share the pleasure of paradise with the poor.”

  But Nawal’s own predicament provided another explanation for the rush to get behind the veil. As a psychiatrist and senior government health official in the 1960s, she had seen the physical and emotional effects of genital mutilation on Egyptian women. Her first book, Women and Sex, published in 1970, had been a condemnation of the distorted Islamic teaching she felt was responsible for ruining women’s lives. Despite losing her job and spending three months in prison, she continued to write about taboo subjects in more than thirty books. She described the childhood trauma of her own clito-ridectomy and how it had left her incapable of orgasm, wrote about the demand for prewedding hymen replacement in the surgical wards of Cairo, and exposed an epidemic of incest in Egyptian families.

  In newspapers and public meetings she attacked powerful sheiks. On one of his television programs, Sheik Sharawi excoriated those who chose to lull themselves to sleep with Western classical music instead of the melodic drone of a Koran reading. A few days later extremist youths in Upper Egypt were arrested for storming a concert and breaking musical instruments. Nawal wrote a newspaper article asking why the government arrested the youths, and not Sharawi, whose ideas had inflamed them.

  In the summer of 1992, Islamic Jihad put Nawal Saadawi on its death list, along with the writer Farag Foda. When Farag was shot dead outside his office, the Egyptian government that had often persecuted Nawal suddenly provided her with a round-the-clock military guard. Mindful that Sadat’s assassin had been part of an extremist Islamic cell within the Egyptian army, Nawal found the presence outside her door of army conscripts rather less than reassuring. “I’m more afraid of them than I am of anyone else,” she confided. In 1993 she went into exile, taking a post as a visiting professor at Duke University in America.

  If authors were already targets, Nawal reasoned, it was only a matter of time before less political artists would come under direct attack. The dancers who renounced their profession often talked about the anxiety and fear that had been replaced by calm once they resigned from the stage. One famous dancer, Halah al-Safi, talked of a dream she’d had of walking by a mosque and feeling dread because she wasn’t wearing the proper clothing. Suddenly, she said, a man in her dream took off his cloak and covered her. Nawal pointed out that it wasn’t necessary to be a psychiatrist to interpret the fear in Halah’s dream as a subconscious response to the pressure from religious extremists.

  In 1993, Nawal’s prediction was proved correct. When Farida Seif el Nasr decided to return to show business after having announced her retirement, an unknown assailant attempted to murder her with a volley of gunshots.

  At my office, Sahar gloated over each new story of an artist’s return to the veil. One morning she looked up from one of the local papers to read me an item about a famous dancer who had wanted to make the Hajj. The religious authorities had refused to give the woman the necessary papers unless she quit dancing. Sahar approved of their decision. “Why should she be able to go, spending money she earned sinning, and stand on the Plain of Arafat as though she’s a good Muslim?” Sahar said.

  But I was sorry to see Egypt’s beautiful traditional dance being denigrated and threatened. I’d watched my first Egyptian dancer through a jet-lagged haze just after we arrived in Cairo, when a friend invited us to dinner at the Nile Hilton’s nightclub. Egyptians keep late hours, and I struggled through dinner to keep my face from falling into my plate of stuffed pigeon. But once the dancing started I forgot all about fatigue.

  Souhair Zaki swirled onto the stage along a pathway of sound. The slow rise and fall of the flute undulated in waves through her body. For the first time, the atonal Arabic music made sense to me. I could see it, weaving through space in elaborate arabesques. And I could see something else: the beauty of a woman’s body that was neither young nor thin. Souhair Zaki was the most celebrated dancer in Cairo, but she hadn’t seen thirty in a while. Flesh clung heavily to her hips. Her abdomen bulged like a ripe pear. I had never seen traditional oriental dance before, but I recognized every movement. What she was doing with her body was what a woman’s body did—the natural movements of sex and childbirth. The dance drew the eye to the hips and abdomen; the very center of the female body’s womanliness.

  As a girl I’d learned the profoundly unnatural movements of Western ballet, whose aim was to make the body seem as insubstantial as air. With its stress on elongation and fluttering extremities, ballet denied womanliness, requiring adult dancers to retain the shape of prepubescent girls. By the time I was fourteen the studio where I did my classes was a miserable place, full of students who knew they’d never be ballerinas. Their bodies had betrayed them by becoming too tall, too round, too womanly. I decided that, before I left Egypt, I’d try to learn this other more ancient dance, whose every movement celebrated a woman’s body as it actually was.

  Religious pressure had already forced Cairo’s dancers to wear one-piece costumes that didn’t expose their bare midriffs. Anything too revealing warranted a visit from a special squad known as the “politeness police.” Occasional items in the newspapers documented raids on nightclubs where dancers’ acts were too erotic or their costumes too revealing. One dancer in particular, Sahar Hamdi, was always being hauled to jail. Going through the newspapers, Sahar would read me these items about her namesake, shaking her veiled head in disapproval. Sahar Hamdi was the darling of the rich Saudi tourists. Some nights she would dance on a stage covered by banknotes and have her dance-weary feet bathed by the Saudis’ champagne. But by 1993 she too had supposedly seen the light and was talking of retirement for the sake of religion.

  Fundamentalists, impatient with the pace of artists’ resignations, wanted the government to ban belly dance at once, and for good. But belly dancing was a big draw for the rich Arabs from the Persian Gulf who poured into Cairo every summer. To accommodate both sides, the government came up with one of its famous half measures: it stopped issuing permits to new performers other than classical folk artists but didn’t ban the dance outright. When I decided to write a story about the controversy, Sahar looked at the floor and said nothing. “Do you want me to find someone else to translate?” I asked. She nodded. She didn’t want to visit Cairo nightclubs or talk to dancers. She had told me once that Souhair Zaki had danced at her parents’ wedding. Now, Sahar felt that the way Souhair displayed her body was sinful.

  But even Sahar wasn’t all that comfortable with demands on the government to ban this and ban that. She felt religion was a personal matter that shouldn’t be turned into p
olitical compulsion. The Islamic revolution she wanted would come through the gradual persuasion of people, not through force. That attitude had prevailed in Egypt and seemed to have served the country well. It was easy to buy alcohol in Cairo, but none of my Egyptian friends drank. Where Saudis had to be herded to prayers by religious police, Egyptians poured voluntarily into their mosques. Many had the dark, permanent bruise of the devout on their foreheads, acquired by a lifetime of touching the head to the ground in prayer.

  If belly dance were banned, it would set a disturbing precedent and lead to increased clamor for further Islamic restrictions. To see how serious the new rules were, I went to visit Mahmoud Ramadan, an official with the Department of Artistic Inspection. Mahmoud had been the chief inspector of dancers, issuing permits to performers whose costumes and choreography weren’t too risque. “I had a wonderful job in those days,” he sighed. He had seen performances by all of Egypt’s leading artists. To him, the real stars had shone in the 1950s, when every Egyptian movie included a belly-dance sequence. The dancers had been idolized and paid up to three thousand pounds a night to perform onstage and at fancy weddings.

  Now, Mahmoud was watching those women grow old, with no newcomers rising to replace them. “The next generation isn’t as good, and after them, well …” His voice trailed off as he gestured at the empty desk in front of him.

  The restrictions also threatened the band of women artisans who sewed the dancers’ elaborate costumes. The most famous costumier in Egypt inhabited a tiny cubicle in the midst of the vast Khan el Khalili bazaar. Inside, a glittering profusion of glass beads and glossy fabrics spilled out of boxes stacked to the ceiling. Customers could leaf through a book of photographs showing possible designs—skirts embroidered with sunbursts in blazes of orange and gold or peacocks in indigo and aqua. An aged seamstress took the orders and the clients’ measurements. “No Egyptians anymore,” she lamented. That day her customers had been a Finn and a German. As I fingered beads and tried on belts, another woman entered. She spoke to the seamstress in heavily accented Arabic, full of guttural “ch” sounds. “Excuse me,” I said in English. “Are you Israeli?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I came on the bus from Jerusalem today.” Before the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, she had to send European friends to buy her costumes for her. “They never fitted properly,” she said. “Peace has been very good for my act.” Not so good was the attention she was receiving back in Israel from fundamentalist Jews. Like their Muslim counterparts, they wanted belly dance banned. They were threatening to withdraw the kashrut certificate—the proof that food was prepared in accordance with Jewish law—from the hotels in which she performed. The daughter of Orthodox Jews herself, she had little patience with the rabbis. “This dance is part of our heritage,” she said. “Moses’s mother probably knew how to do it. We can’t let these old men tell us we have to give it up.”

  Back home I unwrapped my purchase: a cheap practice outfit of skirt, belt and bra. As I looked at the costume, Sahar wandered out of the office and into the sitting room. I waited for the disapproving frown. Instead, she rubbed the transparent fabric of the skirt through her fingertips.

  “How much did it cost?” she asked. I told her.

  “Can you draw me a map of how to get to the store?”

  “Why?” I asked, worried that she might be planning to have her fundamentalist friends picket the place, or worse.

  “I want to buy a costume like this,” she said. “I’m a wonderful dancer. I’ll dance for my husband after we’re married.”

  My own quest to become a wonderful dancer wasn’t going so well. Egyptian girls acquired the ability to dance as naturally as the ability to walk, watching their mothers, sisters and aunts. At my friend Sayed’s house, the three-year-old could already do fluid hip drops and scissor steps. Sayed’s sisters tried their best with me, but it was hard for them to teach something that they had never actually learned.

  “You need a maalimah,” they said. The awalim were the learned women of Egyptian arts, who danced, sang, played instruments and passed on the traditions to their apprentices. Finding a maalimah would have been easy enough a few decades ago. For centuries, clans of entertainers from the Nile villages handed the purest form of Egypt’s ancient dance from generation to generation. When these families settled in Cairo, they clustered in an artists’ quarter. Their remnants are still there, along Mohamed Ali Street, in little shops pungent with the glue and wood shavings of lute carvers and the stinky, drying fishskins of drum makers. From the open doorways, the wail of flutes or the thump-tap-tap of drums signaled a craftsman testing his wares.

  But the dancers had gone. “They became tired of the police bothering them,” an elderly craftsman explained. “The police treated them like prostitutes, always busting into their apartments to see if there were men there.” Right now, he said, no one was encouraging a daughter to seek a career in dance. “The pressure is too much. But it will pass. They’ll be back one day.” The old man looked almost ancient enough to have been around when it all happened before. When Gustave Flaubert visited Cairo in 1850, he found that all the famous dancers had been banned from the city because the governor thought they encouraged prostitution. He had to travel up the Nile to find the performers. His diaries record dancers so erotic that the accompanying musicians had to cover their eyes with a fold of their turbans so they wouldn’t become too aroused to play.

  With a hand that seemed too palsied for his trade, the old man scribbled an address in Arabic on the edge of a torn piece of newsprint. “Go to this place,” he said, handing it to me. “Tell her that the lute stringer sent you.”

  The taxi drove for almost an hour through Cairo’s dense jumble of apartment buildings. Just before the city ended abruptly in desert, the driver stopped to ask directions. As always in Egypt, the two men he asked each pointed a different way. Eventually we found the place: a neat house surrounded by oleander. Music drifted faintly over the low brick wall. The door was open, and I wandered in. Inside, half a dozen women and girls were dancing, balancing canes on their heads as their hips shook vigorously. The women signaled that I could join in. I tried as best I could to follow their movements, but their speed and suppleness were way beyond me. An hour later I gave up, exhausted. Flopping in a corner, I watched as the others continued. One woman, clearly the most graceful and skilled, led the dance. But if she were teaching, it was only by example. She said nothing to the others to correct their stance or movement.

  Finally one of the other women stopped, sweating, and went out to get some water. I followed, asking who the teacher was. The woman sipped her water slowly. We were, she said, in the home of one of Cairo’s best-loved performers. But for her own reasons she never appeared in public anymore. If I wanted to learn, she said, I would find them there in the afternoons, every Tuesday and Thursday.

  I had found my maalimah. From then on I went to the house whenever I could. Gradually I learned how to isolate each muscle group so that the cane stayed on my head. I learned to listen to the music and to follow it with my body. Watching the other women, I learned to move without the crass, bump-and-grind exaggerations that Westerners instinctively associate with oriental dance. In its pure form, less is more, and the most powerful movements are often the tiniest and most controlled twitches.

  I began to wish there was some way to counter the fundamentalists’ campaign against this artful dance. Finally I decided that, as a small act of solidarity with the dancers who refused to be pushed behind the veil by fundamentalists, I would take to the stage, somewhere in Cairo, for an unlicensed performance. I confided my plans to my friend Ian, the Australian ambassador. He buried his head in his hands in mock despair. “I can see it now: I’ll be hauled out of bed at 2 A.M. one morning to answer a ‘distressed Australian’ call, and it’ll be you—busted for belly dancing.”

  The more immediate problem was finding a venue modest enough to match my talents. I went back to Mohamed Ali Street for ad
vice. I’d become friendly with a young drum maker there, who played in the band of a famous dancer named Lucy. He immediately ruled out the fancy hotels and the clubs along the Pyramids Road. “They range from first class to fifth class,” Khalid mused. “What you need is something really tenth class.”

  He suggested the New Arizona Nightclub, admission ninety cents. With Tony in tow, I cased the joint. There were women as well as men in the audience, the performers’ standards weren’t very high, and the management seemed laissez-faire enough about risking an unlicensed dancer, so long as my act appeared to be the impulse of the moment. If the politeness police showed up, I was to pretend I’d been propelled to my feet by the irresistible power of the music.

  As I sat waiting for my cue a few nights later, I doubted I’d be able to sustain a defense of unpremeditated belly dancing. Under my coat I was wearing a black and gold costume with enough beading to buy a small Pacific atoll.

  I was to go on in the middle of the bill, after the third dancer, Ashgan. Like most of the performers, she was a middle-aged woman with a figure well beyond Rubenesque. Her dancing was indifferent, but the audience didn’t seem to mind. Judging from their turbans, mostly askew at this late hour, the bulk of the clients were Saydis, Egyptian country folk, in town for a big night out. Dotted among them, I could see one or two tables of Gulf Arabs in their distinctive red-checkered headcloths. The place seemed way too down market for wealthy Gulfies: either they’d drunk so much earlier in the night that they could no longer tell the difference, or the oil-price slump was more serious than I thought.