Farid Mesbaah, male belly dancer, hopped on a car in Cairo's Shobra district and strutted his stuff.
He clanged metal castanets, magically converted his hips into pistons and twirled his head around like a centrifuge. The crowd at tables lining a dirt alley clapped rhythmically. Young men in jeans jumped up to wiggle along.
Mesbaah was performing at the opening of the Old-Time Moon Cafe, a gig that — along with weddings, birthdays, nightclubs and circumcisions — is typical for belly dancers. Untypical, at least in recent years, are performances by men.
Male belly dancing, a centuries-old Egyptian tradition, is making a comeback — against the odds, considering its periodic suppression by government and religious officials. The problem for Mesbaah is that his craft has long been associated with homosexuality — a taboo in Egypt.
People are also reading…
"I just like to dance," says Mesbaah, who has seven children. "It's very sensual. I've been doing it since I was little."
Yesterday's norm
Mesbaah is shimmying in a society that has long struggled with ever-changing limits of social tolerance. A carved relief at a pharaonic-era tomb near Cairo shows today's dance prohibitions were yesterday's norm. It depicts a chorus line of men at a religious festival; each wears a sash knotted on his left hip, a fashion for dancing men and women that lingers today.
Male performers were once considered more reputable than females. In his book "The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians," Edward William Lane, an Englishman and prominent Arabic scholar who lived in 19th-century Cairo, observed that male dancers were preferred by Cairenes who thought women "ought not to expose themselves." From 1834 to 1849, women dancers, known as ghawazee, were banned from the city.
Rakia Hassan, 62, a retired dancer, recalls that in her childhood, men peddled their skills along with women on Muhammed Ali Street, then a one-stop shop for belly-dancer hires.
"It became a business like any other, and men were part of it," she says. "You know, Egyptians love to dance — boys, girls, whatever — so it was not unusual. However, Islamic trend has made it more difficult for the men."
Goes on in some nightclubs
During the reign of Gamal Abdul Nasser, male belly dancing all but disappeared because it smacked of monarchical decadence. Nasser took over Egypt in 1954, two years after King Farouk was overthrown by military officers.
No one knows the number of male dancers now. There is no belly-dance association, an indication of the profession's seedy reputation. (Belly dance is a Western term invented by the French; Egyptians call it Oriental or "homegrown" dance.)
Male dancing, along with officially proscribed activities such as open prostitution and smoking hashish, goes on in some nightclubs. Mahmoud Karim, 20, who dances in discos along Pyramids Street, says he pretends to be an enthusiastic customer but actually gets paid by clubs to perform. "Just in case someone objects, the owner says I'm an amateur," he says.
Tolerance for male dance doesn't mean tolerance for homosexuality — even among the dancers, who have been known for at least 150 years by an Arabic word, khawal, that's become insulting slang for gay men.
Gay life is dangerous in Cairo, where plainclothes police are on the lookout for hustlers on the streets. "I'm careful not to look like I'm seducing customers," Karim said.
