Over the years, I have watched hundreds of Egyptian films.

Some taught me about dancers. Others introduced me to musicians, singers, actors, composers, and the social customs of Egypt. In many ways, Egyptian cinema became one of my greatest teachers. Through film, I learned not only about Egyptian dance, but about Egyptian life.

Again and again, however, I encountered two names that seemed to appear everywhere:

Raya and Sakina.

Their story appeared in films, television productions, theater, and popular conversation. Different generations of Egyptian actresses portrayed them. Dancers appeared within their stories. Comedians encountered them. Eventually, even one of Egypt’s most beloved singers and actresses, Shadia, stepped onto the theatrical stage to become Raya.

Their names were so deeply embedded in Egyptian culture that I eventually found myself asking a simple question:

Why?

Why had the story of two women from Alexandria remained alive in Egyptian memory for more than a century?

The answer reveals much more than a sensational criminal case. It opens a window onto Alexandria in the early twentieth century, the lives and economic circumstances of Egyptian women, the meaning of gold and personal possessions, and the extraordinary way history can be transformed into popular culture.

For dancers who want to understand Egypt beyond the dance itself, that makes the story worth knowing.

Alexandria, 1920

The story unfolds principally in Alexandria in 1919 and 1920.

Today, people outside Egypt often imagine the country through pyramids, temples, villages, and desert landscapes. Alexandria was something quite different. It was a bustling Mediterranean port city, commercially active and culturally diverse, filled with markets, cafés, theaters, businesses, workers, merchants, entertainers, and people from communities with roots throughout Egypt and across the Mediterranean.

This was the urban world in which Raya and Sakina lived.

The sisters had come originally from Upper Egypt. By the time of the murders, they were living in Alexandria’s Labban district. In November 1920, police began uncovering women’s bodies buried beneath the floors of houses associated with them.

Eventually, seventeen victims were connected to the investigation.

The discoveries horrified Alexandria.

But to understand another important part of the story, we have to understand something about women and wealth during this period.

Women often wore their wealth.

When Gold Was More Than Decoration

Today, dancers tend to think of bracelets, necklaces, earrings, coins, and other ornaments primarily as adornment or costume.

For Egyptian women of the early twentieth century, gold could mean considerably more.

Banks certainly existed in Egypt by this period, particularly in commercial centers such as Cairo and Alexandria. But personal banking was not an ordinary financial tool available to or routinely used by every woman. Gold provided something tangible and portable. Jewelry could be accumulated, given at marriage, inherited, sold when money was needed, and passed from one generation to another.

It could be beauty and wealth at the same time.

A bracelet was therefore not necessarily just a bracelet.

A necklace was not merely something beautiful worn around the neck.

The jewelry a woman wore could represent real economic value—value that could travel with her.

This distinction is important when we come to Raya and Sakina.

According to the criminal case assembled against the group, women were lured into houses associated with the sisters, killed by members of the gang, stripped of jewelry and valuables, and buried beneath the floors.

Gold was therefore not incidental to the story.

It was part of the story.

And that is something I think dancers can understand in a particularly visual way.

We have all seen old photographs and films in which women wear bracelets stacked along their wrists, necklaces across the chest, earrings, rings, coins, and other ornaments. A modern viewer may look at those things and see decoration.

But the woman wearing them may have understood them very differently.

She may have been wearing part of her financial security.

Seventeen Women Disappeared

As women disappeared, anxiety spread through Alexandria.

Families searched for daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and neighbors. Then came the discoveries beneath the floors.

Seventeen women’s bodies were ultimately connected with the investigation. Raya and Sakina, their husbands, and other members of the group were arrested. The resulting case became a national sensation.

There was another reason it was extraordinary.

Two women stood at the center of it.

At the conclusion of the trial in 1921, Raya and Sakina, their husbands, and two other men were sentenced to death. The executions were carried out later that year. Raya and Sakina became historically significant as the first women executed under Egypt’s modern secular justice system.

Yet there is an important detail that tends to disappear when history becomes legend.

Raya and Sakina did not act alone.

The criminal operation included men, including their husbands. Six people were condemned to death.

Nevertheless, history remembered two names:

Raya and Sakina.

And then Egyptian popular culture took over.

The Raya and Sakina I Met at the Movies

This is where the story became particularly interesting to me.

I did not first encounter Raya and Sakina in court documents or history books.

I met them in Egyptian movies.

And apparently, I met them more than once.

Looking back, I now realize that several different productions had become blended together in my memory because Egyptian cinema and theater repeatedly returned to the story.

One of the earliest was the 1952 film Raya wa Sakina, directed by Salah Abu Seif. Negma Ibrahim portrayed Raya and Zouzou Hamdy El-Hakim played Sakina.

What caught my attention as a dancer, however, was another performer in the film.

Zeinat Elwi appeared as Warda al-Ghajariya, a dancer.

That stayed with me.

Three years later came another treatment of the story, the 1955 comedy Ismail Yassin Meets Raya and Sakina. Once again, Negma Ibrahim played Raya and Zouzou Hamdy El-Hakim portrayed Sakina.

And once again, a dancer appeared prominently within the story.

This time it was Naamat Mokhtar, playing the dancer Saniya Agamiya. After performing, Saniya prepares to leave for another engagement. Her jewelry draws her into the world of Raya and Sakina, where she becomes an intended victim.

When I saw this film, I did not know that decades later I would be thinking about why a dancer had been placed in that role.

But now I do.

Why Dancers Appeared in the Story

I want to make an important distinction.

I have not found sufficient historical evidence to say that Raya and Sakina specifically targeted dancers.

That would be a different claim.

What we can document is that Egyptian filmmakers repeatedly placed dancers within cinematic retellings of the Raya and Sakina story.

That interests me enormously.

A dancer was an immediately understandable visual figure in Egyptian cinema. She might be working in a nightclub or performing at a wedding. She could be shown wearing bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and other jewelry. Her appearance instantly communicated movement, nightlife, public visibility, and sometimes prosperity.

In the 1955 film, the connection is explicit. Naamat Mokhtar’s character is a dancer whose gold jewelry makes her attractive to the gang.

Whether or not that represented the actual historical victims, it tells us something about the visual language Egyptian filmmakers used when retelling the story.

And that brings us back to the gold.

A dancer wearing jewelry on screen was not simply sparkling under stage lights.

To an Egyptian audience familiar with the older social meaning of gold, those bracelets could also represent something worth stealing.

Shadia Becomes Raya

The story did not disappear with the films of the 1950s.

Nearly thirty years later, Raya and Sakina returned in one of the most famous theatrical productions in modern Egyptian popular culture.

The 1982 stage production Raya wa Sakina starred Shadia as Raya and Suhair El Bably as Sakina.

For dancers outside Egypt who may not recognize the significance of that casting, Shadia was not simply another Egyptian actress. She was one of the great stars of Egyptian cinema and popular music. Beginning her film career in the late 1940s, she became enormously popular as both an actress and singer, appearing in more than one hundred films. Her screen career ranged from light musical comedies and romances to serious dramatic roles, and songs she introduced through Egyptian cinema became part of Egyptian popular culture. By the time she played Raya, generations of Egyptians had grown up watching and listening to her.

This makes Raya wa Sakina particularly interesting. Shadia was already a beloved national figure when she stepped into the role of one of Egypt's most notorious women. Remarkably, it became her only major theatrical role.

Opposite her was Suhair El Bably, herself one of Egypt’s major comic and dramatic actresses, as Sakina. Abdel Moneim Madbouly, one of the country’s great comic actors, played Hasaballah. Hamdy Ahmed originally appeared as Abdel Aal, with Ahmed Bedair later taking over the role.

And another actress familiar to anyone who has spent years watching old Egyptian films appeared in the production:

Samiha Tawfik, who played Umm Badawi.

Samiha Tawfik is another name that dancers outside Egypt may not immediately recognize, although they may very well have seen her without knowing her name. She was a prolific Egyptian character actress whose long career stretched across decades of Egyptian cinema, theater, and television. With her striking features and commanding screen presence, Western viewers of classic Egyptian cinema may recognize her in the kinds of roles she often inhabited: strong, glamorous, worldly, seductive, or formidable women—the nightclub woman, the femme fatale, the tough neighborhood character, or simply the woman whose arrival immediately changed the atmosphere of a scene.

For students who watch Egyptian films primarily to find dance sequences, performers like Samiha Tawfik can easily remain unidentified because she was not one of the famous dancers we are searching for. Yet she belonged to the same cinematic world. She appeared alongside many of the singers, dancers, comedians, and leading actors whose films preserve so much of twentieth-century Egyptian entertainment culture.

This production did something extraordinary.

It transformed one of Egypt’s darkest criminal stories into musical comedy.

Songs, jokes, theatrical exaggeration, and the enormous charisma of Shadia and Suhair El Bably turned Raya and Sakina into stage characters audiences could laugh at while still recognizing the notorious story behind them.

Think about what that means.

More than sixty years after the crimes, Egyptian audiences knew Raya and Sakina well enough that the story no longer needed to be introduced as history.

It could be played with.

The audience already knew who these women were.

That is cultural memory.

And Then Samiha Tawfik Became Sakina

The following year brought yet another incarnation—and this time a familiar face moved into one of the two central roles.

In the 1983 film Raya wa Sakina, Naima El-Soghier played Raya and Samiha Tawfik played Sakina.

That makes Samiha Tawfik’s participation especially interesting. In the famous 1982 stage production, she had been Umm Badawi. One year later, in a completely different interpretation of the story, she became Sakina herself.

For someone watching Egyptian cinema across many decades, this is one of the pleasures of recognizing the performers. The same faces return in entirely different circumstances. An actress whom we may have seen as a nightclub woman in one film, a villain in another, or a supporting character beside a famous dancer suddenly appears years later as one of the most notorious women in Egyptian cultural memory.

The 1983 film approached the legend as broad comedy. It also featured Sherihan, who would become one of Egypt’s most recognizable entertainers, celebrated for the elaborate musical and dance spectacles of the Ramadan Fawazeer, and comedian Younes Shalaby. Sherihan played Folla, who becomes associated with Raya, while Younes Shalaby played Azzouz, who becomes associated with Sakina.

Once again, the filmmakers were not simply reconstructing a criminal case.

They were using characters every Egyptian already knew.

By this point, Raya and Sakina had traveled an astonishing distance—from newspaper headlines and courtroom proceedings to serious film drama, comedy, musical theater, and popular entertainment.

They had become cultural characters.

Four Productions, Four Different Memories

The progression fascinates me.

In 1952, Raya wa Sakina presented the story dramatically, with Negma Ibrahim as Raya, Zouzou Hamdy El-Hakim as Sakina, and dancer Zeinat Elwi appearing as Warda.

In 1955, Ismail Yassin Meets Raya and Sakina moved the story toward comedy while again featuring Negma Ibrahim and Zouzou Hamdy El-Hakim as the sisters. This time dancer Naamat Mokhtar appeared as Saniya Agamiya, whose gold jewelry places her in danger.

In 1982, the theatrical Raya wa Sakina transformed the story into celebrated musical comedy, with Shadia as Raya, Suhair El Bably as Sakina, and Samiha Tawfik appearing as Umm Badawi.

Then in 1983, another Raya wa Sakina film gave the roles to Naima El-Soghier and Samiha Tawfik, with Sherihan and Younes Shalaby participating in a comic variation on the famous identities.

Four productions.

More than thirty years separating the first from the last.

Different actresses.

Different genres.

Different tones.

But always the same two names.

Raya and Sakina.

For American readers, perhaps the easiest comparison is Bonnie and Clyde. The historical Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were real people involved in real crimes, yet “Bonnie and Clyde” eventually became something more than two names in a criminal record. Their names became cultural shorthand—recognizable enough to be revisited in films, music, theater, comedy, and popular conversation without audiences needing the entire story explained again. Raya and Sakina occupy something of that territory in Egyptian cultural memory. The history remains, but the names themselves have become characters that each generation can recognize and reinterpret.

That tells us something about how deeply the story entered Egyptian consciousness.

Why Should a Dancer Know Any of This?

Someone could reasonably ask what seventeen murdered women in Alexandria have to do with Egyptian dance.

My answer is simple:

To understand Egyptian dance, one must understand Egypt itself.

Dance does not exist separately from the people who created it.

If we study only steps, hip movements, costumes, and choreography, we learn something about dancing. But we do not necessarily learn very much about Egypt.

The dance emerged from a society.

It came from people who had particular ways of hearing music, speaking, celebrating, mourning, flirting, joking, dressing, moving, and expressing themselves. Those people lived within families and neighborhoods. They went to markets and cafés. They worried about money. They celebrated marriages. Women accumulated jewelry. Musicians worked. Entertainers moved between social worlds. Cities changed around them.

All of this belongs to the cultural environment of Egyptian dance.

That is why watching Egyptian films taught me so much.

Sometimes I was watching the dancer.

But sometimes I learned just as much by watching everyone around her.

More Than Gold on a Wrist

When we look at an old photograph of an Egyptian woman with bracelets stacked along her wrists or necklaces hanging across her chest, perhaps we should look twice.

The first time, we see fashion.

The second time, we may see economics, family, inheritance, marriage, security, status, and a woman’s ability to possess something of value herself.

That changes what the jewelry means.

And it changes the way we understand the Raya and Sakina story.

Their story is certainly about crime. It is about seventeen women who lost their lives, and those women should not disappear behind the notoriety of the two women whose names history remembers.

But it is also about Alexandria.

It is about gender.

It is about money.

It is about visible wealth.

It is about Egyptian cinema.

It is about the way one generation takes an event from history and tells it to the next generation—and the way that next generation transforms it again.

And, unexpectedly, it is also about how someone like me, many decades later and thousands of miles away, could encounter a piece of Egyptian history simply by watching Egyptian movies.

That may be the part of the story that matters most to me.

Egyptian cinema taught me to look beyond the dancer.

The dancer was never standing alone.

There was an entire society around her.

Raya and Sakina belong to that society too—not because they were dancers, but because understanding the Egypt in which their story occurred, and the Egypt that continued retelling that story for generations afterward, helps us understand something about the culture from which Egyptian dance emerged.

Raya and Sakina belong to that society too—not because they were dancers, but because understanding the Egypt in which their story occurred, and the Egypt that continued retelling that story for generations afterward, helps us understand something about the culture from which Egyptian dance emerged.

Raya and Sakina Are Still in Alexandria

The story did not remain only on movie screens and theater stages.

More than a century after the crimes, people still go looking for Raya and Sakina in Alexandria.

In the old Al-Labban district, a building associated with the sisters has become an unofficial tourist attraction. Visitors come to see the place connected in popular memory with the murders, and the exterior has been decorated with photographs and material relating to Raya and Sakina, their accomplices, the victims, and the criminal case.

This is not a conventional museum with carefully arranged galleries and display cases. It is something much more unusual: a neighborhood preserving and interpreting its own notorious history.

There is even a Raya and Sakina bazaar nearby, along with a café bearing their names. The story that began with frightened families searching for missing women in Alexandria in 1920 has, more than a century later, become part of the cultural geography of the neighborhood.

There is also an intriguing complication.

The building visitors identify today with Raya and Sakina may not actually be the original murder house in the form in which it existed in 1920. Egyptian reporting indicates that the original building was demolished and another structure later occupied the site. Meanwhile, another old house in the neighborhood was used as a location for Salah Abu Seif’s 1952 film Raya wa Sakina because its architecture retained the appearance needed to recreate the period.

Over time, the historical site, the film location, and popular memory appear to have become intertwined.

I find that fascinating.

It is almost a physical version of what happened to Raya and Sakina themselves.

First there were the actual women and the actual crimes.

Then came newspaper stories and courtroom accounts.

Then films.

Then comedy.

Then musical theater.

Then television.

And eventually people began visiting Alexandria to stand in a place connected with the story they already knew.

The neighborhood itself became another way of telling it.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the power of cultural memory more clearly than that. Raya and Sakina no longer exist only as historical figures. Their names survive on buildings, in a bazaar, at a café, on theater stages, in films, and in the stories Egyptians continue to tell about them.

The Alexandria of 1920 is gone.

But Raya and Sakina are still there.

Sources and Further Reading

• Historical background: Hanan Hammad, “Murderous Economies: Sex Trafficking and Political Economic Change in Alexandria, Egypt, 1914–1921,” for historical context surrounding the Raya and Sakina case and early twentieth-century Alexandria.

• 1952 — Raya wa Sakina: elCinema, film and cast records. Directed by Salah Abu Seif; Negma Ibrahim as Raya, Zouzou Hamdy El-Hakim as Sakina, and Zeinat Elwi as Warda al-Ghajariya, the dancer.

• 1955 — Ismail Yassin Meets Raya and Sakina: elCinema, film, cast, and synopsis records. Naamat Mokhtar appears as Saniya Agamiya, the dancer whose gold jewelry makes her a target of the gang.

• 1982 — Raya wa Sakina, stage production: elCinema, production and cast records. Shadia as Raya, Suhair El Bably as Sakina, and Samiha Tawfik as Umm Badawi. Performances began in Alexandria in the summer of 1982.

• 1983 — Raya wa Sakina: elCinema, film and cast records. Naima El-Soghier as Raya and Samiha Tawfik as Sakina, with Sherihan and Younes Shalaby in the film’s comic variation on their identities.

Every so often, a piece of scholarship arrives at exactly the right moment. Recently, someone shared with me a copy of anthropologist Adrienne L. Kaeppler’s 1978 review article, Dance in Anthropological Perspective. Although it was published nearly fifty years ago, I had never read it. As I turned the pages, I found myself smiling more and more. Here was an anthropologist arguing that dance is far more than entertainment, decoration, or artistic expression. Dance, she wrote, is a structured cultural system worthy of the same serious study given to language, religion, and kinship.

What surprised me was not simply how much I agreed with her. It was the realization that, for most of my life, I had been asking an anthropological question without recognizing it. I had never thought of my work in those terms. I considered myself a dancer, a teacher, and an observer of Egyptian culture. Yet the questions that had occupied me for decades were the very kinds of questions anthropologists ask when they seek to understand how a culture expresses itself through the body.

Kaeppler argues that dance should never be treated as the “frosting on the cake” of culture. Instead, movement itself reveals how a society organizes and expresses its values. Dance is not merely a performance; it is one way a culture embodies itself. Those words resonated deeply because they echoed something I had been observing throughout my own study of Egyptian dance.

Like many dancers, I originally watched performances for their visible movements. I admired elegant arms, expressive faces, beautiful costumes, dramatic shimmies, and memorable combinations. Over time, however, another question quietly displaced all the others. Rather than asking what movements a dancer performed, I found myself wondering what made an Egyptian dancer unmistakably Egyptian—not simply Egyptian by nationality, but Egyptian in the way she inhabited the music.

Kaeppler discusses an idea introduced by anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku, who described what she called a cultural “body dialect.” Just as people learn a spoken language, they also acquire culturally specific ways of standing, walking, gesturing, and moving through the world. These patterns become so deeply ingrained that people rarely recognize them in themselves.

That concept immediately reminded me of something I heard decades ago during a military orientation in Japan. The instructor told us, “People can see you are American. You walk American. You gesture American.” At the time, it seemed like an interesting observation. Years later, after watching hundreds of Egyptian films and countless live performances, I realized I had been asking essentially the same question. If cultures possess distinctive body dialects, then surely Egyptian dancers possess one as well. The challenge was discovering what that body dialect actually was.

For more than fifty years I studied the great Egyptian dancers: Samia Gamal, Taheyya Karioka, Naima Akef, Suhair Zaki, Nagwa Fouad, Fifi Abdo, Dina, and many others. They differed in personality, favorite movements, musical interpretation, and emotional expression. Yet despite those differences, they all shared something unmistakable. I recognized it immediately whenever I watched them, but for years I could not explain exactly what I was seeing.

As I continued reading Kaeppler’s paper, I noticed that much of the anthropological literature she reviewed focused on breaking dance into progressively smaller units of movement, searching for the dance equivalent of sounds, words, and grammar. That work remains valuable and has contributed enormously to dance scholarship. At the same time, reading those discussions helped me understand why my own research had followed a different path. I had never been primarily interested in cataloging movements. My question was never how many hip drops, figure eights, or undulations Egyptian dancers performed. Instead, I found myself asking a more fundamental question: How do Egyptian dancers embody musical time?

That question eventually became the foundation of what I now call the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC®).

For decades, Western belly dance instruction has largely been explained through the language of isolations. Students are taught to move the hips independently, the chest independently, or the shoulders independently while attempting to stabilize the rest of the body. Yet this model has never explained what I observed in Egyptian dancers. To Western eyes, Egyptian dance may appear to consist of isolations, but I have never believed that is what is happening. What we perceive as an isolated movement is better understood as part of a continuously organized relationship between the dancer's body and the musical pulse.

What appears to Western eyes to be an isolated movement may instead be the visible result of a deeper organizational principle: the dancer's body continuously embodying the musical pulse. The dancer is not merely moving one body part while keeping the others still. Whether she travels across the stage or remains in one place, whether she performs a simple gesture or a complex combination, the underlying embodiment of the music continues without interruption. The vocabulary changes from moment to moment, but the organization does not. That realization fundamentally changed the way I understood Egyptian dance.

People often ask when I first recognized what eventually became the Egyptian Dance Code®. Ironically, it did not happen while watching films. The movies taught me timing, gesture, facial expression, and musical interpretation, but the organizing principle itself became unmistakably clear only after watching Fifi Abdo perform live in the late 1990s. At that moment I stopped seeing individual movements and began seeing something much deeper—a dancer inhabiting musical time. Once I recognized that underlying organization, I began finding it everywhere I looked.

Reading Kaeppler’s article did not prove the Egyptian Dance Code®, nor did it answer every question I continue to explore. What it gave me was something equally valuable. It helped me recognize that I had been asking an anthropological question all along. For years I believed I was studying movement. Kaeppler helped me realize that I had actually been studying musical organization expressed through the body. That is a different question, and it is the question that eventually became the Egyptian Dance Code®.

Near the conclusion of her paper, Kaeppler encourages anthropologists to take dance seriously because movement can reveal aspects of culture that cannot be understood in any other way. I could not agree more. Whether future researchers ultimately confirm, refine, challenge, or reject aspects of the Egyptian Dance Code® is exactly how scholarship should work. Ideas should be tested, observations examined, and evidence debated.

My hope is not that every reader immediately agrees with my conclusions. Instead, I hope this work encourages dancers, teachers, musicians, and researchers to watch Egyptian dance with fresh eyes and to ask the question that has guided my own observations for more than fifty years: How do Egyptian dancers embody musical time? If that question inspires others to look more deeply at the relationship between culture, music, and movement, then discovering Adrienne Kaeppler’s paper at this point in my journey will have been a gift indeed.

Every teacher remembers that student. Janet walks into her first Egyptian dance class because she loves the music. Like so many beginning students, she is excited, nervous, and quietly wondering whether she belongs there. She watches everyone else, hoping she won’t make a mistake, hoping that one day she, too, will look like a dancer. What she doesn’t realize is that she already possesses the most important qualities she will ever bring to the dance. She has her own personality, her own emotional responses to music, her own sense of humor, and her own life experiences. Somewhere inside her are elegance, joy, curiosity, earthiness, confidence, tenderness, boldness, and musical sensitivity. She simply hasn’t discovered how those qualities can be expressed through Egyptian dance.

After more than fifty years of teaching, I have come to believe that students do not arrive as empty vessels waiting to be filled. They arrive carrying the very qualities that may someday make them memorable performers. My responsibility has never been to replace those qualities with my own. It has been to help students discover what is already there. That may sound like a simple distinction. It isn’t. It changes everything about how a teacher approaches education.

Technique, of course, is essential. Every dancer needs vocabulary, coordination, balance, discipline, musical understanding, and a structural foundation. Without those things, artistic expression has nothing upon which to stand. A teacher who neglects technique does students no favors. But technique is not the destination. Technique gives dancers a language. Language allows us to communicate. Those are not the same thing. A child may learn every rule of grammar and still struggle to write a beautiful poem. Another child may use that very same grammar to create something unforgettable. Grammar gives us the tools to communicate, but it does not tell us what we should say. The same is true of Egyptian dance.

Over several decades, I studied hundreds of Egyptian films. I watched the great dancers repeatedly—not simply to admire them, but to understand what made each one unforgettable. Gradually, a pattern began to emerge.

Egyptian dance, particularly in its solo performance tradition, celebrates individuality. Even when great dancers performed to the same piece of music, they did not become copies of one another. Their movement choices, timing, emotional expression, and even the way they listened to the orchestra differed.

What fascinated me was not their differences. It was that they all remained unmistakably Egyptian while expressing themselves so completely as individuals. Samia Gamal moved with extraordinary elegance. Her arms floated naturally with the music, framing her body rather than decorating it. Her arm work became part of the music itself. Nagwa Fouad brought theatrical presence to every performance. She understood how to command a stage while remaining deeply connected to the music. Suhair Zaki seemed to dance with the entire orchestra. Her musicality extended through her wrists, hands, and fingertips until every phrase felt complete. Fifi Abdo possessed an earthy confidence that belonged entirely to her. Audiences didn’t simply watch her dance. They felt as though they knew her. None of these women danced alike. None of them should have. They shared a tradition. They did not share a personality. That observation changed me as a teacher. I realized my responsibility was never to produce another Sausan. It was to help students understand the language of Egyptian dance well enough that they could eventually speak it with voices entirely their own.

Years later, another observation reinforced that belief. When Mahmoud Reda created the Reda Dance Troupe, he was pursuing a different artistic goal. A theatrical ensemble requires visual cohesion, synchronized movement, and spatial precision. Ballet training helped create that unity, allowing a company of dancers to move together as a single artistic body. Solo Egyptian dance asks something different. Instead of celebrating uniformity, it celebrates the individual. Neither approach is better. They simply serve different artistic purposes.

That realization confirmed something I had already begun discovering through years of observation. If Egyptian dance itself celebrates individuality, then teaching should preserve it—not erase it. That is why I have never wanted students to become copies of me. I want them to understand the structure of the dance. I want them to understand the music. I want them to understand why movements exist and how they relate to what they hear. But once they understand those things, I want something even more important. I want them to become themselves. Because no teacher can give a student an artistic voice. The teacher can only help the student discover the one she already possesses.

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If helping students discover their own artistic voice is the goal, then the next question becomes: How does a teacher help a student discover something she doesn’t yet know she possesses? My answer has never been, “By teaching personality.” Personality cannot be taught. What can be taught is the language through which personality is expressed.

Every student begins in much the same place. She needs structure. She needs guidance. She needs someone to explain how movement relates to the music and why the body moves the way it does. She needs repetition because repetition builds confidence, and confidence eventually allows her to stop worrying about herself and begin paying attention to something much more important—the music.

Early in a student’s education, correction is essential. But correction is not the destination.

One of the greatest challenges a teacher faces is knowing when to stop correcting every detail and begin allowing the student to discover her own artistic instincts. That moment cannot be placed on a calendar. It happens quietly, almost without anyone noticing.

One day the student stops asking, “Am I doing this correctly?” and begins asking, “What is the music saying?” That is the moment real learning begins. For me, teaching has always been about developing the ear as much as the body.

During the early stages of my curriculum, students dance primarily to Egyptian pop music. I have found that it provides an inviting doorway for Western ears while remaining authentically Egyptian. As students become comfortable with its phrasing and rhythmic structure, they gradually stop thinking about simply following the beat and begin listening to the music itself. Eventually they begin working with complete choreographies.

Many dancers think choreography is the goal. I have never believed that. To me, choreography is a bridge. It allows students to experience an entire piece of music from beginning to end while learning how introductions, instrumental passages, recurring themes, rhythmic transitions, and climaxes relate to movement. They are not simply memorizing steps. They are learning how a composition is built. The choreography is temporary. The understanding is permanent. That distinction is one of the foundations of my teaching.

As students learn a choreography, they are also learning the music itself. They should know where they are within the composition at every moment. They should recognize what has just happened and anticipate what is likely to happen next.

Eventually, something remarkable begins to happen.

If a student momentarily forgets the choreography, she no longer panics. She hears the next musical phrase. She recognizes the next section. She understands where she is. Perhaps the remembered choreography returns. Perhaps another movement presents itself naturally. Either way, she continues dancing because the music—not the choreography—is guiding her.

Understanding replaces memorization. Those three words summarize much of what I have tried to accomplish as a teacher. Memorization is fragile. Understanding is flexible. A dancer who remembers only choreography may freeze the moment something unexpected happens. A dancer who understands the music simply continues the conversation. That understanding becomes even more important when students begin dancing to live music.

A recording never changes. Live musicians do. A violinist may extend a phrase. A percussionist may alter the dynamics. An entire orchestra may unexpectedly repeat a section, shorten another, or change the emotional direction of a performance. Sometimes they even test the dancer. Not to embarrass her, but to discover whether she is truly listening. If she understands the musical language, she smiles, adapts, and continues dancing. If she knows only the choreography, she may suddenly discover she has nowhere to go. That is why I have always believed students must learn the music rather than merely dance to it. When they understand the music, they become free.

Freedom, however, is often misunderstood. Freedom does not come from ignoring structure. Freedom grows from structure. A jazz musician practices scales for years before improvising. An actor studies technique before stepping onto the stage. A writer learns grammar before writing poetry. Egyptian dance asks no less of its students. The stronger the foundation, the greater the freedom.

Over the years I have watched this transformation happen again and again. Some students arrived after years of previous dance training. They already possessed movement vocabulary, but they had learned to organize the body differently and to hear the music differently. Relearning those habits was not easy. Sometimes it took months. Occasionally it took years. Then, almost without warning, everything changed. They stopped trying to remember movements. They started responding to music. The surprise was never mine; it was theirs, and watching that moment never grows old. Students who once doubted themselves suddenly realize they are no longer merely performing movements. They are communicating. They hear the music differently. They trust themselves differently. The dance begins belonging to them instead of to their teacher.

That is also why I eventually stop correcting everything. Sometimes another instructor would immediately call a movement wrong. I don’t always. Occasionally what appears incorrect is simply the first glimpse of a student’s own artistic personality emerging. That does not mean anything goes. Egyptian dance still has its own musical language, cultural traditions, and aesthetic principles. Those deserve respect. But once students understand that language, they must also be allowed to speak it. Otherwise education becomes imitation, and imitation has never been my goal. My goal has always been understanding, because understanding eventually leads to something no teacher can manufacture. It leads to artistry.

———————————

There comes a day when every student must discover whether she has truly learned. For my students, that day is graduation.

After a year of study, each graduate presents a complete performance to prerecorded Middle Eastern music. The choreography is not intended to demonstrate that she can remember a sequence of movements. It demonstrates that she understands the architecture of the music well enough to sustain an entire performance from beginning to end. That difference matters. The performance takes place in my Egyptian restaurant. I have always believed that matters, too. A classroom is a place to learn. A restaurant is a place to perform.

On graduation night the student steps into a real performance environment. Friends, family, classmates, customers, musicians, and members of the community gather to celebrate what she has accomplished. More than once, graduates have had loved ones fly into the San Francisco Bay Area simply to witness that evening. They are not coming to watch another dance recital; they are coming to witness a transformation. So is the graduate.

For many students, it is the first evening they truly believe they are dancers. They walk onto the floor. The music begins. They trust what they have learned. And they discover something no teacher can ever give them—confidence. That confidence is earned, not awarded.

The Certificate of Completion they receive at the end of the evening recognizes an important accomplishment. It acknowledges a year’s worth of discipline, perseverance, and study. But I have never believed it marks the completion of their education. It marks the beginning.

From that evening forward, students continue developing their musical ear. They begin recognizing singers, composers, orchestras, and the personalities of individual musicians. They learn to anticipate musical changes, to converse with live bands, and to trust themselves enough to make artistic decisions in the moment.

No certificate can measure that journey, nor should it. Occasionally I am asked what I think about multi-level dance certifications. My answer is probably different from what people expect. I have no objection to continued study. In fact, I encourage it. Every serious artist should remain a lifelong student. What I question is the assumption that additional certifications necessarily measure deeper artistry.

When I see several certification levels listed after a dancer’s name, I know something valuable. I know she has devoted time, discipline, and commitment to a particular curriculum. I respect that. What I still do not know is far more interesting. I do not know whether she hears the music deeply. I do not know whether she understands the lyrics. I do not know whether she recognizes the orchestra’s subtle changes. I do not know whether she understands the history behind the music she has chosen, who composed it, who sang it, why it became important, or how different Egyptian dancers interpreted that same piece of music. I do not know whether she has developed an artistic voice that belongs unmistakably to her. Only her dancing can answer those questions. A certificate tells me where someone studied. Her dancing tells me what she learned.

One of the greatest moments of my teaching career happened years after one of my students graduated. Her name is Mary. One day she shared a choreography she had created herself. As I watched, I realized almost immediately that I would never have interpreted the music the way she had. At first, that surprised me. Then it delighted me because that was exactly what I had hoped would happen. Her choreography was thoughtful. It was musical. It was authentic. Most importantly, it was completely Mary. She had made artistic choices I never would have made, yet every one of them grew naturally from her understanding of the music. I wasn’t watching my choreography. I was watching her. That was the moment I realized she no longer needed me in the same way. Not because she had stopped learning, because she had learned how to continue learning on her own. To me, that is the greatest success a teacher can experience.

When I think about my own teacher, I still call her “my teacher.” I always will. She taught me everything. She gave me the foundation upon which I built my own observations, my own questions, and eventually my own understanding of Egyptian dance. Everything I have discovered since then rests upon the education she gave me. That is what great teachers do. They do not ask students to remain copies of them. They give students such a strong foundation that they continue growing long after formal lessons have ended.

Over the years, people have occasionally recognized one of my students and asked, “Does she study with you?” Sometimes they recognize the expressive use of the arms. Sometimes they recognize the musical sensitivity. Sometimes they simply recognize something in the way the dancer carries herself. That always makes me smile. Not because she dances like me, because she understands the tradition I tried to teach her. I have never wanted to create another Sausan. If every graduate danced exactly like I do, then somewhere along the way I failed as a teacher. There is already one of me. There has never been another Samia. There has never been another Suhair. There has never been another Fifi. There should never be another Janet, either. There should only be the very best version of Janet that Egyptian dance can help her become.

When this essay began, Janet walked quietly into her first dance class wondering whether she belonged there. I hope that years later someone watches her dance and never asks where she studied. I hope they never ask how many certifications she earned. I hope they simply watch for a few moments, smile, and say, “She has her own style” because that style was never mine to give. It was already hers. My responsibility was simply to help her discover it. Everything else was just teaching.

I’d like to hear from you. What did your best teacher give you that no certificate could measure?

For decades, I have listened to conversations about “authentic Egyptian dance,” and I have increasingly noticed that dancers often use the same words while meaning very different things. Terms such as baladi, shaabi, raqs sharqi, folkloric, Golden Era, traditional, and authentic are spoken confidently throughout the dance community, yet their meanings shift constantly depending on the teacher, performer, musician, generation, or emotional perspective involved. One dancer may describe authenticity as earthy and grounded. Another may point toward Golden Era elegance, flowing arms, and orchestral sophistication. Others may reject ballet influence entirely, while some embrace the theatrical stylization that emerged from Cairo’s famous nightclub and cinema era.

The longer I have studied Egyptian dance, music, film, and culture, the more I have come to believe that many of these discussions are actually describing two very different concepts: aesthetic authenticity and structural authenticity.

Aesthetic authenticity concerns the outward appearance or emotional impression of the dance. It includes qualities such as mood, elegance, softness, earthiness, emotionality, playfulness, costuming, expression, and social flavor. In this approach, dancers often speak about “feeling the music,” dancing from the soul, or expressing the emotional atmosphere of the song. These qualities are important and deeply valued within Egyptian dance. However, they are also highly subjective. What feels emotionally authentic to one dancer may appear highly theatrical or stylized to another.

Structural authenticity may operate very differently. Rather than beginning with emotional performance alone, it begins with how the body physically organizes itself in relationship to the music. In this approach, rhythm, phrasing, weight transfer, propulsion, timing, torso organization, and accent placement are not decorative movements layered onto the music externally; they emerge from the music itself. The body is not merely illustrating the music from the outside but participating inside its rhythmic architecture.

This distinction became clearer to me over many years of observing Egyptian dancers, musicians, films, and social movement traditions. I often reflected on statements made by the late great Egyptian dancer Suhair Zaki, whose observations about foreign dancers were both famous and controversial. In a 2001 interview with the BBC, she stated:

“They will never be up to the Egyptian standards, the Egyptian belly dancers’ standards. They don’t have the lively spirit, they don’t have the sense of humour and they don’t have the musical ear. They only perform steps that they learn - 1, 2, 3, 4. But they don’t have the spirit. They will never, never match us.”¹

For many years, such statements were often interpreted as cultural gatekeeping or as implying that non-Egyptians could never truly understand Egyptian dance. Yet the more deeply I studied movement and music, the more I began to suspect that Suhair Zaki may have been describing something far more embodied and structural.

Notice what she criticizes. She does not say that foreign dancers lack technical ability. In fact, Western dancers often achieve extraordinary athleticism, precision, flexibility, and visual polish. Instead, she speaks about spirit, humor, musical ear, and dancers who merely perform “1, 2, 3, 4” learned steps. Her criticism appears directed not at technique itself, but at mechanical execution disconnected from the deeper internal organization of the music.

What is especially striking is that similar concerns appeared across several generations of Egyptian dance legends, although each expressed them differently. Taheyia Karioka took perhaps the most uncompromising position. In a 1977 meeting with American dancers, she declared, “Nobody has studied with me,” explaining that she did not teach and did not intend to. She was reportedly surprised to learn that oriental dance was being taught in schools and regarded true danse oriental as something that could not simply be transmitted as a formalized system.²

Samia Gamal was far more welcoming toward foreign dancers, yet her language also pointed beyond technique alone. In that same 1977 meeting, she said that “technique should be fueled with the feeling of the Nile,” describing the landscape, people, and emotional atmosphere of Egypt as inseparable from the dance.³

Fifi Abdou has expressed the cultural connection in still another way, describing belly dance as part of Egyptian “DNA and identity, just like language.” At the same time, she has spent years teaching dancers internationally and has spoken warmly about foreigners studying the art, suggesting that for her the dance can be shared globally even while remaining deeply rooted in Egyptian cultural experience.⁴

Although their language differed, these artists appeared to circle around a related underlying question: what separates learning the movements from embodying the cultural and musical logic of the dance itself? Their observations repeatedly lead beyond technical skill alone toward musical conversation, relaxed spontaneity, emotional timing, cultural experience, and lived rhythmic understanding.

This becomes especially interesting when Suhair Zaki speaks about humor. Humor in Egyptian dance is not simply comedy; it is rhythmic conversation. It lives in playful timing, teasing pauses, delayed accents, flirtation with the orchestra, spontaneous gesture, relaxed phrasing, and musical wit. These qualities are difficult to produce through counting and memorized combinations alone. They emerge organically when the dancer is physically and emotionally participating inside the music rather than mechanically reproducing external shapes.

One Egyptian quality that contributes to this kind of expressive presence is dellah (dala‘) — a playful, pampered, coquettish charm that is difficult to translate neatly into English. In dance, it can appear through softness, teasing timing, gesture, humor, and conversational ease.

Yet Egyptian dance is not alone in recognizing that technical execution cannot fully account for expressive presence. Flamenco has the concept of duende, an elusive expressive force understood as going beyond technique alone. In Indian classical performance theory, bhava concerns the emotional states represented through performance, while rasa concerns the aesthetic experience those states help evoke in the spectator. These concepts are not equivalents, and each belongs to its own cultural and artistic tradition. What they share is a recognition that accomplished performance involves something more than the accurate reproduction of physical movement.⁵

Another statement attributed to Suhair Zaki, reportedly from a television interview in the late 1960s, may reveal even more about how she understood dance itself:

“Belly dancing is the way for the body to smile.”⁶

A smile is not usually something mechanically assembled step-by-step. It emerges naturally from an internal emotional condition and expresses itself physically through the body. In the same way, Egyptian dance may not simply be a collection of movements placed onto music externally, but a physical conversation with rhythm itself.

This is where I believe the discussion about “feeling the music” becomes especially important. Many dancers defend aesthetic authenticity by saying, “I’m trying to feel the music.” Yet perhaps genuine feeling is not something imposed onto the dance from the outside through facial expression, mood, or theatrical atmosphere alone. Perhaps feeling emerges naturally when the body becomes structurally aligned with the organization of the music itself.

Over many years of observation, I began to notice that Western and Egyptian movement traditions can organize the body’s relationship to musical emphasis differently. What initially appeared to me as a stylistic difference increasingly seemed to involve something more fundamental: where the body places emphasis, how it travels between beats, and how movement is prepared and resolved.

In Egyptian movement traditions, the body often appears to converse with the music through lift, release, propulsion, suspension, and transitional phrasing that create a distinct rhythmic feel throughout the torso and body organization. These observations eventually led me toward what I call the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC®), a structural framework through which movement, rhythm, phrasing, and musical embodiment may be understood as deeply interconnected rather than merely decorative.

One observation that has increasingly stood out to me over the years is how frequently dancers in Western classrooms are told to “slow down” in order to appear more grounded, emotional, or authentically Egyptian. Yet when carefully observing many of the great Egyptian dancers across generations — including Taheyia Karioka, Samia Gamal, Suhair Zaki, and Fifi Abdou — one often sees not slowness, but continuous rhythmic propulsion, responsiveness, and conversational movement flow.

These dancers were frequently highly active within the music, dynamically transitioning through accents, phrasing, gestures, and directional changes while still appearing relaxed, emotionally present, and musically connected. Relaxation did not necessarily come from reducing energy or slowing movement artificially, but from the body being deeply integrated within the rhythmic architecture of the music itself.

From this perspective, the issue may not be whether non-Egyptians are incapable of feeling Arabic music. Rather, the issue may be that different cultures condition the body to organize rhythm differently from the beginning. If the body organizes musical emphasis differently, then the emotional experience emerging from that embodiment may also feel different. The dancer is not simply “acting” emotional expression. The emotional experience emerges through the body’s relationship to rhythm itself.

Ironically, when movement becomes structurally aligned with the architecture of the music, emotional connection often emerges automatically. The dancer no longer needs to perform musical feeling artificially because the body itself is participating in the rhythmic conversation.

Feeling becomes the result of embodiment rather than performance alone.

Perhaps this is why discussions about authenticity remain so emotionally charged and difficult to define within the dance world. Egyptian dance has never been a single fixed form. It evolved through village traditions, social celebrations, Cairo nightclubs, orchestral modernization, cinema, folklore, theater, and international exchange. Even composers such as Mohamed Abdel Wahab intentionally modernized Egyptian music through Western orchestration and cinematic influence while remaining deeply Egyptian in artistic identity. The visible aesthetics changed continuously across generations, yet certain deeper rhythmic and embodied patterns may have remained more consistent beneath the surface.

After more than fifty years of studying dancers, musicians, films, social movement, and Egyptian cultural expression, I have come to believe that authenticity may not reside entirely in costuming, arm styling, folkloric imagery, or theatrical presentation. It may exist more deeply within how the body hears, organizes, embodies, and converses with the music itself.

Perhaps what dancers like Suhair Zaki called “spirit” was never something mystical or inaccessible after all. Perhaps it was the natural result of a body so deeply connected to the structural logic of the music that expression ceased to feel mechanical and instead became alive — as if the music itself were smiling through the dancer.

1. Frank Gardner, “Belly Dancing Goes Global,” BBC News, June 6, 2001. The article quotes Suhair Zaki on foreign belly dancers, including her comments regarding “lively spirit,” “sense of humour,” “musical ear,” and performing learned “1, 2, 3, 4” steps.

Belly Dancing Goes Global — BBC News

2-3. Pamela Sloane/Hirt, “Meeting Tahia and Samia in 1977: The First Belly Dance Tour to Cairo, Part 2,” Gilded Serpent, May 15, 2012. Adapted from the author’s original account in Habibi Magazine. The article recounts Sloane/Hirt’s September 22, 1977 meeting and interviews with Taheyia Karioka and Samia Gamal.

Meeting Tahia and Samia in 1977 — Gilded Serpent

4. Philippe Ghabayen, “Fifi Abdou: The Original Showgirl,” Plastik Magazine, June 26, 2024. In the interview Abdou describes belly dancing as part of Egyptian “DNA and identity, just like language,” while discussing her teaching in Brazil, Japan, France, Italy, and other countries

Fifi Abdou: The Original Showgirl — Plastik Magazine

5. On these cross-cultural concepts: the Arabic root dala‘ (دلع) includes the sense of pampering or indulging, while Egyptian dance usage extends dala‘/dellah toward a playful, flirtatious or coquettish expressive quality; see the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo, entry for “دلع,” Al-Muʿjam al-Wasīṭ, and Shira, “Exploring Stage Personalities in Belly Dance,” section “El Dala’a.” For duende, see Federico García Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende,” a lecture on artistic inspiration and expressive presence beyond technique alone. For bhava and rasa, see M. K. K. Nayar, “Satvika Abhinaya in Kathakali,” discussing the classical Indian aesthetic distinction whereby bhava is expressed through the performer and rasa is produced or experienced in the spectator.

Arabic Language Academy in Cairo — دلع

Federico García Lorca — Theory and Play of the Duende

M. K. K. Nayar — Satvika Abhinaya in Kathakali

6. Suhair Zaki, statement reportedly made in a television interview in the late 1960s, as recalled/reported by Dr. George Sawa and preserved in Shira.net’s “Quotations for Belly Dancers About Dance.” The original broadcast has not yet been independently located.

Quotations for Belly Dancers About Dance — Shira.net

When I opened Al-Masri Egyptian Restaurant on December 17, 1999, I wasn’t simply opening a business. I was building a bridge.

I wanted anyone who walked through those doors to experience Egypt without buying a plane ticket. I wanted them to hear the music, taste the food, watch the dancers, meet the musicians, and leave with a deeper appreciation for a culture that had transformed my own life. I wanted Egyptians living far from home to feel a little closer to home, Americans to discover that Egypt was far richer than the stereotypes they had inherited, and my dance academy graduates to have a safe stage on which to continue growing as performers. Above all, I wanted the restaurant to become a place where culture was not merely observed but experienced.

That dream did not begin with the restaurant. Long before I ever unlocked the front door of Al-Masri back on December 17, 1999, I was fortunate to have extraordinary teachers. My first dance teacher, Jodette, taught me that Egyptian dance was never just movement. There was always something deeper beneath the surface. My mother, who had traveled to the Middle East before she was ever married, taught me to approach another culture with curiosity rather than fear. Later, Nakish, the first Black belly dancer in America, taught me another lesson without ever saying the words. She never made race the center of our conversations. She simply taught dance. Looking back, I realize she taught me to see the person before the label.

Then came the Middle Eastern nightclub owners who hired me to dance. They did not hire me because I was Egyptian. They hired me because they believed I respected their music, their dance, and their culture enough to represent it honestly. That trust was one of the greatest compliments of my career, and I have never forgotten it.

Even today, every time I unlock the front door to my restaurant on Balboa Street in San Francisco's Outer Richmond District, I still think the same thing:

This is exactly why I opened this restaurant.

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Over the past few years, I have found myself thinking more and more about the musicians who play in my restaurant. One recently retired and returned to Egypt. The others are getting older, as am I. Watching them perform, I sometimes find myself wondering what will happen when they are no longer here.

At first, I thought I was simply worried about losing a generation of musicians. The more I reflect on it, however, the more I believe the issue is much larger than that. What we are losing is not merely a group of talented performers. We are losing an entire ecosystem that once produced a very special kind of musician.

For many years, people have asked me why some musicians seem to have a quality that others do not. It is difficult to explain because it has very little to do with technical ability. Many younger musicians today are excellent players. They know the songs, the rhythms, and their instruments. Some have studied formally and possess tremendous musical skill.

Yet something feels different.

The musicians I knew during the Middle Eastern nightclub era of the 1970s and 1980s were not simply musicians. They were entertainers. They understood that their job was not only to play music but also to create an evening.

Before they ever played a note, they were already observing the room. They knew who was celebrating a birthday, who might be willing to dance, and who was hearing Middle Eastern music for the first time. They knew which dancers were experienced and which were nervous. They knew which songs would suit a particular dancer and which would not. They understood when to extend a musical phrase, when to shorten a performance, and when to shift the energy of the room.

In other words, they did not simply play the room. They read the room.

During breaks, they walked from table to table greeting customers. They spoke with Arabs and non-Arabs alike. They listened to requests, encouraged audience participation, and welcomed people who wanted to sing along. If a dancer was having a particularly strong performance, they might playfully challenge her with a longer improvisation or an unexpected musical phrase. The dancer understood exactly what was happening and responded in kind.

The performance became a conversation rather than a presentation. The audience participated. The dancers participated. The musicians participated. Everyone in the room contributed to the atmosphere of the evening.

This kind of entertainment cannot be learned from recordings or online videos. It cannot be mastered by practicing alone. It was learned through years of performing in nightclubs, restaurants, weddings, and social gatherings where musicians interacted constantly with dancers and audiences.

The musicians who still play for me today came from that world. When they were young, they performed in the Middle East during a period when live music was woven into everyday social life. Many later immigrated to the United States and continued working in the restaurants and nightclubs that once flourished throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

At that time, there were numerous venues featuring live Middle Eastern music. Broadway alone supported several Middle Eastern nightclubs. There were clubs and restaurants throughout San Francisco, Oakland, South San Francisco, San Bruno, Santa Rosa, and other communities. Musicians worked regularly, dancers worked regularly, and audiences expected live entertainment. Most importantly, musicians gained experience night after night in front of real people.

That experience taught lessons that no classroom could provide.

Musicians learned how to rescue a struggling performance. They learned how to handle technical problems without panic. They learned how to keep an audience engaged when the room was half empty. They learned how to adapt when a dancer needed support or when an audience wanted something different than what had been planned.

I remember watching musicians shorten a performance when a dancer was struggling, not to embarrass her but to help her. I also watched them extend a musical passage when a dancer was having a magical night. They instinctively understood that their role was not simply to play music but to support the success of the entire evening.

They also developed a relationship with the music itself that came from lived experience. The songs were not simply pieces of repertoire. They were connected to memories, celebrations, dancers, singers, audience reactions, and countless evenings spent performing for people who knew and loved the music.

Today, much of that environment has disappeared. Many of the venues are gone. The regular work is gone. The informal apprenticeship system that quietly trained generations of nightclub entertainers has largely disappeared as well.

This is not a criticism of younger musicians. Many are talented and dedicated. Rather, it is an observation that the environments which once trained nightclub entertainers have become increasingly rare.

As a result, younger musicians often arrive with a different set of strengths. Many are excellent instrumentalists. They know the repertoire and possess impressive technical skills. Yet they have not necessarily had the opportunity to develop the same social instincts because the places that once cultivated those instincts no longer exist in the same way.

The issue is not talent. It is the disappearance of the living nightclub culture that once provided this kind of experience.

When people speak nostalgically about musicians from the past, they often focus on the music itself. I find myself thinking about something else. I think about how comfortable those musicians were with uncertainty. If a dancer struggled, they helped her. If the audience was quiet, they found ways to engage them. If something went wrong, they adjusted without panic or frustration.

Their goal was not perfection. Their goal was the evening.

That may be the greatest difference of all. A nightclub entertainer measures success by what happens in the room. Are people smiling? Are they singing? Are they dancing? Are they connecting with one another? Are they leaving with memories they will carry home?

Those questions mattered as much as the music itself.

Perhaps that is why I continue presenting live music at Al-Masri after all these years. It is certainly not the easiest path. Recorded music would be simpler and less expensive. Yet every weekend I am reminded that something special still happens when musicians, dancers, and audiences gather together in the same space.

When I opened Al-Masri, I thought I was opening an Egyptian restaurant. Looking back, I realize that I was also trying to recreate the Broadway I had experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. I wanted people to hear live Middle Eastern music, watch dancers perform with musicians rather than recordings, applaud together, sing along when they knew the words, and leave feeling that they had been part of an evening rather than simply served a meal.

For a few hours, the old tradition remains alive.

What I am trying to preserve is not merely a collection of songs or a particular style of performance. I am trying to preserve a way of bringing people together. The musicians who learned their craft in the great nightclub era understood that music was not separate from hospitality, conversation, humor, dance, and human connection. All of those elements worked together to create an experience.

As the musicians grow older and the nightclubs become fewer, I cannot help wondering who will inherit that tradition. More importantly, I wonder whether there will still be enough places left for the next generation to learn it.

Perhaps that is the real challenge facing Middle Eastern music today. The question is not whether the music will survive. The music certainly will.

The question is whether the nightclub entertainer—the musician who could read a room, guide an evening, support a dancer, engage an audience, and make strangers feel like participants rather than spectators—will survive as well.

And yes, I learned an enormous amount about dance.

But somewhere along the way, the films began teaching me something much larger. They taught me about laughter, hospitality, romance, family, music, grief, celebration, and the countless small interactions that make a culture feel alive. The dancers first drew me toward Egyptian cinema. The people who surrounded them taught me why I kept coming back.

Many assume I began watching Egyptian films to study the dancers. In truth, I had already spent years studying them through another source. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, musician Hossam Ramzy assembled many of the classic black-and-white dance scenes from Egyptian cinema onto VHS tapes and made them available to dancers around the world. For many of us outside Egypt, those tapes were our first opportunity to study the great dancers in motion. Years later, I created my own DVD series, Dancing in Egyptian Film, by extracting dance scenes directly from the movies and preserving them for study.

By the time I immersed myself in Egyptian films, I was no longer watching primarily for the dancing. I was watching the people.

Every scene fascinated me.

I watched how families greeted one another. I watched how friends teased each other, how neighbors talked across balconies, how musicians interacted between performances, how children behaved around their parents, and how complete strangers communicated without saying very much at all. I became fascinated by the mannerisms of everyday Egyptians—the expressive hands, the sweeping gestures, the animated conversations, the spontaneous clapping, and the familiar exclamation, “Khalas!” No history book could have taught me those things.

Books preserve facts.

Films preserve people.

As I continued watching, I noticed something that would later become deeply important to my understanding of Egyptian dance. It was not only the professional dancers who embodied the music. I saw it in actresses such as Hend Rostom, Soad Hosny, and Lebleba. I saw it in Fifi Abdo, whose performances taught me countless lessons. I even saw it in actors like Mahmoud Shokoko. Different personalities. Different professions. Yet each shared a relationship with rhythm that seemed woven naturally into everyday life. It suggested to me that this musical embodiment belonged to the culture itself, not only to the stage.

The comedians taught me just as much as the dancers.

I loved watching Hassan Fayek. His laughter was unmistakable, his personality unforgettable. Every actor seemed to possess a unique presence. After seeing them film after film, I felt as though I had come to know them. They ceased being performers on a screen and became familiar companions in my continuing education about Egypt.

As my Arabic improved, the films opened even further. I began understanding sounds that English speakers rarely notice—the difference between long and short vowels, the importance of consonants formed deep in the throat, and how changing a single sound could completely alter a word’s meaning. Language gave another layer of life to performances I had already loved visually. The more I understood the language, the more human the films became.

When I eventually opened Al-Masri Egyptian Restaurant, I realized that those films had influenced me more than I knew. They had shown me that celebration in Egypt is rarely quiet. It is laughter. It is conversation. It is music. It is food shared generously. It is dancing, clapping, snapping, and the joyful energy of people enjoying one another’s company. Coming from a Western perspective, that exuberance initially surprised me. Over time, I realized it was something to embrace rather than restrain. My responsibility was not to quiet that spirit, but to create a place where it could flourish within the practical limits of our local community.

Looking back now, I realize the films changed me as much as they educated me. They made me more observant, more patient, and more appreciative of humor, family, generosity, and everyday human connection. They also taught me to pay attention to the small things, because cultures often reveal themselves in the details.

In many ways, they made me more Arab in the way I experienced life—not by changing who I was, but by allowing another culture’s values and expressions to become part of how I understood the world. Through years of watching, listening, and learning, I absorbed ways of celebrating, communicating, and connecting that continue to shape me today.

Sometimes people ask what I would be if I had never watched a single Egyptian movie. I think about that often.

I would never have come to know the remarkable actors, actresses, dancers, musicians, comedians, and filmmakers whose work filled those films with life. I would never have wandered through old Cairo from my living room. I would never have laughed with its comedians, celebrated at its weddings, or quietly shared in its moments of grief. I would never have spent decades writing about these extraordinary artists or trying to help others appreciate the culture they reflected so beautifully.

People often ask me what I learned from watching hundreds of Egyptian films. The truthful answer is that I learned far more than dance.

I learned to understand Egyptian people a little better.

And in learning about them, I discovered that cultures are not understood only through history books or classrooms. They are understood through the ordinary moments that films preserve so beautifully: a smile across a dinner table, a joke shared between friends, a gesture of welcome, a burst of laughter, the sound of music drifting through an open window.

The dancers opened the door.

The Egyptian people invited me inside.

It was a song.

In 2004, Egyptian singer Hakim recorded “Leila” with James Brown. Most listeners heard an interesting collaboration between two famous performers from different parts of the world. I heard something different: two distinct ways of experiencing rhythm. Before reading further, I encourage you to watch the performance once. Then, after reading this essay, watch it again. You may notice things you didn't hear or see the first time.

By the time the song was released, I had already spent decades studying Egyptian dancers, musicians, films, and social behavior. I had also been actively developing and teaching what I called the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC), a framework for understanding how Egyptian dancers organize movement in relation to the music. Although I had been using the term since 2004, I formally registered the trademark in 2008 to protect the work and preserve its identity.

The song did not inspire the EDC. The EDC already existed. What fascinated me was how clearly this recording illustrated observations I had already been making for years.

When James Brown enters the song, his voice is unmistakable. It is deep, raspy, grounded, and powerful, delivered with the authority that made him one of the most influential performers of the twentieth century. Then Hakim enters, and the atmosphere changes. His voice is lighter, brighter, more animated, and more buoyant. To me, the musical energy takes on a different character.

Most people hear two distinctive voices. I hear two different approaches to rhythm. As I watch the video, I also see those differences reflected in the performers' bodies. James Brown appears to organize his movement by settling into Beats 1 and 3, while Hakim appears to organize his movement differently. Hakim appears to lift into Beats 1 and 3 in a way that closely mirrors the rhythmic organization I have observed for decades in Egyptian dancers. That observation may seem subtle, but for me it lies at the heart of what I have spent much of my professional life studying and teaching.

One of the central observations of the EDC is that Egyptian dancers often organize movement around Beats 1 and 3 differently than many Western dancers do. In the EDC, Beats 1 and 3 are primary organizational moments. The rib cage lifts. The body organizes. Beats 2 and 4 function as transitional moments that prepare for or release from those primary accents.

For many American students, this concept is not immediately natural. If it were, they would master it overnight. Instead, many require weeks or even months before this new organization begins to feel comfortable. Again and again, I have watched students attempt the transition. Their bodies naturally return to familiar rhythmic habits. They are not doing anything wrong; they are simply moving according to the way they have learned to hear and embody rhythm throughout their lives.

Eventually, something begins to change. The body starts to understand. The lift becomes natural. The transitions become natural. The music begins to feel different. Once that happens, students often recognize the same organizational principles in Egyptian performers without my having to point them out. They begin seeing—and feeling—the difference for themselves.

I have used this recording for many years to help students hear and see these differences for themselves. That is why I continue using the Hakim and James Brown recording in class. During the final portion of my lessons, when students are dancing rather than analyzing movement, I ask them to watch carefully—not the choreography, the costumes, or even the lyrics, but the performers themselves.

Listen to James Brown.

Then listen to Hakim.

Can you hear the difference?

Can you see the difference?

More importantly, can you feel the difference in your own body?

You may or may not arrive at the same conclusions that I have. My purpose is not to persuade you that my observations are correct. It is to encourage you to watch the performance carefully and decide for yourself. After decades of studying Egyptian dancers, musicians, films, and social dance, I have come to recognize patterns that I cannot ignore. When I watch this performance, I see those same patterns again.

My experience as a teacher has led me to a particular conclusion. If the upward organization of Beats 1 and 3 were already part of my students’ natural rhythmic experience, they would be able to adopt it almost immediately. Instead, many spend weeks or even months learning to reorganize the way they embody the music. That process has convinced me that rhythm is more than something we hear. It is something our bodies organize and embody.

After more than fifty years of studying Egyptian dance, I have come to believe that the body reveals how music is being understood. This is why I often tell students that Egyptian dance is not primarily about movement. Movement is the result. The deeper question is how the music is being heard, organized, and ultimately expressed through the body.

When I watch Hakim, I recognize many of the same organizational principles I have observed in Egyptian dancers throughout my career. When I watch James Brown, I recognize a different—but equally authentic—relationship to rhythm. Neither performer is wrong. Neither is superior to the other. They are simply embodying rhythm through different cultural experiences, and that is what makes this collaboration so remarkable. The song places those differences side by side, allowing students to hear them, see them, and, for many, feel them for the first time.

The collaboration between James Brown and Hakim was intended as a musical partnership. For me, it became an unexpected teaching tool—one that continues to help students hear, see, and physically experience the rhythmic distinctions I have spent decades studying. It became one of the clearest demonstrations I have found that culture can be heard, seen, and ultimately embodied within the beat itself.

The beat may be the same.

But the experience of the beat is not.

Sometimes, understanding the experience of the beat is the first step toward understanding Egyptian dance.

There is an old saying that it takes years to build a reputation and only moments to destroy one. The same might be said of cultural venues.

Many people see a restaurant, a nightclub, a dance studio, or a music venue and think of it simply as a business. They see the performances, the food, the entertainment, and the social gatherings. What they often do not see are the decades of passionate effort, personal sacrifice, and unwavering commitment required to create and sustain such a place.

A cultural venue is much more than four walls and a stage. It is a meeting place, a classroom, and a gathering space where friendships are formed, traditions are shared, and knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. It is a place where people with different backgrounds and perspectives come together because of a common interest and a shared appreciation for an art form or culture.

For many dancers, some of the most valuable lessons are learned outside the dance studio. They are learned while watching live musicians interact with dancers, observing how audiences respond to a performance, listening to conversations after a show, and witnessing different interpretations of music, movement, costuming, and expression. Musicians learn from dancers. Dancers learn from musicians. Audience members learn from both. Cultural venues become living environments where education happens naturally.

That is one reason their loss is so significant.

When a venue closes, the community loses far more than a physical location. It loses a place where people gathered, learned, exchanged ideas, and developed relationships. It loses a place where culture was experienced rather than merely discussed. In many cases, it also loses an important bridge between generations.

Over the years, I have watched many such places disappear. Sometimes the reasons were unavoidable. Rising costs, changing neighborhoods, economic realities, retirement, and changing audience habits have all contributed to the closure of cultural venues. While unfortunate, those circumstances are often understandable.

What saddens me most are the situations in which the damage is not caused by economics or circumstance, but by misunderstandings that never needed to occur.

Sometimes the damage begins not with economics but with assumptions. Someone believes they understand another person’s motives. Someone assumes they know what a decision means. Someone reaches a conclusion without first having a conversation. What could have been clarified through dialogue instead becomes a conflict.

An assumption becomes a judgment. A judgment becomes a narrative. Eventually that narrative begins affecting not only individuals but the community around them.

The tragedy is that the damage rarely remains confined to the original disagreement. When support is withdrawn from a venue, musicians lose work, dancers lose opportunities to perform, students lose opportunities to observe and learn, and audience members lose a place to gather. The cultural ecosystem surrounding the venue begins to weaken, often in ways that are not immediately visible.

The older I become, the more I realize how often these situations could be avoided. Age teaches us that people are complicated, that motives are not always obvious, and that assumptions are poor substitutes for understanding. Most importantly, it teaches us that a simple conversation can prevent enormous damage.

That is why this subject saddens me so deeply.

Not because people disagree. Disagreement is a natural part of any community. People will always have different beliefs, values, opinions, and life experiences. In a healthy community, those differences can coexist. In fact, they should coexist.

What saddens me is when disagreement is allowed to replace communication. What saddens me is when assumptions are treated as facts. What saddens me is when a conversation that never happened becomes the source of a division that did not need to exist.

A cultural venue should be a place where people come together despite their differences. It should be a place where musicians, dancers, students, and audience members can share a common appreciation for the art regardless of their politics, religion, personal beliefs, lifestyles, or social affiliations. The culture itself should be larger than our individual disagreements.

After all, the music does not ask who we voted for. The dance does not ask about our personal lives. The food does not care about our opinions. The purpose of a cultural gathering place is to provide common ground where people can connect through a shared love of something larger than themselves.

Much of my writing focuses on preserving Egyptian dance, music, culture, and history. Yet preserving a culture requires more than preserving information. It also requires preserving the places where people gather to experience that culture together. Without venues, classrooms, restaurants, theaters, and community spaces, traditions can slowly become ideas we discuss rather than living experiences we share.

The experience that led me to these reflections grew out of circumstances that few people fully understood.

Like many small business owners, I struggled to survive during the COVID shutdowns. By order of the City of San Francisco, both my restaurant and dance academy were forced to close. Overnight, the income that supported the venue disappeared. Musicians could not perform. Dancers could not gather. Classes could not be held. Even many of the cafes and businesses that normally carried my baklava were closed as well.

Like countless small business owners, I searched for any legitimate means of keeping the doors open. I sold baklava directly from display shelves in the restaurant. I created and sold savory pastries. I shipped products from my website and through other online platforms. Every sale mattered. Every dollar helped pay rent, utilities, insurance, and the countless expenses required to preserve a space that I hoped would one day reopen to the public.

Those efforts were not about politics. They were about survival. More importantly, they were about preserving a place where musicians, dancers, students, and audiences could one day gather again.

Looking back, I sometimes think that one of the great lessons of that period is how easy it is to misunderstand decisions when we do not know the circumstances behind them. What may appear to be a statement of belief is sometimes simply an act of necessity.

What may appear to be a declaration of values is sometimes an attempt to keep a dream alive long enough to see another day.

For decades, that was the vision I tried to support in my own venue. I wanted it to be a place where everyone felt welcome—a place where people could learn, perform, observe, exchange ideas, and celebrate a culture we all admired. Over the years, hundreds of dancers, musicians, students, and audience members passed through its doors. Friendships were formed, careers were launched, and knowledge was shared.

I wish I could say these reflections are merely observations gathered over time. Unfortunately, they are not.

A little over a year ago, I witnessed firsthand how quickly assumptions can become narratives—and how difficult those narratives can be to undo once they take hold. Although I later made efforts to open a dialogue, what could have been resolved through a simple conversation instead became a source of division that affected not only me, but musicians, dancers, students, and others connected to the venue.

What saddens me most is knowing how easily the situation could have been prevented. A simple conversation. A simple question. A willingness to listen before judging. None of those things require agreement, only the willingness to understand before reaching a conclusion.

That experience reinforced something I have come to believe very strongly. When a cultural venue is damaged, the loss extends far beyond the owner because the venue never truly belonged to the owner alone. The loss belongs to everyone who learned there, everyone who performed there, everyone who gathered there, and everyone who found community there.

It takes years to build trust. It takes years to build a reputation. It takes years to build a cultural venue. Yet all of these things can be damaged remarkably quickly when assumptions replace conversation.

Before we judge, perhaps we should ask. Before we assume, perhaps we should listen. Before we divide, perhaps we should remember what is at stake.

Sometimes what is being damaged is not merely a person or a business.

Sometimes it is a community.

And communities are far more difficult to rebuild than they are to destroy.

From the very beginning of my study of Egyptian dance in 1974, I never saw the arms as random. Not once. Instead, I saw remarkable consistency. Every Egyptian dancer I watched in Egyptian film appeared to be operating from an organized movement language. The arms were not disconnected from the music. They were part of the music. Their pathways, transitions, pauses, wrist flourishes, openings, and closings all seemed to obey an internal structure tied directly to rhythm and musical phrasing.

I noticed it immediately, and once I saw it, I could never unsee it. Twenty-five years later, after thousands of hours studying Egyptian films and watching dancers perform, I finally organized those observations into what would become the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC®). Suddenly, decades of observation fell into place. What I had been seeing since 1974 finally had an organizational framework.

The movement language of Samia Gamal, Nagwa Fouad, and Suhair Zaki suddenly came into sharp focus. Although each woman danced with her own personality, elegance, and interpretation, the underlying organization of their arms was the same. They were all speaking the same movement language.

As I continued watching Egyptian cinema, I recognized the same organizational principles in dancers such as Samiha Tawfique, Hoda Shams El Din, Fifi Abdo, and many others. Some were more refined than others, but the underlying structure remained remarkably consistent.

The arms were organized by the beat of the music. This is where many Western interpretations of belly dance begin to diverge from Egyptian movement because many dancers unknowingly apply ballet-arm logic to Egyptian dance. But belly dancing is not ballet dancing.

In ballet, the arms generally project outward from the center of the body into space. Egyptian arm movement generally does the opposite. It frequently travels from the outside inward toward the body. Rather than constantly expanding outward, the movement gathers, frames, invites, redirects, and converses.

The feeling is entirely different, and it is not merely aesthetic.

I believe this difference is deeply connected to the way Egyptians experience rhythm, language, emotional expression, and everyday conversation. Egyptians are highly animated speakers. The upper body participates in communication. The shoulders, rib cage, hands, wrists, and head all contribute to expression.

Take the Arabic greeting:

“Ahlan wa Sahlan.”

You can almost feel the phrase rise and fall through the upper body.

Now compare that to the American expression:

“Hey, yo! What’s happenin’?”

The gesture naturally falls downward in a completely different way.

These differences may seem subtle—even trivial, but after decades of observation they become impossible to ignore. Culture lives inside movement long before it is formally taught.

One of the strongest observations I made involved timing itself. Within Egyptian movement organization, Beats 1 and 3 frequently function as arrival points or accented moments, while Beats 2 and 4 function as transitional beats.

The familiar wrist flourish so often seen in Egyptian dance commonly occurs during those transitional Beats 2 and 4. The arms travel during the transitions and then momentarily suspend themselves on Beats 1 and 3.

The movement breathes with the rhythm. This is one reason Egyptian dancers often appear so musically integrated, even while improvising. The body is not decorating the music; it is being organized by the music.

Major directional changes frequently resolve at the end of an eight-count tabla phrase. Once you begin looking for this, the organization becomes increasingly difficult not to see.

When I began teaching the Egyptian Dance Code® around 2000, the response from experienced dancers surprised me. Students who had already studied with numerous teachers would suddenly stop and say, “Now I understand.” They finally understood why Egyptian dancers looked different—why some combinations felt authentically Egyptian while others looked unmistakably Western. Most importantly, they began understanding how Egyptians hear and embody the beat rather than merely counting it.

That changed everything. As I continued teaching, I tested these observations repeatedly.

I noticed that dancers could execute technically correct hip movements, circles, shimmies, and traveling patterns, yet still not look Egyptian. The missing ingredient was often the organization of the arms and their relationship to musical timing.

Incorrect arms immediately changed the visual language of the dance. The hips could be speaking Egyptian while the arms were speaking another dialect entirely.

Once the arms became organized by the music, however, students often began looking more Egyptian even before they mastered advanced technique.

That realization stayed with me. It also created uncomfortable moments.

Over the years, I quietly walked out of more than one belly dance class because what I was seeing no longer resembled the Egyptian movement language I had spent decades studying in films, restaurants, orchestras, and performances.

I did not argue.

I simply left.

Not because I believed anyone was malicious, but because I realized many teachers genuinely did not perceive the rhythmic organization I had come to recognize.

Perhaps they had simply never been taught to look for it.

Part of the difficulty is that moving according to the organizational principles of the Egyptian Dance Code® is simply not part of the Western physical experience.

Our language, posture, gestures, and expressive habits shape the way we naturally move from childhood. Egyptians do the same. Neither is wrong, but they are different movement languages.

The West has also embraced ballet carriage and ballet arm pathways as our visual definition of elegance. Without realizing it, many dancers superimpose ballet organization onto Egyptian dance.

The result is that even when the hips imitate Egyptian movement, the arms may still be speaking an entirely different physical language.

Today, discussions about authenticity in belly dance often become emotional or political. For me, however, this discovery was never ideological.

It was observational. I simply watched for decades. The more Egyptian dancers I studied, the clearer the organizational system became.

So, are belly dance arms random? Not in the Egyptian tradition I have spent my life studying.

They are organized by music. They are rooted in language and culture. They follow rhythmic structure and reveal an underlying movement grammar.

This does not mean every Egyptian dancer moves identically. Quite the opposite. Just as two people can speak the same language with different voices, personalities, and accents, Egyptian dancers express themselves in wonderfully individual ways while still sharing the same underlying movement language.

And once you truly see that language, it becomes very difficult to unsee it.

There are certain musicians whose names are instantly recognized throughout the Arab world. There are others whose contributions were enormous, yet whose names have gradually faded from public conversation, especially among dancers in the West.

One such musician is Rafiq Hobeika.

For many years, I knew him only through his music.

I first encountered recordings such as Djoumana (“Pearl”), Amale (“Hopes”), Sahar (“Enchantment” or “the course before dawn”), and Nado (a familiar woman’s nickname likely derived from Nadia or Nadine”) long before I knew much about the man himself. What I knew was that whenever I listened to those recordings, I heard something different. The music felt organic and full. The violin seemed to speak. The orchestration breathed. The melodies unfolded patiently rather than rushing toward the next musical moment.

Over the years, I choreographed Djoumana, Amale, Nado, and Sahar. Decades later, I can still remember them.

That alone says something about the music.

Recently, I became curious about the musician behind these recordings and began researching Rafiq Hobeika more deeply. What I discovered surprised me.

Rafiq Hobeika was not simply a composer of instrumental music popular among belly dancers. He was a respected Lebanese violinist, composer, arranger, orchestra leader, and former president of Lebanon’s Musicians’ Syndicate. He worked with some of the most important figures in Arabic music, including Fairuz, Wadih El Safi, Sabah, Samira Tewfik, and artists associated with the Rahbani tradition.

In other words, the man behind the recordings was a significant figure within the history of Lebanese music itself.

Yet many American dancers have never heard his name.

That is unfortunate.

Because musicians like Rafiq Hobeika helped shape the musical environment that influenced generations of dancers throughout the Middle East and the diaspora.

As I researched his recordings, I found myself looking again at the album covers. Some featured Hobeika himself holding his violin. Others featured glamorous dancers or scantily clad models designed to capture attention in record stores during the nightclub and belly dance boom of the 1970s and 1980s.

The contrast was striking.

On one side was a serious musician, arranger, and orchestra leader.

On the other side was the commercial reality of the entertainment industry.

To be fair, those covers probably sold records. Record companies understood their market. Dancers, restaurant owners, and music collectors often discovered new recordings through the visual language of entertainment. The covers reflected the era in which they were produced.

Yet looking back now, it seems clear that the enduring value of those albums was never the photography.

It was the music.

The music inside those albums possessed a richness that feels increasingly rare today.

I realize every generation tends to believe the music of its youth was better. Perhaps there is some truth to that. Yet when I listen to recordings such as Djoumana, Amale, Sahar, and Nado, I hear qualities that are difficult to find in much contemporary music.

I hear patience.

I hear orchestration.

I hear melodies that are allowed to develop naturally.

I hear emotional depth.

Most importantly, I hear a musician who understood that a violin could carry feeling as powerfully as a singer’s voice.

This was music that invited the listener into an emotional journey.

For dancers, that matters.

The best Arabic music does not merely provide rhythm for movement. It creates an emotional landscape in which movement can exist. The dancer responds not only to percussion, but to melody, phrasing, tension, release, and atmosphere. Listening to Rafiq Hobeika’s recordings, one can easily understand why so many dancers were drawn to them.

His music gave us room to listen.

Room to interpret.

Room to feel.

Today, information about Rafiq Hobeika is surprisingly difficult to find. Many websites that once documented musicians of his generation have disappeared. Some recordings have become collector’s items. Much of the orchestra culture that produced this music has faded from public view.

Yet the music remains.

I can still remember Djoumana. I can still remember Amale. I can still remember Sahar. And when I recently heard Nado again, I was transported back to a musical world that valued melody, emotion, and orchestral beauty.

Perhaps that is the true measure of an artist’s legacy.

Not how many records were sold.

Not what appeared on the album cover.

But whether the music still speaks decades later.

Rafiq Hobeika’s music still speaks.

And I believe more dancers should know his name.

For decades, I have watched Egyptian dancers perform movements that many modern dancers now take for granted. Yet the longer I studied older Egyptian films, nightclub performances, and stage footage, the more I began noticing that certain movements once looked very different from the way they are commonly performed today.

One of those movements is the hip circle—specifically the large, rearward version that has become so familiar in modern Egyptian dance.

To many modern dancers, the “big hip circle” seems timeless — a dramatic movement in which the dancer bends forward while the hips sweep behind the body in a large circular pathway before returning upright. Today it appears so common that many dancers assume it has always existed in this form.

But I do not believe it did.

When I look at earlier generations of Egyptian dancers such as Taheyia Karioka, Samia Gamal, and especially Suhair Zaki, I see something quite different. Their hip circles tended to remain more frontal and contained. The movement projected forward and resolved upright relatively quickly. Even when soft, expressive, or luxurious, the movement itself did not generally travel dramatically behind the body with the torso pitched forward for extended periods of time.

The last major dancer I personally observed who largely maintained this older aesthetic was Suhair Zaki.

Suhair’s dancing possessed extraordinary musical depth, but her movement architecture remained compact, controlled, internal, and upright. She rarely depended upon exaggerated spatial amplitude for emotional impact. Her dancing lived inside the music rather than on top of it. Watching her now feels almost like looking at the final flowering of an earlier Egyptian nightclub aesthetic before a major stylistic transition took place.

Then something changed.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, while I was still dancing professionally at the Bagdad in San Francisco, I began noticing that the hip circle itself was evolving. The circles were becoming larger. Instead of remaining primarily in front of the body, the hips began traveling farther behind the dancer as the torso tipped forward. The movement suddenly occupied much more space and projected a dramatically different emotional quality.

And the dancer I most strongly associate with this transformation is Nagwa Fouad, although the evolution may well have been underway before I consciously recognized it. I still remember a musician friend of mine, Musa Hanhan, remarking that the modern ‘big hip circle’ itself had come from Nagwa. Whether or not she was truly the first, she was certainly the dancer through whom many of us became aware of it.

Nagwa Fouad brought a theatrical largeness to Egyptian dance that felt entirely different from the contained intimacy of earlier dancers. Her movement quality seemed expansive, glamorous, and visually commanding. Somewhere during this period, the hip circle itself appeared to change direction.

Rather than remaining primarily frontal, the movement wrapped downward and behind the body. The torso hinged forward as the hips swept backward, creating a much larger orbit through space. The visual effect was striking. Suddenly the movement felt dramatic, earthy, emotional, and sensual in an entirely new way.

Another important difference existed in the way earlier dancers transferred weight during the movement itself.

Even in the larger hip circles, older Egyptian dancers usually maintained length through at least one leg as the weight passed from one side of the body to the other. One knee softened while the opposite leg lengthened, preserving suspension, elegance, and directional flow. The movement traveled across the body rather than compressing downward into it.

When the newer “big hip circle” first began appearing, many of us initially reacted strongly to it. The forward hinge and rearward projection of the hips felt surprisingly bold compared to the more upright and contained aesthetic we had grown accustomed to seeing in earlier Egyptian dancers. At the time, the movement even carried a slightly provocative quality that some dancers jokingly commented upon backstage.

But over time, familiarity changed perception.

What once appeared exaggerated gradually became normalized as part of the evolving vocabulary of Egyptian dance. New generations accepted the movement naturally because they inherited it as tradition rather than innovation.

Today, newer variations continue evolving even further, sometimes emphasizing deeper bending through both knees and a more grounded compression than the elongated weight transfers of previous generations. And perhaps those movements too will eventually become fully absorbed into the dance vocabulary of future dancers.

Over the years, I began wondering if this evolution may even have emerged through the body itself.

Dance movements rarely appear out of nowhere. Something usually triggers them. Dancers adapt constantly. We compensate for fatigue, age, discomfort, injuries, costumes, stage size, audience expectations, and changing aesthetics. Sometimes a dancer discovers an entirely new pathway simply by recovering from a momentary physical adjustment.

I occasionally wondered whether the modern “big hip circle” may have emerged through precisely that kind of bodily adaptation. Perhaps somewhere during a more traditional frontal hip circle, a slight twinge, hitch, pull, or spinal adjustment caused the upper body to reflexively tip forward while the hips traveled behind. The recovery itself may have created a new movement pathway.

Whether that exact moment ever happened is impossible to know.

But what matters is that audiences loved what they saw.

And once a movement succeeds visually in Egyptian dance culture, other dancers absorb it almost immediately.

Unlike many Western dance systems, Egyptian dance historically evolved through observation rather than codification. Dancers watched one another constantly. One dancer altered a pathway. Another exaggerated it. Another softened it. Another delayed the timing. Over time, the variation itself became tradition.

After Nagwa Fouad, I began noticing versions of the enlarged hip circle appearing in dancers such as Zizi Moustafa and Mona El Said. The movement continued expanding theatrically behind the body and outward into space.

Then Fifi Abdou took the movement even further.

Fifi often lingered longer in the forward hinge, allowing the bent-over position itself to become part of the performance. The movement gained teasing timing, earthy humor, and coquettish personality. The audience no longer watched merely for the completion of the circle; they watched for the attitude living inside the transition.

Later, Dina Talaat fragmented the movement rhythmically even further by inserting accents during the descent itself. The circle stopped feeling like one continuous movement and instead became conversational — interrupted, punctuated, musically reactive, and emotionally layered.

Eventually, some dancers stopped completing the circle altogether, reversing direction midway and returning toward the same side from which they began. What had once been a complete circular figure became asymmetrical, interrupted, and open-ended.

In many ways, the evolution of the hip circle mirrors the evolution of Egyptian dance itself.

The older aesthetic valued containment, elegance, internal musicality, and emotional subtlety. The later aesthetic embraced larger theatrical movement, extended transitions, interruption, personality, and dramatic visual effect.

Neither approach is wrong.

They are simply different moments in the continuing evolution of Egyptian dance.

And somewhere along the way, perhaps through instinct, adaptation, experimentation, or accident, the hip circle changed direction forever.

Over the coming weeks, I will be introducing occasional subscriber-only essays. My weekly free articles will continue as always, but paid subscribers will receive additional reflections, research, and behind-the-scenes stories drawn from more than fifty years in Egyptian dance, music, and restaurant culture.

A few days ago, I spoke with Nakish.

That simple conversation brought back more than forty-five years of memories and raised a question I have been seeing discussed increasingly on social media: Who was the first Black belly dancer?

Recently, I have seen social media posts and articles identifying Olga Chaviano as the first Black belly dancer. Olga was certainly a remarkable woman. She was a successful Afro-Cuban entertainer, actress, singer, and nightclub performer who achieved recognition throughout Cuba, Mexico, and Latin America. Those claims prompted me to revisit a question I first encountered decades ago through my own teacher, Nakish.

As I began examining the available footage and reflecting upon a lifetime of studying Egyptian dance, I found myself asking a different question. Before we can identify the first Black belly dancer, we must first decide what we mean by the term belly dancer.

Costumes Are Not Dance

Throughout the twentieth century, audiences were shown countless women identified as belly dancers. Hollywood films featured exotic harem scenes, nightclubs advertised Oriental dancers, and movie posters promised mystery, seduction, and visions of the East. The dancers in films such as The Sign of the Cross (1932), Cleopatra (1934), Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Ten Commandments (1956) were often presented to audiences as belly dancers.

Yet when I watch these performances, I do not see Egyptian dance. I see Hollywood choreography. The costumes may suggest the Middle East, but the movement vocabulary often comes from theatrical dance traditions, ballet, showgirl revues, and Western fantasies about the Orient.

As dancers, we know that costumes do not define a dance.

Movement defines a dance.

The Question of Olga Chaviano

This brings me back to Olga Chaviano.

I want to be very clear that nothing in this article should be interpreted as criticism of Olga’s artistry. I think she was beautiful, talented, and possessed tremendous stage presence. She was clearly a gifted entertainer who achieved success in multiple areas of performance.

However, after watching the surviving footage available online, I do not recognize what she is doing as Egyptian raqs sharqi. The music is often Latin rather than Arabic. The footwork appears rooted in Latin dance traditions. The weight transfers appear Latin. The pelvic actions appear Latin. Most importantly, the overall movement organization appears consistent with the cabaret and salsa traditions from which she emerged.

What struck me most was that whether Olga was presented as a nightclub performer, a Latin entertainer, or an Oriental dancer, the underlying movement vocabulary remained largely the same. The footwork remained Latin. The weight shifts remained Latin. The overall body organization remained Latin.

The costume changed. The movement language did not.

For that reason, I believe it is more accurate to describe Olga Chaviano as a pioneering Afro-Cuban entertainer who occasionally performed Oriental-themed numbers rather than as a practitioner of Egyptian raqs sharqi.

My purpose is not to diminish Olga Chaviano's accomplishments. Quite the opposite. I believe historical figures deserve to be recognized for what they actually achieved. Olga's legacy as an Afro-Cuban entertainer is significant enough on its own and requires no embellishment. The question explored here is not whether she was talented, but whether the surviving evidence supports classifying her as a practitioner of Egyptian raqs sharqi.

Looking Beyond Individual Steps

Some readers may wonder whether this distinction is too technical. After all, not every Egyptian dancer uses the same movements. Some dancers use more shimmies than others. Some use more undulations. Some emphasize traveling patterns while others focus on intricate torso work.

My conclusion is not based upon the absence of a single movement. Rather, it is based upon the overall movement system. After spending decades studying Egyptian dancers through hundreds of films, I have come to recognize certain recurring principles. Egyptian dancers organize movement differently. They relate to the music differently. They carry themselves differently. Their movements emerge from a cultural dance language that remains recognizable despite individual stylistic differences.

What I observe in Olga’s dancing belongs to a different movement culture. That observation does not diminish her accomplishments or her importance as an entertainer. It simply suggests that what she was doing was fundamentally different from the movement vocabulary associated with Egyptian dance.

The Difference Between Portraying and Practicing

This distinction matters because history often confuses portraying a dancer with being one. No one would call an actor a concert pianist simply because he portrayed one in a film. Likewise, portraying an Oriental dancer does not automatically place someone within the tradition of Egyptian dance.

Throughout the twentieth century, many performers were advertised as belly dancers despite having little or no connection to the dance traditions they were representing. This was especially true in Hollywood and nightclub entertainment, where Oriental imagery was frequently used to create an atmosphere of mystery and exoticism. In many cases, the label survived long after the dance itself had disappeared.

Enter Nakish

My own experience leads me to a different candidate.

I first began studying with Nakish around 1979 or 1980. She was my second belly dance teacher after Jodette, and I remained her student for approximately four years. During that time, she taught me much more than dance technique. She taught me how to make costumes, how to present myself professionally, and how to approach performance as an art form. Like many teachers of her generation, she understood that belly dance was more than a collection of movements. It was a complete cultural and artistic experience.

Most importantly, Nakish taught within an actual belly dance lineage. She studied with Jamila Salimpour, one of the most influential figures in the development of American belly dance. She performed professionally, taught students, and became a respected member of the belly dance community at a time when very few African-American women occupied visible positions within the field.

Unlike many performers who were merely presented as belly dancers, Nakish was recognized by the belly dance community itself as a belly dancer. That distinction is important because dance traditions are transmitted through teachers, students, and communities, not merely through costumes and publicity photographs.

Egypt Recognizes Nakish

One event in particular stands out.

In December 1983, Nakish was invited by Dr. Bousaini Farid, then President of the Women’s Club in Egypt, to travel to Cairo as part of the Friendship Force International cultural exchange program. Founded in 1977 and announced by President Jimmy Carter, Friendship Force was created to foster understanding and friendship between people of different nations through cultural exchange.

Nakish was selected as the featured dancer and performed at the Nile Hilton before members of Egypt’s social and cultural elite. Today, American dancers travel to Egypt regularly for workshops, festivals, and tours. In 1983, however, this was a rare and remarkable opportunity.

For an African-American belly dancer trained in the United States to be invited to Egypt as a cultural representative was a significant achievement and a recognition of her artistry. The surviving correspondence from Egypt, reproduced here, provides direct evidence of that recognition. It demonstrated that her reputation had extended beyond the American dance community and had reached the country whose dance tradition inspired her work.

By all accounts, Nakish is the earliest documented African-American belly dancer to achieve widespread recognition within the American belly dance community. Her surviving archive includes magazine features, television appearances, interviews, performance materials, and international engagements that establish a remarkable record of professional accomplishment.

A Living History

Nakish stands as one of the most significant pioneers in the history of African-American participation in the American belly dance community. More importantly, she represents something larger than a title. She represents a lineage, a tradition, and a community.

Having spent more than five decades in the belly dance community, having studied directly with Nakish, and having examined both her archive and the available historical record, I have reached a conclusion. Nakish was not simply a performer wearing a belly dance costume. She was a trained Egyptian dancer, a respected teacher, a professional artist, and a cultural representative.

By all accounts known to me, Nakish is the first Black belly dancer to emerge within the American belly dance community as a recognized professional performer, teacher, and cultural representative. The evidence is found not only in memories, but in the photographs, interviews, television appearances, magazine articles, performance programs, and international engagements that document her remarkable career.

Unlike many figures in dance history, she is not merely a photograph in an archive or a name in an old program. More than forty years after I first entered her classroom, we are still friends and I still speak with her.

That is not just history. That is living history.

Over the coming weeks, I will be introducing occasional subscriber-only essays. My weekly free articles will continue as always, but paid subscribers will receive additional reflections, research, and behind-the-scenes stories drawn from more than fifty years in Egyptian dance, music, and restaurant culture.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy:

• Nebawiya Moustafa: The Transitional Beat and the Hidden Structure of the Egyptian Dance - https://sausanacademy.substack.com/p/nebaweya-moustafa-the-transitional?r=14moaa

• Egyptian Dance Beyond Egypt: How a Cultural Art Became a Global One - https://sausanacademy.substack.com/p/egyptian-dance-beyond-egypt-how-a?r=14moaa

• Why Many Great Egyptian Dancers of the Past Would Not Win Belly Dance Competitions today -https://sausanacademy.substack.com/p/why-many-great-egyptian-dancers-of?r=14moaa

I understand why these discussions exist.

Egyptian dance is not simply a collection of movements. It carries music, language, humor, gesture, emotional expression, social behavior, and cultural memory within it. For many Egyptians and Arabs, seeing those elements misunderstood, distorted, or disconnected from their origins can feel deeply personal.

At the same time, I have also known many non-Egyptian dancers who devoted their entire lives to studying, preserving, teaching, promoting, and supporting this art form with sincere love and respect. Some spent decades studying old Egyptian films, listening obsessively to classic orchestras, learning Arabic song structure, working with Middle Eastern musicians, organizing festivals, opening restaurants and cultural venues, and helping sustain international interest in Egyptian dance and music long after many older traditions had already begun disappearing.

Without some of that dedication, much of the material that dancers now study might have quietly vanished.

For years, I found myself asking a deeper question beneath all of these arguments:

What exactly are we preserving when we say we are preserving Egyptian dance?

Because Egyptian dance itself has never been static.

Throughout its history, it continually evolved through changing social conditions, cinema, music, theatrical presentation, and international influence. Cairo’s nightclub era transformed the dance dramatically. Large orchestras replaced smaller ensembles. Cinema reshaped performance styles for the camera. Costuming, lighting, staging, and theatrical presentation all changed throughout the twentieth century.

Figures such as Badia Masabni helped shape Cairo’s nightclub scene into a sophisticated theatrical environment, while dancers like Samia Gamal introduced elegant lines and stage presence influenced by both Egyptian social dance and modern theatrical aesthetics. Egyptian dance absorbed these influences while still somehow retaining something unmistakably Egyptian in its feeling, musicality, timing, and emotional texture.

Fusion and artistic evolution, therefore, are not automatically the problem. Art has always evolved through contact, experimentation, and exchange. Musicians borrow sounds. Painters borrow techniques. Dancers absorb movement ideas from multiple traditions. Creativity itself depends upon exploration.

But evolution is not always the same thing as disconnection.

Over many decades of studying Egyptian dancers, musicians, films, and social behavior, I gradually began noticing that Egyptian dance seemed to operate according to an internal cultural logic extending far beyond the outward appearance of movement itself.

The phrasing of the body often reflected the phrasing of the music itself. Emotional expression appeared tied to the structure of Arabic melody and rhythm. Timing frequently emphasized lift, suspension, release, and conversational response to live music in ways that felt very different from many Western movement approaches.

Even everyday cultural gestures seemed connected to the dance. The way emotions were expressed with the hands, shoulders, eyes, torso, and head often echoed movements later seen on the stage. Arabic music itself moved differently than Western music. Arabic language flowed differently than English. Even the musical concept of tarab — emotional musical ecstasy — reflected a relationship between performer and audience that seemed less concerned with choreography and more concerned with shared emotional immersion.

Over time, I began asking myself whether Egyptian dance possessed not merely a vocabulary of movements, but an underlying cultural grammar.

That question changed everything for me.

Because once we begin looking beneath the outer appearance of the dance, we discover that costuming alone is not culture. Neither are spins, tricks, extensions, or stage effects. A dance form can survive visually while slowly losing the internal cultural structures that once gave it meaning.

And yet, this still does not mean that non-Egyptians cannot dance Egyptian dance. Nor does it mean that every fusion experiment is disrespectful. The issue is far more nuanced than that.

In many ways, the international dance community has helped preserve enormous portions of Egyptian dance history. Countless dancers outside the Middle East preserved rare film footage, promoted Arabic music, hired Middle Eastern musicians, invited Egyptian artists abroad, taught workshops, opened restaurants and cultural spaces, and introduced generations of students to the richness of Egyptian culture.

I know this because I lived much of it myself.

For decades, I danced professionally in Middle Eastern restaurants and nightclubs, worked alongside extraordinary Arab musicians, organized live music weekends, taught workshops focused on Golden Era and Shaabi music, and later opened my own Egyptian restaurant where Middle Eastern musicians still regularly perform. Some of those musicians had accompanied legendary Egyptian singers and dancers during the Golden Era itself.

Through those experiences, I witnessed firsthand that Egyptian dance was never only about movement.

It was about conversation.

Conversation between dancer and musician.
Conversation between audience and performer.
Conversation between culture, music, memory, and emotion.

Perhaps this is why conversations about appropriation can become so emotionally charged. Beneath many of these arguments lies a deeper fear — the fear that a culture’s artistic memory may slowly disappear while only fragments of its outer appearance remain.

But preservation does not have to mean gatekeeping. Respecting origins does not require freezing an art form in time. Cultures evolve because human beings evolve.

The deeper question is whether that evolution still remembers where it came from.

To study another culture’s art form deeply is, in many ways, an act of love. It requires humility. Listening. Observation. Patience. It requires understanding that some elements of a dance emerge from social customs, musical structures, emotional values, language patterns, and lived experiences that cannot always be understood immediately from the outside.

Perhaps the goal is not perfection.

Perhaps the goal is sincerity.

Because Egyptian dance ultimately belongs to Egypt culturally, but its preservation has gradually become an international responsibility shared by all who truly love it.

And perhaps the real question is not whether Egyptian dance should continue evolving.

It always has.

Perhaps the deeper question is whether the dance can continue evolving without losing the cultural heartbeat that once gave it life.

Throughout this essay, I’ve asked what we are preserving when we say we are preserving Egyptian dance.

I’m curious what you think.

Is it the movements?
The music?
The improvisational relationship between dancer and orchestra?
The cultural context?
The emotional expression?

Or something else entirely?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

When I first walked into the studio of Jodette Silhi Johnson one day in 1974, I did not yet understand who she was.

For decades, this living connection to Egypt’s Golden Era quietly existed in a dance studio on El Camino in Sacramento, California.

To me, she was a short, feisty Middle Eastern woman with black hair, a strong stance, a loud commanding voice, and a room full of students. She was all business. I had come to study belly dance — an exotically alluring concept, but I had no real context for what I was entering.

At the time, I had already studied other forms of dance and movement. I had studied Flamenco and Sevillanas in Madrid, Thai Classical Dance in Bangkok, English Highland Fling with the parents of an English friend, Scottish Sword Dance through a Scottish dance club in Sacramento, and eventually found myself standing inside Jodette’s studio about to learn belly dance.

But Jodette was different.

Very different.

I simply did not yet know why.

Only now, with the rediscovery of Egypt’s Golden Era films and performers, do I fully understand how rare she truly was and still is.

One of the first things that struck me was that she began students immediately with finger cymbals. We were expected to execute movements while simultaneously playing cymbals. There was no waiting period where students first learned “basic moves” in silence. Rhythm was already part of the body. Music was already part of the movement.

She demonstrated movements strongly and clearly. She was loud, definite, expressive, and completely unapologetic in her teaching style. I still remember hearing her call out things like, “Sit, sit, sit and kick!” during class combinations. She would tell us to “shake your teasy,” referring to our hips or bottoms. We would giggle and laugh in class with these instructions. At the time, these moments simply seemed funny, memorable, and uniquely Jodette.

Only much later did I begin to understand that even the way she spoke contained clues.

Over the years, I became aware that not everyone always understood Jodette. At times, there were negative opinions about her directness, her intensity, or the way she communicated and taught. But as I grew older, I increasingly realized that much of this may have come from cultural misunderstanding.

Jodette was operating from the culture she came from, not from a modern Americanized or Western framework. Her communication style, emotional expression, authority, humor, musicality, and teaching methods reflected the environment in which she had been raised. She was not filtering herself through Western expectations before entering the classroom.

Because I had spent the first fifteen years of my own life living overseas within different cultures, I think I understood this indirectly, even before I could fully explain it. I had already experienced that people from different cultures walk differently, speak differently, express emotion differently, teach differently, and even experience rhythm differently.

In retrospect, I now believe that many of the very qualities some people misunderstood were actually part of what made Jodette authentically Egyptian.

Jodette was not imitating Middle Eastern dance.

She was Middle Eastern.

Half Egyptian and half Palestinian, she had grown up in Egypt during the Golden Era of Egyptian music, film, dance, and nightclub entertainment. Unlike many teachers in the West who learned from workshops, videos, secondhand systems, or modern interpretations, Jodette came directly out of that world.

She personally knew legendary figures such as Farid al-Atrash, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Abdel Halim Hafez, Samia Gamal, Taheyia Karioka, Yousef Wahbe, Yahya Shaheen, and numerous other actors, musicians, and performers from Egypt’s entertainment industry. She often spoke about growing up in that atmosphere as though it were simply normal life. All of this was new and foreign to me, but I knew I was in authentic and non-apologetic hands.

To those of us listening decades later in America, it sounded like mythology.

But it was her life.

One story especially stayed with me through the years. At fifteen years old, Jodette went to audition at Badia Masabni’s famous casino in Cairo, hoping to dance there. Badia herself reportedly refused to hire her because she was too young.

Imagine that for a moment.

The woman teaching classes in California had once stood before one of the most important figures in Egyptian nightclub history.

And yet when I was younger, I still did not fully understand what I was looking at.

What I understood first was simply that she looked different from American belly dancers.

There was something about her expression, her movement quality, her posture, her weight changes, her emotional delivery, and her musicality that did not resemble what I would later begin seeing increasingly in the West. Even then, I noticed that many American dancers carried a strong ballet or modern dance influence into belly dance. Their lines, arm carriage, posture, and movement intentions felt Westernized to me, even when the costuming and music were Middle Eastern.

But Jodette did not look American.

She looked Egyptian.

Years later, when I began deeply studying Egyptian films and watching dancers such as Taheyia Karioka and Samia Gamal obsessively, I suddenly recognized something shocking.

I saw Jodette.

Not literally, of course. But I recognized the same movement language, the same phrasing, the same timing, the same emotional delivery, the same cultural essence that I had first seen in her studio.

That realization changed the course of my life.

I plunged myself completely into studying Egyptian dance, Egyptian music, Egyptian films, Egyptian orchestras, Egyptian singers, Egyptian social behavior, Egyptian expression, and eventually Egyptian movement structure itself. I danced in nightclubs owned and run by Middle Easterners, listened endlessly to the music, studied old films, watched the great dancers repeatedly, and slowly began trying to understand what made Egyptian dance feel Egyptian.

This process took decades — two and a half to be exact.

From approximately 1974 until around 1999, I struggled to identify exactly what I was seeing and feeling. I knew there was a difference between Egyptian dance and the Westernized interpretations increasingly appearing around me, but I could not yet fully explain it.

Eventually, this search led me toward what I later named the Egyptian Dance Code®.

The deeper I researched, the more I began realizing that Egyptian movement was not simply about steps or combinations. It reflected an entirely different relationship to rhythm, posture, musical emphasis, emotional phrasing, and bodily conversation. Even the way Egyptians speak with the body seemed connected to the dance itself.

And strangely enough, I now believe that even Jodette’s speech patterns carried traces of that structure. The way she explained movement, emphasized words, demonstrated emotion, and physically inhabited rhythm all reflected the culture she came from. Even her conversational phrasing seemed connected to the musical and physical structure I would later spend decades trying to understand.

At the time, I could not see this.

Now I cannot unsee it.

What humbles me most today is realizing that I did not understand the magnitude of what I had been given while I was receiving it.

I thought I was simply taking belly dance classes — a novelty in my mind.

In reality, I had unknowingly encountered someone carrying living memory from Egypt’s Golden Era directly into America.

Jodette was not recreating the era academically.

She had lived inside it.

She was part of it.

Jodette also lived what many would call the American dream.

What makes Jodette’s story even more remarkable is that, when she first arrived in the United States, she did not know how to speak English. She learned the language gradually while building a completely new life in America.

The door that changed her future opened unexpectedly in 1962 when she began informally teaching her neighbors how to dance in her home. One of those neighbors eventually suggested that she begin teaching publicly.

Then, in 1965, the University of California, Davis contacted Jodette and invited her to teach dance and Middle Eastern culture to approximately fifty eager students. It became her first formal public class in America.

From there, she continued teaching at places such as the YWCA and later at a location on Sutter Street in San Francisco, carrying Egyptian dance and culture into communities that had little exposure to it at the time. She also toured the United States teaching workshops and dancing performances.

“I would take my reel-to-reel tape recorder with me and teach dancing with that thing!” she once recalled.

Today, it is difficult to imagine how pioneering that really was. There were no online resources, no belly dance festivals, no streaming music, no YouTube tutorials, and very little public understanding of Middle Eastern dance in America. Yet somehow, through determination, personality, musicianship, and cultural pride, Jodette helped lay the foundation for what would eventually become an entire dance community in the West.

She did not simply arrive in America carrying memories of Egypt’s Golden Era. She actively built a life, career, and artistic community around the dance she loved. She recorded several LP albums, taught dance publicly for decades, collaborated with musicians and performers, and created opportunities for countless dancers throughout Northern California.

At one point, Jodette had more than fifteen venues where her dancers regularly performed. Through her troupe, Binti Balady, generations of dancers appeared annually at the Sacramento State Fair, bringing Middle Eastern dance and music before large public audiences year after year.

What is especially remarkable to me now is that she accomplished all of this during a period when Middle Eastern dance was still poorly understood in much of America. Long before social media promotion, international belly dance festivals, or online visibility, Jodette was already building performance opportunities, public exposure, and cultural presence for the dance in the Western United States.

In many ways, she was not only preserving Egyptian dance culture.

She was helping establish it in America. Many of today’s dancers may not realize how much of America’s early understanding of Egyptian dance came through immigrant teachers like Jodette.

Today, many dancers speak about authenticity, Golden Era style, Egyptian feeling, or cultural preservation. But very few people in the current dance world actually sat in studios with individuals who personally knew the legendary artists, worked within that environment, absorbed the movement socially, spoke the language naturally, and carried the emotional atmosphere of that world into their teaching.

What many dancers may not fully realize today is that teachers like Jodette Silhi Johnson were among the earliest cultural bridges between Egypt and the West. Long before YouTube, international workshops, social media, festival intensives, or online film archives, women like Jodette were already carrying Egyptian dance, music, expression, and cultural understanding directly into American studios.

At the time, many students did not yet understand the historical value of what they were receiving. Much of the dance world was still developing its understanding of Egyptian style, and many dancers unknowingly moved further toward ballet, modern dance aesthetics, fusion interpretations, and Westernized movement structures.

But now, with the increasing rediscovery of Egypt’s Golden Era films, orchestras, singers, dancers, and nightclub culture, a new generation is beginning to recognize something important.

The dancers they admire on old Egyptian film look much closer to teachers like Jodette than to many modern interpretations of belly dance. In some ways, the rediscovery of Egypt’s Golden Era is also a rediscovery of the teachers who carried it quietly into the West.

In many ways, teachers like Jodette preserved cultural information before the dance community even understood what was being preserved.

She was not reconstructing Egyptian dance from research.

She had lived inside the culture that produced it.

And for that reason alone, I consider her invaluable.

Years ago, I also wrote an earlier article about Jodette Silhi Johnson for Gilded Serpent, long before the current resurgence of interest in Egypt’s Golden Era dancers and cultural history. Looking back now, I realize that even then I was already trying to understand the importance of what Jodette represented — though I do not think I fully grasped it yet.

She was a gift from Egypt’s nightclub and film era placed directly into my path before I even understood what I was receiving.

Only after decades of studying Egyptian dance, music, and film did I begin to understand what Jodette truly represented.

Perhaps that understanding is also part of why I have dedicated the last Sunday of every month at Al-Masri Egyptian Restaurant in San Francisco to the Golden Era of Egypt, inviting dancers from all backgrounds to come perform, reconnect with the music, and experience the emotional atmosphere of a period that shaped so much of Egyptian dance culture.

Golden Era music is preferred, though not mandatory. My hope is simply to keep the spirit of that era alive — the orchestras, the musical phrasing, the emotional expression, the improvisation, and the relationship between dancer and music that once defined Egyptian performance culture.

On my restaurant’s street corner stands the sign “Mohamed Ali Street,” named after the famous artistic center of Cairo where so many musicians, dancers, and performers once worked and gathered. Every month, when dancers perform beneath that sign at Al-Masri, I sometimes think to myself:

“Badiya Al-Masabni would be proud.”

And just as dancers once worked professionally throughout Cairo’s entertainment world, the dancers at Al-Masri are also given an opportunity to earn through their performances, receiving a percentage of the dinners sold under their names — sometimes as much as $300 for an evening.

In my own way, I believe I am continuing something that teachers like Jodette helped bring to America decades ago.

Some teachers teach movements.

Some teachers teach combinations.

Some teachers unknowingly transmit culture itself.

Jodette Silhi Johnson is the real thing.

She was a gift to me — a blessing that changed my life.

But more than that, she was a gift to America and to the West — a living connection to the music, movement, expression, and emotional language of Egypt’s Golden Era long before many of us understood what we were witnessing.

And I love her immensely.

I was watching her left foot.

Like many dancers who spent decades studying the great stars of Egyptian dance through old films and grainy video clips, I initially saw Nabaweya as earthy, playful, spontaneous, and unmistakably baladi. Her dancing felt social rather than staged. She did not appear polished in the later Westernized sense of Egyptian dance that eventually became popular through competitions, workshops, and theatrical productions. Instead, she moved with a feeling that seemed deeply connected to the music itself.

But after repeated viewing over many years, I began noticing something else entirely.

Structure.

There was a recurring movement that caught my attention again and again: a small tap or kick of the left foot that repeatedly appeared during transitions in her dancing. At first glance, it looked casual — the kind of charming little gesture audiences might dismiss as personality, improvisation, or habit. But the more I watched, the more I realized it was not random at all.

The movement appeared structurally organized through rhythm.

For decades, I have studied what I call the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC®), a structural framework based on years of observing Egyptian dancers, musicians, films, social movement patterns, and the relationship between movement and rhythm in Egyptian dance culture. One of the central ideas within the EDC® is that in much Egyptian movement organization, Beats 1 and 3 function as structural or arrival beats, while Beats 2 and 4 act as transitional beats — moments of release, transfer, preparation, and redirection between the primary accents.

This is where Nabaweya became especially fascinating to me.

What many viewers interpret as a decorative foot gesture may actually be a visible articulation of the transitional beat itself. The gesture is not the accent itself. It is the connective tissue between accents.

Rather than concealing the transition between movements, Nabaweya appears to dance through it. The movement does not abruptly stop on an accent and then restart on the next one. Instead, the body remains continuously alive between the beats. Weight transfers remain visible. Momentum continues traveling through the torso, hips, legs, and feet rather than freezing into isolated positions.

In many modern interpretations of belly dance, particularly those influenced by stage presentation, competitions, or Western studio methods, the eye is often directed toward the final accent or finished shape. The transition itself becomes minimized or hidden. One movement ends. Another begins. The body appears to move from pose to pose or from accent to accent.

Nabaweya does something quite different.

She allows the audience to see the pathway between movements. The release, preparation, redirection, and transfer of weight remain part of the dance itself rather than being concealed behind polished presentation. Her dancing breathes continuously through the rhythm. Even the smaller gestures — such as the left foot tapping the floor on transitional beats — reveal that the movement is still traveling somewhere.

This is one reason older Egyptian dancers often feel more organic, immediate, and emotionally alive than many modern interpretations. The dance is not merely displaying accents. It is revealing how the body journeys from one rhythmic idea into the next.

Within the framework of the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC®), this becomes especially important because Beats 2 and 4 function as transitional moments rather than simply empty spaces between major accents. Nabaweya’s dancing makes those transitional moments visible. She does not erase the connective mechanics of the dance. She embodies them.

What also intrigues me is that her transitional articulation repeatedly appears on the left side of the body. Over many years of observation, I have noticed that many classic Egyptian dancers seem to organize movement asymmetrically, often favoring one side of the body for propulsion, release, or rhythmic articulation despite being right-handed in daily life. In Nabaweya’s case, the left side appears especially active in transitional timing.

This does not mean all Egyptian dancers move identically. Nor does it suggest a rigid formula. Egyptian dance has always thrived on individuality. But recurring tendencies do appear when one studies enough dancers carefully over time.

What fascinates me is that these asymmetries may reveal deeper principles of Egyptian movement organization itself.

Western dance training often emphasizes symmetry, mirrored execution, and equal-sided precision. Traditional Egyptian dance frequently appears less concerned with geometric balance and more concerned with rhythmic conversation, grounded propulsion, emotional timing, and natural momentum moving through the body.

The result is a dance that breathes differently.

This may also help explain why older Egyptian dancers can feel so difficult to imitate authentically. Many modern dancers reproduce the visible shapes while missing the transitional mechanics underneath them.

Nabaweya Moustafa belonged to an older generation connected to the Mohammed Ali Street tradition and the world of the awalim entertainers. She came from a movement culture rooted in weddings, celebrations, live music, social interaction, and improvisation long before belly dance became standardized through workshops, competitions, and international stage productions. Her dancing still carries traces of those earlier mechanics.

It is also possible that some of Nabaweya’s extraordinary physicality reflected the broader variety-entertainment traditions that intersected with early Egyptian nightclub and cinema culture. Historical descriptions repeatedly mention her flexibility, agility, backbends, and unusual quickness of movement. At times, her elastic movement quality feels closer to the physical spontaneity of early vaudeville, music hall, or acrobatic performance traditions than to the later codified forms of theatrical belly dance that eventually became standardized internationally.

In the earlier entertainment world of Mohammed Ali Street, performers were not always separated into the rigid categories modern audiences use today. Singers, dancers, comedians, musicians, acrobats, and variety performers often shared overlapping performance spaces and artistic influences. Some of Nabaweya’s movement qualities may preserve traces of that older performance culture as well.

Much has been written about Nabaweya’s unusually flexible hips, agility, and elastic movement quality. Yet what makes her dancing remarkable is not flexibility alone, but how that flexibility remained integrated into rhythmic propulsion and transitional timing. The movement does not appear disconnected from the music or inserted as spectacle. Instead, the body seems to continuously travel through the rhythm itself.

And perhaps that is why her movement still feels alive today.

My own teacher, Egyptian-born dancer Jodette Silhi Johnson, now living in Sacramento, belonged to an earlier generation of dancers who were much closer to Egypt’s entertainment world than many dancers today realize. She personally knew Badia Masabni, whose Cairo casinos helped shape modern Egyptian raqs sharqi and launched generations of performers into film and nightlife culture. Through dancers like Jodette, stories about artists such as Nabaweya survived not only through film clips, but through conversation, memory, and lived community transmission.

Jodette also told me that Nabaweya Moustafa and Mohamed Abdel Motaleb were romantically involved. I recently spoke with her again, and she reaffirmed the story. While I have never located formal archival confirmation, oral histories such as these have long preserved aspects of Middle Eastern entertainment culture that official histories often overlooked, dismissed, or simply failed to document.

Much of belly dance history survives this way:
through dancers,
through musicians,
through teachers,
through memory.

Today, many dancers rediscover Nabaweya through surviving film clips scattered across the internet. Some viewers see only an old-style dancer from another era. Others see charm, humor, or nostalgia.

But some of us see something else.

We see mechanics.

We see propulsion.

We see transitional timing.

We see a body organizing itself through rhythm in ways that are becoming increasingly rare.

In an era where Egyptian dance is often becoming more symmetrical, more choreographed, and more visually polished, Nabaweya Moustafa reminds us of something older and perhaps far more important:

that Egyptian dance once breathed through the transition itself.

Inside the release.

Inside the redirection.

Inside the beat between the beats.

When discussions arise about who has the “right” to dance — or teach — Egyptian dance, I often find myself thinking not only about the present, but about history itself. Egyptian dance did not remain within the borders of Egypt. It traveled. It evolved. It captivated. And somewhere along the way, it became part of a much larger global story.

That story is complicated.

Egyptian dance was born from the cultural fabric of Egypt and the surrounding regions. It emerged from social traditions, music, celebration, improvisation, emotional expression, and deeply rooted systems of movement and musical interpretation. Yet the dance that the world would eventually come to know did not spread globally through isolation. It spread through travel, tourism, migration, cinema, literature, nightlife, and international fascination.

One of the earliest widely circulated Western descriptions of an Egyptian dancer came through Gustave Flaubert and his encounter with Kuchuk Hanem in the nineteenth century. His writings, though filtered through the lens of Orientalism and European fantasy, introduced many Western readers to an image of Egyptian dance that was mysterious, sensual, and unlike anything they had seen before. Whether misunderstood or romanticized, these early accounts contributed to a growing fascination with Middle Eastern culture and performance.

Then came the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where American audiences encountered Middle Eastern and North African performers on an unprecedented scale. The fair’s famous “Cairo Street,” organized by Sol Bloom, introduced audiences to dance traditions that differed dramatically from Victorian Western social norms.

Several performers became associated with the stage name Little Egypt, including dancers of Syrian and North African background. Their performances ignited fascination, controversy, curiosity, and sensationalism simultaneously. American audiences, unfamiliar with the movement vocabulary and torso articulations of Middle Eastern dance traditions, often labeled the movements “hoochie-coochie” dancing — a term that reflected both fascination and misunderstanding.

Over time, American burlesque and striptease performers borrowed and exaggerated what they perceived as the “gyrations” of these dancers, further blurring distinctions between authentic regional dance traditions and Western theatrical fantasy. The seeds of both fascination and appropriation had already been planted.

At the same time, Egypt itself was changing. During the British occupation, Cairo underwent enormous social and cultural transformation. Hotels, casinos, theaters, cabarets, and nightclubs expanded as Egypt became increasingly connected to tourism and international commerce. Entertainment culture flourished within this cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Influential nightclub owners such as Badia Masabni helped transform Middle Eastern entertainment culture into large-scale theatrical performance. Her famous clubs attracted Egyptians, foreigners, military officers, tourists, artists, and social elites alike. Within these spaces, many Western visitors encountered Egyptian music and dance traditions for the first time, often through cultural lenses very different from those of the societies from which the dance emerged.

What some Western audiences viewed as exotic or shocking was often simply part of a different cultural relationship to music, movement, celebration, and emotional expression. Egyptian musicians, singers, dancers, filmmakers, and nightclub owners helped shape what would eventually become modern raqs sharqi.

The irony is that colonialism both harmed and transformed Egypt at the same time. Western powers often viewed the East through exoticized lenses, yet international fascination also amplified Egyptian arts far beyond Egypt’s borders. Egyptian cinema would later accelerate this process even further. Films featuring dancers such as Taheiya Karioka, Samia Gamal, Naima Akef, Suhair Zaki, and later Fifi Abdou, among others, spread Egyptian music and dance aesthetics across continents.

Later, political upheaval and immigration patterns in the Middle East also played an important role in bringing Middle Eastern music and dance more directly into the United States. During the Lebanese Civil War, many musicians immigrated to the East Coast, helping establish vibrant Arabic nightclub scenes in cities such as New York, Detroit, and elsewhere. These venues often brought dancers from the Middle East to perform alongside live orchestras, creating spaces where American audiences could experience Arabic music and dance traditions more directly

Restaurants, cabarets, and nightclubs became important cultural bridges between immigrant communities and American audiences. For many dancers in the United States, these venues became living classrooms where the connection between music, culture, improvisation, and movement could be experienced firsthand.

Without cinema, tourism, immigrant communities, musicians abroad, and international performers who embraced the dance, Egyptian dance may never have achieved the global visibility it now enjoys.

This does not erase Egypt’s role. On the contrary, it demonstrates Egypt’s extraordinary cultural power. People across the world fell in love with Egyptian music, movement, orchestration, emotion, and improvisation deeply enough to dedicate their lives to studying it.

In recent years, discussions surrounding cultural appropriation have become increasingly common within the dance world, particularly across social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, and online commentary spaces, like Reddit and Facebook. While appropriation can certainly exist when cultural traditions are reduced to stereotype, fantasy, or commercial gimmickry, it is important to recognize that many dancers outside Egypt have approached this art form with sincerity, discipline, humility, and decades of study.

Many devoted dancers and teachers — myself among them — have spent years studying Egyptian music, film, language, rhythm, history, orchestration, cultural aesthetics, and improvisational structure not in order to mock or exploit the dance, but because they genuinely love and respect it. For these dancers, Egyptian dance became not merely performance, but a lifelong artistic and cultural pursuit.

The story of Egyptian dance beyond Egypt is therefore not simply a story of appropriation. It is also a story of preservation, admiration, migration, exchange, and artistic devotion. Thousands of dancers outside Egypt — myself included — spent decades studying old Egyptian films, listening to Arabic music, learning rhythms, studying aspects of the language and history, working with Middle Eastern musicians, and attempting to understand an art form they loved profoundly.

For some of us, that dedication extended far beyond the dance studio. I began dancing professionally in Middle Eastern restaurants and nightclubs during the mid to late 1970s and eventually became deeply involved in the restaurant world itself, helping organize and run live Arabic music weekends while working alongside highly respected musicians, dancers, and performers from across the Middle East. Over the years, I worked with renowned musicians such as the late John Bilezikjian and helped present live Middle Eastern music to American audiences through packed nightclub and restaurant performances. Later, I taught workshops accompanied by live music and, in 1999, opened an Egyptian restaurant in San Francisco where Middle Eastern musicians regularly performed weekly — some of whom had played for legendary Egyptian dancers and singers such as Mona El Said and Ahmed Adawiya. Through music, film, conversation, performance, and community, the dance remained connected to living cultural traditions rather than fantasy alone.

Egyptian dance was born in Egypt. But its journey across the world transformed it into something larger than geography alone.

If unknown dancers walked onto a modern belly dance competition stage dancing in the style of Taheyia Karioka, Samia Gamal, Suhair Zaki, Nagwa Fouad, Naima Akef, Nebaweya Moustafa, or Fifi Abdo, there is a very real possibility they would not score highly in many modern belly dance competitions.

That statement makes many people uncomfortable. Some may assume it is nostalgia or criticism of contemporary dancers. It is neither.

Many modern dancers are extraordinarily skilled. Competition culture has produced performers with remarkable athleticism, technical control, movement vocabulary, choreography, stamina, and stagecraft. The issue is not talent.

The issue is that the standards used to judge dancers today are often built upon an artistic philosophy fundamentally different from the one that shaped many of Egypt’s greatest dancers.

And once we understand that difference, we begin to understand why so many legendary Egyptian dancers might struggle under modern competition scoring systems.

Not because they lacked artistry.

But because they were dancing according to a different set of priorities.

For decades, I studied the dancers of Egypt’s Golden Era through films, orchestral recordings, live musicians, and repeated observation. I watched Suhair Zaki listen to the orchestra before she even moved. I watched the grounded authority of Taheyia Karioka. I watched the melodic phrasing of Samia Gamal. I watched the rhythmic propulsion and continuous movement of Fifi Abdo and Nebaweya Moustafa. And over time, I realized something profound:

Many of the qualities that made these dancers extraordinary are difficult to measure on a score sheet.

Modern competitions often reward:

• visible complexity,

• technical layering,

• large movement vocabulary,

• dramatic accents,

• polished execution,

• choreographic density,

• symmetry,

• and highly controlled staging.

The great Egyptian dancers often prioritized something very different:

• emotional continuity,

• rhythmic immersion,

• phrasing,

• personality,

• grounded ness,

• repetition,

• orchestral conversation,

• and improvisational fluency.

Those are not the same values.

One of the greatest misunderstandings about Egyptian dance is the assumption that improvisation means randomness. In reality, the great Egyptian dancers knew their music so deeply that their improvisation often appeared choreographed.

But no two dancers heard the music the same way.

Each dancer developed her own highly personal relationship to particular songs and orchestral arrangements. Over years of dancing, these interpretations became deeply embodied. A dancer might perform the same song repeatedly throughout her career, yet her movement choices remained uniquely her own because they emerged through her own emotional and musical instincts.

Samia Gamal did not dance like Taheyia Karioka.
Suhair Zaki did not interpret music like Nagwa Fouad.
Fifi Abdo did not move like any of them.

Even when dancing to the exact same song, each dancer revealed:

• different emotional priorities,

• different rhythmic emphasis,

• different use of weight,

• different timing,

• different transitions,

• and different internal conversations with the orchestra.

This is because Egyptian dance was historically rooted not simply in movement vocabulary, but in personality.

The dancer’s character mattered.

Her emotional temperament mattered.
Her humor mattered.
Her instinct mattered.
Her relationship to the music mattered.

The dance emerged through the dancer rather than being imposed upon her.

And perhaps this is one of the greatest differences between traditional Egyptian dance aesthetics and many modern instructional systems. Today, dancers are often taught not only movement, but predetermined ways of hearing the music itself. Teachers and choreographers may decide:

• where the dancer should accent,

• when she should pause,

• when she should “do nothing,”

• how long emotion should be sustained,

• when energy should explode,

• and how phrasing should be interpreted.

But historically, Egyptian dancers often developed their own intimate relationships with the music.

The movement was not merely taught.

It was discovered.

This is why the classic Egyptian dancers were instantly recognizable. Their personalities were inseparable from their movement choices. Their individuality was not created through branding, tricks, or costume styling. It emerged organically through personal musical interpretation.

Another major difference is that many great Egyptian dancers were almost always moving.

Not frantically.

Not necessarily with large movement.

But continuously alive inside the music.

There was almost always:

• a shift of weight,

• a suspended ribcage,

• a walking transition,

• a torso response,

• a subtle release,

• a hand phrase,

• or emotional continuation moving through the body.

Even during quieter musical moments, the body often remained in conversation with the orchestra.

This is one reason dancers such as Nebaweya Moustafa could mesmerize audiences while using only a small handful of movement ideas throughout an entire performance.

She never appeared concerned with demonstrating endless movement vocabulary.

She rarely slowed down in the modern interpretive sense.

She simply remained deeply committed to the rhythm, the propulsion of the music, and the audience relationship.

And audiences could not stop watching her.

In many modern competition environments, this might be criticized as repetitive. Yet Egyptian audiences often experienced repetition differently — not as lack of creativity, but as groove, immersion, emotional familiarity, rhythmic intoxication, and sustained engagement.

The goal was not to demonstrate how many movements the dancer knew.

The goal was to make the audience unable to stop watching.

Another uncomfortable truth is that many of the great Egyptian dancers were not “clean” according to modern technical standards. Their arm pathways were not always symmetrical. Their posture was not always balletic. Their transitions were sometimes weighted, grounded, asymmetrical, or emotionally impulsive.

And yet they possessed something many technically advanced dancers still struggle to achieve:

Presence.

The audience believed them.

Ironically, Egypt itself now hosts major international belly dance competitions and festivals such as the Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival founded by Raqia Hassan. These festivals attract dancers from around the world seeking workshops, performances, and competition opportunities in the historical homeland of raqs sharqi.

Yet something interesting often happens at these events: many of the dancers participating competitively are not Egyptian.

Part of this may reflect the complicated social position dance has historically occupied within Egypt itself. Public female performance has long existed within tensions involving family expectations, social reputation, modesty, and respectability. Many famous Egyptian dancers themselves navigated significant social pressures surrounding their profession.

At the same time, Egypt has become something else within the international belly dance world: a form of cultural validation.

For many international dancers, attending festivals in Egypt represents serious commitment to the dance and connection to its cultural roots. Listing Egyptian workshops, festivals, teachers, or competition participation on a résumé may also strengthen professional credibility internationally.

This is understandable. Many dancers travel to Egypt out of genuine love for the music, culture, and dance itself.

But it also creates an interesting paradox:
many of the dancers most invested in formalized competitive systems inside Egypt are often not Egyptian themselves.

As belly dance evolved globally, competitions naturally became one way of organizing, teaching, standardizing, and evaluating the dance internationally. Technical codification increased. Measurable standards became necessary. Choreography became denser. Ballet influence increased. Technical display became increasingly visible and rewarded.

None of this automatically made the dancers worse.

But it did change what the dance was optimizing for.

Competitions are designed to evaluate.

Egyptian dance was historically designed to communicate.

Those are not the same thing.

The question is not whether modern dancers are talented. Many are astonishingly skilled.

The deeper question is whether the qualities that once made Egyptian dance emotionally compelling — improvisational fluency, continuous embodiment, personal musical interpretation, rhythmic immersion, emotional timing, and deep cultural intimacy with the music — can fully survive inside systems designed primarily to standardize, categorize, rank, and judge them.

And perhaps that is why some of the greatest Egyptian dancers who ever lived might not win the very competitions now claiming to define excellence in the dance they helped create.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I began going to nightclubs where American belly dancers performed regularly. I saw many beautiful dancers. Some were technically skilled. Some were elegant. Some were clearly beloved by their audiences.

And yet, something felt wrong…missing.

At the time, I could not explain it. I did not yet have the language for what I was sensing. I only knew that what I was watching did not resemble what I had seen in my first dance teacher, native Egyptian born and raised, Jodette. The dancers all seemed to move similarly, but there was something missing in the feeling of the dance itself. Something restrained. Something disconnected. Something that looked like a performance rather than a lived expression.

Then one night, a native Egyptian dancer named Dalal performed.

Suddenly, the dance felt right.

She looked alive.

She pranced rather than posed. She smiled from ear to ear. Nothing about her looked strained or manufactured. The movements flowed from one to another as though they were arriving naturally in real time. She did not appear to be “performing” movement combinations. She appeared to be experiencing the music while her body responded to it.

And when she danced, the Arabs in the nightclub went crazy.

That reaction fascinated me.

I realized then that there was something culturally recognizable happening in her dancing that the audience immediately understood, even if I did not yet fully understand it myself. The difference was not simply technical. It was deeper than choreography. Deeper than costume. Deeper than movement vocabulary.

The other dancers, to me, seemed to lack what I would later call the Egyptian accent.

Not an accent of speech.

An accent of movement.

That realization became the beginning of a lifelong obsession.

For years, I immersed myself in Egyptian films, especially subtitled films from the Golden Era that featured dancers, musicians, orchestras, singers, and social celebrations. For nearly a decade, I watched Egyptian films obsessively. I watched the dancers over and over again. I studied their transitions. Their posture. Their reactions to music. Their emotional expression. Their gestures. Their spontaneity.

I watched legendary performers like Fifi Abdo, Tahia Carioca, Samia Gamal, Suhair Zaki, Nagwa Fouad, Naima Akef, Nelly Mazloum, and countless lesser-known dancers who appeared in Egyptian cinema.

The more I watched, the more I realized they all shared something in common that I was not seeing in much of the American belly dance world.

Their bodies were not isolated.

Their upper bodies were alive.

This deeply contradicted what I was seeing taught in the West.

At the time, isolation-based instruction dominated much of American belly dance teaching. Students were taught to separate body parts into compartmentalized units. Hips isolated from chest. Chest isolated from shoulders. Layers placed mechanically on top of one another.

But the Egyptian dancers did not move this way.

Their movement traveled through the body as a cohesive rhythmic conversation.

At first, I could only sense it emotionally. I could not yet explain it technically.

Then came the dancer who opened my eyes completely: Fifi Abdo.

When I began intensely studying her dancing, something extraordinary happened. I started trying to feel what she felt. I began informally “channeling” her movement through my own body, not by copying choreography, but by attempting to understand the internal organization of her movement.

That was when I saw it.

Her ribcage lifted on the primary beats.

Again and again.

Suddenly, everything changed.

I realized that many Egyptian dancers maintained their rhythmic emphasis in the upper body, particularly through ribcage lift and release, while many Western dancers placed the primary beat heavily into the hips. In much Western belly dance instruction, the chest often collapsed or dropped on the main beats. But in the Egyptian dancers, the torso remained buoyant, expressive, and musically conversational.

It was mind-blowing.

I became convinced that this phenomenon was not accidental. It was cultural. It was linguistic. It was embodied rhythm shaped by environment, music, expression, gesture, and spoken cadence.

I began to understand that Egyptian dance was not merely “movement.”

It was language made physical.

The more Arabic music I studied, the more I saw the body responding directly to the instruments themselves. A shimmy corresponded to the rapid trembling of the qanun or the shimmering resonance of plucked strings. Drum rolls traveled through the body like electrical current. The oud invited vibration. The violin invited long emotional body waves and suspended emotional states.

The dance was not separate from the music.

The dance was the music.

This realization changed my life.

Over decades, I developed what I eventually called the Egyptian Dance Code® (EDC®), a teaching methodology born not from trends or certifications, but from thousands of hours of observation, teaching, performance, film study, musician interaction, and embodied experimentation.

I held workshops. I taught classes. I tried to explain what I had discovered.

Most dancers rejected it.

Some still do.

Many believed I was overthinking the dance. Others insisted isolations were the correct and proper foundation. Some dismissed my observations entirely, even when I demonstrated them physically in class. Others simply did not want to change what they had already invested years of training, money, and identity into learning.

Socially and professionally, this has come with a cost.

I became somewhat of an outcast within parts of the belly dance community. Some people stopped taking me seriously. Some friendships disappeared. Some dancers claimed my students danced “too fast,” even though what they were often reacting to was not speed, but a different rhythmic embodiment altogether.

And yet, I continued.

Why?

Because what I teach is provable.

I have seen it happen repeatedly in my students.

Usually around the sixth class of my Primary Course, something changes in the room. Students who have studied elsewhere for years suddenly begin to understand what they are feeling. Their faces change. Their bodies soften. The movement starts flowing rather than being mechanically executed.

One student in particular arrived skeptical after studying with many teachers. She had tired eyes, guarded eyes. During class, I watched her expression suddenly open as though a door inside her had unlocked.

It was not that I had suddenly become “right.”

It was that she had suddenly seen what had been there all along.

Another student later told me that audiences became more engaged with her dancing without her even trying harder. Arab audience members responded differently to her movement. They felt emotionally connected to it.

I have often heard Middle Eastern audience members describe certain dancers as looking “robotic” or “like AI.” But when they watch dancers who embody this freer Egyptian feeling, their reaction changes instantly. They lean forward. They smile. They respond emotionally because they recognize something familiar within the movement language itself.

That recognition matters.

Today, I own and operate Al-Masri Egyptian Restaurant, the only Egyptian restaurant in Northern California. For decades, I have worked alongside extraordinary Middle Eastern musicians, many of whom performed with legendary Arab artists and dancers. I have listened to their phrasing, watched their rhythmic choices, observed how dancers interact with live music, and witnessed how Arab communities dance socially when they are not “performing” at all.

And that may be the most important lesson of all.

Egyptian belly dance is not simply entertainment.

It is a celebration of life.

It is cultural memory expressed through music and movement. It is emotional conversation between dancer and musician. It is improvisational joy. It is social connection. It is spontaneous expression that can explode from the soul at any moment.

The reason many Westerners struggle to fully recognize its structure is not because they are unintelligent or incapable. It is because this embodied language does not naturally exist within most Western cultural experience. It is not in our speech rhythms. It is not in our daily gestures. It is not in the way most Western bodies are socially trained to express music.

And yet, the feeling is still recognizable.

Even people who cannot explain it can sense when a dancer feels alive.

That feeling is what I have spent over fifty years trying to understand.

And once you truly see it, you cannot go back.