It is becoming increasingly common for more and more women’s wear stores, especially in the Downtown area, to display a belly-dancing outfit or two.

“It must have been 20 years since we started having those; at first it felt somehow awkward to put [belly-dancing] suits on the mannequins of our window shops,” said Soheir, a Downtown shop assistant.

She added that this “trend” started at a time when “most [Muslim] women were already veiled” and before skinny jeans and other form-fitting outfits melted in fully into the daily attire of most women, younger or older, veiled or not.

At the time, Soheir thought it peculiar to display belly-dancing suits alongside veiled women’s attire, long skirts, and long-sleeve shirts. However, it was only a few months before some veiled women came in to enquire about the variety in stock of belly-dancing suits.

“I am talking about young women who are getting married or young married women,” she said.

In the early 2000s, the store where Soheir worked was one of few displaying belly-dancing attires. Today, however, almost every women’s wear store in the Downtown shopping area displays belly-dancing suits.

“Nowadays, women buy the belly-dancing suits not just for “private use” but also “for parties like henna (bridal showers),” she added, stressing that most of these women are veiled.

According to Farah, who had married earlier in the year, it was “essential” that she get belly-dancing suits for her friends and bride’s maids for the henna she hosted at her house. The wedding planner in charge of her henna provided the suits.

“The bride dances much more than the other girls according to the henna night programme I had, so I needed to freshen up and change twice,” she said.

The re-introduction of henna nights and belly-dance practice that started in the early 2000s came with the increase in dance-training centres and dance-training classes provided by several gyms alongside yoga, Pilates, and aerobics.

“Women’s interest in dancing began with Tango and other Latin dancing, and later belly dancing became so fashionable that we had to recruit more than one dance instructor to meet the demand. We also increased classes from once a week to once a day,” said Ghada, an East Cairo gym manager.

“Today it is not just Egyptian women who attend these classes; we have Syrian, Sudanese and Libyan women who are currently living in Egypt who attend these classes regularly,” she added. “We also have some European women, from Eastern Europe, and some American women who come to the classes; we are talking about professionals working in Egypt and spouses of diplomats,” Ghada noted.

Aya Atassi, a Syrian electronics engineer, says Arab women who grew up watching Egyptian movies are bound to fall in love with belly dancing.

For Atassi, watching Souad Hosni dance in the film Khali Balak min Zouzou (Watch out for Zouzou), in which she played a university student who hides her nightlife as a belly-dancer, made “it impossible not to fall in love with that specific type of belly-dancing, which differed from that of a fully-fledged belly-dancer dancer such as Tahia Karioka." 

Furthermore, Atassi began practising belly dancing in the early 2000s when she took a belly-dancing class in the gym she regularly frequented during her stay in an Arab Gulf city.

“It was a great moment when I first decided to join this class; it was a moment of relaxation and unwinding in a very spontaneous way,” she said. “I started to reconnect with my body,” she added.

During the two years between watching Souad Hosni’s Watch out for Zouzou and the belly-dancing class in the gym, Atassi married and had children. In the process, she was becoming uneasy about looking in the mirror.

“Then I was there forced to look at the mirror in that belly-dancing class and everything changed; I started feeling comfortable about looking at my body in the mirror; I was happy with myself and with the way my body was swaying to the tunes of oriental music,” she recalled.

Since then, Atassi, who had to travel with her husband, was sure to find a belly-dancing spot in every city she landed in. It was easier in Arab cities, but it was not impossible to find the belly-dancing spot in almost every city she had been to. Often enough, Atassi said, the trainer was not Arab, and, in many cases, they came from South America. 

According to Amar, a belly-dancing trainer in a Cairo centre, it is not impossible to understand why women of all backgrounds and nationalities love belly dancing.

“A woman does not need a partner for belly-dancing unlike say Tango; of course, some women come to learn how to dance beautifully for their spouses but this does not mean that they only dance for their spouses, because I have seen so many women who come to my class gather once a month to just dance for fun,” she said.

Atassi agrees. She now understands belly dancing so deeply that she is working on a book that explains the connection between belly dance and pressure release. Atassi has seen many women in so many cities worldwide who dance just for the “pleasure of it and for the unwinding they get out of dancing”.

“It is certainly a moment of therapy, but it is also a moment of pleasure; I think this is why it is easy to notice that women attending the belly-dancing classes, in particular, are often smiling – essentially smiling to themselves”. 

Atassi likes quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Nietzsche, who said that those who wish to fly need to learn how to dance first. She also likes to refer to prominent Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s admiration for Tahia Karioka’s dancing and politics. 

According to Amar, it was mostly during the COVID-19 years that more and more women were subscribing to their online belly-dancing classes. “At first, some, especially mothers and women in their 50s and 60s, were very apprehensive about dancing before the camera. I understood their concern that someone would record the dancing to misuse the videos, but eventually, things went alright,” she said.

For Atassi, this expansion of belly dancing, especially in the Arab world, is a sign of liberation. She explained that she refers not to liberation from the mostly conservative dress code, but the liberation from the heavy weight of body-shaming ideas that expect all women to fit certain body measurements.

Belly dancing, according to Atassi, also liberates women from the fear of reconciling with the sensual part of their womanhood, which is often subdued by either social pressures or maternal duties.

“With belly dancing prompting vast muscle movement, women feel they are in control of their bodies; and if they dress up for the dance, they feel beautiful, relaxed, and more confident,” she said.

“This explains why so many pre-birth advisories now instruct belly-dancing as a preparatory exercise to give birth; it is not just about the control of the muscles but about the sense of confidence and ease that women need to handle delivering their babies,” she added.

Atassi argues that from the 1970s to the 1990s, Egyptian media somehow associated belly dancing with sin, thus alienating women from it.  

She added that in the past two decades, things moved away from this coercive negative stereotyping. “Currently, belly-dancing is increasingly perceived for what it is in essence: an art and a woman’s train,” Attasi said.

“This does not dissociate belly-dancing from its sensual element, considered a part of womanhood that should not be shamed,” she added.