This week, Egypt lost one of the last surviving icons of the golden age of Oriental dance. On 2 May, at a Cairo hospital, Soheir Zaki, a belly dancing diva of the 1970s, passed away after a short illness at the age of 81.
It had been 30 years since Zaki exited the limelight, but her passing brought back memories of the times when dancers were the ultimate social butterflies whose performances manifested power and affluence.
One of the most legendary photos from Zaki’s remarkable career was taken at her 1974 performance in a state banquet hosted by President Anwar Al-Sadat for visiting US president Richard Nixon in Cairo, following the resumption of Egyptian-American relations. The photos of a stunned Nixon and a jubilant Zaki made it to the Western press, drawing attention to the iconic art that Egypt had perfected and developed since the early decades of the 20th centuries, with cabarets dotting Downtown Cairo and Alexandria as of the mid-1920s.
Zaki herself took up dancing in the early 1960s, while still a teenager, in response to her fascination with that art and her natural talent for it. In TV interviews she gave during her years of glory in the early 1970s, Zaki said that she was inspired in large part by the glamorous Tahia Carioca and Samia Gamal, two giants whose careers had started in the early 1940s.
In the early 1960s, both Carioca and Gamal had started to limit their performances but their style and allure was far from being passé. Still, Zaki managed to make her own imprint and create a niche of her own. Her signature style was one of souplesse and rejoicing. She performed not just with a splendour that matched her stunning Egyptian beauty, with dark eyes and long dark hair parted in the middle, but also with a sense of joy that made every dance a celebration.
Zaki was actually the first dancer ever to dare dance to the rhythms of songs by the one-and-only Um Kolthoum – and to receive the acclaim of the ultimate diva of Egyptian and Arab singing and for that matter also the legendary composer Mohamed Abdel-Wahab. To date, videos of Zaki dancing to Enta Omri (You are my life), the first song Abdel-Wahab composed for Um Kolthoum, are a source of fascination for those born in later decades. By the early 1990s Zaki had gracefully stepped off the stage in her prime.
Throughout her career, Zaki was the dancer she wanted to be: graceful, celebrated and faithful to the tradition and the soul of her art. Compared to the other icon of Oriental dance of the 1960s and 1970s, Nagwa Fouad, Zaki was deeply conservative. Her dance, her costumes and her looks all spoke of a deliberate choice to stick with the core elements of the art, but with vividness and coquetry of an established vedette.
While her dance appeared in several films of the 1960s and 1970s, Zaki never flirted with acting the way many other star belly dancers did. She remained a dancer whose performances were in incredible demand at the top venues of Cairo’s night life in the 1960s to the early 1980s and in the weddings of the high society.
Once she made her final bow, Zaki kept a very low profile, hardly giving any TV or press interviews or making any social appearances. She turned down requests to record interviews with the top presenters of the entertainment shows in the early years of satellite television and declined to comment on the decision of some belly dancers, like Sahar Hamdi, who made her fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to retire and take the veil. She was confined to a chosen and cherished privacy until her final stepping down on Saturday morning.
Zaki was married to Mohamed Emara, a cinematographer with whom she had a son, also named Mohamed. Family and close friends paid their last respects at a predictably low-profile funeral on Sunday. A condolences ceremony was scheduled for Tuesday evening.
The passing away of Zaki came at an intriguing moment for an art that is being slowly but surely overtaken by foreign dancers from Europe, Asia and South America, artists who – no matter how skillful – fall far short of the grace and charm of the original Egyptian divas.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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