Africa & Middle East > Egypt > Cairo and Giza > Cairo > Articles

The two Englishwomen have come to the Meridien Hotel's reception for the same reason as me, to make reservations to see the bellydancer Fifi Abdu's weekly show. “A table of fifteen,” the women ask. The receptionist repeats the number to be sure he has understood. They turn out to be a group of British belly dance students on a tour of Egypt. Maureen O'Farrell, their teacher, who first looked at me with a touch of suspicion, eases up when she realises that I too am a Fifi fan. We have three days to pass before Fifi's weekly show.

“We're off to see Lucy dance at the Semiramis tonight. Want to join us?” It’s not every day that I get invited out by fifteen women, so I accept.

This is a troubled time for raqs sharqi (oriental dance), as belly dancing is more properly known. For millennia it has been as central to Egyptian culture as the tango is to the people of Buenos Aires, the waltz to the Viennese. Its pedigree, however, is far superior. Ancient tomb paintings show dancers performing what looks like a belly dance, other historical accounts abound and Nagwa Fouad, a retired diva, told me that she was sure this sort of thing is in the genes, that Egyptian kids dance instinctively.

But whatever the heritage, it has suddenly become something of a problem to fill Cairo's belly dance clubs. In part this is because many middle-class Cairenes, who made up the bulk of the audience, have reformed their ways to conform to a wave of Islamic conservatism. To make matters worse, the number of visitors from the Arabian Gulf has slumped as dramatically as a dancer’s cleavage. Some dancers also blame the westernising influence of television, an invasion of cheaper dancers from the west - particularly Russian girls - and the internet: the small group of Egyptian men who used to watch this sort of dance for titillation now have access to cyberporn.

Sex is part of it, of course. Gustave Flaubert set the tone for foreign travellers writing back home when he described a dancer he met between Luxor and Aswan, who rhythmically unveiled herself to the accompaniment of blind-folded musicians and then accompanied him to the nearest divan. Even Egyptians accept the raunchy side of things and dancers still get hired for wedding parties where they turn up the heat for the couple's big night.

There is a wedding party elsewhere in the Semiramis Hotel that night, but the nightclub is less than half full. Maureen and her dancers have secured a stage-side table, while a few Egyptians and a crowd of young Gulf kids are scattered nearby, all watching a tone-deaf couple singing covers of popular Egyptian songs. Around two in the morning, after a massive dinner has been picked over, a change comes over the place. It fills up - a family complete with young children is at the neighbouring table - and the stage is taken over by a 30-piece band. Maureen leans across to me: “You couldn't fail to be a good dancer with this sort of backing.” Lucy doesn't fail. She comes on wearing seven veils, but then proceeds to be more Madonna than Salome, making a virtue out of muscular effort.

Everyone loves her, even at three o'clock in the morning, and by the end several people are up on stage dancing with her. Maureen, who has seen it all before, has a steadying word to temper the enthusiasm: “Just wait till you see Fifi. Then you'll understand what it's all about.”

The following night I go to a little dive I know downtown. The Palmyra Club, like the monocled Greek lady who runs it, has seen better days. I sit at a table in the first of the shadows; around the room I can make out some ten men, few of whom look as though they are able to focus on the movements.

The first dancer is young, but shows more flesh than vigour and leaves as soon as the front row table has thrown enough money to pay her. She wasn't much, but she had more talent than the acts that follow, so I don't stay long. Instead of heading to another club, I wonder the backstreets. Near the night-market I notice a few young guys propped against the bumper of a Jeep. They start playing a tape and then one of them knots a scarf around his hips and gyrates in perfect imitation of the moves I had seen in the clubs. The others clap to encourage him. As Nagwa Fouad said, it's in the genes.

There is a different feel to the Belle Epoque nightclub. The city sparkles below us, the waiters are at full tilt, while the manager is trying to stay polite with the latecomers who have no reservations: the house is so full there's barely space between the tables. Egyptians, Gulf Arabs, some Levantines, a table of Scandinavian dancers, and Maureen and her girls, stage-side again. At 2am, after the usual preliminaries, Fifi emerges from the darkness. Madame Fifi, self-crowned Queen of the Nile, caught in a single spotlight, feted by a fanfare from her 30-member band. She is tall and solid, a rounded Egyptian beauty in diaphanous red robe and sequined bikini. She shimmers in the warm night. It's ten years since I first saw her and although she’s no babe, she can still pump up the blood pressure as she writhes and wriggles, jokes and purrs. Then she slows it all down, a sensuous beast, and lets her belly do the dancing everyone in the room is fixated on that small patch of soft flesh. The show is a touch crude, a touch crass and at times erotic. It is clear that Fifi needs the audience's adoration; in return she stirs them up, makes them long, and makes them laugh.

When it is over - so quick! though it's almost an hour and a half - the women are in tears, Maureen is slamming tequilas, preparing to dance onstage with a crooner, and I am left with an understanding of why, in spite of the social stigma, the majority of young Egyptian girls asked in a recent survey all cited Fifi as their role model. Belly dance is very much alive and rippling.

• More from the same writer