MizzNaaa
New member
So what do American belly dancers do now?
We love and embrace the music and dance from Egypt and the Muslim Middle East. Most of us try to promote all of the arts of the Arabic world and dispel the image of religious fanatics. After 9/11 things were very bad. Here we are again with the attack on the American embassy that has left four of our citizens dead. This makes me angry and sad.
Now what?
Keep telling our students and customers that not everyone “over there” is like that and these are isolated incidents? I do not want to hate monger against Muslims, so what am I supposed to say when everything people are hearing in the news are attacks targeting foreigners, women, Christians, and Jews? I realize every religion and culture has its drawbacks, but this is above and beyond. I don’t think Americans are buying into the “isolated incident” idea anymore.
What makes it worse for me is that I’m a former military, American woman whose father is Jewish, mother is Christian, and I belly dance. I feel like most Muslims would think I’m the Devil himself. How am I supposed to reconcile who I am with my love of Arabic arts? What do I tell my students? What do I tell myself?
I knew those questions would pop up, and somehow, I feel like it's my duty to justify them, but how can I without introducing myself properly first. So here goes...
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I'm an Egyptian, 20 year old artist and graphic design student. I grew up in a sort of typical Egyptian family. And by sort of, I mean we're not the norm here. My dad's a left wing liberal with a bit of Conservative streaks here and there mostly due to the fact that no matter how progressive/liberal we are, we still live in Egypt and must respect the boundaries of the culture and the society. When in Rome...
I grew up learning to think for myself and depend on no one but me, because as my dad always used to say "There's no one out there who'll help you or stand by you other than you, Rana. We El-Naqqashs have no capital in this world but our own hard work."
My mom however, is the typical conservative Muslim Egyptian woman who wants to see her daughters get married, so she could boast about being the mother of the bride, wear the veil, be good little Muslim girls and grow up to bring into this world lots of children that she can play with and would call her grandma. Very very typical.
So you could say, during my unruly childhood, I grew up in a bipolar house where on one end Mama told me I should do this and that, and on the other my Baba told me a completely different set of things, and as such; I consider myself one of the lucky few who had a taste of both ways of life as a typical conservative Egyptian and a progressive liberal Egyptian.
As I grew up, I went through many stages, I went from praying regularly, wearing the veil and fasting every Ramadan, to the other end of the spectrum where I stopped believing in the power of organized religion and being a social liberal, believing in personal freedom and a whole lot of other things you probably heard before.
During that process I've seen quite a lot of faces to our society that I don't think you would able to see without being a direct part of the society.
As a society, Egyptians are bipolar. They're also very diverse. They contradict themselves, and most of all they don't know any better. And I'm not just talking about the conservative majority or the progressive minority or any other faction in our society, I mean the society as a whole.
We've lived, for the past 40 years, in deep rooted corruption in every aspect of our lives. Our government, the past one (that is still ruling, cause not much has changed, trust me) ruled us like a mafia, except they were worse. Under their rule, they inflicted on the society many diseases that would ensure resistance would be futile cause people wouldn't know any better. There is no education, and when I say that, I literally mean it. There is no economy, there are no chances for young grads no matter how important their degrees are; Med school grads work as salespersons because they can't find jobs, there is no money.
We are living in the gutter, and we've passed the rock bottom by miles.
Yes, that's how bad it is for us.
It's not only bad on that front, but it's also bad for us on an international front. Our ex-government supported the interest of the western world religiously, to make sure that they have the backing they need against us Egyptians. Our military is not here to protect Egypt's borders, it's here to protect that government and its interests and of course foreign interests.
On another front we have Saudi Arabia whose monarchs spent outlandish amounts of money to spread their wahabi culture through promoting 'islamic education for free' and offering services like 'islamic banks' and 'islamic hospitals' and 'islamic centers for activities for adults and children'...etc., services that should already be available to people through governmental means in return to the crazy taxes we pay. As well as offering work opportunities for Egyptians in the gulf and in saudi in return to good amounts of money that said Egyptians would never have been able to earn otherwise.
I call it 'islamic' because while I am NOT a muslim, as I said before, I don't believe in organized religion - no disrespect meant to any religion what so ever though- I grew up in a muslim family, so I know that religion more than any other religion and wahabi ways in saudi are NOT muslim.
They've been working to integrate the culture into the society for the past decade or so, so the country would dominate the region instead of Egypt; a country that is known as a leader among the area and one of the most important strategic areas in the Middle East.
So you have a citizen; starved, poor beyond measure, living in a slum of a country, used and abused (BIG TIME) by the government. Said citizen can't even dream because there are no chances for anything, the biggest dream he/she has is to put food in the table and live comfortably enough. Then you have people who tell them that if they travel to said country, they'd get lots of money, and that they should be more like said country, because it's allah who brought so much money and comfort into said country.
So Egyptians go, travel, stay for a decade or two in the gulf then return to their families with enough money to live happily, with heads full of Saudi culture/ways and pockets full of saudi money and no education or knowledge to sift through said culture or ways to know what is real and what is an absolute load of garbage.
Now, religious fanaticism + ignorance = disaster
but, religious fanaticism + ignorance + governmental excitation of such fanaticism = mega sh*t storm disaster.
Yes, our governments use ignorance and fanaticism to entice the people into focusing on things as minor and crazy and unimportant as a movie insulting Muhammad, rather than focus on the fact that the government is ripping us off and we should do something about it. That has been the way since before the Muslim brotherhood took over, it's Mubarak's signature way of ruling, along with torture, murder, terror, killing innocent citizens with or without reason, emergency law...etc.
And so, you have incidents like this happening all over the middle east, especially in Egypt.
Protests happening in Egypt over the movie weren't 'massive'. They weren't even 'big' they were just...literally a group of young people who had nothing else to do but cause trouble. I'm not excusing them, but they literally are a bunch of kids with no education, no money, no prospects...they literally don't know any better. They also have a lot of anger and frustration, and this is the only way they managed to find to justify said anger and frustration. Most importantly you'd rarely find people here who supported that kind of BS here in my country, but media thrives on controversy, so yeah.
I am NOT making excuses for what happened, there is no excuse for what happened in Libya, but I'm trying to paint a bigger picture for you to see why/how things are the way they are specifically in Egypt and in countries of the middle east generally.
When you look at it, as a society, Egypt is full of societal diseases, prejudices, problems of every kind, and nobody wants to help us; not our government, not foreign governments, not even powerful people here cause they have interest in keeping things as they are. It means they stay in power, and they still have their money and they're in no danger of having their situation change.
I want to tell you that things will change, that it is bound to get better; but the frustration and hurt you feel is something i feel 1000x more. I live in my country feeling like an outcast for the way I think, what I believe in, for being a woman...and I want to leave.
All I can say things are bad, very very very bad, and they're bound to get worse with the people in power remaining the same way, but they have to get better at some point. It's just not going to happen any time soon. After all, you can't fix what was being corrupted for 40 years in a year or two or ten. You definitely can't fix it with the people who caused it still in power.
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