Shaaby - cool or shameful?

Hello my readers! This will be a story about what new have I recently learnt, or more like about the conclusions I have reached after paying attention to what the Egyptians and foreigners say about shaaby. I will try to speak less about bellydance shaaby and more about the shaaby class in Egypt, the source, where our shaaby dancing originates.

I will start by telling you a story and this will lead me to the point of this blog. My neighbors are from Yemen. There are many people living in the flat and it almost seems to be an office of some sort, people coming and going 24/7. So one day we notice a funny guy entering the building with us. He smiles to me eagerly and yells "How are You!?". I politely and shortly reply "Im good, thank You" and move on, trying to avoid any conversation. In Egypt its wiser not to get into conversation with strangers, especially men. So thats my first encounter with this guy. Sometimes I can hear the same guy singing in his room, because my window is 2 meters from his. He is hilarious and very loud voiced, able to wake up the whole building. In my eyes he seems like funny, loud characters, chatty and pushy and wild type of people I encounter in Egypt. So, getting closer to my point, one day we leave the flat with a French friend and my Egyptian friend. The crazy Yemeni guy approaches singing and smiling to all of us. He leaves to his flat above. The French guy giggles and tells me "This guy is so crazy, he is adorable!" and then my Egyptian friends warns me " Kaidi, you better stay away from this guy, he is too crazy, so local, so shaaby!"(for Estonian readers, the best word to create a parallel would be "maakas;)". So Ladies and Gentlemen, obviously, what we foreigner see with our foreign eyes to be crazy, wild, exotic character and give him praise to be so different and special, many middle-and high-class Egyptians see as shaaby - bad and unpolite and uneducated and dangerous.

I'll pop into bellydance for a second. During the first years of my bellydance studies what was given to me as shaaby was happy arabic pop-music bellydance. More aerobic and so much fun.

After this I started my dance-travels to Egypt I little by little realized there is a social class behind this dance, a class with its own music, customs and characteristics. And the further I diged I understood the core of shaaby music is the reflection of this class of people, the shaaby people, their hard life, struggles, corruption, drugs, jokes, humor and political or social messages and opinions. Here is a social shaaby example by my own interpretation:

But all this is my personal research by my own travels and experiences. Now I have realized its all through my eyes, the eyes of a foreigner, a stranger to the culture. For us as dancers from another culture and history we see this different, crazy, uncontrollable and exotic, a character we will never be ourselves, maybe just try to imitate. We find these characters cool or adorable as my French friend put it but and the Egyptians find it bad and shameful to interact with.

To end in a positive note, as many dancers before me have said and I agree with that point, we non-Egyptian dancers have the great privilege and possibility to enjoy this music and dance without being looked down upon. We have developed it into a fun and free dance style, so lets enjoy it but lets also stay smart and remember where is the real source of our shaaby privilege;)