Art, Culture & Society

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Winter 2000 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2000 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Grandmother’s Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing, by Rosina-Fawzia al-Rawi. Translated by Monique Arav. 158 pages, 36 photographs. New York, NY: Interlink Books, 1999. $25.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-56656-326-7.

Grandmother’s Secrets presents both a philosophy of belly dancing and a primer. The author begins with a memoir of her childhood in Baghdad in order to contextualize her approach to the dance. This and a section named “From Head to Toe” are the strongest in the book. The latter provides clear instructions on how to perform belly dancing, using imagery and breathing to help direct stance and movement. Two other sections, “A History of Women’s Dancing” and a short survey of Middle Eastern dancing and ritual titled “Variations and Rituals,” are problematic. The book concludes with an epilogue on the ways that dancing can help women’s personal development. Wherever the author writes about her own experiences and philosophy, informed by an Arab childhood and European adulthood, the results are lucid and informative. The book also provides important insights into Sufism as practiced in her family.

Unfortunately, the book is marred by the unnecessary incorporation of a new age mythology of matriarchy and universal mother goddess archetype presented as history. Al-Rawi attempts to develop a universal history of women’s dancing without sufficient training in history or ethnography. The author’s dance history sources are unreliable.[1] Her position that belly dance originated in religious worship and ancient fertility rites is popular among belly dance apologists, but is suspect and too ponderous and detracts from the humor and playfulness that characterize belly dancing as performed in Arab homes.

The book’s description of childhood in Baghdad was highly nostalgic for me. I also spent formative years in Baghdad in my grandmother’s house, full of extended family, visitors and social khabs,a. Al-Rawi takes us skillfully through her experiences of meeting itinerant merchants, the kitchen (“a room…into which no man or child was allowed” (p. 10), an attempted betrothal cut short by her mother’s objections, the humor and candor in women’s visits, and her first menses and ensuing sorrow at “my newly acquired status as a prisoner” (p. 23). The book ends with her first visit to Germany where, “I saw women with long hair on their legs and short hair on their heads” (p. 26). This part is so engagingly written and such tales of Arab diaspora are so uncommon that the reader longs for more detail. What happened next? How did Al-Rawi finally come to terms with a life so foreign to her own?

Al-Rawi’s grandparents were mystics who held monthly zikr. Her grandmother taught her to dance through essentializing the dot, the letter alif and the Arabic b:

“Anchor your feet to the earth and balance your weight on both legs. Now shift your pelvis to the right and then to the left, as if you were drawing a shell. Every time you reach the furthest outward point, stop, balance back to your middle and then to the other side. Now come, make the same movement with the chalk on the board…does this shape remind you of something?”

“It’s the second letter of the alphabet, grandmother, but the dot underneath it is missing.”

“The dot is the beginning,” she explained. ”The dot begets all the other letters. The dot is below and the alef in between.…Together, they form the word ab (father), one of the names of the Divine. When you whirl or when you circle your pelvis, you are drawing the dot, the origins. From this shape all other movements are born—they all stem from this dot, from the navel in your belly” (p. 5-6).

This view of the dance is new to the literature and provides a fascinating contribution to belly dance theory.

The section titled, “Variations and Rituals,” like “A History of Women’s Dancing,” suffers from facile generalizing. A northwest African trance dance is presented as a “mourning dance” of the entire region, childbirth ceremonies are presented as uniform, ignoring existing variation. In sum, although parts of Grandmother’s Secrets are problematic, it provides original and valuable perspectives on a dance form and life style that are misunderstood.

Najwa Adra
The New York Foundation for the Arts

[1] Curt Sachs, Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (World History of the Dance, trans. by Bessie Schonberg (New Yor, 1927]); and Gabriele Klein, FuaenKorperTanz: Eine Zivilisationsgeschichte des Tanzes (Berlin, 1994).
Topkapi Palace: An Illustrated Guide to Its Life and Personalities, by Godfrey Goodwin. 223 pages, genealogy, plans, illustrations, bibliography, index. London, UK: Saqi Books, 2000. $29.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-86356-067-9
Not quite a coffeetable book, this is an armchair guide to Topkapı Palace that, in the words of the bookjacket, “takes the reader through all the rooms and gardens which are open to the public—and some that are not.” Goodwin, an eminent Ottoman architectural historian, describes the layout and decoration of the various parts of the palace and the changes brought about by fire, fashion, and the whims of sultans. These descriptions, devoid of technicalities, recreate for the reader the colors, shapes, and textures encountered on a stroll through the palace, but there is more. Goodwin seeks to bring the palace to life as he recounts the lives and loves, fears and foibles of the denizens of centuries past.

Topkapi Palace is written in the floating, romantic style of the great armchair travelogues of the nineteenth century. A sense of timelessness arises from the juxtaposition—in no particular order—of details from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries with remarks on what can be seen today. Illustrations range from miniatures to European paintings of varied date to early and current photographs (mainly black and white). The book is designed to convey an impression rather than to provide information for study; the sources of historical details and illustrations are not given, and a “Select Bibliography” includes only works specifically about the palace. Nonspecialist readers might well be confused by the quantity of Ottoman dynastic history and foreign relations presented not in chronological order but in the order dictated by the succession of courtyards and rooms through which Goodwin’s tour passes. A genealogy helps, but not enough.

Chapters proceed from the Gate of Majesty through the First and Second Courts to the Harem, then through the Third and Fourth Courts to the rose gardens of Gülhane. On the way we encounter palace cooks making pilav and soap, janissary recruits fishing off the walls, harem neophytes at school, pages laundering the sultan’s underwear, Ahmet I’s pudgy concubines, Osman II’s bloody kaftan, and the giraffes and elephants of the back gardens. We see domes and columns, gorgeous Iznik tile and second-rate landscape paintings, the leaded roofs of the Tile Pavilion and the bones buried under the floor in the Court of the Black Eunuchs. Goodwin’s own judgments are everywhere met with; some counteract negative stereotypes but others, alas, reinforce them.

Topkapi Palace is marred by inexplicable mistakes in Turkish (for example, Yirmisekiz Celebi’s name spelled Yermisekiz and translated “Twenty-Six;” Aya Iren instead of Aya Irini). As so often in works on Topkapı Palace, corruption and kinky sex overshadow creativity and good government, limiting the book’s utility as a textbook. There are some flashes of insight: “the true purpose of a harem was to ensure that a mother bore the sultan a son who was heir to the throne and that wives of future great officers of state were suitably educated” (p. 74); “Ottoman wealth was in perpetual motion” (p. 152). This readable book will frustrate the scholar but should delight the history buff.

Linda T. Darling
University of Arizona
Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, by Predrag Matvejevic. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. 218 pages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. $29.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-520-20738-6
Reading Matvejevic’s Mediterranean is like being aboard a ship at sea; his sea; a sea that is “not merely geography,” but a “mosaic” whose features combine, diverge, blur and become, in the long frame of time and humanized environments connected by water, one. The ship has a destination, but the destination is hardly known by those on board. The ship docks, we learn about people and place; the ship takes on new people, we learn about language and race; the ship departs, and we learn about food and words and things we carry and how and why they and we are aboard. In the end, we know much more, but we hardly know how we learned it or where it was along the way that we discovered the connectivity of all the things that elicit and inform our senses.

Such is the Mediterranean and its people and its landscapes; such is Matvejevic’s languid journey from place to page. This relatively short but densely packed book is arranged as a triptych: first, a “breviary” of Mediterranean seas, physical and cultural features, people, and ways of doing and making things; second, “maps,” the way the Mediterranean and its places have been represented, recorded, and diffused; and last, a “glossary” of Mediterranean terms, building from the word ‘Mediterranean’ itself to the names of its various arms and branches to the ships that traveled the sea and the islands within. Matvejevic plunges on to subjects—the olive, sponges, fish, nets, herbs, markets, curses, winds—interwoven with a skein of intellectual discourse: Mediterranean conferences on the Mediterranean; the Balkans as a separate and special element, a kind of “third coast” (neither northern nor southern) in Mediterranean life; the histories and historians of Mediterranean lore and life. It is a book that travels with no itinerary, stopping at all points, addressing all themes. Sometimes Matvejevic is on the water himself, viewing and relating his personal voyages to cities, coasts and cultures; sometimes Matvejevic is in the library of a long-time past, somewhere in Seville or Venice or Istanbul, revealing nearly lost accounts of Mediterranean society, its polities and technologies.

Matvejevic, a Croatian who teaches in France at the New Sorbonne and at La Spienza in Rome, has emerged as a major intellectual figure in Italy, France, Germany, and his native land. Matvejevic is also an international spokesman for Sarajevo, Kosovo, and the struggle for democracy in Yugoslavia. Readers of the MESA Bulletin will want to know, in this roundtable of the Mediterranean, how the Middle East and North Africa fare in relation to Europe. The answer is not bad: it is there; Matvejevic has traveled the Mediterranean south and east, particularly along the Maghrib, in Egypt and Turkey; he incorporates Arab cosmographers, cartographers, and historians into his lists, languages, and mental maps; the Berbers (Amazigh) are represented as frequently as the Catalans. He is, therefore, inclusive: not always completely accurate, but never dismissive. Matvejevic tends to be more authoritarian when he touches on the Balkans and the Adriatic, which are his subject and example perhaps too often in this broadly associative and impressionistic work on the Mediterranean world.

James A. Miller
Clemson University
Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923, by Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh. 409 pages, maps, index. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. $29.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-674-25152-0
The chief goal of the authors of Empires of the Sand is to explain the volatility of the twentieth-century Middle East in terms of its origins in the nineteenth century, and particularly during the crucial years of World War I and the peace settlements thereafter. In seeking to do so, they have presented a carefully-researched and well-written work but one filled with highly controversial interpretations and claims to originality.

The book’s title is misleading in several ways. The period 1789 to 1914 is covered in 101 pages of text, while the much shorter period 1914 to 1923 is discussed in great detail, taking up 249 pages. For the authors the phrase ‘Middle East’ seems to exclude Iran from detailed consideration. Egypt in the earlier period is treated at length, but for 1914 to 1923 it is only briefly considered. The Fertile Crescent is the geographical region most discussed.

The main focus of Empires of the Sand is on rather old-fashioned diplomatic and military history, with an emphasis on imperialism, nationalism, and diplomacy conducted by European and Middle Eastern leaders and elites. Very little attention is given to those topics which have preoccupied most historians in recent decades, such as crucial changes in the nineteenth-century economy, demography, society, gender relations, educational systems, and methods of constructing and understanding national identity. The causes of crucial events such as Greek independence or the British occupation of Egypt are seen by the authors as contingent upon the often-mistaken decisions made by individuals rather than resulting from broader factors. Although the authors wish to demonstrate the agency of Middle Easterners in determining their own fates, one learns more in this book about British diplomacy than about most indigenous leaders, except for the Hashemites of Mecca. The authors have consulted a wide range of sources, concentrating upon British archives and printed Arabic-language books, but not including the Ottoman archives. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography, which detracts from the usefulness of the book for readers.

Efraim and Inari Karsh are in many ways following historical interpretations first espoused by the late Elie Kedourie and often reflected in the London-based journal Middle Eastern Studies. While discussing briefly and uncritically the origins of Turkish, Armenian, and Zionist nationalisms the authors go to great lengths to debunk the proponents and early leaders of Arab nationalism, yet without sufficiently acknowledging the careful revisionism already published by such scholars as C. Ernest Dawn, Rashid Khalidi, William Cleveland, Philip Khoury, and a host of others. Empires of the Sand can be usefully compared to David Fromkin’s work.[1]  Fromkin’s book is less polemical and will probably remain the more widely-used of the two books by most professional historians in the field.

William Ochsenwald
Virginia Tech

[1] A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Avon Books, 1990).