Dancers, mothers, and those escaping the Zuzu complex

The dramatic climax of the 1972 film  “Khali Balak min Zouzou” (Watch Out for Zuzu) comes in the famous scene where Zainab (Zuzu) played by Soad Hosny — faces the revelation of her mother’s profession, the legendary belly dancer Usta Naeema Almaziya (Taheyya Kariokka), in the home of her fiancé’s family — Saeed (Hussein Fahmy), the son of pedigree and prestige.

Zainab is invited to the wedding of Saeed’s sister at the family house, after Nazek, the daughter of his stepmother, arranges for her mother and her troupe to perform at the celebration. She insists that Usta Naeema herself dance — though she had retired years earlier due to age — and this insistence, motivated by jealousy and hidden spite, sets the trap. Nazek, once engaged to Saeed before he broke off their engagement under the spell of his new love for Zuzu, watches as the two worlds collide.

The film, which director Hassan El-Emam loosely based on the story of journalist Bahira Mokhtar, daughter of the famed 1940s dancer Nabaweya Mostafa, hinges on a painful irony. Zouzou hides her mother’s profession from classmates at the university and from Saeed, hoping to carve a new path within a society that would otherwise judge her through the lens of her mother’s work. She carries a stigma she did not create; one she and her mother struggle endlessly to escape.

Yet the confrontation between mother and daughter at the wedding — that fleeting look in Hosny’s eyes, trembling between fear and compassion, expressing the enormity of injustice that befell the mother, deceived into a humiliation she did not understand — reveals to Zuzu the futility of her attempt to run from her “origin.” She decides, by the very ethics of the craft, to restore her mother’s honor as a master performer (usta), stepping in to dance in her place, after having resisted her stepfather’s attempts to draw her into the troupe — with her mother’s full support —a resistance her mother had always supported.

That scene crystallized the film’s philosophical and social question: how far does one’s “origin” govern the present and the future? And though the film concedes to society’s condemnation of the dancer’s profession, proposing education — and the university in particular — as a possible space for liberation from the determinism of class and fate, its domestic scenes inside Naeema Almaziya’s home offer another view: a world of compensatory solidarity, woven among the dancers and members of the troupe, who know all too well the nature of their own marginalization.

This appears most clearly in the scene of Bat‘a, the dancer who attempts suicide after her lover abandons her, reminding her that she is one of “the awalim,” (traditional belly dancers) that she must return to “her kind.” Zuzu reads in the incident a small lesson, “just so we don’t forget who we are and where we belong.”

Zouzou’s double life in two worlds sealed off from each other might be possible for the child of a lesser-known dancer. But the real-life arc that spans three generations of women who inherited the craft and achieved wide fame—Taheyya Kariokka, Fifi Abdou and Dina—surpasses fiction in a scenario written not by imagination, but by life itself.

Taheyya, Fifi, and Dina

A few years before she died, Taheyya Kariokka adopted Attiyatallah and asked that Fifi Abdou care of her after her death. The girl lived with Abdou’s two daughters, one of whom pursued acting.

Kariokka, who had no biological children, also considered Abdou one of her many “daughters,” and publicly stood by her when Abdou stepped away from the limelight, alongside artists like Shadia and Samir Sabri. Fifi, for her part, never flaunted the relationship; she simply called Kariokka “Mama.”

Fifi Abdou did not, as custom dictates, retire from belly dance with age. On the contrary, she renewed her relationship with younger generations through social media, on her multi million-follower Instagram account, where she continues to share her videos, humor, and unbroken vitality — both physical and human.

She also maintains her pride in being both dancer and mother, meeting demands that she quit with bewilderment: “Why would I retire from dancing? Should I retire from life? This is the oxygen I breathe… Why do you want to deprive me of my oxygen?”

In 2014, Abdou faced an online pile-on when news spread that she was being honored as “Ideal Mother” by the Egyptian Aviation Club on Mother’s Day. Commenters mocked the award as “national setback,” or catastrophic defeat, a taunt laden with anger at supporters of the post–June 30 order, as others lamented that motherhood in Egypt had fallen so low as to find its role model in a dancer.

This wave of attack, with Fifi Abdou at its center, coincided with an attempt to fuse the image of women dancing at polling stations with the new regime itself—reviving the long history of stigma that has clung to belly dance and its performers. That same inherited shame was now weaponized, extended to mock and demean the new regime through the bodies of the women who danced in its name.

In contrast, Abdou’s daughter Hanady El-Derawy posted on Facebook: “I thank everyone who wrote a kind word about my mother, and to those who object, may God preserve your mothers for you, and I hope your mothers raised you as well as ours did.”

The school of Dina Recently, dancer Dina inaugurated her new school for oriental dance in Cairo, offering alongside it classes in other artistic disciplines.

Dina has long taught in workshops and schools around the world. That work, and her ties to global communities of interest in the form, expanded her fan base and her standing as an innovator—someone with tangible contributions and a distinctive style in movement, costume, and performance.

She launched the school in Cairo in the presence of her teacher, Raqia Hassan, the renowned trainer with the Reda Troupe, where Dina started dancing at the age of nine. Hassan trained many stars, including Azza Sherif and Fifi Abdou. At the opening, Hassan described Dina as her daughter and called the achievement a success in an extremely difficult line of work “in our country.”

Within days, the challenge became clear. A lawyer filed a official complaint to the public prosecutor accusing Dina of “promoting debauchery and depravity” and violating entrenched social values by opening the school. A female member of parliament of parliament announced her intention to submit a briefing request demanding the school’s closure.

The most viral moment, though, was the presence of Dina’s son, Ali, at the opening. He stood beside his mother with confidence and affection, supporting her openly. His gesture, tender and simple, unleashed the predictable torrent of comments — questioning his masculinity, and insulting his mother’s honor.

Dina’s case is far from Zouzou’s world. She was born into an upper-middle-class family—unlike most professional dancers historically—and, despite her family’s disapproval, chose the profession after earning a university degree. And just as she distanced herself from convention, Ali, her son stands apart from the legions of men who populate social media with contempt — those we know and live among — and from Zuzu herself, who was haunted and destroyed by her mother’s profession.

The witch syndrome

Across these stories, dancers and their mothers, daughters, and sons care for one another regardless of blood ties. Generation after generation, they move slowly toward reconciling what was long torn apart: the dancer’s craft and the mother’s role.  Motherhood here is a symbol of social legitimacy, one too often withheld by a nexus of class, religious, and moral standards that all converge on a single axis: the limits imposed on the movement of the female body, and on a woman’s right to that body — what is permitted, and what must remain forbidden.

Dancers often face the harshest enforcement of those standards because they exercise control over their bodies—through performance, beauty, spectacle, and seduction. Living without family or social protection, and without the masks that mimic dominant moral codes, they are denied the right to their bodies and sexuality in exchange for motherhood as a supposed passport to acceptance.

Contempt for dancers has long served as a tool to uphold a dominant image of “desirable” femininity — one that reflects men’s own conflicted relationship with the art. They are its widest audience, and at the same time, its most hostile adversaries. This image reaches completion through the demonization of the dancer’s conduct and appearance, casting her as the antithesis of the “good mother” — a role she is never allowed to inhabit within that logic.

Within this same image, ultra-nationalist machismo finds a ready vessel for its fury: a means to police social groups and to impose a single, rigid design for both bodies and minds.

This surfaced again in another attack from a different reactionary camp, when members of the Awalem Khafeya troupe celebrated Alaa Abdel Fattah’s release after a presidential pardon and were likened to “the dancers of Ishtar, goddess of war and destruction, who lures victims with ritual dance and then kills them as sacrifices to her lord, the devil.”

This delusional message spread verbatim across several neo-nationalist pages. Its author drew directly from the misogynies of the Middle Ages, resurrecting the image of wanton women possessed by the devil — women who, having turned to him, were misled by his illusions and seductions.

The archetypes of myth and the “witch syndrome” have long served to demonize women, turning them into scapegoats in times of deep social crisis. This machinery of vilification has always extended beyond women themselves,  to every group stripped of social protection: ethnic and sectarian minorities, and all those suspected of straying from the rigid order of patriarchal society.

Facing the backlash

The barrage of criticism aimed at “Watch Out for Zuzu” reflected a similar nationalist, reactionary mood in the years after Egypt’s 1967 defeat. Writer Yusuf Idris and critic Sami El-Salamouni, among others, attacked Salah Jahin for scripting Hassan El-Emam’s story—accusing him of indulging in tales of dancers and “awalim” that pandered to escapism and helped dull the public’s consciousness at a time that demanded awakening and mobilization.

The language of those articles betrays something else: the deep provocation critics felt at linking dancers with positive concepts such as honor, hard work, and the pursuit of social mobility. Idris worried this would turn society “into a vast school producing slave girls, courtesans, and prostitutes. [...] In this way Hassan El-Imam’s dream would come true, and all of Egypt would become Mohammed Ali Street.”

What the three stars of baladi dance sustained across generations has not been matched by a continuity of their profession  in the country where this art first took its modern form. Today, Egypt’s dance market is dominated by foreign performers. Mohammed Ali Street has vanished as a training ground. Since the 1970s, a rising social-religious conservatism has squeezed dancers out of family celebrations, and belly dance has slowly receded from Egyptian media and the arts.

Responding to the current frenzy, Dina says she is protecting “our art, which is being pulled out of our hands,” even as it spreads worldwide. Her school also trains in long-neglected folk forms, world dances, and therapeutic movement. She adds that the emergence of a new star is far harder today—and she is right. The ecosystem that birthed modern baladi in Egypt with pioneer Badia Masabni has almost disappeared: the social fabric, the streets, and the cultural incubators that once fed performance with genuinely liberating visions.

In contrast to the patriarchal, Oedipal mother-myths that drive legal complaints, parliamentary interpellations, and online harassment stands a persistent false binary. Professionals and politicians often claim Egypt is a country “where dancers succeed and scientists fail,” while others condemn dancers to hell as an act of piety.

Yet the intertwined stories of Taheyya, Fifi, and Dina—and of their children and mothers—offer another vision. Their maternal generosity becomes a symbol of reconciliation between femininity and motherhood. It meets hostility with solidarity, answers cruelty with tenderness, and, like Zouzou in her moment of revelation, shows how a daughter can become a mother to her own mother.