Thread: A History Refresher

Hi zumarrad - I know. I was thinking of a friend of mine who writes historical fiction and the publishers have their own researchers (or something), to doublecheck her accuracy. Any ideas on that? I guess I'm wondering if there's any kind of process for making sure that the material they publish is accurate.

Originally Posted by david

OMG you're having Lubna? She is more than hot, she is sizzling. Man, you cant miss it for anything, believe me.

And now back to thread.

I'm desperately trying to make up for '08 when I went on my honeymoon instead of going to Randa.

Khaled, Artemis Mourat, Kazafy and Lubna in '09 -- *sigh* heaven

Originally Posted by zumarrad

If anyone wants to read my (very truncated and cursory) history of NZ BD, my thesis should be available for interloan shortly. There's a lot more interesting stuff in it than that. But I'm not putting my entire thesis on Bhuz every time somebody demands a full account of myself.

Yes yes yes. 50 times yes. sign me up Zum.

Originally Posted by BreaMorgiane

Hi zumarrad - I know. I was thinking of a friend of mine who writes historical fiction and the publishers have their own researchers (or something), to doublecheck her accuracy. Any ideas on that? I guess I'm wondering if there's any kind of process for making sure that the material they publish is accurate.

I'm guessing that some publishers want to verify certain facts, but others want to sell a book and don't care.

Obviously with historical fiction an author would probably take certain liberties with fact or at least imagine things that they could not verify occurred, but an editor might want to make sure the general names, dates and places are reasonably accurate.

Originally Posted by SaraKat

I don't have anything to contribute other than I too would be eager to get my hands on any and all academic work related to any of these topics

I've been having a great deal of luck with using Google Scholar. I've tried the terms "belly dance", as well as "raqs", and although there's a good bit of "static" in the results, there are also some gems of information.
My new local library also allows online entry pf ILL (Inter-Library Loan) requests; I've been getting articles back as PDFs within a week or so.

I just found about twenty articles on Google Scholar ranging from probably awesome to at least sort of interesting looking. (thanks to the fact I work at a university, I can download lots of things through jstor.) Thanks Asim!

Okay, I just wanted to narrow down a few things:

1. How old can we *definitively* say this dance is, or is trying to pinpoint that essentially looking for a needle in a haystack?
2. When men were professional dancers as well, what time period did this cover?
3. Are we absolutely certain that even the folk dance was not related in any way to either spirituality or the harem myth?
4. How did the dance migrate from the Middle East?

I guess I'm just trying to corral some solid ideas as far as teaching others. Of course, I have my pat answers to these questions, but I'm hoping for a refresher where everyone takes another look at the dance. I'm sure I'll think of more questions soon.

Originally Posted by BreaMorgiane

1. How old can we *definitively* say this dance is, or is trying to pinpoint that essentially looking for a needle in a haystack?
2. When men were professional dancers as well, what time period did this cover?
3. Are we absolutely certain that even the folk dance was not related in any way to either spirituality or the harem myth?
4. How did the dance migrate from the Middle East?

Some (non-)answers (citations available upon request, but much of this is from my work researching Mid-East Dance in the Middle Ages*:

1. Needle, meet haystack. The first question really is, what do you mean by "this dance"? I can tell you my personal research tracks "raqs" as a term back to the 15th Century (in Turkey, believe it or not!), and descriptions of dances with "freely-swinging hips" back to the 'Abbasid period (roughly European Middle Ages) -- I avoid the Roman references mostly due to lack of cultural context (after all, we "know" Tahitian dance "looks just like" Raqs, to take a modern example of confusing dance forms....)
2. Understand that the concept of a "professional dancer" is a fairly rare one in any pre-1600 Arabic source; dance was but one, fairly small, part of what a well-rounded performer did. I don't really see dance-only performers until the 15th Century, again in Turkey, but there seems to have been, at that point, roughly equal numbers of male and female dancers.
3. We can't ever be that certain of anything in history. Most of the criticism isn't that we can't find references (which is pretty true), but that the people who discuss and promote such references do so with precious little evidence or analytical rigor themselves.
4. ??? From the Middle East to...where? When? I need to know more about what you're aiming for, in terms of origins and information, before I can spout off like a fool. .w.:

* See:

The SCA period dancer in the Middle East: An Overview - Apostate
The SCA period dancer in the Middle East: A Bibliography - Apostate

Hi asim,

I was looking for broad generalities (should such things be definable). That is, did sharqi develop prior to Badia's era? The dance that you're referring to in Turkey - was this a root dance or the same dance? I was under the assumption that the dance couldn't be more than 150 years old or so (barring other proofs of its previous existence).

Migration from the Middle East to "the West" (ie, Europe, outlying regions, and how long did it take to get there?)

I have many, MANY students that seem to become very disillusioned or upset when they discover that the harem/spirituality thing is a myth, sometimes to the point of giving up the dance, so I just had to ask one more time whether we had any evidence for or against those things.

What time period would you say there were relatively equal female and male performers?

(by the way, your research on the qaina is fascinating)