Inches away, a Saudi businessman waves his handkerchief in appreciation. His wife, veiled from head to toe in black, sways to the beat. With their frequent costume changes and a medley of tunes ranging from the Can Can to Ricky Martin, the troupe strikes poses as pretty as a Russell Flint watercolour. But what it definitely is not is belly dancing as most Egyptians know it. And the Egyptian dancers have had enough of what has been called the Russian Navel Invasion.
Invaders are nothing new in a city as ancient and large as Cairo.
Besides, Russians are everywhere in the Middle East nowadays. But times are especially hard now for the native exponents of the belly dance, whose place in society has always been precarious. Regularly condemned by Egypt's Islamic militants as licentious, and looked down upon by polite society as disreputable, the dancers suffer from a variety of official prejudices, which is accelerating their demise. Belly dancing has been banned from TV for years as part of the strategy of President Hosni Mubarak to take the wind out of the sails of the fundamentalists by absorbing the codes of Islam. Last year, for instance, the American University in Cairo was banned from importing 89 books, including Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita .