On a hot summer night in Cairo, a hip crowd watches a group of musicians perform a lively fusion of Egyptian folk music and freeform jazz. The beat is strong, with three percussionists playing traditional instruments.
Suddenly, a little girl of five or six climbs onto the front of the stage and starts to bellydance. Her middle-class parents watch proudly as she gyrates her hips and lifts her long hair suggestively. The crowd claps in time with the music and she continues her extraordinary performance, mimicking perfectly the movements of a confident, grown woman out to seduce. Eventually, her smiling father picks her up and carries her back to her seat while the crowd roars its appreciation.
Bellydancing is a tradition going back centuries in Egypt. Historically women dancers appeared with singers, storytellers and poets at occasions as diverse as saints' day festivals, weddings and circumcision parties.
With many events segregated, the dancers would often perform only for women or would appear veiled before men. Their costumes, usually a wide skirt or baggy trousers, an undershirt and a waistcoat, were a far cry from the diaphanous veils and hip-hugging bikini bottoms that Hollywood propagated in the 1940s and 1950s and which have in turn become the norm in Egypt today.
For all its longevity, the dance's blatant sensuality and celebration of the body have given it an ambiguous place in Egyptian society, where religious conservatism and good, old-fashioned fun are engaged in a constant tug of war for people's hearts and minds. Given the chance, women and men of all social classes will tie a scarf around their hips and move expertly to a drum beat.
Yet many women who think nothing of donning a bikini at the beach would be shocked at the suggestion of bellydancing in front of men. Similarly, the parents of the dancing five-year-old would never dream of letting her climb on stage if she was 15.
Professional dancers bear the brunt of these contradictions. On the one hand they are vilified as little better than prostitutes; on the other they are invited to dance at respectable family gatherings and, in the case of a talented few, are treated as stars. But now these contrasts, which make Egypt the vibrant place it is, are destroying the art they have helped flourish for centuries.
Bellydancing in Egypt is dying, the country's youngest bellydancing diva, Dina, tells me as she fields calls on her mobile phone. Now there are hardly any Egyptian dancers. Over the past two years, many have quit because they can't make enough money.
Although Dina herself is a multi-millionaire and is not worried about her future ("the fewer dancers there are the better it is for me," she laughs), she and her colleagues blame the falling demand for professional dancers on an unlikely combination of the influence of conservative Islam and the growing Westernisation of the country's upperclass youth.
As Islamist groups grew strong in the late 1980s and early 1990s, their battle against what they saw as moral corruption had a strong effect on Egypt's increasingly disenfranchised urban middle and working classes. Bellydancing, with its scantily-clad women, provided them with an easy target. In some Cairo slums in the early 1990s, roaming groups of young religious men would forcibly prevent women from dancing and singing at weddings, cutting off a vital source of income for bottom-rung performers.
In an attempt to out-manoeuvre the growing religious opposition, the government joined in and announced it would clean up the profession, decreeing, among other things, that bare midriffs, cleavage and thighs were out. At the same time, a number of high-profile female entertainers retired, donning the veil and denouncing their former profession as sinful.
Yes, dancing is haram (forbidden), but so what, says Dina. Everyone does things that are forbidden. The 34-year-old herself recently retired, spawning rumours that she had turned to religion. But as she sits in her interior-designed living room in the tiniest of miniskirts, it is clear that the rumours are false.
"My retirement lasted for seven days," she laughs. "I love my work and couldn't bear being away from it." But even she admits that the dishonour attached to the profession is one of the reasons why fewer and fewer young Egyptian women are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to pursue the art.
Ironically, it was 19th-century Western travellers who helped bring bellydancing into disrepute. In her book on Egyptian women entertainers, A Trade Like Any Other, Dutch academic Karin Van Neiuwkerk traces a series of measures taken in the 1820s and 1830s by the Egyptian government. The authorities were under pressure from religious authorities outraged, not by the dance, but by the spectre of Muslim women performing in front of infidel men. By imposing heavy taxes and then banishing all female entertainers from Cairo, the authorities marginalised the dancers, forcing many to become prostitutes to survive.
For Victorian travellers this only increased their lure. Like modern sex-tourists trawling the sex shows and brothels of Bangkok for thrills, thrill-seekers such as the French writer Gustave Flaubert went out of their way fulfil their erotic fantasies. Flaubert's account of how he travelled hundreds of miles south of Cairo in search of the dancer Kuchuk Hanim, and then got her to reluctantly dance the Bee 94 - essentially a striptease in which layers of clothing are removed in order to free a fictitious trapped bee - is famous in the annals of travel literature and helped form the West's image of bellydancing as a symbol of the mysterious, exotic East.
The stigma of prostitution continues to hang heavily over modern dancers. Fifi Abdou, a belldancer in her 50s, is Egypt's wealthiest woman, a veteran film actress and one of the country's three top dancers. But during Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, she found herself pitted against the country's religious authorities when she, like other wealthy benefactors, funded a charity dinner table for the city's poor. Despite her table's reputedly generous portions of food from a five-star restaurant, the gesture generated a huge controversy when a conservative cleric declared it was a sin to eat food bought with tainted money.
An angry Abdou responded in one of the government weeklies: "My money is halal (permitted) because I earn it thanks to my hard work," adding that at least 30 families were dependent on her handouts. In the end, her charity table was given a reluctant green light by the country's highest religious authority.
To try to counter their negative image, most dancers take pains to portray themselves as professional artists. "Oriental dancing is an art," explained world-renowned bellydance trainer Raqiya Hassan. "It incorporates elements of ballet and folk dancing and takes years of training and dedication. You never stop learning and training."
Hassan travels the world to hold master-classes in bellydancing and works with many of Egypt's top dancers. She blames women working at some of Cairo's less salubrious nightclubs for bellydancing's bad reputation. "Many of the women in the lower-class casinos are not dancers. They just want to make money. They do bad things," she says indignantly.
Still, in the 1970s and early 1980s, an influx of tourists from the newly oil-rich Gulf countries made the seamier side of the business tempting for even the most dedicated artist. "People don't like to talk about this," said Semasem, a Swedish bellydancer who, like a number of foreigners, went there nearly a decade ago to study at the feet of Egypt's famed dance coaches. But there were all sorts of things happening in the back rooms of nightclubs. Some of the dancers would take several thousand dollars to dance naked for Saudi men. In a very short time, they set themselves up for life. Only a few did it, but they gave the profession a bad name.
"Among those who do want dancers at weddings, it is trendy to hire a non-Egyptian. You know, foreign dancers are much more tasteful," one wealthy young woman tells me. Semasem, whose real name is Marita Fahlen, snorts derisively when she hears this: "People often mistake lack of emotion for taste," she says. "Everyone knows Egyptians are the best dancers."
Raqiya Hassan agrees. "It's in our blood. A Russian can be a great ballerina. But even if she's a technically perfect bellydancer, she can never be as good as an untrained Egyptian. It doesn't come from inside."
Still, as fewer Egyptian women enter the profession, tourists and nightclub patrons are more likely to find Lebanese, Argentinean and Russian bellydancers performing for them. As foreigners, they are not affected by society's disapproval and are willing to work for less money than Egyptian dancers in the interests of getting experience. Most will return to their countries after a year or two and charge higher fees than most Egyptians could ever command.
But there is hope that Egyptian bellydancing will survive its current crisis. On Cairo's crowded corniche one morning, a group of university students gathers to take a day-trip on the Nile. While waiting for their boat, the men in the group clap their hands and sing. Immediately, one of them puts a scarf around his hips and moves his shoulders and hips in time to the beat. Others join in his impromptu performance.
Raqiya Hassan is right: bellydancing must come from inside and once there, it's impossible to take it away.