A Few Words
This summer, I had the privilege of giving two presentations for my fellow dance students. The first was a brief history of Egyptian belly dance; the second tackled the somewhat provocative question of men in belly dance and the historical evidence of gender diversity in Egyptian entertainment before the 1952 Revolution.
Both presentations had one small problem: they were supposed to fit into a reasonably civilized amount of time.
They didn’t.
In fact, both ran more than an hour over their allotted time. (Oh, Dorothy, I can hear you asking, How is that even possible? Believe me, I have asked myself the same question.)
The trouble was that I kept running into those pesky little things called history and geopolitics. Every time I thought, “Surely I can skip this bit,” I would discover that the particular conquest, migration, social upheaval, political reform, technological advancement or cultural shift I was about to skip had actually shaped the entertainment traditions we now casually call belly dance.
And, in my unsolicited opinion, some of those things are rather important.
So, no, I did not manage to stick to the schedule, but I hope every attendee came away with a renewed appreciation for something that is easy to forget when we look at belly dance from the present day: traditions do not simply appear. They accumulate. They borrow, adapt, disappear, reappear, change names, change performers, cross borders, and can even surprise us by turning up somewhere we weren't looking for them.
Which brings me to three words with rather large historical baggage: jawārī, qiyān, and ghulāmiyyāt.
Sorry, Dorothy, understanding what they mean won't make you a better dancer! But it might send you down your very own historical rabbit hole.
Let’s dive right in!
Jāriya (plural jawārī) is a term that literally translates to "young woman," "maiden," or "female bondwoman." In the early centuries of Islamic history, as the Arab Conquest brought new territories and populations under Muslim rule, warfare was one of the ways in which people entered slavery. The people who entered the expanding Islamic world in that capacity came from a vast geographical area and included populations from the Byzantine and Persian worlds, North Africa, Central Asia and beyond. Women and children were the most affected groups.
Slavery did not begin with Islam. It was an ancient institution, thousands of years older than the Arab conquests, and it existed in many of the societies that preceded and surrounded the early Islamic world.
This post is not intended to be an exploration of the institution of slavery in the Arab-Muslim world, but rather an opportunity to zero in on something that can be traced through the centuries, all the way to the modern day: entertainment as a profession.
This is where you might want to set aside that familiar image of the fair-skinned female slave or odalisque - an idea popularised and romanticised in European representations of the "East" through the lens of Orientalism.
A jāriya was an enslaved woman, whose legal status differed significantly from that of a free wife (zawja). An enslaved woman who became the concubine of her male owner and bore him a child acquired the special legal status of umm walad (“mother of a child”). Her child was considered free and legally recognized as the owner’s legitimate offspring, while the mother could no longer be sold and was entitled to her freedom upon her owner’s death under classical Islamic law.
In essence, jāriya was the umbrella term: an enslaved woman. What she did, whom she lived with, whether she became a concubine, whether she had children, and whether she was trained as an entertainer were separate questions.
Some jawārī were not merely servants or concubines - they were deliberately trained as professional entertainers.
And that brings us to the next word.
Qayna (plural qiyān). During certain periods of Arab and Islamic history, owning - or having access to - highly trained female slave entertainers could be a significant marker of wealth, sophistication and social status. The qiyān were trained in music, singing, poetry recitation, dance, writing and calligraphy, courtly etiquette, and even such pursuits as chess and backgammon, among other things. Their education was specialized, intensive and could take years, which made accomplished qiyān extremely valuable on the slave market.
These women were not simply purchased for their labor. Considerable resources could be invested in their education and training, with the expectation that their accomplishments would reflect well on their owners. In other words, they weren't just buying a person - they were investing in PR.
But PR is of very little use if nobody is around to admire it. So, where did one display one's beautifully trained, highly cultured, ridiculously expensive human status symbol? In the majlis, of course.
A majlis (plural majālis) was an elite social gathering where conversation, poetry, music and entertainment could all take place. For a qayna, it could function rather like a medieval cultural salon - except that instead of someone putting on Spotify in the background, the entertainment was sitting right there in the room. And she was expected to be considerably more interesting than your average playlist.
In a culture where much knowledge circulated orally as well as through manuscripts, a performer who could accurately remember and reproduce a large repertoire was, in effect, a mobile repository of cultural material.
In Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History (I.B. Tauris, 2021,), Lisa Nielson discusses the extensive education of the qiyān in Chapter 4, “Performing Power: Courtesans, Singers, and Concubines.” Their education extended well beyond music to include literature, poetry, grammar and history, and their mastery of vast repertoires made them important transmitters of Abbasid court culture. As Nielson puts it, the qiyān “essentially functioned as living archives.”
In other words, imagine an archive that could sing, recite poetry, play an instrument, tell you a story, beat you at a game of chess and, presumably, have some fairly strong opinions about your fashion choices.
Some qiyān became celebrities of their day, known for particular voices, repertoires, compositions, wit or intellectual accomplishments. Their fame could extend well beyond the household in which they were owned.
And here is another reason the qiyān are fascinating: some of them appear to have been more than celebrities - they were trendsetters. Their influence was not limited to what they sang or how they performed. The most accomplished qiyān were highly visible participants in elite cultural life, and their clothing, hairstyles, jewellery, perfumes, wit, poetry and musical styles could become objects of admiration and imitation. Abbasid Baghdad was a place where fashion and cultural sophistication mattered enormously, and the qiyān occupied a rather unusual position within that world: they were performers, intellectuals, social companions and, in some cases, fashion icons in their own right. Their influence could extend beyond the room in which they performed, helping to circulate new songs, poetic forms, musical styles and fashions through the wider urban culture.
Some female slave entertainers enjoyed a degree of social mobility that was unavailable to many free women of their time. If you would like to learn more about some of the most celebrated qiyān and the fascinating stories of their lives, I recommend The Qiyan: the Singers, Poets, Dancers, and Courtesans of Medieval Iraq by Miftin al-Hadithi, available on Shira.net
However, I would caution against romanticizing the circumstances that led to these women being remembered as great historical figures. The vast majority of them were, at least at some point in their lives, enslaved - and some remained enslaved until the end of their lives. Fame, education, wealth, social access and even a degree of personal agency did not necessarily mean freedom.
For those who would like to take this particular rabbit hole a little further, there are some excellent academic resources available. F. Matthew Caswell’s The Slave Girls of Baghdad: The Qiyan in the Early Abbasid Era is a must-read for anyone interested in the qiyān themselves. Caswell examines their origins, education, artistic accomplishments and place within the social and cultural world of ninth-century Baghdad. For a broader examination of women, slavery and concubinage across Islamic history, I also highly recommend Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, edited by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain. The collection includes several particularly useful studies of Abbasid courtesans, qiyān, performance, social mobility and the education of enslaved women.
And now I am about to venture into territory where I need to put on my “speculating” hat.
I am still learning about the history of entertainment in early medieval Egypt and, in particular, the long and complicated process by which the practice of owning professionally trained slave entertainers eventually fell out of fashion. So I am very much not presenting what follows as an established historical fact.
But I have to admit: the more I learn about the qiyān, the harder it is not to notice the striking similarities between them and the much later ʿawālim of Egypt. Both were highly trained professional female entertainers whose accomplishments could extend well beyond singing or dancing into music, poetry, literary knowledge and sophisticated social performance. Both operated within elite entertainment cultures, and both could acquire considerable reputations for their artistic abilities.
Does that make the qiyān the direct ancestors of the Egyptian ʿawālim?
I don't know.
At this point, I think it is safer to say that the qiyān provide a fascinating earlier precedent for a type of professional female entertainer that we encounter much later in Egypt. Whether there is an actual continuous historical line connecting the two is a question I am still investigating - and, naturally, this is precisely the sort of question that sends Auntie Helen running headfirst down another historical rabbit hole.
If the qiyān have taught us anything, it is that “female entertainer” was a considerably broader category than we might imagine. These women could be singers, musicians, poets, dancers, intellectuals, companions and cultural tastemakers, and their performances could cross some of the boundaries we might instinctively associate with gender and entertainment.
And that brings us to another wonderfully curious word: ghulāmiyya (plural ghulāmiyyāt).
If qiyān complicate our understanding of what an enslaved female entertainer could be, ghulāmiyyāt complicate our understanding of what a female entertainer was expected to look and behave like. The word is derived from ghulām - a term associated with a young male servant/pageboy or youth - and was used for women who adopted aspects of masculine dress, appearance, manner or performance.
In other words, we have now wandered from highly educated female entertainers into the rather fascinating territory of women performing masculinity. Naturally, I had to investigate.
The phenomenon becomes particularly visible in ninth-century Baghdad, during the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Amīn (r. 809–813). According to accounts preserved by the historian al-Masʿūdī, al-Amīn was particularly fond of male eunuchs. His mother, Zubayda, apparently decided that the solution was to make some of the female slaves around him look a little more... well, boyish. These women were dressed in male-style clothing, their hair was cut or arranged in masculine fashion, and they became known as ghulāmiyyāt - roughly, “boyish girls.”
Looks like everyone thought this was a terrific idea!
The style spread beyond the immediate court and became something of a fashion in ninth-century Baghdad. The ghulāmiyyāt were not necessarily trying to convince anyone that they were actually men. Quite the opposite: the appeal seems to have been in the deliberate blurring of masculine and feminine appearance. They were women presenting a stylized version of youthful masculinity - and the fact that everyone knew it was part of the point.
And here is where our qiyān make another appearance. One of the most celebrated female entertainers of the ninth century, ʿArīb, reportedly began her career as one of al-Amīn's ghulāmiyyāt. She did not, however, remain permanently associated with that persona. Later, she became famous in her own right as a singer, musician, poet and cultural figure.
So, no, ghulāmiyya does not simply mean “a woman who dresses as a man.” Nor should we casually translate the phenomenon into modern categories of sexual or gender identity. It was a particular cultural performance of gender, and one that could be adopted, discarded and imitated.
In other words: ninth-century Baghdad had a gender-blurring fashion that was, apparently, brought on by one mom really wanting some grandkids. Can you blame her? When you are the mother of the caliph, you probably want to make sure there is an heir to the throne somewhere in the family tree.
If you want to know more and, perhaps, even dive into such juicy details as ghulāmiyyat fashion, hairstyling, comportment and performance, I suggest adding the following to your reading list, alongside the sources I’ve linked above: Everett K. Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Transgression in Classical Arabic Texts”, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, and Kristina Richardson, Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World.
And, at last, I find myself at a crossroads and facing two choices: I can introduce one more fascinating term to your growing list of early medieval performers and take you on yet another deep dive. Or I can dangle a click-baity hook in front of you and say, “Stay tuned for a blog post dedicated to performers who adopted gender-nonconforming presentations in the same historical period, known as mukhannathūn.”
I shall do neither.
Instead, I invite you to investigate the subject for yourself - or come to one of my presentations on men in belly dance. We might speculate about their fashion choices, or perhaps read some Islamic homoerotic poetry together. You know, a perfectly normal afternoon.
In the meantime, I would like to remind you that applying modern-day terminology such as gay, lesbian, transgender, and so on to people who lived a thousand years ago is anachronistic and best not done willy-nilly. Historical people deserve the courtesy of being understood on their own cultural and historical terms, rather than being squeezed into categories that did not necessarily exist in their world.
Have something to add to the discussion? Did you learn something new from this post? Get in touch and let me know: askauntiehelen@gmail.com
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