Manners before Morals

She dances like dancing and only dancing is her life (and is not that how Egypt used to be?) and she dresses to invite attention, to challenge views of what a proper appearance for women in public shall be. Ruby is a singer and a rising star. She is commercial and aware that sexy videos sell, but she is also a window where aspirations of a new generation are breezing trough; attitudes that are taking on the older generation’s efforts to craft a counterculture to the West. Not everybody is pleased:

“They have no dreams except feeding these kinds of instincts or living like their fellows in the West," a university lecturer tells the BBC. "They gain the bad things from the Western culture - like free relationships between men and women," he says.

On the surface his statement sounds true. Underneath, no, it is a reaction to their society’s way of living; an attack not on religious beliefs but on bottled up feelings and hypocritical pretence. It is a modest protest by way of fashion that in words would have read: “We know you have lovers and are more often than not betraying your spouses, it is as common as dates in a palm tree garden. This is not the future society we desire. We are starting from a different point; we are showing more and hiding less.”

Two articles from Cairo by the BBC in a series about young people in the Middle East are here and here.
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