{"id":3824,"date":"2012-02-17T12:38:41","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T19:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gildedserpent.com\/cms\/?p=3824"},"modified":"2012-02-20T20:49:58","modified_gmt":"2012-02-21T03:49:58","slug":"edwina-nearing-end-of-banat-mazin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gildedserpent.com\/cms\/2012\/02\/17\/edwina-nearing-end-of-banat-mazin\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of the Banat Mazin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Struggles with Religious Fanatics,
\nReal Estate Management , and Other Ghawazi<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"Khairiyya<\/p>\n

by Edwina Nearing<\/a>
\n A portion of this article was published in Habibi Magazine<\/a> in 1993
\nposted February, 2012<\/span><\/h3>\n

Yusuf Mazin<\/span>, a Nawari Gypsy, had wandered the land dealing in livestock, entertaining the villagers with stories, delivering messages and generally making himself useful until his non-Gypsy wife blessed him with five beautiful daughters.\u00a0 Beautiful, talented daughters who could master singing and dancing — the arts of the ghawazi<\/em>, as such women were traditionally called in the countryside — were the best hope for the prosperity of a Nawari family in Egypt.\u00a0 So as soon as Yusuf’s oldest daughter, Su’ad<\/span>, was seven years old, she was put on stage behind her aunt Labiba<\/span>, a famous dancer in Yusuf’s home province of Qena.\u00a0 The other daughters, Fathiyya<\/span> ("Touha"), Feryal, Raja’<\/span>, and Khairiyya<\/span>, the youngest, were served similarly, although Khairiyya, from the age of ten frequently requested to take a turn in mufti at stick dancing, for which audiences had somehow discovered her extraordinarily gifted, was allowed to stay in school until the age of fourteen.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1970s the Banat Mazin<\/span> — "Daughters of Mazin" — were as famous in Qena as oriental dance star Najwa Fu’ad<\/span> was in Cairo.\u00a0 The girls wore wide gold bangle bracelets, and usually at least two of them shared with Yusuf a comfortable, spacious house from which he reigned over a peaceful Dandara Street near green pastures on the outskirts of Luxor.\u00a0 Yusuf prepared stuffed, roast pigeon for honored guests like Cecil B. DeMille<\/span> with his own hands; fair-voiced Su’ad recorded audio cassettes in Cairo; she, Fathiyya and Feryal sang and danced in the Egyptian film Al-Zauja al-Thania;<\/em> and Khairiyya portrayed a Napoleonic-era ghaziyya<\/em> temptress in a French dramatic production.\u00a0 Fathiyya and Feryal finally married wealthy men and retired.\u00a0 Even in winter, the "off season," the remaining girls often had more work than they could comfortably handle.<\/p>\n