Hi u/Spectre-Cat!

So there is a lot of orientalism informing the assumptions that underpin the question. The dance is not necessarily seductive, and Islamic countries have not been monolithic or uniform over history. There are so many amazing books on this - and please someone feel free to link a good biblio, but I really like Zachary Lockman's Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. The whole basis for the question would benefit tremendously from some re-thinking on that front.

My focus was on mid 20th c. belly dance. I'll talk primarily about Egypt. In belly dance's arguably contemporary heartland, Egypt, raqs sharqi can be found easily all over the place today, and it was this way for sure since the golden age of cinema there. Living rooms, nightclubs, and top hotels --- It is definitely not always seduction.

Contemporary Western assumptions about how provocative raqs sharqi is in any given context are heavily influenced by hardcore ingrained orientalism. Najwa Adra explores how in the Arab world belly dance is not considered a dance of seduction in the majority of social contexts . You can check out her chapter “Belly Dance an Urban Folk Genre,” in Belly Dance, Orientalism Transnationalism & Harem Fantasy, ed. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. You can also see Kathleen Fraser's work, A Trade Like Any Other, that talks a lot about how the dance form in Egypt has only been considered seduction work in specific professional contexts (this was an ethnography from the 90s). If a general audience in Egypt is going to see a performance of raqs beledi or raqs sharqi as seductive or as fun and folkloric is highly dependent on who is doing the dancing, when, where, and with who around. If you are paid and a pro, it is more likely to be seduction. If you are dancing with your pals at home, then not so much. For more, check out Anne Vermeyden's ‘The Reda Folkloric Dance Troupe and Egyptian State Support During the Nasser Period’. Dance Research Journal 49, no. 3 (December 2017): 24–37. Vermeyden talks about this exact issue --- the whole positionality thing is part of why the Reda Troupe's dance is considered folklore, but the dance of Fifi Abdu is considered beledi or sharqi.

Just another thing to note---the movements/stylizations that came to be termed raqs sharqi by a contemporary individual really came into existence during the 20th century. You can check out Kathleen Fraser's Before They Were Belly Dancers: European Accounts of Female Entertainers in Egypt, 1760-1870 for academic work on what I would argue is the closest studied dance "lineage" to modern raqs sharqi. Any dance form that was pre-Islamic would have a completely different context/meaning than the forms that were performed in the 19th c., and Fraser argues (I would too) there are different from the forms popular in Egypt in the 20th or 21st c.

An answer to your question would be if professional (ie paid dancers who make a living entertaining) belly dance's evolution over time began in the pre-islamic period and shifted and morphed until today, it would not have been considered provocative in the way it is now. Also, law has not been conservative for centuries, and women have been dancing publicly in Egypt, for example, for sure since the 18th c, and I'm sure earlier. There were periods of persecution against pro dancers (see Fraser's awesome book), but this was interspersed with great popularity.

Actually the debate in the scholarship is more about what effect colonialism had on criminalizing women's public performance/dance, but that's a tale for a different day XD.

My experience is with Egyptian dance, but I suggest looking into the research by Sahra C. Kent (Sahra Saeeda) and Heather Ward (Nisaa of St. Louis). Sahra does a seminar series called Journey Through Egypt in which she discusses Egyptian culture and dance and how dance has evolved from local social dance to stage performance, and Heather Ward is the author of Egyptian Belly Dance in Transition: The Raqs Sharqi Revolution, 1890-1930.

Modern Egyptian belly dance has evolved from the dances of the Awalim ( female singers, dancers, musicians who performed for the lower and middle classes in private residences) and Ghawazee, dancers who performed for the rural populations in public. Awalim, while being of a similar social class to the Ghawazee, were held in higher esteem because they performed in private, higher class residences, whereas Ghawazee performed in public.

In the 1830s, King Muhammad Ali banned public performances by these two groups, as well as prostitution in urban areas, and when they were able to return decades later, the lines between the two blurred.

In the 1890s, the new style raqs sharqi (what we know as belly dance) developed with the advent of entertainment halls.

Costuming and movement styles would evolve with influences from the film industry and western influences such as ballet. I'm sure Mahmoud Reda, one of the founders of the Reda Dance Troupe, had a large influence on the evolution of this movement as he studied multiple forms of dance, including ballet, and trained many dancers over the course of his life. According to Nada El Masriya, there isn't a professional belly dancer in Egypt who hasn't taken at least some foundational ballet. You can see it in the terminology and movement vocabulary currently taught.

I would also say that the Reda Troupe had a large hand in bringing the dance styles to the rest of the world, via the Reda Troupe and his and Farida Fahmy's involvement in the Egyptian film industry, which featured a lot of oriental dancers, such as Tahiya Carioca, Samia Gamal, Soheir Zaki, and Nagwa Fouad.

You have to understand though, that Egypt has a very complicated relationship with its native music and dance forms. They aren't exactly viewed as high art by many people. And dancers can often be viewed as "loose women." Like, they may want a dancer at their wedding, celebration, etc, but they would never want their daughter to become a dancer. And even professional dancers (native, not western ones) will be sure to distance themselves from the Awalim and Ghawazee traditions because of stigma.

I won't speak about Orientalism, as I haven't done a ton of research into that area at this time.

It is important to note that homestyle dance and stage performance are very different. While they share some movement vocabulary, belly dance for the stage, depending on the style, does tend to be more seductive, because you are portraying a sort of fantasy, or playing a character. But the seductive nature of it will vary depending on your audience.

I am an Egyptian style dancer who has been studying for the last 8 years with various native Egyptian and Western teachers, and I have taken the first two levels of Sahra C. Kent's JtE series and have sat in lectures by Heather Ward.

Edit: When I was working on this /u/floofyflooferi submitted an excellent answer that is now the top answer, and definitely go read that one! Some of my answer is now a bit unnecessary as the other response was removed (thanks mods) but I think still hopefully people can benefit from the larger analysis around Orientalist depictions of belly dancing that influences this question.

No reasonable scholar of Islamic history today would still subscribe to the “Islam was so liberal before Wahabism” framework—that is not a useful description of the region nor of Islam. The MENA was neither backwards waiting for Europe to arrive nor some liberal multicultural utopia. I also fail to see what pictures of women in Iran pre-revolution have to do with belly dancing—as if Islam didn’t exist there before 1979?

So that being said, let’s talk about the history of dance in the Middle East and North Africa, the parts of the Muslim world most strongly associated with “belly dancing,” “dance of the veil,” etc. It is an immensely diverse region with many dialects spoken, religious and racial diversity, class stratification, etc. – so it therefore also has a diverse history of art and culture! Belly dancing as we usually picture it is somewhat of an amalgamation of different elements of Arab dance, including for instance hand drumming techniques, or the wearing of gold coins and other forms of ornamentation by women for special occasions (usually only weddings). There are many other forms of Arab dance that are also performed either by men or by men and women. Dabkeh is a traditional form of Arab dance common across the Levant but most strongly associated as a Palestinian dance. It is (perhaps mythically) associated with pre-Islamic cultivation or agricultural rituals, involves a lot of feet stomping with everyone in a line or semi-circle linked arm to shoulder, and nowadays frequently performed by men at weddings or by men and women together in more urban spaces or in Palestinian-American settings. Belly dancing does not really resemble any particular one of these dances.

Much of what we in the West consider “belly dancing” emerges thus not necessarily from some true “pre-Islamic fundamentalism” dance technique or form but through performances that Western travelers to “the Orient” recorded in written travelogues, postcards, or other travel narratives to distribute to European (and later US) audiences. The term “belly dance” arrives to us not from any Arabic translation but from a translation of French Orientalists description in the late 19th century. Malek Alloula describes not just belly dancing but the larger phenomenon of photographic postcards of Algerian “harems,” odalisques, etc as both “stereotype and phantasm,” a crucial part of the French colonization of Algeria. Algerian women became both desired and to be held at arm’s length. The Western photographer sending back postcards of belly dancers was showing both his privileged status of getting access to the “closed harem” as what he portrayed as an objective scientific western observer documenting traditional native life (which was pretty much always staged for the photographer’s lens), while also leaning into to the lewdness and sexualization of Algerian women. Veiled women’s bodies stood in for the land of Algeria – waiting to be conquered and penetrated by French men (colonists and conquered), yet also inaccessible, mysterious, desirable. There is a lot of great scholarship that is a bit beyond the scope of this question about how the veil actually became a tool of Algerian resistance during the revolution that kicked out the French (Fanon writes about it quite a bit, somewhat problematically at times), but short aside there is that wearing the veil actually became an anticolonial symbol against French imperial secularism. Veiled women, often assumed to be docile and apolitical, would actually smuggle in bombs under their coverings.

The US got on the belly dancing train particularly after the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which included belly dancers in an exhibit. Amira Jamarkani argues that these belly dancers, who then had their photographs distributed on postcards, served less as some actual representation of Arabic dance practices than as a source of displaced American anxiety: about industrial progress and concurrent social change; the US as an imperial-power-in-waiting anxious about its state in the world; and the internalized disgust at women’s bodies of the Victorian era – shaming these belly dancers was a useful way to thus hold up white women’s “proper behavior” domestically as opposed to these “savage undulations.” Jamarkani even compares the way the belly dancers were discussed and their images circulated to minstrel shows which maintained a certain racial order in the US. This continued into the 20th century. Ella Shohat, in writing about the history of Orientalism in Western cinema, describes how belly dancing was really just a mash up of a lot of different “Eastern” cultures to feed American audiences hungry to see “the harem”: “films often included eroticized dances, featuring a rather improbably melange of Spanish and Indian dances, plus a touch of belly-dancing (The Dance of Fatima, The Sheik, and Son of the Sheik (1926)). This filmic practice of melange recalls the frequent superimposition in Orientalist paintings of the visual traces of civilizations as diverse as Arab, Persian, Chinese, and Indian into a single feature of the exotic Orient.” This continued and had a resurgence in the 1970s with the Arab oil embargo and the rise of US interest in the Middle East, which saw another rise of belly dancing and harem depictions in US movies and television.

Essentially or TL;DR: Our idea of “belly dancing” is historically inaccurate, has little or nothing to do with a “pre-Islamic fundamentalist” utopia of the Middle East, and much more to do with Western fantasies of Muslim and Arab women linked to historical colonization and imperialism in the region.

Sources:

Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Jarmakani, Amira. Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Shohat, Ella. “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13, no. 1–3 (1991): 45–84.

I don't have the authority to speak on the matter, but u/Cptbuck made a great answer