Grandmother's Secrets

Al-Rawi has written a strikingly graceful and original book that blends p personal memoir with the history and theory of the dance known in the West as "belly dancing". She conveys in this book not only the history and technique of grieving and mourning dances, pregnancy and birth dances, but the spirit of these age-old rituals, and their possibilities for healing and empowering women today.

Dr. Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi was born in Baghdad and spent her childhood in Iraq and Lebanon. She is the author of Grandmother’s Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing, Divine Names: The 99 Healing Names of the One God, and Midnight Tales: A Woman’s Journey through the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Islamic studies. She completed her Arabic, Islamic, and ethnological studies at the Universities of Vienna and Cairo and has been teaching Sufism for over 20 years. She holds workshops in various countries and her books were translated into Arabic, German, English and French. Al-Rawi’s workshops, classes, and training courses are based on knowledge drawn from psychology, spirituality, cultural anthropology, and medicine. They are underpinned in particular by a body of knowledge known as Sufism, which has been collected and passed down over centuries, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Dancing, meditation, breathing techniques, traditional Sufi-practices such as zikr, whirling or working with the Divine Names all focus on opening the heart and embedding oneself into the great universal laws, beyond egocentric and social norms, connecting body, soul and spirit. In Vienna she set up a center for female spirituality, where seminars, workshops, and personal support on the path to self-discovery are offered.