Dancing Stars

8/6/06 - 8/12/06

by C. Zaitz

I did a google search for “arabic stars” recently, and I landed at a bellydance site. Funny, I had just visited my dance teacher, Princess Madiha. She’s a real princess, living here in the Detroit Metropolitan Area. Madiha's mother was of the Awabdi family, originally a royal family in Syria. When Madiha's grandfather, Prince Halil Awabdi, died in a power struggle in the late 1800s, the family lost all their power and wealth. Her mother later married into a farming family. Both she and Madiha are entitled to retain the title of "Princess" in memory of their heritage.

Princess Madiha is one of those special people who enrich your life in ways it takes years to fully appreciate. She not only taught me how to dance, but how to express the beauty in a kind of music that was new to me. She always said she didn’t have blood in her veins, she had music instead. She always tells her students that until the music and movements are part of our vocabulary, we’d always dance with a foreign accent.

I had been researching Arabic star names. The majority of star names are of Arabic origin. This is a little known fact, since it’s assumed that the Greeks named everything in the sky. Greek civilization was intensely interested in constellations and myths. Most of the constellations familiar to us today are of Greek origin, but the Greeks weren’t as interested in individual stars. It was the Arabs, between perhaps the 6th – 12th centuries, that catalogued and named many stars. They used the stars for time keeping, so they needed to know when individual stars rose and set. Western pronunciation has mutilated some of the names. Ibt al-Jauza is the origin of the name Betelgeuse. Its meaning is clearer than its pronunciation. It means the “armpit of the central one.” Betelgeuse marks the right armpit of Orion, the mighty hunter. His foot is marked by a star named Rigel. In Arabic, “ar-rijl” means “the foot.” The names are to the point.

The names of the constellations and planets come from the language of the Romans, Latin. However, the Romans adopted and assimilated the vast pantheon of gods and goddesses, heroes and witches from Greek culture, which in turn had assimilated images and symbols from even older cultures. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians were the first to write down their ideas, but I am pretty sure that folks made up star pictures even before there was writing. Humans have a strong impulse to recognize patterns in things, and the sky is a good example of this. I’ve always thought it interesting that someone looked up at the teardrop shape of stars in the summer sky and decided that it looked like an Eagle. Or that the teapot shape of Sagittarius reminded the ancients of a centaur, a creature half-horse, half-man. But we look at the constellations with a “modern, foreign accent” and are ignorant of the very heavy and important symbolism the constellations once carried to cultures who relied on the stars to tell them stories of life and of time.

When you look up into the sky, you see the same star patterns that people have seen since there have been people, but the planets are always in motion. Jupiter has been pretty much the same all summer, though he is creeping toward the western sunset as summer heads down to the finish line. The other planets are basking in the Sun’s glow, and won’t be seen for a few more months.

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!