Zar: Spirit Possession, Music, and Healing Rituals in Egypt by Hager El Hadidi (review)

Zar is a striking, time-honored, living, and ever-changing healing ritual that is most prevalent in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Practitioners of zar believe in demons and good spirits, which they often identify with the blowing winds, and which possess people, sometimes bringing them various kinds of harm and suffering. When someone is possessed by one of these winds, specific ceremonial practices need to be performed by traditional healers, their musical bands, and the formerly possessed, who together constitute distinct local zar communities. Engaging people’s different experiences of sound, touch, smell, sight, and taste, zar performances use sensory practices to tame the winds, and potentially help the sufferers cope with their difficulties, pains, or afflictions.

Although zar healing rituals offer rich material for diverse areas of academic research, there have so far been only a limited number of publications that have applied rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of zar. For years, Ioan Myrddin Lewis’s meditation on women’s medicine, shamanism, and spirit possession in Africa (1991), and Janice Boddy’s research on zar healing ceremonies in northern Sudan (1989) have been the only available references for those seeking adequate resources to explore the ritual more intimately.¹

Hager El Hadidi’s Zar: Spirit Possession, Music, and Healing Rituals in Egypt is an outstanding starting point for properly filling this scholarly void. The book consists of six chapters that stem from the author’s long involvement in the ritual, as both a cult member and researcher, as well as her two-year multi-sited fieldwork as an anthropologist. Moreover, in order to acquire sufficient knowledge about zar, El Hadidi has collected and analyzed about three hundred zar songs performed during several ceremonies in metropolitan Cairo. Accordingly, she uses storytelling and ethnographic collage to understand the ways in which people perceive the zar world.

The introductory chapter starts with a review of existing anthropological studies of zar, and of spirit possession more generally. The author begins by examining Lewis’s functionalist peripheral-cult theory, Boddy’s feminist and hermeneutic conflict theory, and Soheir Morsy’s analysis of sick roles in a rural Egyptian village. After noting certain shortcomings of these works (including being merely descriptive, limiting consideration of practitioners to a cult of women, ignoring the complexity and multilayered nature of the ceremony, and reducing zar to its therapeutic and psychological aspects), as well as her points of agreement with Kapferer (1983) and Kramer (1993), El Hadidi introduces her own approach to the study of zar.² According to her, zar ceremonies are creative, non-homogenous, and open-ended ways of perceiving the world that embrace different therapeutic, historical, social, and artistic aspects, and that should be interpreted according to their different local contexts.

The second chapter endeavors to supply the reader with adequate contextual knowledge about zar as it has been practiced in Cairo since the nineteenth century. El Hadidi commences with an overview of the roots of the word “zar,” linking it to “old Sephardic Jewish communities who were doing silversmithing and goldsmithing in many parts of the Middle East, including Yemen and Egypt,” the first probable inventors of the term (37). However, it appears that we still need more etymological, historical, and anthropological evidence to support such a bold hypothesis confidently. Moreover, the author perpetuates the premise of evolutionary anthropologists, which grants Ethiopian (/African) origins to the ritual and views black slave communities as the carriers of zar beliefs and practices to various Middle Eastern societies. Descriptions of the complex, multicultural, and transnational character of zar; treatment of the hierarchy of zar professionals; and supplementary information about zar music and dance constitute the most interesting (and least problematic) parts of the second chapter.

The third chapter begins with a discussion of Arjun Appadurai...