Introduction: Dance in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.- Part 1: The Arab World.- Chapter 01: Belly Dance: Somatic Ways of Improvising Happiness.- Chapter 02: Dancing Bodies, Religion, and Gender in Egypt.- Chapter 03: Song in Najib Mahfuz' Palace Walk: Recreating and Appreciating the Diegetic "Soundtrack" of a Modern Egyptian Novel.- Chapter 04: Bourdieu's Thinking Tools Applied to Bellydance Research.- Chapter 05: Representations and paradoxes in the practice of belly dance in Egypt and Brazil.- Part 2: The Turkish World.

- Chapter 06: Anatolian Folklore and the Construction of a New Turkish Identity.- Chapter 07: Halay: From Ritualistic Circle Dance to Political Act in Turkey.- Chapter 08: Motion and Transcendence in Euro-Turkic Context: the Alevi Semah.- Chapter 09: Standing in the D'r: Shrinking the Body Towards the Vertical Axis in Alevi Rituals.- Part 3: The Iranian World.- Chapter 10: What Can Dance and Other Non-Dance Patterned Movement Systems Tell Us about Iranian Society?.- Chapter 11: The Quotidien and Cinematic Lives of Iranian Cabaret Dancers in Twentieth-Century Iran.- Chapter 12: Iranian Dancers Perform Despite Restrictions: Navigating a Sociopolitical Obstacle Course.

- Chapter 13: Examining Dance as a Third Space in the Iranian Diaspora.- Chapter 14: Contemporizing Iranian Dance: The Importance of Using Pedagogy Rooted in Traditional Iranian Dance Aesthetics to Explore Current Themes.