EVERYBODY GOES TO FEZ:

Weapons of Mass Sedition: Can a sacred music festival lure us away from violence and toward reason? (Larry Blumenfeld, March 23rd, 2004, Village Voice)

I flew to Casablanca on my way to last year's Fez Sacred Music Festival just three weeks after terrorist bombings shook Morocco. Everywhere were public-service billboards bearing the Hand of Fatima, a symbol of protection for Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Scholars and cab drivers alike told me that the slogan, in Arabic and French—"Don't lay a hand on our country"—was directed at terrorists and fundamentalist Muslims.

Set in Morocco's northern Middle Atlas region, Fez is among the oldest of Islamic holy cities, a center of learning since the founding of Qaraouine University in the ninth century. It boasts a history of religious tolerance: Many of the Muslims and Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century ended up there. I'd arrived for a week of sacred music and consciousness-raising. Yet little prepared me for how the first sacred sounds I'd encounter would affect my consciousness. A 3 a.m. muezzin's call to prayer, issued from mosque minarets in all directions, woke me. I'd heard this before, right down to the vocal embellishments, from the Sephardic cantor in my childhood Brooklyn synagogue.

Morocco is ruled by a monarchy, but its constitutional reforms and civil society stand in contrast to most Islamic states. Sufism, the mystical humanist face of Islam, is represented in Fez by the many brotherhoods active there. Embodied as it is in the tenor of daily life and high-level policy-making, the Moroccan Sufi spirit is akin to the voice of liberalism here—a force for moderation and inclusion.

Fez native and Sufi scholar Faouzi Skali first initiated a film festival in the wake of the first Gulf war. He dubbed it Desert Colloquium, after Desert Storm. "It was a modest response," he told me over mint tea in Fez last year, "and it has kept on evolving." What it evolved into is the current Fez Festival of Sacred Music. "Music seemed more elemental," he explained, "and it got around barriers of language."

The Moroccan festival has included Buddhist and Native American music, but its focus remains the unity of the three Abrahamic traditions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. And for the past three years, among the festival's most resonant sounds has been people simply talking.

Morocco, mind you, is one of those places that people who hate religion say can never be a decent liberal society because it is Islamic.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 24, 2004 8:49 AM