Fez Sacred Music Festival - update #3

Many people have emailed saying that they are having problems getting information from the official festival website either because the pages they want are still under construction or are not in English.

For a comprehensive look at the festival and some good links to further information, please visit our guide to the festival: Fes Festival of World Sacred Music Program

For those who speak French the official site now has some further information on the Sufi Nights and literary cafes.

Although there are semi-regular newsletters, the last only contained a dissapointing interview with the festival director, Faouzi Skali, and had little information to encourage people to attend. It is to be hoped that future newsletters are of more interest.

Here, in part, is what Faouzi Skali had to say in the newsletter about spiritual values and the economy:

We are becoming more and more conscious that it’s not just an economic crisis we face, but a crisis of the Economy; in other words, a particular way of looking at the world. When we talk of globalisation, most people think of economic globalisation. But in fact, we see in the news every day that we must look at globalisation in conjunction with a great number of other parameters in play in the world today. One of the most important of parameters is that we find ourselves in a world where different cultures coexist, interact with each other and even collide sometimes, and that there are no general rules of managing this coexistence. I also feel that, parallel with economic globalisation, one must also consider political globalisation, the like of which we already see in some international organisations such as the United Nations, for example, or at the major summits such as Kyoto where decisions are made that affect everyone on the planet. One must also mention the increasingly important role played by the policies of international law. There is another level of accomplishment to attain within this political globalisation, it is the success in building up a truly international community founded upon common values and the harmonisation of cultures. Cultures, as we can see daily, emanate from different visions and perceptions of the world, rather like individual members of the same society. We must therefore try to create democratic management strategies that will function on the level of culture, just as they function on the level of the individual, be it national or local. This is something that hasn’t been done yet. But if we don’t succeed in this, it will be extremely difficult to find non-violent ways of resolving conflicts

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