Morocco - where everything is music

“We have fallen into the place where everything is music.” RUMI

Our guest contributor today is Steven Scholl. Steven is a writer on religion with special focus on the Middle East. He is a graduate of McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies and leads Imagine Adventures. The full version of his story on the Fez Festival of Sacred Music first appeared in the Jefferson Monthly in September 2008. The View from Fez has edited and added photographs to Steven's article.

I first traveled to Morocco in 1966 at the age of 12. Well, it was virtual travel as we knew it back then as my travelling companions were Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour and their film Road to Morocco. My next trip came a few years later when my mother introduced me to the fabled city of Casablanca in its American romance version starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It took me another thirty-five years to find my way to the real Morocco, which bears little resemblance to the Hollywood version or to the image many Americans have today of the Arab world.

It was in 2005 that I made my initial journey to the country known in the Muslim world as Al-Maghrib (the West). On arrival, I was greeted by two dimensions of Moroccan culture that walk hand-in-hand as intimate friends: chaos and the sublime. Morocco lies both geographically and developmentally somewhere between Mali and Spain, between the Third World and First World. Morocco is rough around the edges, there is poverty and beggars and the smell of dust, diesel and debris rising in the heat of a 90 degree day. But within the chaos there is beauty, refinement, order, and tranquillity found in the gardens, architecture, music, and especially the people of Morocco. I now travel annually to Morocco to attend the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music and to further my explorations of the magical cities of Marrakech, Fez, Essaouira, Ouarzazate, Meknes, and Tangier, and to hike in the High Atlas Mountains, swim in lagoons, and trek out into the Sahara desert. But it is the music of Morocco and the spirituality behind it that I continue to find the most compelling force that brings me back to Al-Maghreb.

My first encounter with the World Sacred Music Festival was a musical and spiritual initiation. I reached Fes late in the afternoon and hurried from my hotel to Bab Makina, the magnificent outdoor setting of the festival’s headline concerts. The Tokyo Gagaku Ensemble was performing. As their gentle chants reached us from the stage, set before the intricately tiled gate, or báb, the muezzin’s evening call to prayer came floating over the walls of Bab Makina from a nearby minaret and sweetly mingled with the ancient Japanese chants. This unexpected interfaith dialogue seemed to me the perfect introduction to the Spirit of Fes and the World Sacred Music Festival.

In Fez, music is everywhere

The festival was conceived in a moment of world crisis. The inaugural 1991 festival was the vision of Dr. Faouzi Skali, a professor of cultural anthropology, a Sufi teacher, and a resident of Fes, who was dismayed by the devastation of the first Gulf war. Skali felt that some positive counterforce was needed. “It was a modest response,” he recalls, “and it has kept on evolving. Music seemed more elemental and it got around barriers of language.”

Sufi musicians dominate the Moroccan music scene and the richness of this tradition has been given a special showcase at the World Sacred Music Festival.

The goal for the festival has been more than just putting on a music festival for the sake of entertainment. From the outset, the World Sacred Music Festival has had a much more ambitious agenda: to celebrate world spirituality in all its diversity and create a forum for cultural exchange.

Since its birth in the wake of the first Gulf war, the festival has grown into an important gathering of both musicians and thinkers. The United Nations has called the festival an “unsung hero in the dialogue among civilizations.”

Fez attracts people from every culture and country.

Fes seems fated to host this gathering of spirituality-driven musicians. Situated at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, it is the most ancient of the Imperial Capitals of Morocco. Founded in the ninth century, Fes has long been a centre of international commerce and a cultural crossroad. Fes is home to Qaraouine University, founded in the ninth century, one of the oldest centres of higher learning in the world. It was long the city of a vibrant Jewish community, many of whom came to Fes when forced out of Spain by Christian zealots in the fifteenth century. The brilliant Jewish philosopher Maimondes (d. 1204) lived and taught in here for a time. Sufis, the mystics of Islam, have been practising their brand of ecstatic Islam here for centuries.

Fes provides a feast to one’s senses. Fes el-Bali (Old Fes) is the main attraction and home to over 700,000 Fassis, as the residents of Fes are called. The narrow and winding lanes of Fes el-Bali mean that there are no automobiles inside the walls of the old city. Fes el-Bali’s honeycomb of small lanes are packed with vendors selling leather goods, jewelry, carpets, fabrics, clothing, fruit and vegetables, wood carvings, perfumes, herbs, and more.

Guides, both official and unofficial, are available to help navigate the maze that is Fes. Or, you might follow novelist and transplanted Fassi Paul Bowles’s recommendation, to “lose oneself in the crowd — to be pulled along by it — not knowing where to and for how long . . . to see beauty where it is least likely to appear.”

The Bab Makina stage

One night at at a food stall a man beckoned me and my friend Sam to dine at his establishment. When he found out we were Americans he began to talk presidential politics. He stood tall, cleared his throat, and then began to recite these words: “It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.” Hearing this young Moroccan reciting Obama’s speech of hope was extremely moving. It also shows a side of the Arab world that is often missing in the American media.

Some critics of the Arab world such as Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, try to convince Americans that Arabs are insular, hate the West, and are driven by a fundamentalist creed that hopes for Islam to conquer the world. I have lived and travelled extensively in the Middle East and can assure readers that such views are not accurate. On this last trip to Morocco nearly every Moroccan I talked to wanted to discuss what was going on in the United States and what I thought about the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Arab Muslims are proud of their faith and culture, however, they are not out to conquer the world but to become part of a global culture as equal partners.

The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music is one important Muslim event that fosters just this global perspective.



Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news