Fez festivals

Faozi Skali, the Boutchichi Traditionalist Sufi who started the now well-established Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, no longer directs it--but has started a new annual festival, the Fez Festival of Sufi Culture.

The aims of the festival are "to allow Moroccan people to discover or re-discover how the Sufi brotherhoods have mainly succeeded in preserving a message of universal spirituality that irrigated the whole of the Muslim culture and nourished its artistic, literary, and even social and economic forms of expression" and "to allow people from other cultures to discover another face of Islam" and "show how Sufism, as a school of spiritual and civic education, can be a means of human development and a peace mediator."

The 2009 festival is the third, runs from April 18 to April 25, and mixes concerts with round-table discussions involving Sufis, academics, a French senator and the president of the Hermes foundation.

Strongly recommended.