Music as a Force for Peace
July 2004
Banner photo: ©SEKAI BUNKA PHOTO
The Spirit of Fès
Sheikh Habboush and the Al Kindi Ensemble and the Whirling Dervishes (Syria)
The city of Fès is known as the Jerusalem of North Africa, a place where Jews and Muslims have coexisted peacefully for hundreds of years. The best-preserved medieval city in the Arab world, it is the spiritual and cultural capital of Morocco and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Each year, over a period of about nine days, some 30,000 people gather here from around the world, drawn together in celebration of the common humanity that underlies a diversity of culture and religious belief. While this diversity is, sadly, often a cause of conflict and division, the Fès Festival of World Sacred Music is demonstrating the power of the music that springs from these different traditions to draw us back to common ground.
The Fès Festival was founded by Faouzi Skali, a Sufi and a cultural anthropologist from this city. In 1994, after the first Gulf War, Skali took the idea of a music festival that would foster tolerance and focus people on peaceful coexistence to Mohamed Kabbaj, then the finance minister of Morocco, who supported it in full.
The Music of Transformation
The effectiveness of using programs of sacred music to bring home the aims of the festival lies in the nature of sacred music to draw one to contemplate. It is our hope that Fès can serve as a "green lung" between the various points of polarization where people could come and breathe and oxygenate and be nurtured in some way and feel safe, even though our world is so terribly volatile right now.
A member of the Anointed Jackson Sisters gospel group at the Fès Festival
[Rémi Boisseau, French Institute in Fès]
The musicians themselves have described a sense of transformation they feel performing at Fès, from the outpouring of love and the human embrace from festivalgoers and organizers. I remember in particular a Jewish ensemble from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, who now live in New York who came to the festival last year. After the Casablanca bombings, which happened just a few days before the festival began, they were not going to come. They were finally persuaded but were terrified. They asked for bodyguards and all kinds of security and stayed in their hotel room the entire time until they performed. During their performance there was a ring of security people around them on the stage. The physical barrier was awful but we understood their fear, and the audience gave them a standing ovation, honoring their courage to come out.
Performing there, however, loosened something radically in them, and after that they came out to performances of other musicians, particularly Muslim musicians. When they got back to New York, they rang me to say that on the airplane back they were singing to passengers and telling them about their experience in Fès, and that they would become advocates in their own community about their experience in a Muslim country.
Giving a Soul to Globalization
The Fès Festival also includes a colloquium component. Each year the festival has a different theme, and in 2000 it was "Giving a Soul to Globalization." From that, in 2001 we held a colloquium with the same title, and that has become the ongoing theme of the colloquia since then. We visualized that it would serve as an alternative to the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum, that it would be a place where people would come into a more organic, intimate environment, leaving aside their intellectual, institutional hats to speak very personally on a variety of subjects. Fès has historically served as a sanctuary for intellectuals and spiritual people, and it seems very fitting that we could do this here.
The speakers are from many disciplines and from all over the world. Grassroots activists blend with ambassadors, intellectuals, spiritual leaders and artists in panels on peace, on the environment, on socially responsible economies, on human rights, and how spirituality can function in modern society to counteract some of the more disturbing and maddening aspects of globalization.
Numbers are kept fairly small and this gives the audience a chance to talk with the speakers.
South African singer Miriam Makeba, an iconic figure in the anti-apartheid struggle
[Rémi Boisseau, French Institute in Fès]
On the first two days this year colloquium panels focused on peace in the Middle East while the performance schedule featured musicians from Palestine and Israel. In this way the arrangement of programs helps reinforce the point that we want to underscore, which is that though these are regions that are having difficulty, they also share a lot in common.
All the events at Fès, including the colloquia, are held outdoors so that people can feel the environment that they’re in, instead of being in a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned cell. The events are held in a historic old structure under a 400-year-old Barbary oak tree with a large clan of birds that chirp throughout. It is a very natural, organic environment, which is important as we are talking about the state of the planet.
Beyond Fès
In addition to the festival actually held in Fès, from this year a Spirit of Fès tour of the United States was launched, taking artists to 11 states and 17 cities, including children’s concerts. The aim of the Spirit of Fès tour is to take the message of the Fès Festival beyond Morocco to other parts of the world, to encourage people to expand their point of view and to look more fully at ways in which we can live together in a more tolerant way, respecting our cultural and spiritual distinctions. The musicians spoke very specifically about peace, especially to the children, on many occasions.
Right in the middle of the tour the Madrid bombings happened. On one occasion the front page of one of the local papers had a picture of the Anointed Jackson Sisters--a gospel group who were part of the tour--talking to university students, and on the same page, a picture of Saddam Hussein having just been captured. This juxtaposition of programs against the backdrop of world events underscores the purpose of the tour. We are finding that people from all over the world are e-mailing the website, www.spiritoffes.com, and expressing their support for what we are doing.
Like the main festival, the Spirit of Fès tour also included a colloquium component. In each city we invited American speakers who had been participants in Fès to join us, along with members of the local community in various capacities--spiritual leaders, artists, activists, academics--to discuss the idea of peace building in those communities. The aim was to start public conversation focused on peace building and harmoniously living together in these difficult times.
It is very evident that these events are really resonating with people. For the finale of each performance during the tour we had taken a Native American traditional song and translated it into Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and English. In every city that we went to, by the time the musicians had finished performing, many people in the audience were weeping--I remember being backstage at the concert in Berkeley, and the house manager and stagehands were weeping. People had lit their lighters, and they were waving and singing and dancing and crying all at once. This was true on all of the 17 cities on this tour. It is not what we are doing, but the idea that we’re promoting that touches people. It is obvious that there is a real need.
Zeyba Rahman is the artistic director of The Spirit of Fès.
