“Festival de la Culture Soufie” in Fez

III Festival de la Culture Soufie

Fez, 18th to 25th april 2009. Morocco

The program this year is a journey throughout various Sufis Cultures. Every day will allow us to discover one country more particularly, with its spiritual observances, its native spiritual leaders, the sayings that have nourished its history, the arts and the culture that express its profound essence. Thus we’ll travel through Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Syria, France, Turkey, African Countries, Spain…

In the mornings, round tables will debate on the best connection that is to be found today between spiritual values and life in society or on a larger scale, between spiritual values and globalisation In order to do so, important people in various fields such as culture, spirituality, religion, politics, civil society, business, are invited to debate on how it could be possible to instil a “soul into globalisation”. These meetings provide with an opportunity to discuss the “common goods of our humanity” whether they are issued from spiritual values or from the necessity to explore new paths in order to face the challenges of our times, such as social exclusions, extremisms, energy or food crisis, and also the present urge to find new models of development able to protect environment.

Famous thinkers such as Assïa Alaoui, Benjamin Barber, Dominique Voynet, Driss Al Yazami, Edgar Morin, Katherine Marshall, Marie Arena (Minister of large cities in Belgium), Mohammed Berrada, Nouzha Skalli or Pascal Boniface have already confirmed their presence at the next edition.

Aims of the Festival

To allow Morroccan 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 especially in Morocco.

To allow people from other cultures to discover another face of Islam thanks to the message of opening and peace inherent to Sufism, far from the image generally spread by the media.

To show how Sufism, as a school of spiritual and civic education, can be a mean of human development and a peace mediator.

Through this event, to reinforce the position of Morocco as a link between Orient and Occident in the intercultural dialogue.

To show the richness and the creativity of the spiritual, academic, artistic and social dimensions inspired by Sufism.

To let people know contemporary artists and thinkers, national and international, and with them, to find new ways of social, cultural and artistic expressions that can strengthen the intercultural dialogue and help to the development of the society.

To question the role of spirituality nowadays, the connection between spirituality and business, environmentalism and social actions. How the spirituality may, under the present frames of the social and entrepreneurial activity, become a particularly prolific contributor to the human development, in its social, cultural and spiritual contexts.
By: Faouzi Skali