Sound faith : nostalgia, global spirituality, and the making of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music

This dissertation examines the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music and the historical and cultural milieu of which it is a part. Held annually since 1994 in the city of Fes, Morocco, this festival was first launched in the wake of the first Gulf War as an interfaith initiative and was conceived with a European and American audience in mind. It was later housed under the aegis of FES-SAISS, an NGO based in the medina of Fes, Morocco. Over time, the festival became both more local and more global, with local residents using the global rhetoric of western democratic ideals and human rights discourses as a way to shape the festival’s local programming. After 9/11 and the May 16, 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca, the festival took on a new significance as Moroccans began to think of the festival as an event that would counter its own domestic extremism. This dissertation looks at the role of sound and music and its place in This dissertation examines the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music and the historical and cultural milieu of which it is a part. Held annually since 1994 in the city of Fes, Morocco, this festival was first launched in the wake of the first Gulf War as an interfaith initiative and was conceived with a European and American audience in mind. It was later housed under the aegis of FES-SAISS, an NGO based in the medina of Fes, Morocco. Over time, the festival became both more local and more global, with local residents using the global rhetoric of western democratic ideals and human rights discourses as a way to shape the festival’s local programming. After 9/11 and the May 16, 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca, the festival took on a new significance as Moroccans began to think of the festival as an event that would counter its own domestic extremism. This dissertation looks at the role of sound and music and its place in This dissertation examines the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music and the historical and cultural milieu of which it is a part. Held annually since 1994 in the city of Fes, Morocco, this festival was first launched in the wake of the first Gulf War as an interfaith initiative and was conceived with a European and American audience in mind. It was later housed under the aegis of FES-SAISS, an NGO based in the medina of Fes, Morocco. Over time, the festival became both more local and more global, with local residents using the global rhetoric of western democratic ideals and human rights discourses as a way to shape the festival’s local programming. After 9/11 and the May 16, 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca, the festival took on a new significance as Moroccans began to think of the festival as an event that would counter its own domestic extremism. This dissertation looks at the role of sound and music and its place in viii Moroccan spiritual traditions and questions how a local religious musical aesthetic produced by the festival impacts interfaith efforts beyond Morocco’s borders as well as local Moroccan conceptions of spirituality. Important components in the shaping of conceptions of spirituality are interactions in the sphere of tourism, and local and international efforts at historic preservation, and in the history of how local musics became world music. Perhaps more than ever before, the preservation of local histories and traditions are co-constructed at a global rather than a local level, where global spheres are new grounds for creating local meaning. In conclusion, this dissertation considers the nature and scope of the impact this festival has as it travels around the globe.