There are other aspects to Fez that brought me here, of course, but the festival remains one of the most important. Last year I had press accreditation, and this year I’m translating the programme and advertising material from French into English.

Last year the festival celebrated its 10th birthday, inviting back many previous artistes including Miriam Makeba and Youssou N’Dour. Now it’s back on the road of discovery and has a wonderful array of people lined up for this coming June.

The festival started out as a showcase of sacred music from the three great Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Over the last few festivals, music from other belief systems has been represented too: Buddhist, Hindu and shamanic faiths such as Native American.

This year there’s everything from Renaissance Christian music, Pakistani Qawwali teamed with Flamenco, Ravi Shankar and his daughter Anoushka, as well as Indian dance, Japanese traditional music and dance, a whole day dedicated to music from Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, traditional shaman music from Colombia, local artistes including a women’s group from the Rif mountains, and Gospel from the US.

The evening concert in the square of Bab Makina. Pic: Remi Boisseau

Most of the 15 concerts are held in the medieval medina of Fez. At 4pm each afternoon, musicians gather in the shade of a magnificent Barbary oak surrounded by the splendours of the traditional Moroccan architecture of the Dar Batha museum. Evening concerts take place in the Bab Makina, a large parade ground adjacent to the Royal Palace.

Here in the moonlight, surrounded by tall, ochre, crenellated walls, I watched one of the most intriguing concerts last year presented by the Mevlevi Sufi Brotherhood of Konya in Turkey. This Muslim religious order was founded by the famous poet Rumi, born in 1207 in what is today Afghanistan, and buried in Konya. Accompanied by the ney (reed flute) and daf (drum), five monks perform the ritual dance before their sheik who conducts the ceremony. After greeting him, the dervishes begin to whirl.

The whirling dervishes. Pic: Remi Boisseau

It’s slow and controlled, perfectly beautiful, white skirts spooling out around the dervishes and their tall fezzes inexplicably staying in place. The dervish represents man, situated between heaven and earth. The right palm is upraised to receive the benefice of heaven; the left faces downwards to transmit this to the earth. This was one of several remarkably meditative concerts where, whatever your own spiritual path, you can truly enter the realm of communion with the divine through the medium of the performance.

Wednesday afternoon sees a concert held at the World Heritage Site of Volubilis, some two-and-a-half hours drive from Fez through the rolling hills, verdant farmland and vineyards around Meknès. Volubilis was a Roman settlement, feeding the Roman army in Africa and around the Mediterranean. It is remarkably well-preserved and a delightful setting for concerts. Storks nest high on ancient pillars and watch the concerts too, occasionally adding the odd squawk. The king of Volubilis, Yuba, was married to Cleopatra and Anthony’s daughter.

The Fez Festival was founded by the Moroccan Sufi scholar and humanitarian activist Faouzi Skali. His aim was to provide a beacon of peace from the Islamic world. The theme of the 2005 festival is Paths of Hope. In the words of the Festival President, Mohamed Kabbaj, “In Fez we pay homage through music to the many cultures of our world and to their inherent beauty.”

The ancient site of Volubilis. Pic: Remi Boisseau

The festival programme incorporates the Fez Encounters Colloquium, under the rubric Giving Soul to Globalisation. Savants and activists from diverse cultures come together in this “forum for understanding and action” to discuss topics that include Identity and Democracy and Healing Memories. Included in the programme are South African Susan Marks and her American husband John with their films The Shape of the Future and Nashe Maalo.

In addition to the film screenings, there are art exhibitions, activities for children, free concerts in the huge Bab Boujloud Square and Sufi nights of ecstatic music and dance in the Dar Tazi gardens. The Fez Festival is a week of distilled magic. In the words of Simon Broughton, the editor of Songlines world music magazine, “In 10 years it has become one of the great music festivals of the world.”

I remain delighted that I’m here in the city of the festival, and am looking forward to June and all the concerts. It’s a concentrated feast for the soul, and like the Grahamstown Festival, there are activities all day and all night to keep you busy. It’s a bit hot in Fez at that time of year to rush around quite as madly as you might in the frigid air of the Eastern Cape; it’s more a question of floating serenely from one amazing experience to the next, water bottle in hand!

		Fez Festival of World Sacred Music For more information, visit www.fesfestival.com. This year’s festival runs from June 3 to June 11, 2005. Tickets to the festival range from 100 Moroccan dirham (about R73 at current exchange rates) for concert tickets to 3000 dirham (R2200) for a full pass. Packages are also available, which include bed and breakfast, airport transfers and access to the festival. These range from $98 to $236, not including single supplements. Want to go? You'll need a flight to get there, so click here for an online booking. Need to work out how much you'll have to spend when you get there? Click here for a handy currency converter. Check out our Travel Deals page for some great specials to destinations around the world.