Seven Oaks Magazine.

Granted, I knew from the start what I was getting myself into. I braced myself, knowing that, being halfway through my fast, I wouldn’t even be able to crunch loudly on over-expensive popcorn to vocalize my irritation with this Woodstocky movie. That said, the Sufi-loving pro-peace idealist in me was still curious – and so I made it out on Friday afternoon to see the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Sound of the Soul: The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music (USA).

As suggested by its title, the film was supposed to be about Sufi-inspired Fez music and a World Music festival. Unbeknownst to me, it was paired with a short called Christus Vincit, featuring Canadian vocal ensemble Musica Intima. I sat there unbelievably confused as a circle of white women and men sang beautifully in Latin, beneath the high domed ceiling of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The framing of a movie about Moroccan Fez music with such an opening felt symbolic of the way the rest of the movie went: it was as if they were subtly explaining, here’s a glimpse of the real thing – now let’s explore the more exotic in relation to that which we can assure ourselves is the standard.

Sound of the Soul explores the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, held in the city of Fez, Morocco and bringing together groups singing devotional or spiritually-inspired music from across the world, particularly Europe and Africa. It offers an attractive and aurally outstanding case study for peace, arts, and tolerance amidst our increasingly divisive world. The groups shown span ethnicity and national affiliation, and are interviewed about their common appreciation for the universal language of music. But the central focus of the film is Fez itself, both the city and the music style, and the rich history of its Sufi traditions.

The city of Fez was founded by a Sufi mystic named Moulay Idriss, we are told. (Although it enlisted the assistance of an Arab expert on the history of the city, the film itself was narrated [and directed] by a white man with terrible pronunciation of Arabic words, often speaking to his audience over the background of Arabic music or Qur’anic recitation.) Apparently, Moulay Idriss’s mystical conception and practice of Islam gave the city its tolerance: fundamentalists in other parts of the Muslim world, we are told by both narrator and some of the Sufi singers, condemn all music – devotional or otherwise – and insist prayer can only take the form of ritualized recitation five times a day, to be said in the mosque. We are assured that the music festival could not happen anywhere else except in the tolerant atmosphere of Morocco.

Sufis have been persecuted or labeled as heretics in many parts of the Muslim world, historically and continuing today, and personally I am in complete agreement that the ritualization of prayer and religion has lost a more soulful connection with the Divine. But the notion that those who are not Sufi – those “conservative Muslims” outside of Fez, with their praying-five-times-a-day and mosque-going routines, are the embodiment of intolerance feeds directly into contemporary racist discourse surrounding Islam and Muslims. The appropriation of mystic traditions, including the heavy breathing, chanting, and bodily motions that accompanied many of the Sufi dhikr recitations we viewed, for the enjoyment of a predominantly-white audience – who would laugh lightly at such phrases as “people here just abandon themselves” – also serves to further perpetuate racist conceptions of these Muslims as Other. Be they odd, exotic, hyperemotional, hypersexualized, or otherwise, they remained in whatever way far removed from the black-and-white elegance of Christus Vincit. Furthermore, while the Sufi music was considered as deviant from the oppressiveness of the rest of the religion, the Christian music is presented as in harmony with its larger context. This implicit good-bad contradiction subsequently presents the rest of Islam as in need of reform (and thus a target for intervention), while the notion of harmony leaves Christianity and all that is associated with it unproblematized and obviously in need of no reform.

The film similarly does not explore the socioeconomic or political context within which the festival takes place. The thriving insertion into Morocco’s tourist industry provided by an international music festival, and how the music groups were able to participate – whether they had access to funding, whether groups received honoraria, whether the festival was accompanied by a market within which their music was sold, and who might profit from such sales – as well as the cost at which local Moroccans were able to participate in attending the festival events was left unquestioned. In turn, it was even easier for us to forget our own location in relation to the film. We were watching, tickets in hand, not a public display or a personal home-video but a well-crafted film; a product offered to us within what has been theorized as “the multicultural marketplace”. This market, where difference is for sale – most often in the forms commonly-described as the 3 C’s of costume, craft, and cuisine – seeks to ensure that in a globalized economic system, all must become accessible for consumption. In turn, that which cannot be similarly consumed – the ritualized prayer, for example – is juxtaposed as both inaccessible and oppressive.

Finally, the notion that music can bring us all together, as the Reverend of an Interfaith Center in New York explained, is one that – while it may make for great comfort – I have a hard time not taking cynically. A section of the film explored a conference of artists, scientists, spiritual leaders and international development representatives which was held as part of the Festival “to promote peace and further the understanding of the role of spirituality.” But as Katherine Marshall, a Director of the neoliberal World Bank, spoke of her desire to develop new political strategies which took into consideration religion, I felt myself squirming in my seat. Were we now going to see Structural Adjustment Plans which promised loans on the condition of reducing social assistance programs and contracting out the building of mosques to multinational corporations? Regardless of the director’s intentions, the depoliticization of the film’s content leaves yet another audience in denial about growing American imperialism, Islamophobia, and their links to systemic and institutionalized oppression on a global scale. Instead, it seemed convinced that we will all get along if we could only just hold hands and sing together. And that is surely not what my soul is saying.