http://www.festivalculturesoufie.com

As we have more and more spontaneous demands in the national and international fields, to take part into the program of the festival, it becomes obvious that this event is bound to become a real platform of artists’ encounters who will let the world discover the cultural diversity of Sufism and the richness of the Islamic Culture. Indeed, Morocco which has always been a land instilled by Sufi spirit, will reinforce its role in the dialogue between different cultures and will be able to show to the rest of the world, a tolerant Islam, opened to other cultures and religions. Its role of mediation in its history, and even more recently, will help this country to become a real bridge between Orient and Occident.

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.

History of Sufism

Sufism is a mystic and ascetic movement which originated in the Golden Age of Islam, from about the 9th to 10th centuries.

The emergence of Sufism is a consequence of the wide geographical spread of Islam after the Rashidun conquests, and the resulting absorption of a wide range of mystic traditions from outside Arabia, especially Greater Persia. Sufism became a more formalized movement by the 12th century, and was a very successful movement throughout the Muslim world during the 13th to 16th centuries. There also were numerous Sufi orders active in the modern period, especially in non-Arab parts of the Muslim world.

1 Early history 
2 13th to 16th centuries
2.1 Spread to India
2.2 Muslim Spain
3 Modern history

 

http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/ma

http://allafrica.com/morocco

http://moroccoworldnews.com

http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/morocco/western-sahara

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/FreedomReligion/Pages/FreedomReligionIndex.aspx