We're sprawled on carpets in an Alhambresque courtyard. Onstage, a French woman is singing Sephardic songs even as muezzins broadcast their air-raid style calls to prayer. A vast, spreading oak envelopes us all in a single swath of shade.

As I attended this year's edition of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, I kept thinking how very 'Lonely Planet' it all was: exotic (medieval medina, whirling dervishes), great value (dirt cheap), unapologetically One-Worldist (bring Jewish, Christian and Muslim musicians together and world peace is bound to follow).

Founded in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the festival's goals are lofty, though also fortified with realpolitik. The omnipresent photos of King Mohammed VI - the West's staunchest Arab ally - definitely say "realpolitik," as do the quantities of European television cameras, which pound for pound outweigh audience members at many concerts.

But Sufi Nights - free, midnight concerts in a sprawling medina garden - feel lofty, sublime. A mixed crowd of Europeans and locals watch Sufi masters chant Koranic passages in a bid to dissolve the self and unite with the divine. A crescendo is reached the night Gnawa musicians take the stage. A cousin of Sufism, Gnawa combines Arab, Berber and West African rhythms to invoke mluk - spirits that cause the brightly arrayed musicians, as well as multiple audience members, joyfully to writhe.

Fez's medieval medina - the largest in North Africa - is the remarkable base on which the festival's superstructure is laid. A walk in that great labyrinth, with its narrow passages, sharp smells, aggressive merchants, ornate courtyards and sudden vistas onto its own vastness, is another sure way to short-circuit the ego in the face of something much larger.


- Robert Landon