Despite anthropology’s turn to performance toward the end of the twentieth century, Michael Herzfeld (2001) observes that anthropologists have been more comfortable examining rituals and public (mainly state-sponsored) spectacles than the spaces of cultural expression, especially those of the world of “entertainment,” that fall in-between these two theoretical extremes of the continuum (see also Beeman 1993; Handelman 1998). In this paper, I examine one of these in-between spaces, that of the theatrical “mega-spectacle” El-Hadra, a choreographed concert of Tunisian Sufi songs and imagery conceived of as “recovery” of Tunisian musical heritage. El-Hadra performances have filled sports stadiums on an almost annual basis since 1991, and have resulted in widely distributed audio and video recordings that have, in effect, solidified the construction of a genre—and something of an industry—of staged “Sufi music” in Tunisia. Two aspects of El-Hadra stand out as crucial for any consideration of its mediation of sound and society. First, the performances mix Western instrumentation (e.g., electronic keyboards, drum set, saxophone, oboe) with traditional Arab aesthetics—both Sufi and non-Sufi. Second, the show mainly consists of songs from two Sufi orders—the Sul?miyya and the ‘Is?wiyya—that are considered by many Tunisians to be mutually incompatible socially and ritually: the Sul?miyya, with its close ties to the Tunisian socio-political elite and its physically reserved rituals involving the chanting of litanies praising God, the Prophet, and Muslim saints, is a highly respected institution in Tunisia, while the ‘Is?wiyya, in contrast, with its working class membership and dramatic trance rituals involving acts of self-mortification (such as the eating of nails, chewing of glass, application of fire to flesh, etc.), is considered a far more problematic presence in Tunisian society (see Chelbi 1999; Mizouri 1996). An anthropology of sound perspective provides insight into what happens when Sufi songs—associated with social and ritual institutions with very different histories and identities—are reclassified into a generic domain of “Sufi music.” It asks how the reception of sound can create a new conceptual order out of the “disorder” of the messiness of lived social and political relations, and how ideologies of nationalism and modernism continue to bear on cosmopolitan cultural projects that espouse to “rescue” sacred traditions by reconceptualizing them through aural aestheticization and desacralization.