How does sound encode sacred affect? And how is sacred sound, and thus sacred emotion, learned? While much has been written on spiritual belief from the point of view of narrative and the body, less attention has been paid to the power of “sound” and, more importantly, listening, to shape sacred identities and create community. This paper attends to the aural dimensions of sacred performance focusing on the role of music, chanting as well as listening and utterance in the performance of “Sufi Music” in public venues in France. Moving respectively through the social context, the ritual form and analytical frames, I end by explicating what I refer to as a “literacy of listening” -- the acquired ability to learn other (religious) cultures through participating in its sound economy. How do learned auditory and sound practices transport a once local and ecstatic religion outside its point of origin? What do these communities of sacred affect perform in the larger public sphere of secular France and how do they transform it? There are many places in the Muslim world where non-Arabic speakers learn to recite the Qur’an beautifully (Rasmussen 2001). But unlike pedagogies in Qur’anic schools where phrases are taught slowly and over years, the Sufi initiates in France undergo a complete immersion into the ritual all at once. No one gives them individual lessons. They come to the ceremony and they learn to listen. When I asked S. how she learned the entire liturgy, she said, “just by assiduity.” I asked another young women, “But you, H., you understand Arabic, don’t you?” “Just a little,” she answered. “Then how is it you speak so beautifully?” A force d’écouter, she said, “just by listening.” Il faut écouter avec le coeur, “you have to listen with your heart.” Clearly, it is not an ordinary listening taking place, but what some scholars have called “deep listening” (Becker 2004; Oliveras 2005), and what the Sufis call sama‘—spiritual audition. It is an active and attentive listening that involves not just the ear, but the entire affective and sensate being. Sufi initiates become competent not just in the music of a new language, but in the technique of sama‘. Learning to listen, they acquire a new soundscape as well as a new way of being in the world. This paper is based upon fieldwork conducted in Morocco and France over the span of 16 years.