In the 21st century, the Sufi voice has become an important symbol for representing Islam as peaceful, tolerant, and accessible to non-Muslims. In Morocco, Sufi sam?` (sung devotional poetry) is often presented in festivals as an expression of universal spirituality, spirituality that anyone, regardless of background or religion, can partake of if only they listen (Kapchan 2008). However, festival presentations often ignore exoteric practices and textual meanings in favor of a stress on esoteric spiritualities of sound, which separate Sufism from Islam (Bohlman 1994). My work with munshidin (Sufi singers) in Fez, Morocco who participate in these festivals reveals discrepancies between their intentions and those of festival organizers. While the festival organizers attempt to transform Sufism in order to bring it to a transnational and multi-faith audience, the munshidin attempt to transform listeners in order to bring them to Islam. In this paper I focus on the munshid Haj Muhammad Bennis of Fez, who has been instrumental in re-contextualizing devotional music for diverse audiences and is adept at negotiating the multiple intentions involved in promoting and performing sam?` in public concerts. Haj Bennis argues that the esoteric and sonic elements of sam? can lead listeners to textual meaning, exoteric practice, and ultimately to conversion to Islam. Amidst heated debates about the proper contexts for Islamic devotion, Haj Bennis’ narratives highlight a discursive ethics of listening that defends the appropriateness of performing sam?` outside of its normative devotional contexts. For him the Sufi voice indeed has the power to transcend cultural, linguistic and religious borders. However, Haj Bennis claims that this voice is rooted in the Maliki Sunni Islam of Moroccan Sufism. Therefore, for him the Sufi voice is not an expression of universal spirituality but the universality of Islam. Expressing this voice in the performance of Moroccan Sufi sam?` gives it the power to gather diverse audiences and create Islamic subjectivities through an ethical listening grounded in Islam.

Since the early 2000s, Moroccan hip hop artists have had access to a national audience via radio, television, and festivals throughout the country. The best-known artists authenticate themselves both to fans, by adroitly adapting the latest transnational trends in the genre’s music and fashion, and to skeptics, by weaving references to cherished Sufi and popular musical traditions into their compositions. In the context of discourses about music’s morality and effects shared by most Moroccan Muslims, in which embodied listening does signi?cant ethical work, hip hop practitioners’ performance and listening practices create the conditions for a counterpublic (Hirschkind 2006, Warner 2002) at once ethical and open to wide variations in expressions of piety. Learning through listening together (Kapchan 2009) in performances, rehearsals, recording and listening sessions allows musicians and audience alike members to undertake the affective work necessary to form a counterpublic, however ephemeral, with its own comportment, expressions, and values. This paper argues that this counterpublic most frequently performs political quietism through, not despite, Moroccan practitioners’ embrace of the transnational hip hop tradition’s normative ideology of critique and opposition as both a stylistic and an ethical goal. Analyses of live musical performance and quotidian performances of cultural competence and affiliation demonstrate that this emergent hip hop counterpublic links its trenchant systemic critiques to discourses of personal responsibility, shifting the response to issues like inequality, corruption, and police brutality from the domain of the political to that of the personal. By casting solutions to these problems in ethical terms, hip hop performances invoke the rights and responsibilities of individual citizens, rather than older political or class-based solidarities, encouraging each practitioner to take him- or herself as the terrain of change and improvement. While Islamist and activist emcees have gained niche audiences since early 2011, Morocco’s most famous hip hop musicians do politics by appearing to mistrust and eschew the political, performing to the state’s vision of moderate, cosmopolitan Muslim citizens.

Sidi Ali, a small Moroccan mountain town north of Meknes, hosts an annual inundation of pilgrims, ritual performers, and popular musicians. Setting up makeshift venues in tents and basements, adepts from a variety of semi-marginalized traditions participate in ritual healing while usually inviting anyone interested in to watch, to be entertained. In this paper, I explore ways in which the pilgrims' engagement in these rituals illuminates the fluidity between spirituality and entertainment, between adepts and audiences, and how these musical practices show a much higher degree of permeability between sacred and secular, adaptability within firm traditions, and flexibility across allegedly rigid sacred boundaries. Connections between economics and aesthetics allow listeners to influence musicians' performances. I focus on interactions between these forms of spiritual entertainment, noting the variety of permeable aesthetic boundaries highlighted by consistent performer and audience behavior across genres. Ritual leaders, from the Hamadsha, Gnawa, Jilala, and others, compete for ritual work rebuilding relationships between adepts and their possessing spirits, facilitating healing. Yet, they must appease audience demands, borrowing songs, and even spirits, reshaping the aural aesthetic of what are considered firm, closed practices. Close analysis of performed musical content makes apparent many marketing strategies, bringing into focus unexpected ways in which musicians and audiences negotiate ritual concerns within modern frameworks of audience tastes and expectations. Conversely, popular groups cite ritual content in an attempt to attract audiences for informal paid concerts. "Sacred" and "secular" blur, not just in discourse, but in the shared techniques used by audiences and performers each engaging the other. Specific musical and physical behaviors demonstrate learned types of active ethical listening, allowing individuals to negotiate and demonstrate their own orientation toward these marginalized spirit possession ritual practices in Morocco. Because participants act in modes from passive audiences, actively engaged listeners, or fully possessed adepts, types of dancing or trancing, seating position, and ways of giving money starkly depict ethical views on the traditions' value to their lives. These strategies, always the subject of vociferous debate, illuminates how pilgrims and musicians in Sidi Ali reshape both religious and popular musical aesthetics. In semi-open rituals, they negotiate the ethics, efficacy, and value of these traditions as both powerful transformative experiences and entertainment via their personal active, and ethical, listening.