Casablanca brought the curtain down on Saturday evening on the first edition of the Mouldiyat El Beida festival, a new cultural gathering dedicated to Morocco’s spiritual and musical heritage. The closing ceremony, titled « Min Hadra ila Hadra » (« From One Hadra to Another »), unfolded within the walls of the Al-Mechouar palace in the historic Habous district.
Over two days, October 23 and 24, Morocco’s economic capital turned into a showcase for the country’s intangible heritage. The hadra traditions of Chefchaouen and the Charqaoua order shared the stage with samaâ and madih, the centuries-old devotional chants, alongside Andalusian music and Gnawa rhythms, an artistic pairing rarely brought together on a single program.
Friday’s opening night, evocatively named « Laylat Awliya al-Maghrib » (« The Night of Morocco’s Saints »), featured performances by Saïd Belqadi and Bilal Belhouaj. The closing show, meanwhile, spotlighted Mohamed Gharfi, Ali Erriahi and singer Marwane Hajji, whose appearance drew a sizeable crowd from across the city.
Ismail Qallalech, head of the organizing association Majalissouna, described the inaugural edition as an unprecedented artistic panorama. He said the association’s goal is to keep Morocco’s spiritual expressions alive and pass them on to a wider audience, rather than let them fade into folklore reserved for specialists.
Ali Erriahi, the festival’s artistic director, framed the event as a meeting point for the kingdom’s varied musical and heritage traditions. Bringing hadra, samaâ and Gnawa together under one roof, he argued, highlights just how interconnected Morocco’s spiritual legacy really is, even though these traditions are often presented separately.
For his part, Marwane Hajji emphasized the identity dimension of the gathering, telling organizers that festivals of this kind above all celebrate Morocco’s religious and cultural inheritance, a sentiment that resonated with much of the audience at Saturday’s closing night.
Backed by the Majalissouna association, whose stated mission is to promote samaâ, madih and Morocco’s broader spiritual heritage, the Mouldiyat El Beida festival is already positioning itself to become an annual fixture on Casablanca’s cultural calendar, alongside the city’s better-known music festivals held throughout the year.
