My name is Frédéric Calmès, I am a musician specializing in Arabic music as well as a student and a researcher in anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.
I have lived for five years in Fez, Morocco, where I study the Hamadcha Sufi brotherhood. I work in particular with a group in Fez, led by the moqaddem (leader) Abderrahim Amrani Marrakchi.
As a musician, I take part in all their rituals, both as a dancer and percussionist, and sometimes in place of the leader, as a singer and lute player. As a researcher, I try to understand and to describe the brotherhood and its activities.
If being a researcher implies a certain distance, being a musician and a friend of the members of the brotherhood led me to be concerned with the future of the Hamadcha.
The present circumstances for the Hamadcha are shaped by the following:
Morocco is in a process of modernization which involves an important decline of the traditional practices in favor of behaviors and activities influenced by the West. In that context, the place of brotherhoods like that of the Hamadcha keeps dwindling, and every day they lose a part of their audience.
Paradoxically, the new networks of tourism and of the entertainment industry (television, festivals), which also follow from the modernization of the country, offer a new space of expression to the Hamadcha, like a new lease on life.
It is true that in these conditions, the context for the ceremony is not what it should be ideally. However, these new opportunities enable the brotherhood to still exist and to protect their ancestral practices.
In this perspective, we support the Hamadcha group of Fez, so that its members can continue to perform and get to be known.
This website is devoted to the Hamadcha group of Fez, who we have been following for five years. However, we collaborate with other Hamadcha of Morocco and especially with the traditional overseers of the brotherhood. With them, we work on the protection of the extraordinary cultural heritage of the Hamadcha brotherhood.
For more about the brotherhood,
its history, its groups, etc., you will soon able to visit the
website: www.hamadcha.org.
We will put online the documentation currently available, numerous
photographs, some recordings, as well as the main part of our
research, as it becomes complete.
To find out more, do not hesitate
to contact us at this E-mail address: frederic.calmes@hamadcha.org