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The city of Fes, Morocco has never looked quite so splendid at night as it did last month during the recent, fourteenth annual Fes Festival of World Sacred Music and Dance.

The city, at once ancient and modern, is dressed up from top to bottom these days. At night, small blue lights shine over the mosaic-tiled Bab Boujeloud—the gateway to Fes el-Bali ("Fes the Old"), with its dark-corridored souk, the 14th-century Bou Inania medersa, and countless diversions both great and small. Across town, the elegant parks along the colonial-era Mohammed V Boulevard are dotted with cheery flowers; at night, airy canopies of twinkling fairy lights lighting up these meridians make evening walks even more of a pleasure. And atop a nearby mountain visible from town, a boldly lit display proudly proclaims in Arabic: "Fes: 1200 Years."

Despite all this newly acquired sparkle, however, the main attraction in summertime Fes continues to be the music festival, which each year draws both artists and audience members from all around the world. This year's edition featured such artistically diverse headliners as the American opera diva Jessye Norman, the Tamashek (aka Touareg) women-dominated group Tartit from Mali (accompanied by Tamashek men), the popular Moroccan singer/actor/songwriter Abdelwahab Doukali, and Senegalese pop legend Ismael Lo (pictured).

One might well ask what some—or even many—of the acts on this year's lineup might have to do with Fes' stated purpose of celebrating sacred musical traditions. A valid answer might well be "little or none"; indeed, as the festival has waxed over time and member s of its administration have come and gone in recent years, longtime Fes-goers, myself included, are now wondering if the festival hasn't indeed meandered far away from its purported mission, with less spectacular and/or less well-known artists being billeted as headliners. It remains to be seen whether the festival administration's current programming gambits can work over the long term; it was hard in 2008 not to notice many empty chairs at several of the "big" shows, or the absence of major international media excitement over the festival's artist roster.

To be certain, however, there were some artists included whose programs were either overtly or somewhat spiritual in nature, from Damascus' Al Kindi Sufi group performing in collaboration with Athens' Byzantine Tropos Choir, the North Indian classical singer Madhup Mudgal singing in the Hindu devotional genre of bhajans, and the Balinese troupe Panti Pusaka Budaya performing classical dance. At several of the performances I attended, the old Fes magic was in full force. In the gorgeous and serene courtyard garden of the Batha Museum, Mudgal gave an enchanting concert, accompanied by his daughter and protégée Sawani. The Belgian early music group La Roza Enflorese, who specialize in the Sephardic Jewish repertoire of Andalusia's Golden Era, were a delightful discovery who also played at the Batha; they are just at the brink of breaking through to an international audience, and deservedly so.

Tickets to concerts at the Batha and at the Bab Makina, the open-air site of the evening concerts, remain prohibitively expensive for most locals, with seats for individual events topping out at 600 Moroccan dirhams, or about $83. (By contrast, the US government's 2007 estimate for per capita income in Morocco overall was $4100.) Nevertheless, plenty of extremely well-heeled Moroccan patrons—just the type of audience the festival organizers seem the most intent on attracting—attended each evening to see and be seen. On several evenings, their numbers included Morocco's Princess Consort, the Fes-born Lalla Salma (who is the wife of King Mohammad VI, and actually the first wife to a Moroccan ruler to be publicly acknowledged, photographed, and bestowed with a royal title of her own).

In fact, the festival itself is patronized by the Morocco's current king and princess. It's understandable, both as a general means of attracting foreign visitors and their currencies, but perhaps even more importantly as an evocation of a happily religiously diverse, multi-cultural plurality—the Fes that was once a haven for Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers, intellectuals, artists, and commoners alike, back in an age now long past. Pope Sylvester II, the Roman Catholic pontiff at the turn of the tenth into the eleventh century CE, studied in Fes; Maimonides taught at the city's university after the conquest of Cordoba by the Almohads. The city also became a refuge for Muslims and many Jews following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Quite naturally, King Mohammed VI, who is anxious to present himself as a modernizer, is keen to promote that spirit today, particularly in light of the undercurrents of jihadism that are roiling Morocco among so very many other places in the world today.

Despite the economic impossibility of many fassis (Fes residents) being able to attend the ticketed events, two series of free public concerts continue to draw huge crowds. In order to score a seat, you had best get to the "Sufi Nights" events each evening at least an hour early; a very hot commodity was space on the floor in the courtyard of the Dar Tazi, a beautifully tiled mansion, in order to get a good vantage point for these concerts by local and foreign groups who mostly sang praises to God and the prophet Muhammad. (Another puzzling booking here: again, Mali's Tartit group, who specialize in the folk songs of their Tamashek community.) And a performance by the wildly popular Moroccan band Nass al Ghiwane at the "Festival in the City"crammed in thousands of spectators, and brought everyone from toddlers to teens to grandmothers dancing to a Gnawa-bred beat.

The festival's website (www.fesfestival.com) is already promising big things in store for its fifteenth anniversary season in 2009. Hopefully, a festival focused on the soul can find its heart again.