Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

GIVING SOUL TO GLOBALIZATION
Faouzi Skali, President of the International Fez Forum
Starting with the objective of creating an inter-faith dialogue, I realized that music and 
especially sacred music can create a dialogue between cultures and civilizations. This 
inspired me and we discovered the inner beauty of each culture and religion of the world 
in a very sensitive way. So we organized the Interfaith Fez festival for Arts and Music.
This event made it very clear that the diversity of the cultures and religions around the 
world was important. In fact what made this diversity something tangible, something that 
we can feel and we can see, was the age of information and communication.
There are more than 5,000 languages now in the world and we are losing one language 
every week. So in 100 years, we will lose almost 4,500 languages. Diversity is 
diminishing but at the same we have never been in a situation to have to live in a 
challenging world where diversity is our daylight.
Because of all the information about all religions and cultures, we now have to enter into 
dialogue with them, to embrace living experiences of this diversity, in an Islamic city like 
Fès. The whole city was so happy to welcome all the religions of the world: Judaism, 
Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. People felt that everybody was welcome because 
all the religions were represented.
Like a huge pilgrimage, everybody came to the fair to share the same values: the values 
of love, compassion, generosity and hospitality. At the festival, Katherine Marshall and 
myself founded a forum which is called “Giv ing Soul to Globalization”. For many years 
we wondered how we could mobilize the spiritual resources of humanity to make our 
globalization more human, more spiritual, and more dignified. At the end we found a way 
to make people from different profiles: spiritual leaders, political leaders and economic 
leaders to meet and think about how to build a new approach to spiritual globalization. 

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98 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age