‘Sufi Night’

15:00 Lecture The Masters of Sufi Poetry, Idris de Vos
16:15 Poetry and song Passages. Music and Poetry, Taha Adnan, Elke de Rijcke & Ramón Neto
17:30 Film Al-Ghazâlî, L'alchimiste du bonheur, Ovidio Salazar, Matmedia Productions, 2007, 80 min. 

Sufi poetry developed around three fundamental themes: the notion of uniqueness, love and praise of the prophet Mohammed. Idrîs de Vos, author, translator and lecturer in Arabic language and civilisation, invites you to discover these three major themes at a talk (only in French) on the masters of Sufi poetry.

This will be followed by a contemporary poetry reading accompanied by live music. Taha Adnan, Elke de Rijcke and Ramón Neto, three Brussels-based poets, set off in search of the capital’s Sufi community.  On the occasion of the Sufi Night, they perform some of the creations which were their inspiration for this human and cultural encounter. This reading is the first stage of “Passages”, a project of Passa Porta.

Al-Ghazâlî, L'alchimiste du bonheur, the docu-fiction by the American film maker Ovidio Salazar goes back over the spiritual and philosophical path taken by al-Ghazâlî, the great thinker in the history of Islam. Born in 1058 in Tus, Khorasan (present day Iran), Abou Hamid al-Ghazâlî influenced emblematic figures of the Judaeo-Christian culture such as Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides. The screening will be introduced by Tayeb Chouiref, doctor in Islamic Studies and professor of Arabic at the University of Lille. This specialist in Islamic mysticism recently published the works Lire et comprendre le Coran (Reading and understanding the Koran) (Tasnîm, 2014) and Citations coraniques expliquées (Koranic citations explained) (Eyrolles, 2015).