Musulmans en France L'actualité des musulmanes et musulmans en France
Dubai, the city of all excesses, infinite towers, sprawling business, limitless money, « lifted » face influencers, and Emiratis driving 2 million euros carriages…
What if I told you that this is all just a facade? Emiratis don’t have only 1000 meter high towers. Their roots also have the same depth.
In the medina of Marrakech, you have to know how to cross the door set in a cracked wall to discover the opulent richness of a sumptuous Riad. Here, you sometimes just have to push a door to discover the Emirati life, the real one. Simple, friendly, warm.
One of these doors leads into a « salon » . I mean one of those literary salons which brought together, from the 16th to the 17th centuries, the most brilliant minds of an inventive, creative, cultured and refined France. Somehow another era…
There, we talked about literature, poetry, music,. The authors presented the first lines of their new novel. The composers played the first measures of his future concerto.
The first salon to go down in history was the one that Madame de Scudéry opened in 1652. Then it was that of Madame de Stael where you could rub shoulders with Voltaire, Émilie du Châtelet, Marie du Deffand, Montesquieu or D’Alembert. It is said that it was thanks to her and other « salonnières » that the « Enlightenment » could flourish. Funny paradox when you know that at that time, women were banned from certain professions, such as teaching!
The Revolution completed, Juliette Récamier, opened her apartments to Théophile Gautier, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Alphonse de Lamartine, Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas father and, George Sand.
Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the French Academy, three and a half centuries after its creation, said of these women: « I am tempted to step aside to let their shadow pass »
And like these salons, the one hiding in a cozy apartment in the Palm Jumeira, at the end of the trunk of this residential palm tree, is run by a brilliant, welcoming, generous woman: Ferrouze Gadery. Ferrouze is French, but she also draws her origins from the Orient, which is rightly said to be eternal. Multiculturalism personified in a way. Singer, musician, talent scout, she is the embodiment of this magical encounter where the bewitching tones of oriental melodies and western scales meet, brush against each other and harmonize.
And this osmosis between East and West is precisely what you will find at Ferrouze. There, you will meet Fuad, the Dubai Sheikh who has preserved, like a treasure, the architecture of his native village, today a historic district of the city, with its wind towers, its interior gardens, in which he hatched an Art Gallery. You will listen to Ali, the Emirati industrialist who talks to you about Myamoto Musashi and the « Book of the 5 rings », inner silence, the power of the spirit, Costas, the Greek composer and musician, artist prodigy who plays as a virtuoso of 20 instruments, Nikhil, the Indian guitarist, producer, with a hoarse and suave voice. You will meet Youssef, a young senior civil servant from Sharjah, but also a talented conductor who evokes Gustave Le Bon, Sigrid Hunke, and tells you the story of Wallada the Andalusian. Salwa, singer, director, Chris and Karim, computer geniuses who take you on a journey to the heart of the virtual worlds of the 22nd century.
The « Salon de Ferrouze » is the joy of encounters. A place out of time where, like music, spirits meet, brush against each other and agree.
Where to find the Ferrouze salon? That’s a secret I guard jealously. But to discover the entry, to decipher the Sesame, nothing is easier in truth: you just have to deserve it.
