RABAT, Dec. 20 (Xinhua) -- Shared Sacred Sites exhibition has opened in the Moroccan city of Marrakech on Tuesday, sending an invitation to explore religious tolerance in the Mediterranean world.
Held in the reinvigorated Dar El Bacha museum, the exhibition features a variety of digital and traditional works of art and artifacts, depicting the phenomenon of followers from different communities of faith in the Mediterranean attending the same sanctuaries.
The exhibition focuses its attention on contact situations where sites and figures of sanctity place distinct traditions in communication.
The principle objective of the exhibition is to inform a wide audience about these surprising phenomenon that concern, today as in the past, millions of people around the Mediterranean.
About 70 percent of the works exhibited belong to the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) in Marseilles, while 30 percent of them are from Moroccan museums, the director of the Moroccan National Museum Foundation (FNM) Mehdi El Kotbi told the press at the opening of the exhibition.
The exhibition reflects Morocco's place as a land of religious tolerance and dialogue between different religions, El Kotbi said.
Designed first based on research conducted by the French National Center for Scientific Re-search and Aix-Marseille University, the exhibition takes a fresh look at the religious be-havior of Mediterranean populations and highlights some of the most interesting phenomenon in the region, namely the sharing and exchange between religious communities.
The exhibition was first launched in 2015, at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) in Marseilles, France. From November 2016 to February 2017, it was featured at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia.
Before arriving in Morocco, the exhibition landed in September in Thessaloniki, Greece.
In the face of rising fundamentalism and far-right extremism, the exhibition offers for the public until March 19 a genuine place for a deeper understanding of the complexity of exchanges between Mediterranean religions.
