In Senegal the generic word became the proper name of one of West Africa's largest Islamic movements: the Muridiyya, founded by Amadou Bamba in the late nineteenth century during French colonial rule, organised its followers, called Murides, around a strong work ethic and devotion to the founder, and the movement grew into a major social, religious and economic force in Senegalese society, with its own extensive networks of trade and mutual support extending into the West African diaspora in Europe and North America.
The movement's annual Grand Magal pilgrimage to the holy city of Touba, commemorating Bamba's exile by French colonial authorities, now draws millions of murides each year, making it one of the largest religious gatherings in West Africa, and the scale of the Muridiyya illustrates how far the ordinary Sufi disciple relationship, generally a matter of one person under one guide, can grow into a mass movement with real economic and political weight when it becomes organised around a single founding figure and his hereditary line of successors, the khalifa-general, who still leads the order today.
Within the Muridiyya a distinct sub-group, the Baye Fall, followers of Bamba's close companion Cheikh Ibra Fall, expresses devotion through manual labour and service rather than through scriptural study, working the order's fields and enterprises as an act of worship in place of prayer and fasting, a division of religious labour the order itself sanctions, so that Mouride identity accommodates both a scholarly path of study and an ascetic path of physical work under the same founding allegiance.