Amadou Bamba was born around 1853 in the Baol region of Senegal, into a family already respected for Islamic scholarship, at a moment when French colonial forces were steadily dismantling the Wolof kingdoms and religious establishments that had structured the region for centuries. He began teaching his own path in the early 1880s, drawing followers from communities left without their earlier sources of religious and political authority, and founded the Muridiyya, from the Arabic murid, meaning seeker or disciple, around 1883.
In 1887 he founded Touba, a settlement intended from the start as the order's spiritual home rather than an ordinary town, a modest beginning that grew over the following century into a major Senegalese city built around the Great Mosque of Touba, among the largest mosques anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
Bamba's rapidly growing following alarmed French colonial administrators, who read a movement of this scale, led by a figure the colonial state did not control, as a likely source of resistance regardless of what Bamba himself actually taught. He was exiled to Gabon in 1895 and later held in Mauritania, years he and his followers came to describe as a period of trial that deepened rather than weakened the order, and he was eventually permitted to return to Senegal, where he died in 1927 with the Muridiyya already firmly established across the country.