Each year, millions of Mouride Sufi pilgrims travel to Touba, the holy city the Mouridiyya order built and administers in central Senegal, for the Grand Magal, an annual commemoration of the exile of the order's founder, Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba, by French colonial authorities beginning in 1895. Bamba was sent first to Gabon and later to Mauritania over a period of roughly a decade, a punishment the colonial administration intended to break the movement he led; Mouride tradition instead reads the exile as a trial that confirmed his spiritual authority, and the Magal commemorates the date of his departure into exile rather than any military or political victory.
The pilgrimage centers on Bamba's mausoleum inside the Great Mosque of Touba, one of the largest mosques in West Africa, where pilgrims gather for collective prayer, recitation of Bamba's devotional poetry and the distribution of food and hospitality organized largely through Mouride religious and commercial networks that operate year round across Senegal and its diaspora. The scale of the gathering, regularly cited among the largest annual religious assemblies on the African continent, depends on an extensive volunteer logistics operation run by the order itself rather than by the Senegalese state, an arrangement consistent with the substantial informal authority the Mouride caliphate holds over Touba, a city it administers as effectively autonomous within Senegal's otherwise secular constitutional structure.
For the Mouridiyya, traveling to Touba for the Magal functions as a devotional obligation comparable, for many adherents, to other pilgrimages elsewhere in the Islamic world, expressing loyalty to Bamba's teaching and to the caliph who currently leads the order.