Touba

Amadou Bamba was a scholar and poet from a family of Muslim clerics in the Wolof country, trained in the older Sufi orders, who began gathering his own following in the 1880s at a place he named Touba, from the tree of paradise named in Islamic tradition. The French colonial administration read the size of that following as a political threat and deported him to Gabon in 1895, then to Mauritania, and afterwards kept him under supervision at home until his death in 1927.

The exile is the centre of Mouride memory. The best known account holds that when he was refused space to pray on the deck of the ship, he spread his sheepskin on the water and prayed there. Whatever a historian makes of such stories, their function is clear: the order presents its founder as a man whose weapons were prayer and writing rather than arms, and it takes a deliberate pride in having resisted a colonial power without a war.

Bamba's teaching centred on work as a form of worship performed under the direction of a shaykh, on the copying and recitation of his own devotional poetry, and on submission of the disciple to the guide. The organisation that grew from it, the Muridiyya, is a Sufi order that became an economic institution as well, first through groundnut cultivation and later through trade, with disciples remitting to the order and the order investing in the city.

Touba is the second largest city in Senegal and is administered by the order rather than by the ordinary municipal system. Land is held under the caliphate, the general caliph of the Mourides exercises authority over its affairs, and the state's usual presence is limited by an arrangement dating from the colonial period and renewed since independence. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling, football and popular music are prohibited within the city limits, and the rules are enforced by the order's own supervisors.

At its centre stands the great mosque, begun in the 1930s and completed in 1963, with a minaret named for Bamba's son that dominates the plain for miles. Bamba's tomb is inside it, and the library beside it holds his manuscripts.

The Grand Magal, held on the anniversary in the Islamic calendar of Bamba's departure into exile, brings several million people to the city over a few days, with households along the route feeding travellers and the order distributing meals at scale. It is one of the largest annual religious gatherings in Africa.

Within the order the Baye Fall, followers of Bamba's disciple Ibra Fall, are a recognised and distinctive group: they emphasise labour and service to the shaykh over the ordinary requirements of fasting and prayer, wear patchwork clothing and long hair, and are regarded by some other Muslims as having departed from obligation, which the order itself has repeatedly had to address.