The teaching most closely associated with Amadou Bamba, and the one that gives the Muridiyya its distinct character among Sufi orders, holds that disciplined labour performed in devotion to God carries the same spiritual weight as prayer itself, an ethic often summarised by followers as pray and work. In practice this shaped the order's early economic life around agricultural discipleship, disciples working the land under a local shaykh's guidance as a form of religious training, and it has continued to shape Murid identity as the order's followers built extensive trading networks, first across colonial and postcolonial Senegal and later within a substantial emigrant diaspora abroad, where Murid trading communities remain a recognisable feature of West African commercial life in cities on several continents.
The order's central annual observance, the Grand Magal of Touba, was instituted in 1928, the year after Bamba's death, by his son and successor Mouhamadou Moustapha Mbacke, and it commemorates not a battle or a miracle but Bamba's 1895 exile itself, drawing pilgrims by the millions to Touba on the eighteenth day of Safar in the Islamic calendar to mark a trial the order regards as the founding test of its own endurance. Leadership of the order has passed since Bamba's death through a khalife-general drawn from his descendants, seated at Touba beside the Great Mosque that now dominates the city he founded as a modest settlement in 1887.
Sources The Mourides of Senegal: The Political and Economic Organization of an Islamic BrotherhoodDonal B. Cruise O'Brien with Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853-1913Cheikh Anta Babou