Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke founded the Mouridiyya, a Sufi tariqa distinct within the wider landscape of Senegalese Islam, in the late nineteenth century, building a following that grew despite, and Mouride tradition would say partly because of, repeated French colonial suspicion and periods of exile intended to suppress him. Cheikh Anta Babou's historical study of Bamba and the order's founding traces how Bamba built Murid identity around his own person and teaching during a period of colonial conquest that had destroyed the region's existing Wolof political structures, offering a religious framework that gave displaced and disoriented communities a new source of authority and belonging.
Central to Mouride teaching is a distinctive theology of labor, in which disciplined agricultural and, later, commercial work performed under a spiritual guide's direction is understood as a form of worship and a path to salvation in its own right, alongside conventional Islamic devotion. This ethic shaped the order's historical role in developing Senegal's peanut export economy through disciple labor organized on land controlled by Mouride religious leaders, and it continues today in the order's extensive commercial networks, which stretch from Senegal through the West African region and into a global Mouride trading diaspora.
Bamba's poetry, composed largely in Arabic during his years of exile and confinement, remains central to Mouride devotional practice and is recited widely during the Grand Magal itself, giving the pilgrimage a literary as well as a communal dimension; adherents treat his writing not merely as historical record but as a living devotional text whose recitation is itself part of what the pilgrimage asks of those who make it.