Senegal

Senegal is the clearest case anywhere of a society whose religious life is organised around Sufi orders rather than around a clerical hierarchy, a state establishment or a mosque bureaucracy. The relationship that matters is between a marabout and his talibe, his disciple, and it is inherited, lifelong and reciprocal: the disciple gives loyalty, labour and offerings, and the marabout gives guidance, intercession and practical assistance.

Two orders dominate. The Tijaniyya is the larger, centred on Tivaouane and, in a distinct branch, on the Niasse lineage at Kaolack, whose founder Ibrahim Niasse gathered a following across West Africa and into Nigeria that made him one of the most widely followed Muslim teachers of the twentieth century. The Mouridiyya, founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba in the 1880s, is smaller but more visible, and its centre at Touba is a city the order built.

Amadou Bamba's significance is partly what he refused to do. He preached work and study rather than armed resistance to the French, who nonetheless exiled him to Gabon and then Mauritania and kept him under surveillance for the rest of his life. That exile is the founding story of the order and the occasion of its largest gathering.

The orders reach into everything: agricultural labour, market trading, transport, the migration networks that carry Senegalese traders to Europe and the United States, and voting. Politicians seek the endorsement of the caliphs of each order, and a public instruction from one is a significant event.

Coexistence with the Christian minority is genuine. Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Catholic, was elected repeatedly as president of an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

Touba was founded by Amadou Bamba in 1887 on land he said was shown to him in a vision, and it has grown into one of the largest cities in Senegal while remaining, in effect, the property and the administration of the Mouride order rather than of the state.

The arrangement is unusual and largely informal. The Grand Magal, held on the anniversary of Bamba's departure into exile, brings several million people to the city over a few days, which makes it one of the largest annual religious gatherings in Africa. The great mosque, begun in the 1920s and completed after independence, holds Bamba's tomb. Within the city the caliph general's administration handles land allocation, and a set of prohibitions applies that the national law does not impose elsewhere: alcohol and tobacco are not sold, and certain kinds of entertainment are absent. The state provides infrastructure and largely does not police the city's internal affairs.

The order's economy is as distinctive as its geography. Mouride labour built the groundnut basin, Mouride traders dominate parts of Senegalese commerce, and the diaspora networks in Italy, France and New York remit substantially to Touba. Work performed for a marabout has an explicitly devotional character in Mouride teaching, which is what makes the economic and religious sides inseparable.

One aspect requires plain statement rather than admiration. Many boys are sent to residential Quranic schools, the daaras, and while a great many are properly run, the practice of some urban daaras of requiring children to beg on the streets for daily quotas has been documented at scale by Senegalese authorities and international monitors, and successive governments have attempted to regulate it.