Marabout

Marabout is a French rendering of the Arabic murabit, a person stationed in a ribat. A ribat was originally a fortified post on a frontier, and its garrison combined military duty with devotional discipline, so the word carried both senses from early on. As the institution moved inland across the Maghreb and the Sahara, the fortification fell away and what remained was the association of a place, a lineage and a reputation for holiness. By the time European observers were writing about it, a marabout might be the head of a Sufi lineage, the keeper of a Quran school, a maker of written amulets, a mediator in disputes between families, or a man whose principal qualification was descent from someone who had been all of these.

That range is the first thing to hold on to about the word, because it is not one role. The second is the relationship to lineage. Holiness in this system is inherited as well as achieved: baraka, the blessing or effective power attributed to a holy person, is understood to persist in his descendants and in his tomb, so a family can hold religious standing across generations without any individual member having done anything remarkable. Whole social structures rest on this, with maraboutic families occupying a distinct position beside warrior and merchant groups.

The word is also, unavoidably, a colonial artefact. French administrators used it for almost any Muslim religious figure they had to deal with, and the ethnography written in that period carried the flattening into the scholarly literature, where it is still being undone.

The clearest modern case of what a maraboutic lineage can become is the Mouride order of Senegal, founded by Amadou Bamba Mbacke, who died in 1927. He was a scholar and teacher of the Qadiri tradition who gathered a following in the aftermath of the French conquest, was exiled twice by the colonial administration on suspicion of preparing resistance, and returned to a reputation far larger than the one he left with. Donal Cruise O'Brien's study describes an order organised around work as devotion, in which disciples laboured on land held by their shaykhs, and which became a central institution of the Senegalese groundnut economy and later of Senegalese migration.

The order's centre is Touba, the town Amadou Bamba founded, where his tomb sits inside a great mosque and where the annual Grand Magal draws very large numbers. The relationship between disciple and shaykh is the structural unit: a disciple attaches himself to a particular marabout, and that attachment is inherited by his children, so the order is a dense network of clientages rather than a single hierarchy. Political scientists have written extensively on how that network has functioned in Senegalese elections, which is a subject about which people inside and outside the order disagree.

Naming the Mourides here is not an endorsement of the arrangement or an invitation to join it. It is the example that shows the category doing something no dictionary definition conveys: a living institution of several million people organised around one man's grave and the blessing believed to persist there.