Murid

The murid is the disciple in a Sufi order, one who has given the pledge to a guide and undertaken the discipline of the order, and the word itself, meaning one who wills, names the aspiration at the heart of the office.

The pledge and the path

The murid gives his allegiance to a master, the murshid, in a formal pledge of initiation, and thereby undertakes the litany, the practices of remembrance and the moral discipline of the order under the master direction, committing himself to the inward journey the order teaches. The word means one who wills or desires, naming the seeker aspiration toward God, and the relationship the murid enters is understood as one of obedience and trust in the guide, likened in the tradition to the surrender of a patient to a physician or a body to the one who washes it.

Formation under a guide

The murid progresses under the correction and instruction of the master through the stages of the path, and the whole structure of the order is built on this relationship of disciple to guide, so that the murid is the counterpart without which the office of the murshid would have no content. The intensity of the bond, and the obedience it asks, has been both the strength of the Sufi orders, allowing a demanding inner training, and a point of criticism, where the surrender to a guide could be abused. The murid represents the ordinary member of a Sufi order, the seeker under formation, and the tradition holds that it is only under such guidance, and not alone, that the path can safely be travelled.

In Senegal the generic word became the proper name of one of West Africa's largest Islamic movements: the Muridiyya, founded by Amadou Bamba in the late nineteenth century during French colonial rule, organised its followers, called Murides, around a strong work ethic and devotion to the founder, and the movement grew into a major social, religious and economic force in Senegalese society, with its own extensive networks of trade and mutual support extending into the West African diaspora in Europe and North America.

The movement's annual Grand Magal pilgrimage to the holy city of Touba, commemorating Bamba's exile by French colonial authorities, now draws millions of murides each year, making it one of the largest religious gatherings in West Africa, and the scale of the Muridiyya illustrates how far the ordinary Sufi disciple relationship, generally a matter of one person under one guide, can grow into a mass movement with real economic and political weight when it becomes organised around a single founding figure and his hereditary line of successors, the khalifa-general, who still leads the order today.

Within the Muridiyya a distinct sub-group, the Baye Fall, followers of Bamba's close companion Cheikh Ibra Fall, expresses devotion through manual labour and service rather than through scriptural study, working the order's fields and enterprises as an act of worship in place of prayer and fasting, a division of religious labour the order itself sanctions, so that Mouride identity accommodates both a scholarly path of study and an ascetic path of physical work under the same founding allegiance.