Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853-1913

Cheikh Anta Babou is a historian, and this academic book, published by Ohio University Press, traces the life of Amadu Bamba and the founding of the Muridiyya, the Senegalese Sufi order, working from Wolof and Arabic sources including the Muridiyya's own devotional and hagiographic literature read critically alongside French colonial records. Its strength is combining the movement's own internal religious sources with colonial archival material, letting Babou reconstruct Bamba's actual historical circumstances, including his relationship with French colonial authorities, more fully than either source alone would allow. Its limit is that it focuses on the movement's founding period specifically, so the Muridiyya's later twentieth and twenty first century development needs separate, more recent sources to cover.