The order Bamba founded, the Mouridiyya, is built on a pairing his followers compress into a proverb: pray as if you will die tomorrow, work as if you will live forever. Disciples submit to a sheikh, and labor, above all the agricultural labor that opened the Senegalese interior to groundnut cultivation, is itself sanctified as devotion. The daara, the working religious community, became the order's engine, and the scholarship of Donal Cruise O'Brien and his successors has traced how that engine made the Mourides a decisive economic and political force in colonial and independent Senegal, from the groundnut basin to the trading diasporas of Dakar, Paris and New York.
Bamba's own legacy is above all textual: tens of thousands of verses of Arabic devotional poetry, the khassaides, praising God and the Prophet and teaching the path, which Mouride communities chant in collective sessions that are the order's most distinctive public practice. At the center of everything stands Touba, the city he founded in 1887, where the Great Mosque raised over his tomb, completed in 1963, anchors the Grand Magal pilgrimage: each year millions travel to Touba on the anniversary of the day the sheikh went into exile, commemorating not a victory or a birth but a departure endured in patience, which is the whole Mouride reading of his life.