The Great Mosque of Touba

The Great Mosque of Touba is the principal mosque of the Mouride Sufi order, founded by Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba in 1887 in the city he established as the order's spiritual capital, and completed by his successors in 1963. Built in a distinctive style combining Sudano-Sahelian and Moroccan influenced elements with striking blue and green domes, the mosque houses Bamba's mausoleum in a gold fenced niche beneath its central dome, the devotional focus of the annual Grand Magal pilgrimage described in the companion entry for the pilgrimage route.

The mosque's tallest minaret, called Lamp Fall and rising 87 metres, is named for Sheikh Ibrahima Fall, one of Bamba's most influential early disciples and the founder of the Baye Fall branch of Mouride practice known for its emphasis on labor as devotion. Six further minarets complete the mosque's structure, and the complex is regularly described as the most visited Islamic pilgrimage site in West Africa outside the annual Hajj season.

Bamba died in 1927 and was interred inside the mosque he had founded forty years earlier; construction continued under his successors in the Mouride caliphate for a further thirty six years. The mosque is administered by that caliphate rather than by the Senegalese state, consistent with Touba's broader status as a city that functions as effectively autonomous within Senegal's otherwise secular constitutional structure.