Touba, and an Order Built Around One Grave

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.