Khidma as Worship in the Muridiyya

Amadu Bamba, who founded the Muridiyya order in Senegal in the 1880s under French colonial rule, taught khidma, service or labor performed for one's shaykh, as a legitimate and complete form of worship in its own right rather than as ordinary manual work performed alongside a separate spiritual practice, a doctrine that gave the order's early followers, known as talibes, religious grounds for the intensive agricultural labor, chiefly groundnut cultivation, that came to define the movement's early economic life. Cheikh Anta Babou's history of the order's founding describes how Bamba framed this labor doctrine within a wider teaching that ordinary worldly activity, performed with the correct inward intention and submission to one's spiritual guide, carries the same religious weight Sufi tradition more commonly assigns to formal prayer and remembrance, a position that let the young order integrate its economic survival directly into its theology rather than treating farming as a merely practical necessity separate from religious life. The doctrine also structured the relationship between disciple and shaykh in concrete terms, since khidma performed for a specific teacher was understood to deepen the disciple's own spiritual formation under that teacher's guidance, making labor itself, rather than only formal instruction, one of the primary means by which a talibe progressed along the order's spiritual path.