Senegal is the clearest case anywhere of a society whose religious life is organised around Sufi orders rather than around a clerical hierarchy, a state establishment or a mosque bureaucracy. The relationship that matters is between a marabout and his talibe, his disciple, and it is inherited, lifelong and reciprocal: the disciple gives loyalty, labour and offerings, and the marabout gives guidance, intercession and practical assistance.
Two orders dominate. The Tijaniyya is the larger, centred on Tivaouane and, in a distinct branch, on the Niasse lineage at Kaolack, whose founder Ibrahim Niasse gathered a following across West Africa and into Nigeria that made him one of the most widely followed Muslim teachers of the twentieth century. The Mouridiyya, founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba in the 1880s, is smaller but more visible, and its centre at Touba is a city the order built.
Amadou Bamba's significance is partly what he refused to do. He preached work and study rather than armed resistance to the French, who nonetheless exiled him to Gabon and then Mauritania and kept him under surveillance for the rest of his life. That exile is the founding story of the order and the occasion of its largest gathering.
The orders reach into everything: agricultural labour, market trading, transport, the migration networks that carry Senegalese traders to Europe and the United States, and voting. Politicians seek the endorsement of the caliphs of each order, and a public instruction from one is a significant event.
Coexistence with the Christian minority is genuine. Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Catholic, was elected repeatedly as president of an overwhelmingly Muslim country.