Amadou Bamba, Exile, and the Founding of a City

Amadou Bamba was a scholar and poet from a family of Muslim clerics in the Wolof country, trained in the older Sufi orders, who began gathering his own following in the 1880s at a place he named Touba, from the tree of paradise named in Islamic tradition. The French colonial administration read the size of that following as a political threat and deported him to Gabon in 1895, then to Mauritania, and afterwards kept him under supervision at home until his death in 1927.

The exile is the centre of Mouride memory. The best known account holds that when he was refused space to pray on the deck of the ship, he spread his sheepskin on the water and prayed there. Whatever a historian makes of such stories, their function is clear: the order presents its founder as a man whose weapons were prayer and writing rather than arms, and it takes a deliberate pride in having resisted a colonial power without a war.

Bamba's teaching centred on work as a form of worship performed under the direction of a shaykh, on the copying and recitation of his own devotional poetry, and on submission of the disciple to the guide. The organisation that grew from it, the Muridiyya, is a Sufi order that became an economic institution as well, first through groundnut cultivation and later through trade, with disciples remitting to the order and the order investing in the city.