The Muridiyya on the Move

“Babou shows a true cultural and social anthropological intuition in describing the present making of the Muridiyya brotherhood throughout parts of Black Africa and of the Western world.”

“Based on years of intense ethnographic and historiographic research on three continents, Cheikh Anta Babou chronicles the ways in which individual migrants built local communities closely tied to transnational networks radiating from the holy city of Tuuba. The Muridiyya on the Move explores the relationships between religious associations known as dahiras, entrepreneurial migrant disciples, and key personalities from the order in inscribing physical and social Murid spaces in each setting. Recounted in rich detail and often through the voices of the actors themselves, this fascinating work will be of great interest both to those familiar with the Muridiyya, and to those who are just discovering this dynamic Sufi community.”

“Combining several historical, ethnographic, sociological, and theoretical perspectives, this book offers an exemplary social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of a community that has been creatively adjusting to a constantly changing world. Babou engages with the question of how the Murid became subjects of globalization in their own terms and languages. Bold and innovative in his conception and execution of this book, Babou persuasively argues for the crucial role played by migration in reshaping the identity and global performance of the Murid community, culturally, politically, and religiously, at home and abroad. Diligent in uncovering sources and scrupulous in the use of primary materials, interlacing historical detail, personal interviews, and observations, Cheikh Babou brings together (un)familiar elements to account for the creative and vernacular-inspired self-inclusion to the temps du monde.”

“Cheikh Babou combines scholarly rigor with an insider’s knowledge to produce a compelling account of the remarkable diaspora of Mourides from Senegal that combined individual initiative with collective solidarity to forge networks and communities in several African countries, France, Italy, and the United States. Attentive to religious and socioeconomic dimensions of migration, Babou brings out both the tensions and the creative adaptations as migrants became citizens in their new homes, worked out their relations with Muslim and non-Muslim fellow citizens, and brought up a new generation of Murids.”

“This is a meticulously researched and well written history of the migrations that made the Muridiyya, the Sufi order created by the Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba, travel from Tuubaa, its holy center in Senegal, and spread throughout the world, becoming the global reality it is today. The book illuminates the crucial point that the nascent diaspora of the Muridiyya has meant the continuous reinvention, in new spaces, of the life and creative force of the order. Its migrant followers did not just turn their new location and experience into a shadow of the “real thing” back home: they made the diaspora another home where the Murid experience and the message of the founder produced renewed meanings, which then traveled back to the center. The Muridiyya on the Move is thus an eloquent and powerful demonstration that, yes, indeed, Islam is at home in the modern and the ‘Western’ world.”