Senegal - a Muslim World Apart From Others

Daily Champion (Lagos)
OPINION
29 July 2007
Posted to the web 29 July 2007

By Haroon Siddiqui
Lagos

We know Senegal as the westernmost point of Africa, a shipping point of the old slave trade, and, lately, the Dakar Rally and as West Africa's most politically stable country where governments change democratically.

Senegal should also be known as the nation that upends the West's received wisdom on Muslims.

This is not Al Qaeda turf. And the 10 million people (94 per cent Muslim, 6 per cent Christian) here don't fit any cliché.

There are no hijabs in sight. But women are observant. They pray at work and in the mosques, where, unlike in some Muslim lands, they are welcome.

What's most striking about the women - more than their colourful long robes and matching turbans - is their confident bearing. They exhibit neither hostility nor deference to men. They seem their sovereign selves.

They enjoy equality in property and other matters under a law that's a fusion of the sharia and the French civil code.

Singing and dancing are integral parts of life. Youssou N'Dour, the singer, songwriter and band leader whose keening, haunting voice transcends the language barrier to touch audiences the world over, learned to perform with his mother, a griot singer of oral songs dating back to pre-Islamic times.

Music here is infused with the spirituality of the Islamic Sufi sects to which most Senegalese belong. In his Grammy-winning CD, Egypt (2004), N'Dour invokes "Touba, Touba," the headquarters of the Mouridi order of which he is a member.

Touba, 200 kilometres north of Dakar, is where the sect's founder Shaikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke (1850-1927) is buried. In 1891, the mystic claimed to have seen the Prophet Muhammad in a dream. As he amassed a mass following, the French colonials feared he might raise an army of resistance. They exiled him, to Gabon (1895-1902) and Mauritania (1903-1907). That only made him more popular.

The French let him return once they realized he was a pacifist, like Mahatma Gandhi in India against British colonial rule.

Bamba was also apolitical, preaching the Greater Jihad of controlling oneself, a war fought not with weapons but, as per his simplified creed, hard work and fidelity to the spiritual master.

His mausoleum is a popular place of pilgrimage. His descendant, Shaikh Saliou Mbacke, is the current head of the sect.

The day I was there he was available to his followers, not to speak to but to be glimpsed at through an iron grille as he sat in a silent praying repose.

Such veneration - saint worship, in critical theological parlance - is not exclusive to Senegal. But it seemed to me to be pervasive here.

The evening I returned from Touba, I went to listen to a backup singer for Baaba Ma'al, that other great Senegalese performer, and saw the bar crowd swaying to his Sufi chant of "Mouridi, Mouridi."

Religion is not divisive here. Churches stand next to mosques. Muslim-Christian marriages are common. The first post-colonial president, Leopold Senghor (1960-80), was a Christian. An acclaimed poet, he remains an icon for Muslims as well.

"He taught us that before we were Christian or Muslim, we were Negroes," says Boucounta Diallo, a noted lawyer, who served as Senghor's aide. "We have African and Christian and Muslim identities. And our faith, Islam or Christianity, is a moderating force."

Copyright © 2007 Daily Champion. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).