Being Muslim

Those of you up on your world religions have probably found it odd that I haven’t mentioned hardly anything about the fact that Senegal is an overwhelmingly Muslim country. This it certainly not because the Islam here is a negligible part of daily life that I personally don’t experience because my host family is Catholic. On the contrary, the Islam here is unavoidable and I’ve learned a lot about it since I’ve been here. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while now, because to me, it is hands down the most fascinating thing about this place. It’s also the hardest to understand, because there are a lot of historical and cultural factors that I don’t know anything about. Islam in Senegal is a lot different from the Islam in the Middle East and places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, so a lot of the things that Americans “know” about Islam don’t even apply here. Sometimes I’ll learn something that clarifies things that have confused me, but nearly as often, I will learn something that contradicts what I thought I already knew and which just leaves me more confused. I’ve been very hesitant to write anything about what I’ve observed because I feel like I’m not getting the whole picture, and that I’m misunderstanding or leaving out crucial bits so that what I’m saying comes off as ignorant or offensive. This blog entry has been in the works for probably two months now, and I still don’t feel like its authoritative or complete. So take this with a grain of salt. The chances that I don’t always know what I’m talking about are pretty good.

To start off with, here’s a brief history lesson about how Islam actually got to Senegal:

Way back when (11th century or so), Muslim Arabs conquered North Africa and Islamized the Berbers, who in turn conquered many of the black empires of West Africa and Islamized at least the ruling classes. Most of the rest of the population stuck with traditional animist religions. The societies that inhabited the area that is now Senegal (because “Senegal” didn’t exist until some Europeans drew some lines on a map, and the modern borders in no way correspond with the territory of any African civilization) had highly rigid social structures. The tacit social contract was that the garmi, or ruling families of nobles, were supposed to protect the lower classes in exchange for their fealty, like European feudalism. It wasn’t a particularly egalitarian arrangement, but it was stable.

Enter the Europeans and the transatlantic slave trade (16-19th centuries). Suddenly, the garmi have a lot to gain by allying themselves with the colonizers, picking fights with their neighbors, and selling prisoners of war to the Europeans as slaves. Instead of protecting the people, the garmi began preying on them, which threw the centuries-old social order into chaos. Because they could no longer count on the protection of the garmi, the people sought refuge in Muslim communities lead by marabouts, or charismatic religious leaders. These communities usually consisted of a mosque, a school, and fields, and thereby provided a new faith, learning, and work for the people who flocked to them. Because the garmi were largely Muslim, the marabout communities were, by another tacit social contract, off-limits from war, pillaging and slave raids. This guarantee of safety effected the conversation en masse of the people in these regions.

That’s how 95% of the Senegalese population came to be Muslim. The small percentage of Christians in Senegal are, for the most part, grouped in cities on the Atlantic coast that used to be important colonial cites (Dakar, Rufisque, St. Louis, etc). Even in these places, Muslims overwhelmingly outnumber Christians.

The Islam practiced in Senegal is a very particular brand. Most Americans now know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims (or at least know that there is a difference). Technically, Senegalese Muslims are Sunnis, but they are much more accurately described as Sufis. Sufism is a form of Islam that emphasizes mystical aspects and allows for the charismatic style of leadership exercised by the marabouts. African animism found common ground with Muslim mysticism, and as a result, Senegalese Islam is deeply infused and entwined with ancient practices and beliefs. My literature professor likes to say that Senegal is 95% Muslim, 5% Christian, and 100% animist. By way of illustration, he told us a story about an old man that he picked up on his way back Dakar after visiting his parent’s village. To show his gratitude for the ride, the old hitchhiker gave my professor the words to an incantation that would protect him from car accidents. Senegalese wrestling matches are also a good place to observe traditional practices in action. I watched some on TV once. Some of the wrestlers doused themselves in oil that had been blessed by their marabouts to ensure their victory. The camera also cut to a chicken on the sidelines a few times. I’m not quite sure what the purpose of the chicken was, but the chances that it was part of some sort of charm or talisman are pretty good.

Muslims here belong to brotherhoods, sort of the same way that Christians belong to denominations. There are technically four major brotherhoods in Senegal, but the overwhelming majority of people belong to one of two: the Mouridiya and the Tijaniya. The Tijaniya was founded by Moroccans a long time ago, but the Mouridiya was founded by a Senegalese, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, during the height of French colonialism in the 19th century. Its early history is closely tied in with the popular resistance against colonial rule. Today, the Mouridiya is the most important brotherhood in Senegal.

Cheikh Amadou Bamba and a devoted student of his, Cheikh Ibra “Lamp” Fall, are highly revered figures for Mourides. During his lifetime, there was only ever one photograph taken of Amadou Bamba, and it’s probably the most recognized image in Senegal. You can see it reproduced as decoration or graffiti on walls, signs, shops, and stalls. Some Mourides even wear pictures of Bamba, Fall, and the current marabouts as amulets around their necks, which is a holdover from the traditional practice of wearing grigris, or fetishes, charms to ward off evil. This isn’t just a Muslim thing; lots of Catholics here wear pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary the same way. You also see other kinds of grigris pretty often, too. They usually little pockets of leather, sewed up tight and mostly likely containing pieces of paper with verses from the Coran on them. You see them tied around little kids’ necks and waists all the time.

Back towards the end of the 19th century, France was feeling threatened by how popular Bamba was getting, so they exiled him from Senegal. In 1907, they let him come back, and this event is celebrated every year by the Mourides by a huge pilgrimage to Touba, which is a town that I think Bamba founded and which is definitely the seat of Mouride power today. This pilgrimage is called the Magal, and practically all of Senegal packs up and heads to Touba to go to the enormous mosque and see the marabout.

This year, the Magal was on Valentine’s Day, and I already know that my biggest regret about my semester in Senegal will be that I didn’t go to Touba for the Magal. I had a few friends who went and who invited me to come with them, but I declined the offer and stayed in Dakar. I was overwhelmed at the idea of all the crowds and traffic jams and the seemingly slapdash way this trip was being thrown together (though after 3 months in Senegal, what used to seem slapdash now seems totally legit). I then spent a monumentally boring weekend in an empty city, wishing I was in Touba with the rest of the world. Next time, I am totally there.

There is another pilgrimage that happened in the beginning of March, called Gamou. This is a big one for the Tijanes, who all get together and go to Tivouane, where the Tijaniya brotherhood is headquartered. It’s a celebration of the prophet Mohammed’s birthday, but it has its roots in traditional African religion. The guy brought Tijaniya to Senegal, El Hadj Malick Sy, appropriated the Gamou (which is a Wolof word) and applied it to the Mawlid (which is the Arabic word for the holiday commemorating the Prophet’s birthday).


One a more day-to-day basis, there are a lot of little things that let you know that you’re in a Muslim country. There’s a big, sometimes even huge, mosque on just about every major road, and you’ll see the smaller minarets of neighborhood mosques poking up between the houses in the more residential areas. There’s a mosque just across the street from the house I live in, and every day without fail, I am woken up before dawn when the muezzin starts calling everyone to the first prayer of the day. From what I remember from my 9th grade lessons on mosque architecture, mosques were built with minarets, or tall spires, so that the muezzin could get into a high place and sing the call really loudly so that everyone could hear, but in these days of fancy technology, the muezzin stays on the ground and sings into a microphone. His voice is then amplified to a volume much louder than any human could manage and played through the speakers at the top of the minarets. I read somewhere that some mosques even just play a recording. Whatever they do, they certainly succeed in making sure that everyone in the city knows that it’s time to pray, no matter where they are or what they’re doing.

If you can’t hear the call to prayer, then chances are you’re in the middle of a market where there is LOTS of noise and distractions. To make sure that you still know when to stop, drop, and prostrate yourself, you can usually find a poster with the prayer times on them on the side of a shop or a stall. I’ve also seen then posted on little pavilion thingys, which aren’t really mosques because they don’t have minarets (or walls, sometimes), but where people can go pray out of the dust and crowds. I think the prayer times are figured according to where the sun is in the sky, so they might change slightly every day. The first prayer, for instance, is a several minuets earlier now that it was when I first got here.

Sometimes, especially on Fridays, (which are to Muslims what Sundays are to Christians), you can hear services or something going on in the mosques just about all day long. When I first got here, it was sometimes hard to sleep through the night, because sometimes there would be singing broadcast sporadically from the mosques all throughout the night at well. There probably still is, but I just don’t notice it because I’ve gotten used to it and sleep through it.

Sometimes people will go into the mosques for the prayers, but if there isn’t one handy or the person can’t stray too far from their job or their companions, they’ll pray wherever they are. You’ll see brightly colored teakettles next to every shop or market stall, which people use for ablutions before they pray. The mats are little rugs just big enough to fit a prostrate body and instantly sacralize any space for prayer (there’s my shout-out to Carlin Barton with the word “sacralize”). This demarcation of a sacred space is very important. Tening, our old maid, was Muslim, and I don’t think she had a prayer mat. She’d never just pray on the floor, though. I used to see her pray on the shawl she’s wearing (which I think is not uncommon for women here) and once I even saw her use an empty rice sack.

Maybe it’s a little voyeuristic of me, but I love walking around Dakar during prayer times and seeing all the people washing their feet and faces with their teakettles and praying on their mats. Their devotion and their unity are really impressive. I’ve been in the Sandaga market a few times during prayers, and I’ve seen the men line up in rows and go through their prayers all at the same time, (synchronized supplication, if you will). I was walking home from school one day during a prayer and had to walk around a taxi that had pulled up on the sidewalk. The driver had stopped his cab and gotten out to pray on the side of the road. I thought that was so cool. Something I have noticed though is that the huge majority of people who pray outside are men. I won’t say I’ve never seen a woman pray outside, but I can probably count the number of times I have seen it on one hand. I have no idea why this is.

Islam gets into everything here. Even the language is infused with it. The future tense in Wolof is pretty much just present tense with an “inshallah” (or “God willing”) attached to it, and people even toss it in when they’re speaking French. If you pay attention to a Wolof conversation, especially if it’s just getting started and there are lots of salutations to get through (salutations are very important in Senegal), you’ll hear “Alhamdoulilai” (or “Thanks be to God”) as the response to lots of questions. The car rapides have blessings, the names of marabouts, “Touba,” and “Alhamdoulilai” written all over them. They also have pictures of the marabouts stuck to surfaces that are usually and, one would think, importantly transparent, such as the windshields. (I guess that if you’ve got a picture of a marabout to protect you and all your passengers from accidents, you don’t need much more than 6 square inches to look through). People walk around with chapelets, or rosary-like prayer beads, either wrapped around their hands or dangling loosely so they can flick through the beads as they whisper the prayers to themselves or say them in their heads.

Very, very rarely will you see a woman covered from head to toe in a burka like they wear in Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia (I’ve seen two the whole time I’ve been here). More often, but still not often enough for it to be common, you’ll see a woman wearing a Muslim headscarf. Many, or even most women here wear scarves on their heads, but a length of the same bright, printed fabric that your whole outfit is made out of and that lets your ears and braids or weave stick out is certainly not the same as a carefully wound scarf that reveals only a calculated oval of you face. Wearing the scarf is definitely a personal choice and not a cultural norm in Senegal. Also, the women who do wear the scarf don’t usually go for somber colors like black and beige. They tend to choose scarves that are neon pink and/or covered in sequins. Interestingly enough, women at the University, who you would think would be a little more liberal and liberated, dress more conservatively than other women their age. This would be the only place that I would say that young women wearing the scarf outnumber those who don’t. Some of the WARC girls who take classes there have said that this is probably because bescarfed girls get a lot less annoying attention from guys, and that for them, the cut of a t-shirt can make or break a day in class. Some of the WARC girls have even taken to tugging a scarf over their head and shoulders when walking home alone, which has the added benefit of cloaking their toubab-ness.

On the subject of education, Senegal is crawling with talibe kids. From what I’ve gathered (and this particular bit of knowledge has a LOT of holes in it), lots of Muslim boys (but not girls, I don’t think) go to Coranic school when they’re kids, which means they got to schools directed by the marabouts. These kids are called “talibe,” which means student, (and which probably has the same root as “Taliban”). Their schedule consists of a full day of begging with lessons in the evenings. They give the money from the begging to the marabouts, who use it to feed and house them, or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. I’ve heard people express suspicions that some of that money gets pocketed by the marabouts for their own personal use. It would certainly be a temptation, but I hesitate to call the whole arrangement a corrupt sham. The kids usually aren’t particularly clean or well dressed, but they don’t look like they’re starving to death. I don’t know when exactly kids start in these schools, or when they finish, but lots of high school kids here are a few years older than high school kids in the US, and I think it’s because they spent a lot of time in Coranic school.

It’s kind of a sensitive situation for an American to observe. Judging only from the sheer numbers of talibe, the system is an integral part of Senegalese Muslim culture and it’s definitely the kind of thing that people here would fight to preserve, but with my Western notions of the rights of children, a barefoot kid with a tin can and outstretched hand makes my exploitation-masquerading-as-a-cultural-norm-slash-religious-practice senses tingle. This could also have something to do with the fact that I don’t really know all the ins and outs of how these schools work. It’s something I’d love to know more about.

Marabouts of any brotherhood are very powerful, and the head marabouts of each brotherhood, or caliphs, are enormously powerful. They are also enormously wealthy. I think this wealth and power came together during the early 20th century, when the religious leadership and the colonial leadership started playing nicely together to each get what they wanted. One of the things that the brotherhoods got out of this deal was control over the vast fields of peanuts, which is Senegal’s cash crop, and they made and continue to make a lot of money from the peanuts. Another source of financing for the marabouts is the members of their brotherhoods. People pay their marabouts to pray for them. Here, personal successes that we in the US of A would chalk up to our own hard work are credited to the strength of the marabouts’ prayers, which work better than just your average Abdoul’s. The personal successes of Senegalese Muslims translate not just into their own family’s prosperity, but into SUV’s, palatial homes, and extra wives for their marabouts. The marabouts are widely criticized (at least, among my Catholic family and my professors) for amassing such staggering individual wealth while huge numbers of their followers are experiencing economic hardships if not downright poverty.

Another potentially (read: certainly) troublesome aspect of the power structure of the brotherhoods is that the caliphates are hereditary. When a caliph dies, his son becomes the next caliph. Because of this, certain surnames in Senegal carry a lot of weight. For the Tijanes, the caliph’s family is Sy, for the Mourides, it’s Mbacké. You see these names everywhere: on signs, shops, car rapides, t-shirts, whatever. If people can claim a connection to these families, they will. I’ve heard that there’s a lot of intermarriage in these families, and powerful marabouts can sometimes have dozens of wives (though technically you’re only allowed 4, according to the Coran and Senegalese law). The whole thing smacks of royalty, which is a reminder that the brotherhood system basically stepped into the place left behind by the ruptured feudal system, and I would imagine that it has a lot of the same problems that a monarchy has. To me, you’re asking for trouble any time you base your system of leadership on bloodlines rather than merit, but the mystic power of the blood of Serigne Touba (the Mouride caliph’s title; “serigne” means marabout in Wolof, “marabout” comes from Arabic) is a force to be reckoned with.

Even though the Senegalese people are all very devoted to their religion of choice, Senegal is religiously tolerant country. According to the Senegalese constitution, Senegal is a secular state. There’s no sharia law here, although there are bits and pieces here and there that show a decidedly Muslim flavor, such as the allowance for men to marry up to 4 wives and the option of unequal inheritances based on the sexes of one’s children. No political parties can be founded along religious lines (or ethnic ones, for that matter), and religious discrimination is also a no-no. Senegal’s first President was Catholic, which sort of set the tone for religious tolerance in Senegal. There is little friction between Catholics and Muslims, or between any of the brotherhoods. The different religious groups like to make public signs of their solidarity. The different brotherhoods will send delegations on each other’s pilgrimages, and the Catholics will too. Muslims and Catholics are friends with each other, and intermarriage, although rare, is not unheard of. Senegal’s discrimination problems fall more along the lines of gender, class, and sexuality (being gay is actually illegal here).

All that said, Islam is pretty bound up in Senegalese politics. It is hands down impossible for anyone to get elected in Senegal without the support of the marabouts. The caliphs have the power to issue what’s called an ndigël, which is essentially a command. When people join the brotherhoods here, especially the Mourides, they take an oath of allegiance to their caliphs and swear to follow the commands. I don’t know if it’s a common practice for caliphs to issue ndigëls about who to vote for, but the sheer fact that they have the power to control the votes of 95% of the population if they want is pretty overwhelming. The leadership of the brotherhoods has been instrumental in some of Senegalese policy-making. For instance, the government of Senegal passed a law banning excision, or female genital mutilation, which is an important traditional practice among several ethnicities within Senegal. It’s not a Muslim practice, but the sometimes the caliphs fancy themselves the guardians of not just the religion but the wider culture as well. One of the caliphs objected to the law and it was suspended.

When the current President Abdoulaye Wade was up for reelection in 2007, he was opposed by a guy named Kara Mbacké, who was part of Serigne Touba’s family and probably a marabout. I don’t really know much about Kara and the election, except that his challenge represented a significant threat to the separation of “church” and state in Senegal. Dakar is big on political graffiti, and one of the things that you see tagged most often around here is a leftover from the 2007 election that says “Pourquoi pas Kara?” (“Why not Kara?”) Clearly, he had a lot of support, but Wade was reelected and the secular state lived to fight another day.
There’s a whole lot more I could talk about and there’s a whole lot more that I don’t know anything at all about. In any case, I’ve gone on for more than 6 pages in Microsoft Word, so it’s time for me to stop. I’ve been thinking seriously about writing my senior thesis about Islam in Senegal or in Sub-Saharan Africa more generally, so if anyone is still interested in this in about a year, I might have an even longer paper for you to read . . .