Transnational Mouridism and the Afro‐Muslim Critique of Italy

Abstract

Founded in the 1880s by Cheick Amadou Bamba, the Mouride brotherhood has its capital in Touba, Senegal, where Mourides have constructed the largest mosque in sub‐Saharan Africa. The brotherhood's vertical and horizontal ties and a culture of migration have been readily reproduced within transnational networks. Most Mouride migrants are men, who are involved in circulatory migration. They have left their families in Senegal where their transnational social networks are ‘anchored’. In addition to exploring their transnational networks in both receiving and sending contexts, I consider Mouride attitudes towards and discourses about the society of migration. Their Afro‐Muslim critique of Italy offers methodological lessons. Indeed, it demonstrates the need to combine analytic anti‐essentialism with the ethnographic exploration of prosaic essentialisms.

Keywords:

• Essentialism
• Italy
• Mourides
• Senegal
• Transnational Migration

Notes

Bruno Riccio is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bologna, Italy. Correspondence to: Universita` di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Educazione, Via Zamboni, 34, 4126 Bologna, Italy. E‐mail: [email protected]

In general, daara means a Koranic school or the house of a marabout, but among the Mourides was also used for an agricultural community of young men in the service of the marabout. The dahira means a local ‘cell’ (Villalon 1995), ‘circle’ (Carter 1997) or organisational unit of a Senegalese brotherhood (other orders followed the example of the Mourides, M.C. Diop 1981) or of the followers of a specific marabout.

The Baye Fall is a sub‐movement and sub‐culture of Mouridism, very successful among the young people. It descends from and refers to Ibra Fall, the first follower of Amadou Bamba, who was more attentive to the organisational and political aspects of the brotherhood than to the spiritual ones. The Baye Fall are sometimes criticised for not always respecting Islamic practices. Instead, they stress more the characteristic service of the talibe toward the marabout and they take the work ethic to an extreme. Generally, in Senegal they cultivate the link with traditional animist culture, they hardly accumulate wealth (unlike many important marabouts), they work toward a social end or they beg in the street. In Touba they are responsible for control and organization; their guide is a direct descendant from Ibra Fall, the Khalifa of the Baye Fall.