*Senegal - a Muslim World Apart From Others*

*Daily Champion* (Lagos)

OPINION

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."

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