ABSTRACT
Islam has existed in Senegal since the eleventh century. In the 1880s, the collaboration between Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927) and Sheikh Ibrahima Fall (1858-1930) gave it a new momentum through the Mouridiyya, the Sufi brotherhood of Mourides. Today the latter coexists with the Tidjaniyya, Layeniyya, and other local Muslim brotherhoods. Bamba, a scholar from a family of learned people and Quranic schoolmasters, attended Quranic school in Senegal and Mauritania. As soon as it was founded, the Mourides recruited and integrated different ethnic groups from diverse sociopolitical levels and families (noble men, free men, dependents, slaves and people of caste) from the Wolof and Serer territories colonized by the French.
