ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on women and Sufi Islam in Senegal. She aims to show Senegalese female religious practice in the Muridism of today. The author presents the Murid brotherhood and provides an account of the Murid gender ideals as manifested in the legends about Mam Diarra Bousso and in the Murids’ daily life. The mother image of Mam Diarra Bousso, the mother of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, fulfils both the Wolof and the Sufi ideal expectations. And they affect women’s participation in Muridism, as Sufism and Islamism are partly interacting and influencing each other in contemporary Senegalese society. The Mam Diarra Bousso daira in Mbacke was presented to the author as a women’s daira. The ideological reasons presented by the Murid men fall back on the Islamic gender ideas about women as being ritually impure -and moreover ignorant, lacking religious education.
