ABSTRACT
The Muridiyya is, arguably, one of the most researched topics of West African religious history. From the colonial administrators and ethnographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to twenty-first century scholars, the history of the Murid order has fascinated researchers across the disciplines (anthropology, political science, sociology, geography, history). 1 However, scholarly work on the Muridiyya has mostly taken an instrumentalist approach to the order. Much attention is paid to Murid involvement in the colonial cash crop economy of peanut and international trade, and to the role of the religious leadership as political brokers. Until recently, little attention was paid to the spiritual and cultural dimensions of the Muridiyya. This chapter is concerned with an important turning point in the development of the Muridiyya; that is the trial and exile of Amadu Bamba, the founder of the Murid order, between 1895 and 1907. The circumstances of this trial and the subsequent exile are well known and abundantly written about. Less known is the spiritual meanings of these events for Bamba and his disciples. I explore Murid internal oral and written sources in multiple languages to reconstruct the disciples’ discourse about the trial and exile of their spiritual guide. These sources allow recasting the conflict in eschatological and cultural terms and they offer an alternative to the dominant narrative conveyed by the colonial archives. For Sufis and practitioners of mysticism across religions, persecution and suffering play a crucial role in the spiritual itinerary of pious religious masters and leaders, especially those on the path to sainthood. The originators of the stories I discuss in this essay were clearly aware of this, first as learned Sufi who understood the philosophy and ethics of Sufism, and then as disciples who were instrumental in the construction of Amadu Bamba as a saint. I argue that Murid narrative about Bamba’s trials and exiles serve two purposes: first, to counter French official narrative of the events and, second, to promote Bamba as a wâlî Allah, or friend of God.
