Gender and agency in the history of a West African Sufi community

In 1929 French colonial officials in Mauritania began monitoring a young man named Yacouba Sylla, the leader of a religious revival in the town of Kaédi. A Sufi teacher (shaykh), Yacouba Sylla had incurred the hostility of local administrators and the disdain of Kaédi’s elite for preaching radical reforms of social and religious practice and for claiming authority out of proportion to his age and his rather minimal formal education. He claimed to derive his authority instead from a controversial shaykh named Ahmed Hamallah, then in exile from his home in Nioro, French Soudan (now Mali).