ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, Mali was battered by a series of political crises and mired in economic troubles. Mali is today one of the poorest countries in West Africa. In the early 19th century, Muslims were a small minority in future Mali, and were concentrated in the Songhay north from Timbuktu to Gao - now a hamlet huddled amid the vestiges of the old capital. The French Sudan was the agricultural colony par excellence. Islamisation in Mali was first manifested by the growth of what Robert Launay and Benjamin Soares call the Islamic sphere, that is, a new kind of public space shaped by religion rather than by politics or social dynamics. The Union Soudanaise regime had broken the traditional alliance between the ruling and trading classes in the western Sudan. Mali's story does not end with the progress made by the Wahhabis under the capable leadership of Imam Mahmoud Dicko.
