Journal of Religion in Africa 48 (2020) 312-346 brill.com/jra Staging Touba: The Performance of Piety Kate Kingsbury Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada [email protected] Abstract Touba, in Senegal, is the equivalent to Mecca for Sufi Mouride Muslims, who embark on an annual pilgrimage called Le Grand Magal to celebrate the founder of their faith, Cheikh Amadou Bamba. When devotees describe their sacred city they frequently com- pare Touba to heaven, juxtaposing it to the materiality and chaos of other Senegalese cities, as though it was distinct from these lieux. Yet Touba shares many similarities in terms of its economic importance with other metropolises. Mourides despite pre- senting themselves as a united religious community, have differences of opinion and even praxis. This paper explores the imagination of Touba and the Mouride order by Mourides, positing that the sacred sites of Touba comprise a stage for the performance of piety and the generation of a particular Mouride ontology through which they see Touba, their order and the world. Keywords Senegal – Touba – Mourides – Pilgrimage – Magal – Africa – Religion In 1887, a Senegalese Sufi saint wandering across the arid sands of the Sahelian desert on a mystical retreat to find God, sought respite from the blistering sun, recount hagiographic tales. In the middle of the arid wilderness he came across a lone baobab tree. Reclining against its trunk in the shade of its canopy, it is said that he experienced a hierophanic vision. The angel Gabriel soared down from the heavens to deliver a divine message to the sitting Sufi. Gabriel prophesied that one day that barren spot would comprise an immense sacred centre. That day the Sufi Saint, the founder of the Mouride order known as Cheikh Amadou Bamba, named the lieu Touba. By 1963 Touba boasted the © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15700666-12340150Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:16:34PM via free access Staging Touba: The Performance of Piety 313 largest mosque in West Africa and a few decades later the once desolate loca- tion became the second largest city in Senegal. In 2019, like every year since Bamba’s death, millions of Senegalese assem- bled to celebrate and venerate the Cheikh. Many, like Bamba, are impelled to visit due to mystical visions, such as Aida and her husband, both originally from Christian families. Aida kept dreaming of Touba and the Sufi saint Bamba. She related that she constantly encountered the Cheikh’s devotees in her home- town of Dakar. They told Aida the tale of Touba. Convinced it was a sign, she and her husband Ousmane journeyed to Touba for the first time in 2001 where they both converted to Mouridiyya. Aida told me ‘I experienced a revelation. I felt that I had found my place at last in this heaven on earth. I felt sanctity, Godliness, and a deep sense of piety. I knew this was a place of God, it was my community and His forever.’ … Touba, located in the Western Sahel, was established as a small village in 1887. It was built to honour Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the religious leader who found- ed the Mouride faith in 1883 (Guèye 2002:56). The Mourides are a uniquely Senegalese Sufi order who account for approximately a third of the nation’s population1. There are also numerous Mouride migrants living abroad (Bava 2003, Riccio 2006). The city now boasts the largest mosque in West Africa, known as La Grand Mosquée. Inside the edifice is Bamba’s tomb. It is a holy city for disciples, who are known as talibés. Every November, on the 18th day of the Islamic month of Safar, approximately 5 million Senegalese2, travel to Touba to attend le Grand Magal, an annual religious rite honouring the found- er of the faith. Talibés circumambulate holy monuments and provide obla- tions to their religious leaders, in particular the Khalifa General, the head of all Mouride marabouts, in order to receive blessings in their ventures and pay their respects (Coulon 1999). Touba is a bustling globalised metropolis, and as detailed the second largest city in Senegal. It is connected, through trade and through mobile migrant Mourides, to the four corners of the globe. Like any metropolis it can be chaotic, noisy and even dangerous, especially as due to its religious status it benefits from being beyond state legislature, functioning as an autonomous territory run by Mouride leaders (Guèye 2002:186, 313). As such it has become a haven for selling black market goods and refuge for recidi- vists seeking to escape authorities. Yet, Touba is depicted by disciples as a peaceful city, even as paradise on earth. It is said, by talibés, to be distinct and different from other major urban Journal of Religion in Africa 48 (2020) 312-346 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:16:34PM via free access 314 Kingsbury conurbations, such as Dakar or Rufisque. According to this point of view, Touba is characterised by a Durkheim dichotomy contrasting an ‘ideal and transcen- dental world’ far from the secular, profane ‘material world’ (Durkheim 1965:52) of Dakar and the rest of Senegal. Indeed, Touba frequently features in disciples’ accounts as a critique of the secular, materialist, modern world. As Momar told me, the Mouride owner of my local shop, who was keen to educate me on Le Grand Magal before my first Magal in 2007: ‘Touba is a place for communion with God, far from the troubles of Dakar, where you forget greed and envy.’ Le Grand Magal is portrayed by Mourides as a purely religious affair where all Mourides unite in devotion, yet there are many other sides to this rite, and to this city beyond those portrayed in academic articles and disciples accounts as I shall evince. This paper probes below the surface of the city as imagined and portrayed by Mourides, to deconstruct depictions of Touba and evince its complexities. The Mourides and the Mouride faith itself are far less homogeneous than dis- ciples, marabouts or even certain scholars3 describe and Touba, although por- trayed by Mourides as far from the chaos of other cities, is hectic and full of the contradictions that are inherent to all large metropolises. Touba is the site of continual controversy and contestation. Marabouts, each with their own per- spectives and interests, vie for land, power, resources and followers. Disciples of different orders, known as tariqas, like their leaders, have alternative con- ceptions of what it means to be Mouride. It is not uncommon for talibés of dissimilar orders and branches to feud and even engage in physical fights, each claiming their marabout is prepotent. Yet despite these apparent contradictions, depictions of the city by Mourides always focus on the idea of a unified corpus of devotees in a tran- quil haven that is often stated to be heaven on earth. Nevertheless, as Schielke reminds us, to assume that all pious peoples in their endeavours and rites are consistently coherent and that religion itself is practiced in a manner that is perfectly unflawed and free of discrepancies is naïve and short-sighted (2009, 2015). Furthermore, it denies scholars the opportunity to understand the ‘frag- mented nature’ of faith and the faithful who as a rule, rather than an exception, embrace ‘double standards, fractures and shifts’ in their spirituality, morality and religious realities (Schielke 2009:S38). I posit that in the context of these contradictions and inconsistencies, the rites that take place once a year at le Grand Magal serve to veil the disunity and disorder that exists, whilst reifying, reinforcing and coalescing the symbolic Mouride system. Touba’s central mosque, engirded by a plethora of other reli- gious sites, functions as a theatrum sacri. It is a stage for religion to be enacted, Journal of Religion in DownloadedAfrica 48from (2020) Brill.com09/29/2021 312-346 05:16:34PM via free access Staging Touba: The Performance of Piety 315 belief to be affirmed and a model of the Mouride worldview to be manifested and reified by disciples. It is a façade that conceals the chaos of Touba. These rites allow an impalpable religious ideology to exist in the imagination by being rendered incarnate in mimetic ‘techniques du corps’ (see Mauss 1936). On this stage, religious rites are regularly enacted, physically, materially and psychically generating and regenerating Mouridiyya. Faith ‘must always be ac- tively made and be witnessed being made’ (Gharavi 2011:18). The rites enacted ensure Mourides continue to view Touba and their reli- gious order through the lens of this symbolic system. This explains why disci- ples and their leaders use a specific spiritual lexicon to describe the metropolis and their pilgrimage experiences, whilst omitting to mention the mundane activities that take place in Touba. Like beauty, ‘holiness exists in the eye of the beholder’ (Verschaffel 2012:36). Mourides envision Touba through the optic of this sacred worldview, having no access to a ‘reality’ independent of that sym- bolic lexicon. As Turner has expounded in his concept of ‘social drama’, functionally rit- uals are also vital for resolving potential conflicts (Turner 1974). They act as redressive mechanisms easing societal tensions by allowing for crises to be provisionally resolved through acts that bring about communitas, which he de- scribes as an intense community spirit which functions as a means of ‘binding diversities together and overcoming cleavages’ (Turner 1974:206). Communitas itself becomes a symbol. The devotees physically become part of a sacred dramaturgy that reinforces belief in the religious symbolic system, bolstering their own belief conjointly with that of fellow disciples. The Greek word drama is derived from dromenon which means religious ritual, literally things done (Harrison 1951:49).