Senegalese Exceptionalism and the Role of Sufism Revisited
Sufis and Sufism are often credited with helping to stabilize Senegal. But there are Sufis throughout West Africa, including in some of the most conflict-torn countries...
Two major annual Sufi celebrations in Senegal - the Magal of Touba and the Gamou of Tivaouane - fell in August and September of this year, respectively. Those events, and some interesting conversations with colleagues, have brought to my mind an old but important topic: Senegalese exceptionalism and Sufism.
How Not to Think About “Senegalese Sufism”
There is a version of this conversation that can be reductive and troubling. I can’t count the number of times, especially in Washington, DC, that I’ve been asked - or told - about “Senegal’s Sufi brotherhoods” and their role in stability. Sometimes the person’s phrasing even suggests they are unaware that Sufism is widespread in the Muslim world and is not something that somehow belongs to Senegal.
Indeed, Sufism is present and deeply rooted in other West African countries that are currently experiencing violent conflict, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria. Not only that, “Senegal’s Sufi brotherhoods” are not confined to Senegal - the Sufi orders there are either (a) branches or offshoots of more widely diffused orders and/or (b) the trunks of branches found elsewhere in Africa and the world. So:
the Mouridiyya order of Senegal is an outgrowth of the Qadiriyya, which is found around the world;
the Tijaniyya sub-orders found in Senegal are branches of a larger order found throughout much of Africa and elsewhere; and
the Tijaniyya Ibrahimiyya of Senegal, one sub-order of the Tijaniyya, has adherents from Mauritania to Sudan.
All of these orders are, of course, found in the global Senegalese diaspora as well. Moreover, Senegalese Sufis pursue and maintain ties with other centers of Sufism, such as Morocco and Algeria.
So if Sufis are found in both peaceful and conflict-torn countries, it cannot be the case that Sufism on its own stabilizes societies. Whether there is a distinctively Senegalese form of Sufism we can consider below, although I am skeptical.
Meanwhile, whether the claim of Sufism’s stabilizing power emanates from Western capitals or North African governments or from Sufis themselves, there can also be a politics underlying the idea of “Sufi brotherhoods” as a stabilizing force - a politics that categorizes Muslims into “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” Sufis (especially since 9/11) have been understood by various DC thinkers as some of the “moderates” that the United States government should promote and encourage. Trying to pick winners and losers among Muslims is an ugly approach to politics and policy, one that advocates social engineering projects that, I am convinced, the proponents do not actually understand in either the design or the potential consequences.
What Is Exceptional About Senegal?
With all that said, there is nevertheless a Senegalese exceptionalism that calls for explanation and analysis. This exceptionalism consists of a combination of (a) the country’s freedom from military coups and high-casualty civil wars and, since 2000, (b) regular competitive elections that are sometimes won by opposition candidates and, even more recently, (c) freedom from jihadist attacks and relative freedom from jihadist recruitment.
(We should note, as a major caveat to Senegalese exceptionalism, that there has been armed conflict in the Casamance region, with thousands of estimated deaths since 1982.)
The classic and still most persuasive explanation for Senegalese exceptionalism comes in Leonardo Villalón’s 1995 book Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal. Villalón was researching and writing at a time when Senegal was still under de facto single-party (Socialist Party) rule. Therefore his work is most attuned to (a) above rather than (b) and (c). But his explanation actually helps us with all three. Villalón’s central argument (see pp. 12-13), which is rooted in a careful engagement with Senegal’s colonial and postcolonial history, is that a three-way relationship exists between the state, the shaykhs, and ordinary people (“citizen-disciples”). He argues further that this relationship allows Senegalese citizens a voice as well as a range of options for engaging the state - “contest-cooperate-flee” - and that the state gives the citizen-disciples and the shaykhs major room to maneuver. Relatedly, another serious academic book worth consulting is the edited collection Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (Columbia, 2013). Note that this kind of careful research and argumentation is miles away from the DC canard of “Senegalese Sufism brings stability because Sufism is nice.”
What Differentiates Senegalese Sufis from Sufis Elsewhere in the Region? A Few Hypotheses.
If the answers about why Sufism helps stabilize Senegal are mostly convincing, we are nevertheless left with a bigger question - why does a stabilizing relationship not obtain between states, Sufis, and citizens elsewhere in the region? I can think of five hypotheses, not all of which are mutually exclusive:
Threshold: We could argue that Sufi orders can play a role as religious civil society, but only when politics is fairly stable. Under this explanation, Senegal would partly be luckier than many other countries in the region; Sufi orders act as a stabilizing force because the system is not under too much pressure. But if we added in some other element - such as an ethnic separatist movement that gains traction, or a successful military coup that sets off a series of coups - then instability would overwhelm any stabilizing potential that Sufism might offer. We might then ask why Senegal is luckier. Geography? (Senegal is not landlocked like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, or even northern Nigeria, if it were a separate country.) Relative economic prosperity? (Again, Senegal is relatively better off than the landlocked Sahelian states and northern Nigeria.) A favored relationship with France? Note that under all the different variants of this type of threshold explanation, Sufism wouldn’t be an underlying source of stability for Senegal at all; the constructive state-shaykh-citizen relationship would be a product rather than a cause of stability. Meanwhile, we could also bring in the idea of a kind of “Mauritanian exceptionalism” post-2011, and considering Mauritania and Senegal together could emphasize what they have in common geographically and developmentally, and even religiously (Sufism is widespread in Mauritania too, although Salafis there played a considerable role in attempting to tamp down jihadism); so perhaps we’re left not with “Senegalese exceptionalism” but rather “Western Sahelian exceptionalism” versus “central Sahelian instability.”
Personalities: Perhaps certain key figures in Senegal made politically sustainable decisions at key moments in ways that allowed for stability. One hears this argument about the crystallizing figures in Senegalese Sufism, above all Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba (1853-1927). Two generations later, Senegal’s President Léopold Senghor (1906-2001, in power 1960-1980) was unique within the Sahelian band for being an independence-era leader who stepped down voluntarily rather than being overthrown in a military coup; from Mauritania’s Mokhtar Ould Daddah to Mali’s Modibo Keïta to Burkina Faso’s (then Upper Volta’s) Maurice Yaméogo to Niger’s Hamani Diori to Chad’s François Tombolbaye, one could draw a line from west to east and find every single Sahelian leader other than Senghor toppled in a coup between 1966 and 1978. Nigeria and Sudan and Somalia and various other places have broadly similar stories of political turmoil, coups and assassinations and civil wars. One could argue that there was a particular sophistication to Senghor’s rule, including his relationship with major Sufi shaykhs such as Shaykh Fallou Mbacké (head of the Mouridiyya from 1945-1968), that allowed him to escape the fate that befell virtually all of his peers. And Senegal’s Sufi shaykhs could also be credited with making sage decisions at critical junctures; Villalón has pointed, for example, to shaykhs’ adaptation to a changing electoral environment in the 1980s and 1990s, as major shaykhs began refraining from endorsing incumbents so as not to upset their young (and opposition-minded) followers. To fully trace out the argument that personalities saved Senegal and doomed its peers, we’d have to survey both the political strategies and the relationships (or lack thereof) cultivated between other Sahelian/West African/African politicians during the independence era and after. And we’d also want to go back even further in time, of course. So perhaps the major Senegalese Sufi personalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then the particular interactions between Senghor and the leading shaykhs of his time, set in motion long-term patterns that never took root elsewhere.
The structure and spiritual geography of Sufism in Senegal: Senegal is not exceptional for having Sufism but maybe there is a Senegalese Sufism that is exceptional. If we pursued this argument, we might say that (a) the senior Sufi families have managed succession tensions well, (b) Sufism in Senegal is tightly organized down to the neighborhood level, and (c) the cities of Touba, Tivaouane, and Medina Baye inscribe zones of spiritual autonomy that do not have many precise equivalents elsewhere in West Africa (I am grateful to a colleague for suggesting this latter idea). Just on point (c), I would mention Mali’s Nioro do Sahel as one key spiritual enclave elsewhere, but I can’t think of too many other West African towns that are so thoroughly demarcated as Sufi zones as are Touba, Tivaouane, and Medina Baye. The Nigerian hubs of Sufism - Sokoto, Kano, etc. - are all major cities with multifaceted identities, and Sufis do not rule there in the way that they do in Touba, in particular. At the same time, I’m skeptical that points (a) and (b) are distinctively Senegalese; there have been clear lines of succession within many major Tijani families of Nigeria, for example, and one can find neighborhood-level Sufi circles across the region. And I think one needs to distinguish between Sufism in Senegal and Senegalese Sufism because, as noted above, there are followers of Senegalese Sufi shaykhs elsewhere and allegiance to those shaykhs has not prevented violence in Maiduguri, or Darfur, or many other places. Going back to point (c), meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear to me why the spiritual and to some extent political autonomy of Touba would necessarily stabilize, say, Dakar. When political tensions heated up over the past few years between President Macky Sall (in office 2012-2024) and now-Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko (took office along with current President Diomaye Faye in 2024), my impression is that the ultimate resolution came about more due to street pressure by Sonko and Faye’s supporters combined with (likely) a fair amount of behind-the-scenes international pressure. Sufi shaykhs weighed in but did not seem to exercise decisive influence. And had Sall continued to lock up the opposition and postpone the elections, I’m not sure the shaykhs could have, or would have, stopped him. We’ll never know, though.
Over-politicization of Sufis elsewhere: Perhaps it is not that Senegal’s Sufi leaders are more hands on than Sufis elsewhere - perhaps Senegal’s shaykhs struck, and strike, the right balancing point between involvement and aloofness. The Senegalese shaykhs who sought to become politicos often hit a ceiling, whereas the senior shaykhs typically refrained from being perceived as politicians, or retreated quickly from electoral politics when rebuffed. One could argue that elsewhere in the region, Sufi shaykhs and leaders politicized their credibility - or had it politicized by states - in ways that made their authority brittle. Sebastian Elischer has argued that state regulation of Salafism, through Muslim religious councils, helped some countries shrink the space for jihadism - but we could flip that argument on its head and ask whether participation in such councils actually made Sufis seem like creatures of the state (in Niger, Mali, Chad, etc.), and thereby contributed to weakening Sufi authority. Or we could go back to the colonial period to trace patterns of authority, as many specialists of the region have done (see Villalón above). For some further insight, see pp. 240-242 of Ousmane Kane’s Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria, where he brings out, among other points, the contrast between the “pact” French colonial officials made in Senegal with Sufi shaykhs after dismantling precolonial kingdoms versus the “pact” British officials made with Muslim hereditary rulers in colonial Northern Nigeria. Did a state-shaykh pact bequeath more stability than a state-emir pact? In Nigeria, Sufism became intertwined with hereditary rule by emirs in ways that partly exposed Sufism to the fluctuations in emirs’ authority; if an Emir of Zaria or a Sultan of Sokoto or an Emir of Kano could be summarily sacked by a colonial official or a military dictator or an elected civilian, what repercussions did that have for how ordinary people saw the purchase of Sufism? (The Sultanate of Sokoto is associated with the Qadiriyya, and the Emirate of Kano with the Tijaniyya.) In Nigeria’s rough-and-tumble politics, meanwhile, shaykhs of various stripes have often become linked (by their own choice or in the popular mind) to parties and candidates, or have been at the center of political controversies. One would be hard pressed to find, even with the most outspoken Senegalese shaykhs, the equivalent to the controversies surrounding Abduljabbar Nasiru Kabara of Nigeria, for example.
Nature of the Salafi Challenge: Perhaps Senegal did not see as formidable a Salafi challenge as arose elsewhere in the region. In a way, this argument could be a variant of one of those above - maybe it’s about personalities, and Senegal did not have the equivalent of a figure such as Abubakar Gumi (1924-1992) of Nigeria or Buddah Ould al-Busayri (1920-2009) of Mauritania or Mahmoud Dicko (b. 1954) of Mali. Did Senegal’s Cheikh Touré (1925-2005) and Mahmoud Ba (d. 1978) lack the precise combination of elite support and mass appeal and media innovation and infrastructural reach that enabled other Salafi and Salafi-leaning activists elsewhere to build huge influence? Or maybe it’s about educational institutions and their impacts; Malian Salafism gained impetus through a network of schools, as well as a particular network of West African Salafis based in what became Saudi Arabia, while Gumi came out of an elite British colonial school for Muslim judges. Roman Loimeier’s comparative history of Muslim reformism in Africa is a good resource for thinking about these contrasts. Ultimately, here, we are also confronted with a chicken-and-egg question - did Salafism have limited impact in Senegal because the Sufi orders blocked Salafism’s growth, or did the Sufi orders remain strong because Senegalese Salafism proved weak? And, to push even further, why should we assume that Salafism is destabilizing - has not Salafism been a source of stability for Saudi Arabia, and arguably for Mauritania, to pick two examples?
My goal, obviously, is not to provide a definitive explanation for Senegalese exceptionalism here. I lean towards a combination of these arguments, with a bit more weight on the first, the threshold argument. After all, other countries in the region were credited with unique political and religious cultures, or with successful management of extremism - until they weren’t. One bombing in Dakar could substantially change the image of Senegal, after all. On the other hand, Senegal has a long, nay incredible, track record of avoiding coups and, more recently, jihadist insurgencies, and that would call for serious explanation and reflection even if a full-scale insurgency erupted tomorrow. So I’d say we’re left, as the rough outlines of that explanation, with a combination of some structural advantages for Senegal over the landlocked Sahelian states, as well as some stabilizing decisions and approaches taken by key actors at key junctures, plus some elements of the character and structure of Sufism in Senegal itself, and then finally some of the alternative structures, decisions, and accidents that unfolded elsewhere. The bottom line for the policymakers and would-be peace-builders, meanwhile, is that Senegalese exceptionalism is (a) contingent, (b) likely more fragile than it appears, and (c) very difficult to replicate.