On the ledger of institutional Sufism the activities and influence of African Sufis that marked the nineteenth century did not disappear in the twentieth. Two orders in particular the Tijaniyya and the Murldiyya continued the legacy that had made the nineteenth century Sufi Africa’s peak century, even as they combated Wahhabism within Islam and colonialist strictures from without.
Indeed, an uneasy trust between local Tijaniyya and the French authorities worked to the programmatic benefit of some Tijan'i, such as the Niassene Tijaniyya of Senegambia/Senegal. Far from collaborating with the French, the Niassene Tijaniyya used French support to Islamise the Senegalese hinterland, to spread their order at the expense of others, and to outflank colonial authorities whenever/wherever possible.
Peanuts provided the common commodity, and peanut farming the com mon industry that benefited both parties and made the alliance work. The French administrators encouraged the cultivation ofpeanuts by constructing a railway that linked the hinterland to the sea. TijanI disciples would travel to distant parts to cultivate peanuts but also, in their 'spare time’, to give religious instruction to would be converts.
The Tijaniyya increased in number and influence under French rule. They also expanded to Nigeria. It was during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1937 that IbrahIm Niasse (d. 1975) met the emir of Kano in northern Nigeria. He persuaded the emir that he was the pole of saints, the top of the spiritual hierarchy in a Sufi world view. He also relied on the distinctively Tijlrn'i view of fayti or Divine Grace, namely, that it is linked hieratically to the Muh. ammadan Truth, channelled down through the seven heavens to the Prophet Muliammad, and then through him to Shaykh Alimad al Tijan'i and to his successors. It, and it alone, is the most direct route to Divine Grace.
The triumphalist brand of TijanI Sufism enabled the Niasse subbranch to spread from Kano through the rest of black Africa, especially after the Second World War. It was not only charisma and teaching, however, but also location and networking that helped. Kano in Nigeria, like Kaolack in Senegal, was a key commercial centre. It remains till today the largest industrial and com mercial axis in western Africa, and so the Tijan'is, like other Sufi orders, benefited from layering their spiritual network with material, specifically commercial, interests. It was an intensely reciprocal relationship: TijanI mis sionaries were involved in trade. Their location at the apex of northern Nigeria political economy helped reinforce their spiritual credentials and influence. They maximised both profit and the Prophet in their networking.27
And the networks of Tijanniyya influence expanded across the Atlantic. Just as local celebrations reinforce intra regional solidarity and link Tijanls from major Arab states to their West African co religionists, so there are relation ships with American zawiyas or local nodes, all of whom connect to an immigrant spiritual leader, the grandson of the founder, Shaykh Hassan Cisse. While a student at Northwestern in the 1970s, he related to needs of African Americas. From the early 1980s, he developed a following in New York, Chicago and Atlanta, establishing further zawiyas in each.28
Still another example of a networked West African taHqa is the Murldiyya.29 Mamadou Diouf has analysed the Senegalese Mur'id trade diaspora as a vivid example of Sunn"! Sufi networking in his essay on vernacular cosmopolitanism. Tracing the history of a West African Sufi brotherhood from its foundation in the nineteenth century to the present, Diouf claims that the network grew 'by ofiering a new religious form, a new memory and new images to peasant communities that had been disrupted and severely disturbed by colonial military campaigns (and) epidemics connected with the Atlantic slave trade’.30 Concurrently engaged in exclusivist mystical practices and an interna tional peanut business prized by the French, they were able to reconcile Islam with colonial modernity. Theirs was what Diouf calls 'a unique cosmopolitan ism consisting in participation but not assimilation, thus organizing the local
27 Muhammad S. Umar, 'The Tijaniyya and British colonial authorities in northern Nigeria’, in Triaud and Robinson (eds.), Tijaniyya, pp. 327 55.
28 The creation of a transatlantic Tijlnl network, linking Senegal to the USA, is explored in Ousmane Kane, 'Muslim missionaries and African states’, in S. H. Rudolph and J. Piscatori (eds.), Transnational religion and fading states (Boulder, 1997), pp. 47 62.
29 On the twentieth century emergence of the Murldiyya, the classic treatment is Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal: The political and economic organization of an Islamic brotherhood (Oxford, 1971). On the development of'Tilbii as its centre, consult Eric Ross, 'Touba: A spiritual metropolis in the modern world’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 29, 2 (1995), pp. 222 59.
30 Mamadou Diouf, 'The Senegalese Murid trade diaspora and the making of a vernacular cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12, 3 (2000), p. 682.
Not only to strengthen its position but also to establish the rules governing dialogue with the universal’.31 A major phase in the spread of the Mur'id network came in the 1970s when drought drove peasants into the Senegalese cities and later overseas. They wove an immense global network linked to their spiritual capital of 'Ttiba, with economic and distribution centres in Sandaga and Dakar. Wherever they went they established a firm discipline and an unbreakable trust.
What took place in the Senegalese trade and spiritual network provides a model case of the integration of Muslims as Muslims into the contemporary global economy. Muslims were able to turn to their advantage oppressive structures that colonial powers had put in place. Networks provided the means and also the limits for Sufi brotherhoods: only those groups with resources and mobility could project abroad, and remain religious agents on a global scale in the twenty first century.
World History
