Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba (review)

Touba, the Muslim holy city founded by Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké in 1887, is Senegal’s second largest urban site and the capital for the country’s powerful and populous Mouride order. In this book, Eric Ross interprets Touba’s spatial production in relation to the practices of Sufi Islam, West African urban design, and the processes of urbanization. His analysis of Touba as a city in the landscape is impressively researched and lucidly presented in four chapters that weave the author’s trenchant reading of the city as a geospatial, spiritual, social, and political site with a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including direct observation, topographic and cartographic analysis, colonial administrative records, newspaper reports, oral histories, and the written works of Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké.

In the first chapter, Ross provides the foundation for his examination of Touba as the earthly expression of Tûbâ, the Tree of Paradise in Islamic tradition. By explicating the paradisiacal tree as a symbol and archetype in Sufi cosmology, Ross argues that Sufi thought informs all aspects of Touba. In chapter two, Ross expounds on Touba’s urban design, especially its spatial configuration and built environment in relation to both Sufi thought and the circumstances of the city’s founding and expansion. The central premise of the first two chapters is that the city mirrors Sufi concepts, yet it is not merely a passive reflection of Sufi cosmology (26), for multiple agents act upon it and give it shape by working with a shared set of ideas about a common project. Ross discusses these agents of urban processes—“the people, forces, and institutions that bring about its form through acts of habitation and acts of will” (44)—with detail and insight. It is somewhat surprising, however, given his agency-oriented approach and the Mouride order’s hierarchies and rivalries, that the primary attention accorded the order’s various lineages involves their association with certain neighborhoods comprising the city. In this respect, Ross’s narrative privileges Touba as a coherent, collective project executed cooperatively, rather than a city inflected by (let alone produced by) competing powers, incongruent ambitions, or contested resources.

Chapter three situates Touba within a network of Sufi towns to underscore the crucial role of these sites in broader urbanization processes. Much of this chapter is devoted to the historical factors enabling the autonomous Muslim towns characteristic of Senegal’s geography. Ross considers Muslim agents, French administrative divisions, agricultural practices, and railroads to support his claim that the emergence and growth of these Sufi centers was integral to Senegal’s modern urban landscape. Though urban networks in Senegal are often viewed as a result of French colonial activities, Ross advances an alternative paradigm for understanding urbanization in Senegal while reminding readers that “Touba exists despite colonialism not because of it” (174).

The book’s final chapter examines Touba’s spatial layout in comparison to West African urban design practices representative of modern Sufi settlements and precolonial capitals to argue that the continuity between historic and contemporary urban designs can be attributed to arboreal practices. Specifically, Ross focuses on the pénc, or central public square, to consider how Senegambian urban design models and spiritual, social, and political concepts traditionally associated with palaver trees were transferred to the mosques and public squares of Muslim cities. In considering the means by which mosques replaced trees in urban design, Ross also sheds light on the ways Islamic symbols and institutions were adapted and re-imagined in West Africa.

Although focusing on a single city, this book’s contribution is far-reaching. With its comparative, interdisciplinary orientation, Ross’s book both draws upon and connects scholarship in African and Islamic studies while enriching the existing research on Senegal’s Sufi orders. As the author notes, because his is a work of cultural geography, it is concerned less with the visual and aesthetic dimensions of Touba’s spatial production; nevertheless, it does offer several...