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Conclusion Murid voices have been largely muted in the scholarship on the Muridiyya , which has resulted in a lopsided historiography. Thus, works on the political and economic significance of the tariqa—the topics that most concerned the producers of the archives that remain the main source of Murid history—far outweigh those on its spiritual, doctrinal, and educational dimensions . One of my aims in writing this book was to bring the Murids back in. Without ignoring the role of the social and economic forces unleashed by the colonial takeover, I have deliberately made the choice to place the Murids on center stage. I have tried to write a history of the Muridiyya from within. Though based primarily on Murid internal sources, this history has also drawn insights from external voices. Such an approach has mitigated the dominant role ascribed to the influence of macro structural forces and recognized the importance of people’s spiritual and psychological needs and their beliefs, knowledge, and concerns. The Muridiyya is not conceived as a coping strategy, a sort of bricolage cobbled together by bewildered Wolof farmers to respond to changes wrought by French colonization, but rather as an integral and vital phase in the development of Islam in Senegal. Writing a history of the Muridiyya that is centered on Murid disciples and sheikhs’ voices required emphasizing two aspects of the order’s development that have not received much attention in scholarly literature. First, it was necessary to place the Muridiyya in the broader context of the development of Islam in Senegal and to analyze Amadu Bamba’s actions in the light of the ongoing effort by Muslim clerics from the eighteenth century onward to reform 175 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. the increasingly dysfunctional societies of the Western Sudan. From this perspective , Bamba is no longer viewed as a passive historical actor unwittingly subjected to the social forces that coalesced behind him, as suggested by Marty and subsequent scholars, but as a dynamic agent consciously committed to transforming his society.1 Second, I have paid serious attention to the beliefs, aspirations, and motivations of the disciples in the founding of the Murid tariqa. Amadu Bamba’s history is foregrounded in the long Islamic tradition of his ancestry, marked by the quest for knowledge, alliance with prestigious Muslim clerical families, and political neutrality, as well as his personal experience growing up in a period of great historical transformations. Like his forebears, he highly valued education, and he devoted his life to acquiring the credentials of a respected Muslim cleric. Following his ancestors’ example, he used the cultural and symbolic capital earned from educational accomplishments to marry among prominent Muslim learned families. However, Bamba diverged from his ancestral heritage in three important respects. First, he did not limit his teachings to the transmission of oral and written knowledge within the confines of a school. Instead, he gave a central role to writings for a wider public. Second, he adopted Sufism as both a way of life and an educational tool. Third, he gave a more radical content to the family tradition of distrusting rulers. Like the clerics who preceded him, Bamba was critical of traditional rule, and also like them, he aspired to transform Wolof society, which was plagued by political violence, slavery, and economic depression. He was equally distrustful of the new colonial order. But if he shared some of the aims of his predecessors and contemporaries, he differed with them on diagnosis and strategy. Bamba blamed the hardships and sufferings that beset the society of his time on people’s deviation from the right path—that is, the path paved by the Prophet Muhammad and followed by rightly guided Muslims. He was a proponent of religious and social renewal, but he believed that education was the best instrument to bring about the changes he envisioned. For him, the most effective way to reform society was to change the material of which society was made, the people. Moreover, to have an enduring impact, the seeds of change had to be sown in people’s hearts and souls. However, for Bamba, not every type of education had the desired transforming power. He believed that to have a positive effect on the social order, education had to go beyond the mere transmission of knowledge. It also...

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