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237 The Plight of the Taalibés Revisited I have spent nearly three years living in Senegal’s urbane and cosmopolitan capital city of Dakar. As I write, it is a sprawling modern metropolis with a population of at least three million souls. I have lived for extended periods in four different neighborhoods, and in each there was a traditional Qurʾan school within roughly two hundred meters of my home. Everywhere you go in Senegambia, you find a daara. Taalibés have rung my doorbell and stopped me on the street thousands of times. They do not ask for much, and whenever I have coins in my pocket I try to give them alms. Fifty FCFA (roughly ten U.S. cents) is often enough to send ten taalibés away happy, each one a penny closer to earning his keep for that day. When I began researching Qurʾan schools a dozen years ago, I shared Human Rights Watch’s view that the daara was an exploitative and backward institution. I pitied the taalibés because I assumed that they were suffering awful exploitation, and I too wondered whether they were actually learning anything. Years ago, I began routinely asking taalibés to recite verses in exchange for alms. Sometimes I ask them to recite freely; other times I start a particular verse for them to finish. Some have an astonishingly beautiful delivery, others mumble, and most recite in a hurried monotone. But I can count on one hand the number of times they could not recite at all. Many of the dusty children dressed in rags that people see at traffic lights have hundreds of verses of the Book inscribed in their minds. One should not judge a book by its cover; these are fragile partial copies of the Qurʾan that are walking between the cars. Nowadays, many people never get beyond superficial encounters with taalibés. Some do not roll down the windows of their air-conditioned vehicles to respond to their call, sarax ngir Yàlla (alms, for the sake of God). CONCLUSION THE QURʾAN SCHOOL, THE BODY, AND THE HEALTH OF THE UMMA The people of the West will keep triumphantly following Truth until the Hour arrives. —Saying attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad 238 | Conclusion Sarax is the Wolofized version of an Arabic word, ṣadaqa (charity or alms). This is not the zakāt or fixed rate of alms intended for the poor. Ṣadaqa is not mandatory. It is given voluntarily, for the sake of God. Along with poor relatives and neighbors, those who are learning the Qurʾan are ideal recipients of pious alms. In expatriate quarters as well as in some other affluent neighborhoods, doormen keep taalibés from ringing the bell and asking for ṣadaqa. But living in ordinary residential neighborhoods, even in a bustling city like Dakar, one gets to know the taalibés. One often sees the same groups of children every day or every few days. Shopkeepers and housekeepers, old women and young watchmen keep an eye on them. Many offer unsolicited gifts to neighborhood Qurʾan teachers or buy medicine when they hear of a sick child. People rarely throw away food. Leftovers, sweets, soft drinks, and candy are saved for taalibés. With their deeds, the community is saying that these are our children; we must take care of them. ■ Taking care of taalibés is rooted more in commiseration than in compassion , more in empathy than in sympathy. One Ponty student highlighted this in the 1940s: “In Fouta, we generally tolerate these poor boys. We pity them and try to ease their pains with a maximum of generosity.The men, in seeing them, think of what they went through, the women of what their children are going through.”1 Traditionally, society saw itself in its taalibés, but this sensibility is now in danger, for many reasons: campaigns against urban mendicancy have unfairly focused on taalibés rather than on the scourge of urban poverty. Newspapers often sensationalize the plight of the taalibés. But the deeper problem is that new efforts to fix “the problem”—by NGOs, human rights groups, and the state—are driven by compassion but not commiseration . Colonial and postcolonial propaganda against Qurʾan schools has not been framed by people who “think of what they went through” when they see taalibés. Most Western critics and increasing numbers of urban Senegalese have never spent a single day learning...

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