Remembering the nation: the Murid 'Maggal' of Saint-Louis, Senegal

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Periodical article

Title:	Remembering the nation: the Murid 'Maggal' of Saint-Louis, Senegal
Author:	Jong, Ferdinand de
Year:	2010
Periodical:	Cahiers d'études africaines
Volume:	50
Issue:	197
Pages:	123-151
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Senegal
Subjects:	Muslim brotherhoods religious rituals prayer anticolonialism memory Sufism
Abstract:	Every year on the 5th of September, the Murid brotherhood of Senegal remembers a prayer conducted by Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, founder of the brotherhood. This prayer was said by the Saint while he was tried and condemned to exile by the French colonial authorities. This article presents a history of the prayer and an ethnography of the pilgrimage that Murid disciples undertake to commemorate this prayer as an act of resistance against the colonial regime. It analyses the prayer as a palimpsest performance that remembers historical relations between secular and Sufi leaders in the present, while merging civic and religious subjectivities among citizens. The article shows that the prayer performs a range of different temporalities while it is itself framed by the Gregorian calendar. It suggests that the prayer produces a hybrid subjectivity of belonging to both Muslim brotherhood and Senegalese nation and that the Senegalese nation is produced through remembrance, rather than historicism. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]