A Saint in the City: Sufi arts of urban Senegal.

It's so hard to be a saint in the city.

Bruce Springsteen

"A Saint in the City" presents the visual culture of a dynamic religious movement known as the Mouride Way that is inspired by a Senegalese Sufi pacifist, poet, and saint named Amadou Bamba (1853-1927). (1) Mourides are galvanizing contemporary Senegal and its ever-expanding diaspora through their hard work and steadfast devotion. (2) The exhibition presents a striking range of Mouride arts, from large popular murals, intricate glass paintings, and calligraphic healing devices to posters for social activism, colorful textiles, and paintings by internationally known contemporary artists. (3) A devotional sanctum filled with sacred imagery and an urban market scene capturing the bustle of contemporary Dakar are re-created to suggest how Mothrides live and work under the beneficent eye of the Saint (Fig. 1). Artist profiles and videos feature the voices and works of nine artists who have shaped our understanding of this deeply spiritual movement. Signal works from Islamic cultures elsewhere in Africa reveal a similarity to Mouride arts while underscoring particularities of Mouride creativity.

Mouride arts are derived from images and messages of Amadou Bamba, his descendants, and his most ardent followers. A single photograph of the Saint taken in 1913 (Fig. 2) has become the catalyst for an explosion of artistic imagery, especially since the 1980s. (4) Of particular interest is "the centrality of usefulness in [the] popular visual culture" of everyday life (Morgan 1998:24, our emphasis)--that is, how images are instrumental to solving problems and meeting needs. Two terms, "icon" and "aura," are points of reference for the visual dynamism of Senegal, for they allude to how sacred images convey a blessing power called baraka (or barke). (5) Baraka helps people to address and overcome the misfortunes, contestations, and transitions of everyday life. Investigating such social processes and visual practices helps redress a deficiency that David Freedberg has perceived in the literature of representation, in which images may be described "but the relations between how they look and why they work are almost entirely passed over" (1989:135). (6)

Like the icons of Byzantium (see Belting 1994), images of Amadou Bamba and his family are active sources of potency and power. It is common to see Mourides touch Bamba's image to their foreheads or kiss wall murals to receive his blessing. As David Morgan asserts, "the first thing to learn about the popular piety to which ... images appeal is that, for most people, it is more important to cope with an oppressive or indifferent world than to resist or subvert it [Fig. 3]. Thus, the theology of the sublime and sovereign Deity is subordinated by many believers to an apparatus of intercession" (1998:23-24). Mouride visual culture provides just such an apparatus.

It is not difficult to understand why some have debated whether baraka should be translated as "charisma," as understood through Christian theology and Weberian sociology (Cruise O'Brien 1988). In our opinion, the term "aura" comes closer to the Mouride concept of baraka than "charisma" seems to do. (7) "Aura," from the Greek, literally means a "breeze" or "breath" (OED 1982:565), and is extended to refer to the inherence of power and presence within a work of art (Freedberg 1989). "In the auratic experience the object becomes human, as it were" (Foster 1988:197), and possesses the capacity to produce a response, bestow well-being, and protect its viewers. Through the theorizing of Walter Benjamin and the debates his work has engendered, "aura" has also come to be associated with the "authenticity of a thing ... [and] the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" (1988:221). When Benjamin wrote that "to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return" (1988:188), he might have been speaking of a Mouride sense of how their icons possess baraka. That an image with aura has "weight, opacity and substance" and "never quite reveals its secret[s]" (Baudrillard 1983:22-23) also echoes Mouride sentiments. Above all else, Mourides feel that baraka does things: it works, changes, and helps.

Social scientists might assert that human agency underlies the experience of aura. From such a perspective, one may believe that saints, holy places, relationships, and sacred objects possess baraka, but these are predispositions, intentions, and imaginings rather than "realities." (8) Such perspectives can bear useful fruit, and we recognize that the visual culture we would understand is shaped by religious values, epistemological frameworks, and onto logical premises; but "A Saint in the City" pursues a different path, following the call of Rowland Abiodun (1990) to put the "African" back into "African art." After one hears many Mourides explain how transformative baraka can be, especially through the powers of writing and as directed through mystical devices of healing and protection, it is difficult not to accept such an explanation as its own frame of reference. Regardless of whether those espousing a Cartesian sense of science would accept such views, "A Saint in the City" presents Mouride visuality as closely as possible to how Mourides themselves might prefer to present it. (9)

Mouridism is one of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary Senegalese social life. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand how the republic's "brisk and vigorous democracy" (NPR 1998) makes it "a beacon of hope ... in a troubled region" (Wallis & Caswell 2000) without fully appreciating this, the republic's most economically and politically influential Islamic movement. Mouridism links all secular and sacred activities. Senegal also has "a long tradition of amicable and tolerant co-existence between the Muslim majority and the Christian ... and other religious minorities" (CIR 2000; see also Ndiaye 2002:606); and political scientist Leonardo Villalon (1995) holds that the country's striking stability can be attributed to the unusual balance of power between the Senegalese government and the Mourides and other religious orders (also see Biaya 1998). In the year 2000, Senegal peacefully elected the long-time opposition candidate Abdoulaye Wade their president. Mr. Wade is a devoted Mouride, and since his election he has played a prominent role in negotiations for African peace and economic recovery (Onishi 2002).

Walls That Speak

Dakar is a boldly visual city. Images abound, despite Senegal's being a largely Muslim country. Of critical importance is the creative tension between universalist Islam and its local adaptations, especially with regard to the use or avoidance of visual imagery. Many Muslims--including some Mourides--believe that images are forbidden in Islam, yet art representing human subjects has flourished throughout the Muslim world up to and including our times. (10) The Quran makes no mention of imagery at all, and Mourides confirm David Freedberg's assertion that "the will to image figuratively--and even anthropomorphically--cannot be suppressed" by anyone, Muslims included (Freedberg 1989:54-55).

To give visitors a first sense of Mouride visuality, one enters "A Saint in the City" through a corridor of murals by the street artist Pape Samb, better known by his graffitist tag "Papisto Boy" (Fig. 4). In the late 1980s Papisto was a primary actor in an urban movement called Set/Setal that was triggered by the syncopated beat of world-music superstar Youssou N'Dour singing about cleanliness, dignity, and rectitude. At a moment of dire tensions between urban youth and the Senegalese government over a lack of jobs and the collapse of basic city services, young people took to the streets--not to riot, as had been feared, but to refabulate their neighborhoods. That is, they cleaned, reclaimed, repainted, and renamed alienated spaces by endowing them with icons of their own imaginary. Instead of reminding people of colonial humiliations, new monuments and murals celebrated soccer stars, musicians, politicians, human-rights heroes, and above all, the saints of Senegalese Sufism (Fig. 5). Portraits of Amadou Bamba figured importantly in this vibrant collage, and the Saint emerged as an "alternative figure in nationalist memory" standing for and promoting both "a rupture in postcolonial memory" and a "new modernity" (Mamadou Diouf, personal communication, 1995). (11)

Papisto's murals portray what he calls "messengers," from Martin to Malcolm, the Pope to Gandhi, Marley to Mandela (see Roberts & Roberts 2000a). Overseeing them all is the enigmatic image of Amadou Bamba, whom the artist reveres. The world is brought to Papisto's informal community, tucked among factory walls of the port of Dakar as a visual tactic of his discrepant modernity. These varied messengers reflect Bamba's quest for peace and his sacralization of hard work to feed one's family, even if such toil should prevent one from ordinary Muslim devotions. The strains of Youssou N'Dour's "Do You Hear Me, Father Bamba?" (1994) that lead visitors into the exhibition refer to the Saint's image as well as his spiritual presence:

   My strong faith in you makes me survive in this crazy world.
   Now I can go anywhere, 'cause I know you'll be there.
   We know that your pain will always make us stronger,
   Mame [Grandfather] Bamba.

The Heritage of Islam

"Islam in Africa is nearly as old as the faith itself" Rene Bravmann reminds us (2000:489), and a mere century after the Prophet Muhammed's death in 632 C.E., Islam was being practiced in trading towns of the Sahel. Islam reached what is now Senegal by the tenth century (Hiskett 1994:107) and soon became important to local politics (Levtzion 2000:78). In the eighteenth century, Sufism brought its international influences, spiritual technologies, and paths to divinity to Senegal. The growth of Islam in Africa has been phenomenal ever since, and now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, one of every eight Muslims hails from sub-Saharan Africa, while one of every three sub-Saharan Africans is Muslim (Kane & Triaud 1998:7, 12).

Ocean trade has connected Senegal to other parts of the world for many centuries. Lying at the westernmost point of the African continent, Senegal is the first sub-Saharan country encountered as one sails southward "around the bend" from Europe. It has long been a threshold between the Americas and Africa as well, and the fortifications and infamous "Slave House" of Goree Island lying just off the coast of Dakar provide poignant reminders of the transatlantic slave trade. Senegalese Muslims were among the first slaves brought to the Americas. "Literate, urban, and in some cases well traveled," they "realized incomparable feats in the countries of their enslavement" (S. Diouf 1998:1). (12) To underscore the point, Manning Marable writes that "faith and spirituality have always been powerful forces in the histories of people of African descent. Central to that history is Islam" (quoted in S. Diouf 1998, back cover).

At the beginning of "A Saint in the City," a gallery of quiet elegance introduces visitors to the history of Islam in Africa and to the shared roots of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Senegalese glass paintings depicting scenes from the Old Testament demonstrate common threads running through these major "religions of the Book" (Fig. 6). Glass paintings from the 1940s introduce important episodes in Muslim history to suggest ways that Senegalese learn about Islamic history through images to which artists lend their own visual interpretations (Fig. 7). Outstanding works from west, north, and east Africa demonstrate a fusion of Islamic ideas with particular African aesthetic sensibilities: an inscribed Swahili architectural panel from Tanzania, a Sudanese warrior's shirt, a talisman from Cote d'Ivoire covered in colorful yarn, Tuareg silver jewelry from Niger, a Chadian talismanic belt, a Baga headdress from Guinea that depicts the winged horse that bore the Prophet beyond the Seventh Heaven.

The Life of a Saint

Crossing an arched threshold evoking the Great Mosque of Touba where Bamba is buried, the visitor next encounters a nearly life-size print of the photograph of the Saint taken in 1913 (Fig. 2), from which all subsequent depictions are derived. Such an unpretentious photograph was undoubtedly meant to have a practical, denotative purpose rather than any aesthetic appeal or elaborated significance (Barthes 1991:196-97). In the early colonial period, photographs were taken, not "made," and Senegalese were objects rather than subjects of French photography (Prochaska 1991:46). (13) The acquisition and appropriation inherent in photography--what James Faris calls "photographic capture" (1992:214)--were very handy hegemonic devices that required little fuss or finesse. Yet if the 1913 photograph was meant to be a mug shot, it failed insofar as Bamba can hardly be seen. What it depicts instead is an exotic subject, swathed in mystery. With whom does the agency of the photograph lie, then: the photographer or the photographed?

Unlike most photographs of the colonial period, Bamba's photograph has not been lost in the welter of administrative files. The negative can no longer be found, but the image lives in the persistence of its reproduction, reinvention, and the simulacra that appear to be more "real" than the original (cf. Baudrillard 1994). Lithographed reproductions are hung in workshops and places of small business, photocopies are displayed on the windshields of buses and trucks, and countless wall paintings depicting the original photograph grace the walls of shops and homes across Senegal and anywhere else in the world where Mourides are found. In all these circumstances, the image of Amadou Bamba announces fidelity to the Saint and participation in the Mouride Way; it also attracts customers to Mouride businesses (Cruise O'Brien 1988) and provides an apotropaic presence, for its active blessings promote and protect.

The Saint's 1913 photograph has truly taken on a life of its own, as understood through the distinct visuality of the Mourides. To understand this, one must be willing to "move away from the insular security" of a Euro-American conventional wisdom concerning photography (see Pinney 1997:8). What may seem technical, "coincidental," and therefore irrelevant details of the photograph need not be dismissed. Instead, Mouride visuality echoes Susan Sontag's suggestion that "surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise," for photographs (or, rather, aspects of them) are like "found objects--unpremeditated slices of the world." As such, photographic details provide "inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy" (Sontag 1990:52, 69, 23). Just as the Surrealists delighted in recognizing chance encounters and ironic collage (A. Roberts 1992) as marvelous means to transcend stultifying expectations, so through scrutiny, erudite Mourides recognize God's signs (aya) in the details of the 1913 image.

That only one of Bamba's feet is visible is such a "found object" within the image that provokes exegesis. If the Saint's foot is not there, where can it be? Through details such as this, the photograph demonstrates that Bamba is a saint, able to traverse the veil between humanity and divinity. As he wrote in his celebrated ode, "Jaawartou" (n.d.), "Thanks to the Quran, I have come into proximity with my Lord"; and Mourides know from the 1913 photograph that Bamba brings them God's blessing.

The Saint's face is so shadowed that it presents little if any trace of personality or emotion, and a pronounced timelessness results. Yet, according to Bogumil Jewsiewicki, "the act of looking reinserts the image in time," bringing it to bear on the viewer's present concerns and reflections (1996:19; see also Kratz 2002:119). Mourides use the term "mirror" to refer to how they see themselves in Bamba's portrait, and in the words of the Mouride artist Mot Gueye, such reflection occurs as he paints the image. (14) Such visual hagiography is an active process of identity formation conceptually located between memory and history. That is, hagiography retains origins as diffuse as memory, yet it can be as purposeful and politically driven as history. (15) Hagiography causes or permits one to become swept up by a saint's biographical narrative in such a way that one's life becomes an extension of the saint's. As Edith Wyschograd (1990) asserts, saints' lives do not merely exist, they are constructed and reconstructed endlessly, ensuring that they are perpetuated in a present that is continuously grafted onto the pure potentiality of a remembered past.

Who was and is Amadou Bamba? Born in Mbacke, Senegal, in 1853, Bamba "followed the traditional peripatetic pattern of scholarship and Sufi affiliation," and even is the student became a teacher (Robinson 2000:212), the Saint "regarded education as the main weapon in his struggle to save the souls of the masses" (Babou 2002:152). He soon became known as a man of profound faith who emphasized charity, humility, and above all, the hard labor necessary to feed one's family. (16)

Late-nineteenth-century Senegal was marked by political turmoil, as centuries-old slave trades ended and several small but influential kingdoms were brought under French colonial dominion. Bamba's piety and work ethic proved especially apposite in the transition then taking place from a feudal political economy to colonial capitalism (Robinson 1991:150). Sufism, with its stress upon strong bonds between taalibe followers and marabout holy men like Bamba, provided "an Islamic handbook to the production of charisma" and ideology, and a structure of adaptive practice in the early colonial years (Cruise O'Brien 1988:4).

While some Senegalese Muslims called for holy war against the French, the Saint professed that the only jihad he would undertake would be against the venality (nafs) of his own soul (Dieye 1997:17-18). (17) Indeed, as one admirer had it, Bamba was a lifelong pacifist who carried a pen, not a gun (Cruise O'Brien 1975:54). Yet the French colonial administration found Bamba to be "surreptitiously revolutionary" (Dumont 1975:34) and sent him into seven years of exile (1895-1902) in their distant Equatorial colony of Gabon, followed by four years in Mauritania and long house arrest in Senegal (see Robinson 2000:214-22). The administrators' intention was to diminish Bamba's prestige and bring an end to the intolerable state-within-a-state created by his avid following (see Coulon 1985). Only later would they realize that such exile echoed the Prophet Muhammed's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 that marked the advent of Islam; it confirmed Bamba's saintliness. Furthermore, just prior to and during his first exile, Bamba performed his greatest miracles; and when he prayed on the waters, calmed a ravenous lion, and escaped the cruel plots of his French captors, he proved himself a saint according to Sufi criteria (see Schimmel 1994:128, 193). In all naivete, "the French, much more than Bamba and his followers, created the resistance and the image of resistance" by which the Saint is still known (Robinson 1991:150). (18) In turn, Bamba's perseverance and miraculous response to oppression inspire the courage to overcome even the most overwhelming of obstacles (see A. Roberts 1996).

Many Senegalese artists depict the stations of Bamba's persecution, exemplified in "The Life of a Saint" gallery of the exhibition by the colorfully detailed glass paintings of Mor Gueye--the dean of artists working in this genre today (Figs. 8, 9). Mor Gueye creates many copies of his glass paintings, selling some to Mourides but more to tourists. According to the artist, he paints other images to make a living, but if he did not need to do this, he would only paint images of Amadou Bamba. (19) Do his works possess and convey baraka, even when sold to foreign tourists? Yes, even they receive the Saint's healing blessings. Painting the Saint's image is like prayer, Mr. Gueye said. (20) He intends for each person who sees his work to think of the sainted man. And as soon as he paints the image, Bamba's blessing comes forth.

Senegalese glass painting has a fascinating history. Soon after the turn of the last century, William Ponty, Governor General of French West Africa, who was headquartered in Senegal, "denounced Islam as being a feudal and enslaving system," for he considered holy men like Bamba to be "the last obstacle to the complete triumph of our [French] civilizing work" (Triaud 2000:174). In 1908 he prohibited the importation of Islamic literature and chromolithographs because they "present a hostile character ... promoting maraboutic action [and] ought to be destroyed.... One cannot deny what a marvelous instrument of propaganda these thousands of rough engravings constitute here, [that are so] vivid in color and that present the defenders of the only true religion in the most favorable light" (in Renaudeau & Strobel 1984:50). Ponty was soon outfoxed, however, for lithos that escaped the authorities' notice could be reproduced through glass painting. A pane placed over an image could be traced and painted, "permitting the diffusion ... of votive images that affirmed a faith [that was] in active expansion" (Renaudeau & Strobel 1984:50).

Rounding out "The Life of a Saint" gallery, examples of Bamba's published writings are displayed as they might be in a Dakar shop, but what will astound Mouride visitors to the exhibition is that three texts in Bamba's own hand are also present, loaned by a fervent Mouride. Their baraka will be especially potent. Photographs document the holy pilgrimage site of Touba, which more than two million Mourides visit annually to obtain baraka blessings at the Saint's tomb.

The Aura of the Image

A wall in the next gallery displays images of the Saint in many media--paintings on wood (Fig. 10), lithographs, posters, silkscreened banners, plaster plaques, photocopies, sand paintings, and even an inked image on cuttlefish bone. Bamba's portrait lives in such multiplicity, for his aura is maintained even when his images are painted in a series or mechanically produced as tourist art, photocopies, or even Web pages. An important nuance should be stressed: images of the Saint are produced rather than reproduced, and they present rather than represent, for each time an artist creates an image (and many state that Bamba guides their hands as they do), an "inherence" of the saint as experienced through his baraka results, to borrow a term from David Freedberg (1989). Such active blessing is available because in some sense, every portrait is the Saint. (21)

The visual stimulation of this wall of images finds a serene counterpart in a small room opening to the right, re-creating the devotional sanctum of a Mouride holy man named Serigne Modou Faye. Exhibition visitors are invited to remove their shoes and enter the room, where they are greeted by the singing of zikrs and a visual feast. Throughout the day but especially in the afternoon, a steady stream of people visit Serigne Faye, who lives in a working-class neighborhood of Dakar. What distinguishes his home is its concentrated imagery: acrylic paintings on canvas; paintings and drawings executed directly on the walls; framed calligraphic holy names and Quranic Scripture; lithographs, banners, calendars, postcards, photocopies, and stickers; clocks shaped like mosques that sound the azan call to prayer five times a day; display boxes holding replica Qurans; boomboxes and stacks of cassettes; and revolving disco lights projecting the ninety-nine names of God painted upon their facets. These and ever more visual arts cover the walls and fill the corners of Serigne Faye's reception room and adjacent bedroom (Fig. 11). Most images portray the Saint, notable people in his extended family, and his first and most devout follower, Sheikh Ibra Fall. Swallows soar across the low ceiling in a trompe l'oeil painting of a paradisiacal sky. So intense is the visual impact of this marvelous place that it may be considered an "imagorium." (22)

Serigne Faye's sanctum is a place of great "visual piety," a useful phrase coined by David Morgan to refer to "the set of practices, attitudes, and ideas invested in images that structure the experience of the sacred" (1998:2-3). Images of Amadou Bamba inform and condition every act and moment within the imagorium. Under their gaze Serigne Faye counsels and heals those who come to him. In their presence his followers listen to his parables and achieve ecstasy by singing zikr "songs of remembrance" and khassaid "odes" written by or about Amadou Bamba (see Roberts & Roberts 2003b).

Serigne Faye is a calligrapher, but it is his encouragement and guidance of Assane Dione that led to the creation of the imagorium. Dione trained in formal and industrial arts and had a budding career as an illustrator and contemporary artist; but some years ago he left these pursuits to follow a spiritual path in Mouridism. At first glance, Dione appears to be a photorealist, for his large portraits are based upon well-known pictures and rendered in strikingly precise detail. Yet from Dione's point of view, their realism and design are superficial features. Recalling Seyyed Nasr's paraphrase of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi that "no reality is exhausted by its appearance" (1987:128-29), the artist explains that he has "a habit of concentrating on the image, for there is always something else, something more to find." One must "pierce" the image (percer in Dione's French) in order to discover its "hidden side," or batin. Each time Dione completes a painting, he is eager to begin another and learn something new with his teacher's guidance.

The impact of Dione's paintings is tangible. Serigne Faye's imagorium wells with the baraka of Amadou Bamba. Dione says he feels "secure" and "content" whenever and wherever he sees the Saint's image: "for me, he is there. I don't see the image, I see the sainted man." As taalibes squeeze together in the tiny space to face Serigne Faye, an intensity of sensation (heat, sound, perfume, touch) complements the visual piety of Dione's paintings. Yet as small as the imagorium is, scale is defied, for the paintings are so oversized that, as our then three-year-old son once exclaimed, one can almost "jump into" them. The imagorium's trompe l'oeil ceiling further challenges place and time, directing one toward Paradise; yet just as release seems at hand, attention is redirected inward through the hidden messages and powers of the sacred images. The dialectic of display and secrecy essential to Mouride visuality is what gives Serigne Faye's imagorium such tangible impact.

Assane Dione has painted a portrait of Amadou Bamba that has been reproduced and sold as a snapshot-sized print all over Senegal for several years now (Fig. 12). The portrait frames the bust of Bamba, eliminating all background and executing the image so crisply in saturated black and white that it is "posterized" (Kunzle 1997:20) and has greater graphic impact than the grainy 1913 photograph. Dione's painting also emphasizes the frontality of Bamba's image, "heightening the communicative force" and "enhancing the intimacy of reception" (Brilliant 1990:20). And it presents a heightened interplay of voids and solids that provides visual directness, for its strong black and white shapes serve as "chromatic poles" that produce powerful kinesthetic and tactile effects (Saint-Martin 1990:33-35). When crisp black and white shapes are juxtaposed, "each becomes more intense and saturated" through what is known as "simultaneous contrast." The white sets off the black and vice versa, emblazoning the image on one's perception, and many Mourides attest that after long contemplation of the Saint's image, they can see it when they shut their eyes and in their sleep. Just as important, the shapes composing the Saint's face begin to take on the look anal visual rhythm of Arabic script, and indeed, an anonymous artist has transformed Dione's image into a calligram (Fig. 13).

Healing Words

Sufis have long made poetic reference to the face of the Prophet as "a marvelously written manuscript of the Quran" (Schimmel 1975:413). Arabic calligrams of people and birds are common popular arts of north Africa that are available and sometimes reproduced in Senegal. Bamba's calligrams are undoubtedly created after such precedents, but they also suggest his effacement (fana) into the Word of God through a kind of textual transubstantiation that is the ultimate goal of Sufism. As Rumi wrote, "I have prayed so much that I myself have turned into prayer" (cited in Schimmel 1994:135). Such transcendence implies written as well as oral prayer.

When the image of Amadou Bamba is "received into writing," as Jean-Michel Hirt might assert, it will be reflected "in all its breadth," for writing "alone is able to make seen, by being read, the veiled dimension of sensed reality." The visible becomes legible, not only to the eyes of the body but to those of the soul. In this way, the image can be recognized as a mere veil "between the reality that it shows and the reality to which it alludes" (Hirt 1993:14, 15, 32, 223).

"A Saint in the City" celebrates the importance of writing in a gallery called "Healing Words." "Everyone agrees," Fernand Dumont affirms, that "Sheikh Bamba spent his whole life writing" (1975:1). It is said that the Saint wrote seven metric tons of verse, most of which he consigned to the ocean, for only such a limitless body could contain his profound wisdom. Bamba's known writings are recited, sung, commented upon, and discussed to create a Mouride sonoral universe. The active, talismanic impact of the Saint's written works upon these performances is based on the esoteric functions and powers of Arabic letters, words, phrases, verses, and the act of writing itself (see Schimmel 1975:411-25).

Sufis hold that letters possess numerical values, so that any text can be read in many different ways. One may recite a chapter of the Holy Quran and appreciate its overt content in addition to its rhyming and other word play, for example, but one may also investigate meanings hidden in the shapes of letters with respect to how one letter suggests another. Once the numerical values of each as well as their combination are known, further deductions can be made. Sufis have sometimes held that letters "converse" with each other through such mystical relationships (Nasr 1987:32).

Three fine glass paintings in the "Healing Words" gallery show Bamba writing and children carrying or studying Quranic tablets. A section entitled "Activating the Word" presents the artistry of a calligraphic healer named Serigne "Batch" Massamba Djigal, and the various instruments of his profession. This area features Quranic boards used for teaching and healing, shirts endowed with mystical squares and verses (Fig. 14), ten-foot-long prayer papers that are rolled up and tucked inside a leather belt, and a container for "drinking the word," together with video footage showing the objects in use.

Serigne Batch's techniques of healing are contrasted with the work of Elimane Fall, the charismatic founder of an urban ministry for troubled youth. Fall's work is among the most memorable in the exhibition, for he creates dramatic "imagetexts" (Mitchell 1994; see also Roberts & Roberts 2000c) whose stunning iconographic programs in deeply saturated colors are matched by didactic purpose (Fig. 15). Fall has also invented a calligraphic script which he says gives "body" to the "hard-working" letters used by sub-Saharan Africans. A course of twenty-eight black, red, and white letters in precision-cut, plasticized paper creates a powerful aesthetic moment.

Dress of Devotion

The visitor is now drawn to an array of colorful patchwork ensembles presented on mannequins. These vestments are worn by Baye Falls devoted to Sheikh Ibra Fall, Bamba's first and most fervent follower (Fig. 16). Behind this display float larger-than-life, ethereal sculptures of recycled iron sheeting and rebar by Moussa Tine that portray dancing Baye Falls. The gallery is dominated by Assane Dione's ten-foot-tall painting portrait of Ibra Fall as the incarnation of the Saint's teachings about labor as love. The close relationship between the Prophet and his African muezzin Bilal may find its parallel in the devotion that Bamba received from Ibra Fall (Strobel-Baginski 1982:97, 102).

It is common for young Baye Falls to spend a number of years contributing to construction or other sacred projects at Touba such as building or maintaining the Great Mosque (Mbacke 1995:75), or toiling on the farms of Mouride holy men and women. These are joyous times of intense solidarity, when young men visit villages singing khassands, playing drums, and dancing to beg for sustenance (see Gadio 2001). They often bear images of Amadou Bamba to bless those who give them alms (Fig. 17). Vibrant glass paintings by Mor Gueye--who is himself an ardent Baye Fall--illustrate such activities.

Over the years, Baye Falls have developed an "anti-fashion" that distances them from the mundane preoccupations and crass consumerism of contemporary society (Heath 1990:27). (23) Women or tailors give Baye Falls scraps of fabric to sew together into colorful patchwork clothing. The play of colors and shapes in African textiles of this sort "can be profitably compared with off-beat phrasing in music [and] dance," as Robert Farris Thompson (1974:11) has taught us. There may well be an aesthetic shared between music and the "staggered and suspended pattern" (1974:13) of Baye Fall design. Patchwork tubeey bu son ("pants of fortune") may also possess a quality called aduna, suggesting "the whole world brought together" (Strobel-Baginski 1982:102) in their quilt-like assemblage of memories and intentions.

The "Dress of Devotion" gallery is also devoted to Mouride women, who enjoy a degree of independence not commonly associated with Islamic societies (Callaway & Creevey 1994). Mouride and Senegalese women more generally are justly acclaimed for their sense of dressing well called sanse in Wolof (Heath 1990:19), and their "audacious creativity" in dance (Heath 1994:99). They are also famous for their chic hairstyling and their culinary arts, and some are celebrated for their poetry, novels, and documentary writing (Boyd-Buggs 1991; Cham 1991). Senegalese women are less prominent in the visual arts than men, although a few such as Ndeye Darro are gaining attention (Anonymous 1999:5). The art form in which Mouride women truly excel is vocal music, both in neighborhood circles and on national and international scenes.

Fatou Binetou Diouf has been among the most popular Mouride recording artists since the early 1990s. She has taken the stage name Fatou Guewel, for she is of a lineage of griots (gewel in Wolof), the praise-singing troubadours so famous throughout westernmost Africa. Fatou Guewel's most celebrated songs honor Bamba's mother, Mame Diarra Bousso (see Fig. 9), and Papisto has depicted Fatou Guewel several times in his Bel-Air mural (Roberts & Roberts 2000a), explaining that when he dreamed about Mame Diarra Bousso dressed like Fatou Guewel, it was the latter whom he painted as a manifestation of Bamba's mother (Fig. 18). Glass paintings and other works in the "Dress of Devotion" gallery portray Mame Diarra as the mirror for all Mouride women. A spectacular appliqued robe that Fatou Guewel wore in concert in Italy and offered for exhibition in "A Saint in the City" is seen in the gallery near a video showing Mouride women's ecstatic singing.

Global Networks

A last gallery offers the work of several of Senegal's world-famous contemporary artists who are Mourides or are influenced by Mouride principles. Dakar has been an epicenter of contemporary art for more than four decades. By "contemporary" we mean works created for sale in galleries in Senegal and elsewhere in the world, as opposed to the sorts of coeval but often in situ devotional, popular, and personalized arts seen elsewhere in "A Saint in the City." The Ecole des Arts du Senegal, founded in 1960 by Leopold Sedar Senghor, fostered an early turn toward Modernist work by some artists (Harney 1996) and opposition by others to anything so formally sanctioned (Huchard 1994:30-32). Many contemporary artists in Senegal refuse "to accept any identity based on an unmediated African past," and instead employ "a taunting sense of free play, reflexively deploying various meanings, sometimes exaggerated or conflicting, across many lines of interest" (Ebong 1991:208-9).

The contemporary art scene in Dakar is gaining exponential prominence and now counts a "third generation" of contemporary artists (Grabski forthcoming). In a review of just how vibrant Dakar has become, Saliou Demanguy Diouf (1999) profiles more than 150 artists whose works in many media, from painting to sculpture, tapestry weaving to futuristic furniture design, are exhibited, sold, and held in important public and private collections in Senegal and around the world. In 1989 artists founded Dak'Art, the biennial of contemporary African art, which was still going strong in its 2002 iteration, showcasing artists working in Senegal while momentarily shifting the axis of the international art world to Dakar.

Moussa Tine is the first of four artists featured in the "Global Networks" gallery. He began as a sign painter and is now a prizewinning painter and sculptor whose assemblages of automobile parts evoke Mouride solidarity, with emphasis on the uplifting joys of ecstatic faith (Fig. 19). Tine exclaims that "Mouride art exists! It is an attitude for Mourides. It is not an art form that can be presented as such, though; rather, it is a way of reasoning." Chalys Leye, the gallery's second artist, shares this "way of reasoning" as he crafts deep-brown canvases by mixing tar and other earthy substances into acrylic paints. His works are inscribed with secret codes and mystical squares inspired by the healing techniques of Mouride holy men (see Cover), and he feels that his work is mystically informed by the soul of Serigne Falilou Mbacke (1886-1968), one of the Saint's sons.

Viye Diba holds a doctoral degree in Urban Geography and teaches at the Ecole National des Beaux Arts in Dakar. He brings an acute sense of environmentalism to the acrylic canvases he creates in the earth tones of arid Africa. He is also a conceptualist, for as he says, he "engages, interrogates, and aggresses" his materials to recognize their validity and valor as things (Fig. 20). His sculptural assemblage called Materialite musicale (Fig. 21) connotes the transporting beauty, "weight" of worship, and grounding of Mouride faith while referring to the notes of marimbas and the clubs sometimes carried by Baye Falls (Fig. 17). The gallery is not restricted to Mouride artists; Samba Laye follows a different Senegalese Sufi movement, yet he portrays Bamba's teachings. His ethereal collage harbors esoteric messages in its painted strips of locally woven cloth and recuperated window shutter that recalls the building behind the Saint in the 1913 photograph.

As one exits "A Saint in the City," a captivating moment awaits in a high-contrast scape of twenty-eight paintings of Amadou Bamba by Assane Dione. While such a display might simulate "the vertiginous emergence of semblances" (Gilles Deleuze cited in Stoichita 1997:217) of Andy Warhol's montages, the differences among the paintings would be far more significant to the artist than their superficial similarities. As the visitor will know by now, the image of Amadou Bamba holds secrets that are only available through deep study and devotion to work, peace, and perfection of the soul.

Senegal is undergoing constant refabulation: new cultural topographies are created through the inscription of ever-evolving imaginaries. Portraits of Amadou Bamba figure importantly in these transformative processes that are defining a modernity that is both specific to Senegal and carried throughout the Mouride global diaspora. In the life and lessons of the Saint, Mourides find ways of coping and thriving; indeed, they see themselves in his "mirror." When the image of Amadou Bamba graces the wall of a home, business, or inner-city junkyard, a simple site of activity becomes a place endowed with the "distinct potencies" of connotative significance (Casey 1987: 186). Such lieux de memoire provide the basis for social identities constantly negotiated with the world. While the contemporary political economy may be the context for such transaction, it is the active impact of the image of the Saint--its blessing aura--that articulates the dynamic nature of Mouride visual culture.

A project of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, "A Saint in the City" brings together approximately 200 works of art from the Fowler collection and private lenders. Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts curated the exhibition, which may be seen at the Fowler Museum from February 9 through July 27, 2003. Additional venues are under consideration. A host of activities will be held over the course of the Los Angeles showing, including an interreligious, interregional symposium called "Global Saints, Local Lives: Images and Icons in Urban Space" (April 12). The exhibition is previewed at www.fmch.ucla.edu/passporttoparadise.htm.

The Robertses have written an accompanying book of the same name (284 pp., 300 color photographs, $45 softcover); it is published by the Fowler Museum and distributed by the University of Washington Press.

"A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal" is partially funded by a major exhibition implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. "Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities." Since 1994, research upon which the exhibition is based has been made possible by small grants from (in chronological order) the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Project for the Advanced Study of Art and Life in Africa, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the African Studies Program at the University of Iowa; the Midwestern Universities Consortium for International Affairs; the J. Paul Getty Trust; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; Dak'Art (Dakar, Senegal); and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the James S. Coleman African Studies Center, and the Faculty Senate Council on Research at UCLA. The scores of Mouride friends and academic colleagues who have assisted in our nine-year research project are acknowledged in Roberts & Roberts 2003a, with special thanks to Gassia Armenian, Ousmane Gueye, and Doran H. Ross, without whose assistance "A Saint in the City" could not have been realized. Despite the generosity of these agencies and individuals, all responsibility for this exhibition remains our own. For Avery; Seth, and Sid, and in memory of our late friends T. K. Biaya, Moustapha Dime, and Ali Meroueh, who contributed to our project.

(1.) Like all religious terms, "Sufism" is difficult to define, in large part because it is so "self-consciously esoteric" (Ernst 1997:139). An immense literature introduces and explains the history, beliefs, and practices of worldwide Sufism, as outlined in Shah 1990 and Ernst 1997. It is instructive to note how infrequently African Sufis are mentioned in such texts, and an avowed purpose of "A Saint in the City" is to help rectify such neglect. "Saint" is the most common English translation of Wali Allah--an "Intimate" or "Friend of God" in Arabic (Cornel11998:xviii). There are four principal Sufi Ways in Senegal: the Qadiriyya (of which Amadou Bamba was originally a member), the Tijaniyya, the Layens, and the Mourides. It is estimated that there are some four million Mourides, most of whom self-identify as Wolof and speak the Wolof language. As a Muslim movement, Mouridism cuts across ethnicity, and because Islam has been practiced in Senegal for many generations, ethnicity is not as pronounced as it may be in some parts of Africa.

(2.) "Mouride' ("disciple") is the French spelling of the Arabic term murid that Mourides usually use when writing about themselves. As a Sufi movement steeped in the mystical teachings of Amadou Bamba, it shares a great deal with orthodox Islam but also differs from it in significant ways. The term "orthodox" is problematic because it is so perspecrival, yet there is no central authority determining dogma or what is "correct" for all Muslims; see El Fadl 2001a. For African examples of how Sufism differs from more "orthodox" and reformist movements, see the essays of Westerlund & Rosander (1997) and Kane & Triaud (1998). Our purpose is to present the proudly distinctive heritage of Mourides as reflected in their visual culture; we pass no judgment upon, nor do we ourselves in any way intend to participate in, debates about reform within Islam as it might be applied to Mourides or anyone else.

(3.) The present preview of the exhibition abridges issues discussed at far greater length in the accompanying book (Roberts & Roberts 2003a). The book also includes discussion and application of visual theories, long exegeses by Mouride artists, and two entire chapters--"An Architecture of the Word," concerning an astounding example of Mouride vernacular dwellings, and "Pilgrimage and Exile: The Idea of Touba," about the Mouride diaspora that are not presented in the exhibition.

(4.) Oumar Ba, now retired from the Senegalese National Archives, has not been able to find the original negative, despite years of trying (personal communication, 1997). According to Mr. Ba, all copies of the photograph now available, including those in his own book (Ba 1979), are derived from the 1913 photograph published by Paul Marty (1917:222).

(5.) Baraka is an Arabic loan word referring to "benedictions" (barakat Allah). In west Africa, baraka "bestows physical superabundance and prosperity, and psychological happiness" (Triaud 1988:53), and it "has come to designate the aura surrounding a saint, his power, his sanctuary, his miracles, his blessing, or his tomb" (Chebel 1995:67). Baraka is inherited by the direct descendants of a holy person like Bamba.

(6.) As Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton have concurred, "why art objects should function as they are supposed to do, how in fact they do so, and why and how they are vehicles of meaning are questions more often ignored than asked, and more asked than answered," in part because of the distinct marginalization of art as a subject of interest within the greater discipline of Anthropology (1994:3), in part because of similar deficiencies within "good eye" Art History (see Shohat & Stam 1998:27).

(7.) We make this choice with trepidation because of the extensive use of the term "aura" in New Age and related practices; still, there may be cross-cultural similarities worthy of investigation. (8.) It may also be that what the late Alfred Gell called "methodological atheism" (borrowing the phrase from Peter Berger) is sometimes at play, as a "principle that, whatever the analyst's own religious convictions, or lack of them, theistic and mystical beliefs are subjected to sociological scrutiny on the assumption that they are not [and cannot be] literally true. Only once this assumption is made do the intellectual maneuvers characteristic of anthropological analyses of religious systems become possible" (Gell 1994:41). On the biases introduced by considering other logics than one's own to be "beliefs," see Needham 1972.

(9.) Hal Foster (1988) presents the contrast between vision (the biological event of seeing) and visuality (how what one sees is interpreted according to one's cultural particularities). Visuality is a "cultural system," to borrow the famous phrase of Clifford Geertz, for "symbols...synthesize a people's ethos-the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood--and their worldview--the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are" (1979:79, our emphasis). Robert Nelson (2000) has assembled essays applying such perspectives to a wide range of world artistry through an equally wide range of periods--including Mouride arts, in Roberts & Roberts 2000b.

(10.) Obvious examples include illuminated manuscripts and miniature paintings produced by Mogul, Persian, Ottoman, and related cultures (Grabar 2002); north African popular arts featuring sacred subjects in wide use today (Starrett 1995); and contemporary popular paintings from Egypt that joyfully celebrate fulfillment of pilgrimage to Mecca (Parker & Neal 1995). Political photographs are in constant public display, even in the strictest of contemporary Muslim states such as Iran. Oleg Grabar (1987:93-94) asserts that the "puritanical" reaction to imagery that many have mistakenly assumed characterizes all of Islamic history was the product of a complex history of interaction between early Muslims and the Christians and Jews in whose midst Islam arose. For a useful bibliography see Freedberg 1989:451, fn. 4; Hirt 1993: 220-23; and Schimmel 1994:34.

(11.) It is by no means a coincidence that this same moment gave birth to vibrant rap and hip-hop in Wolof, inspired by music from the United States (Benga 2002; Mbodji 2002), or that other subversive forms of expression emerged then and continue to develop at an accelerating pace, ranging from popular dance to new forms of dress and modes of adornment (Biaya 2002). See Repetti (1999) and Mustafa (2001) on the creation of new topographies for the urban imaginaries of Dakar; and the essays and photomontages of the issue of Revue Noire called "Africa Urbis" (Mulin 1999) for other cases on the continent.

(12.) Muslim contributions to early colonial life in the Americas are a subject of current study; see Gomez 1998 and 1994, and Turner 1997, for discussion and relevant bibliography.

(13.) The history of Senegalese photography has received little attention within Senegal itself (although see Thiobane & Wade 1999) or from expatriate scholars (but see Buckley 2001). The recent annotated bibliography of Massimo Zaccaria (2001) suggests the paucity of materials specifically about Senegal and the richness of literature concerning other parts of Africa and the continent more generally. Attention to early Senegalese postcards for a French audience is an exception; for a review and bibliography, see Prochaska 1991, and on studio photography in west Africa, see Werner 1996.

(14.) Similar metaphors abound in Sufism outside of Senegal, for "the mirror (mazhar) of signs reflects the visible and announces the invisible," while the speculation that Sufism encourages "consists of polishing the mirror of the soul" (Hirt 1993: 39, 64).

(15.) Memory and the making of history in central African societies have been explicit topics of our previous research, writing, and exhibitions; see Roberts & Roberts 1996.

(16.) The history and bibliography of Amadou Bamba's life are accessibly presented in Babou 2002, Barry 1998, M. Diouf 1990, Hamoneau 1998, Klein 1998, Robinson 2000, Searing 2002, Sy 1969, and Villalon 1995. Broad but somewhat dated views are also available in such works as Cruise O'Brien 1971, Copans 1988, and Creevey 1970. Important hagiographies of Amadou Bamba include Mbacke 1995 and Wade 1991.

(17.) Jihad is "struggle" and by no means necessarily refers to "holy war"; for a critique of reductionist Eurocentric understanding of this signal term, see El Fadl 2001b.

(18.) In later years Bamba actively collaborated with the French colonial agenda, but David Robinson cautions that Bamba or others who acted similarly should not be dismissed "as 'sell outs," according to a polarization into 'resistors' and 'collaborators," but rather [they] should be seen as persons who sized up their historical contexts and chose their options in rational ways" (Robinson 1997:156).

(19.) Fruitful comparison can be drawn with the genre paintings of Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and other Zairian (now Congolese) artists of the early 1970s. Tshibumba painted many copies of images as "reminders" of heroic moments in a certain history of southeastern Zaire. These works are known as ukumbusho, a Swahili term that Johanneg Fabian teanslates as "a quality capable of triggering memories" that "circumscribes not only the function (purpose, intent) of genre painting but also what could be called its semantic domain," for such works were created "to support rhetoric and oral performance" (1996:195, 198). Of particular importance is the way that memories triggered by Tshibumba's paintings "are significant to the extent that they comment on the present" (Fabian 1996:217; see also Jewsiewicki 1999).

(20.) Direct and indirect quotes are from the artists and other Mourides who participated in our research from 1994 to 2002. Some interviews have been translated from Wolof to French by Ousmane Gueye, and from French to English by the authore or by Gassia Armenian. We wish to stress that the Saint in the City book and exhibition are focused upon the voices and practices of the few Mouride artists and other persons with whom we have had the privilege to work, and readers should not assume that we have spoken with or are speaking for all Mourides.

(21.) The wall of images reveals another aspect of Mouride artistry, revealed to us over the course of the nine years of research leading to the "Saint in the City" exhibition. Every time we visited Dakar, we found images in new media, and at the same time, we would not see images of the sorts that we had encountered on previous visits. Many Mourides participate in the informal economy of the "invisible city," and must use their ,ingenuity to survive (A. Roberts 1996). New ideas are gifts from the Saint, as are the sales that may result. Resilience and self-reliance are qualities of Bamba's life that Mourides especially cherish.

(22.) Our neologism 'imagorium" might be applied to other examples of African visual expression, such as the displays of icons and wall paintings in ancient Coptic churches of Ethiopia (see Chojnacki 1973:34-65) or the astounding displays of Vodun shrines in coastal Benin (Rush 1999:68-69).

(23.) Some Baye Falls also wear dreadlocks, and are sometimes mistaken for Rastafarians by tourists; see Savishinsky 1994. While there may be Rastas in Senegal, as there are in other African countries, in the Baye Fall case it is more often an identification with what they perceive Rastas (and especially Bob Marley) to be about than any actual participation in Rastafarian religion and praxis. Some may even use the mistaken identity to their economic advantage. The late T. K. Biaya (2002:346) described these "Baye Faux" with acerbity, suggesting that "these epicureans of poverty deck themselves out in the attributes of real Baye Falls who beg for alms but hide their mendicity by joining Baye Fallism with Rastafarianism." Indeed, Papisto has created images of Bob Marley wearing the image of Sheikh Ibra Fall, to assert the opposite relationship---that Rastas may become Baye Falls so as to benefit from the blessings of Bamba.

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ALLEN F. ROBERTS is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures and director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA. He is also an editor of A African Arts. His current research includes consideration of visual arts in AIDS-awareness activities in southern Africa and Suriname.

MARY NOOTER ROBERTS is deputy director and chief curator of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Her current research includes comparative study of the visual pieties of people living in Mauritius and Reunion who are devoted to the Senegaiese Sufi saint Sheikh Amadou Bamba or to the Indian saint Shirdi Sai Baba. She is also an editor of African Arts.