Conference Abstracts
42. Ross, Eric; Akhawayn University, Morocco:
" Touba : A Trans-Colonial Sufi Metropolis"
Touba, in Senegal, is the “capital” of
the Mouride brotherhood (tarîqah). It was established
in 1887, at the very beginning of the colonial period, but has really
only grown as a city since Senegal’s independence in 1960.
Touba is one of the fastest growing cities in Senegal and, with
approximately half a million inhabitants, it is now that country’s
second largest city. Moreover, Touba is an autonomous city, benefiting
from a special legal status which places it under the nearly exclusive
jurisdiction of the brotherhood. This paper will argue that Touba
is the product of a specific religious and social project which
effectively transcends colonialism and modernity as paradigms.
Touba is categorized as trans-colonial because
its historical trajectory as a place transcends the usual compartmentalization
implicit to the colonial process, i.e.: there being “pre-colonial”,
“colonial” and “post-colonial” conditions.
Touba started out as an isolated spiritual retreat (khalwah)
in the wilderness, deliberately removed from the social and moral
compromises associated with the colonial order. Yet, in the first
decades of the 20th century the Mouride brotherhood came to an accommodation
with the French authorities. The brotherhood was henceforth to be
a major institution of what we would term today “civial society
and Touba emerged as one of the principal instruments of its social,
cultural, political and economic strategies. The Mourides’
cultural resistance to colonization, intitially the spiritual project
of one man, became a platform for a dynamic process of economic
growth (and of capital accumulation) and social empowerment.
Touba is modern in the architectural and
urbanistic sense of the term. The building of Touba’s large
central Mosque was initiated in 1926 and completed in 1963. The
laying out of a city to surround this shrine is an even more recent
phenomenon, marked by three successive planning schemes: 1958-63,
1974 and 1994. Both the central shrine and the city have been built
using modern methods and materials, exemplified by such processes
as recourse to building contractors, the use of reinforced concrete
and, more recently, the creation of a Geographic Information System
to manage real-estate transactions and the distribution of public
utilities. Touba’s rise as an urban centre has also been conditioned
by such modern social factors as the creation and mobilization of
a mass movement of national scale, the expansion of a colonial cash-crop
economy, railway construction, rural-urban migration, and, most
recently, monetary remittances from migrants abroad. The city’s
growth is currently being financed with funds raised abroad by Mouride
disiples involved in a variety of trades and businesses, and channelled
through formal and informal international financial institutions.
With Mouride communities established in cities throughout Africa,
Western Europe, North America and the Indian Ocean, the Mouride
metropolis is increasingly a global city.
Yet Touba is foremost a Sufi city. It is a Sufi city
to the extent that it was founded by a Sufi shaykh in a
moment of mystic illumination and that it has been designed and
built by the Sufi brotherhood he established. Touba is named for
Tûbâ, the tree of paradise of Islamic tradition.
This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of righteous
life on earth, divine judement and access to the Hereafter. The
city of Touba actualizes this spiritual construct. Important aspects
of its topographical configuration, such as the vertical and horizontal
alignment of its monumental central shrine complex, its radiating
avenues and encircling ring roads, and the actual trees that mark
its urban landscape, relate directly to the archetypal tree called
Tûbâ. By using a semiotic approach to the analysis
of landscape, one can explain this relationship by recourse to the
neo-Platonic emanationist pheneomenology which underlies many other
Sufi cultural expressions. Thus in Touba, modernity is configured
according to metaphysical principles one usually associates with
pre-modern societies. Not only was the colonial condition subverted
in the interest of resistance, but post-colonial modernity has become
an instrument of spiritual fulfilment at the global scale.
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