Generational Changes, Political Stagnation, and the Evolving Dynamics of Religion and Politics in Senegal

The simultaneous crises of waning regime legitimacyand generational successiontensions indicate shifts inthe Senegalese model of religion and politics.Although the ediﬁceremains standing, there arecracks in the foundation.

Generational Changes, PoliticalStagnation, and the Evolving Dynamicsof Religion and Politics in Senegal

Leonardo A. Villalón

Religious institutions, in the form of Muslim Suﬁ orders,have been an integral feature of Senegal’s stable and rela-tively democratic socio-political system. Over the course of the 1990s, this system has experienced strains due to two factors: generational changes and a crisis of legitimacy of the political system. This has resulted in three potential-ly signiﬁcant types of phenomena: 1) the growing (thoughstill limited) appeal of reformist Islamic ideology; 2) con-testatory movements for leadership of the orders; and 3) suc-cession struggles within religious families. This article ex-amines these three trends by means of a discussion of the Muslim students’ movement at the University Cheikh An-ta Diop de Dakar, the Hizbut-Tarqiyyah movement in the Mouride Order, and the Moustarchidine movement whichhas resulted in a schism in the Sy Tijan family. While thesocio-political system remains well in place, its evolution islikely to be shaped by these dynamics.

As it approaches the end of its fourth decade of independence, Senegal con-tinues as a unique case both within sub-Saharan Africa and in the broaderMuslim world. The country has maintained a remarkable political stabil-ity, even a degree of democracy, based on a peculiar socio-political systemin which Islamic institutions have been central but have coexisted with anominally secular state and have made no signiﬁcant challenge for controlof the state, at least until recently. I have argued elsewhere (Villalón 1995)that these two peculiarities are closely related. A well entrenched systemof trilateral relations between the state, the religious elite, and a well-orga-nized religious society have provided for a measure of reciprocity in Sene-galese state-society relations, providing the country with its singular po-litical system.The system has proven durable, but there have also been periodicindications of strain. As elsewhere in the Muslim world following the Is-

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GE N E R A T I ON A L C H A N GE S ,P OL I T I C A L S T A GN A T I ON ,A N D T H E E V OL V I N GD Y N A MI C S OF R E L I GI ON A N D P OL I T I C S I N S E N E GA L

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lamic revolution in Iran, many observers of Senegalese politics noted anapparent increase in the importance of religion to public life and feared forthe country’s stability. Christian Coulon and Donal Cruise O’Brien wroteat the end of the decade of an “Islamic Renaissance” in Senegal and noted:

To stay just a few days in Dakar is to realize that the tranquiland moderate Islam which has long prevailed in this coun-try is now in question. One ﬁnds in Senegal the atmosphereof Islamic agitation which marked the early years of colo-nial rule, a period when the economic, social, and politi-cal upheavals introduced by the European presence producedlarge scale religious movements . . . for the last ten years orso, and especially since the accession of Abdou Diouf as headof state [1981] Islam seems to be a more and more autono-mous force. (1989:156)

More dramatically, the journalist Moriba Magassouba, noting theproliferating signs of religiosity, the founding of religious associations, andmosques “multiplying like mushrooms,” subtitled his book on Islam inSenegal with the ominous question: “Tomorrow the Mollahs?” (1985).Even to the extent that these impressions were valid, by the late1980s both the state and the leaders of the Suﬁ orders, the traditional pil-lars of Senegalese religious life, appeared not only to have contained andcontrolled this new dynamism but actually to have co-opted and divertedthe growing interest in religion to their own purposes. That is, to a strikingdegree, the increase in public religiosity in the 1980s served to

reinforce

the existing system of “tranquil and moderate Islam,” rather than to un-dercut it. The remarkable vitality of the religio-political system was itsmost salient feature in the late 1980s. And yet the changes of the decadealso entailed some pressures and left some lingering questions about thesustainability of the system.In the early 1990s, several events seemed to signal once more thecontestatory potential of increased religious fervor. Most signiﬁcantly, in1993–94 a religious movement known as the Moustarchidines became di-rectly and centrally involved in political protests surrounding the 1993elections, marking the ﬁrst time that resistance to the

Parti Socialiste’s

(PS) historical domination of the government was cast so explicitly in Is-lamic terms. In the press coverage surrounding them, and for various schol-ars of Senegal, the events suggested an incipient threat of “Islamic funda-mentalism” (da Costa 1994; Vengroff and Creevey 1997:209).The subsequent trajectory of the Moustarchidine movement indi-cates that the suggestion that militant Islam threatened to overwhelm theexisting system was an overstatement, but it also clearly indicates thatthere have been incremental changes in the established pattern of religionand politics in Senegal. While there has been no revolution, there clearlyhas been an evolution. I would suggest that this evolution in the role of