Hill - 2010 - All Women Are Guides Sufi Leadership and Womanh PDF

Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 375-412 brill.
nl/jra
‘All Women are Guides’: Sufi Leadership and

Womanhood among Taalibe Baay in Senegal
Joseph Hill
Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology & Egyptology Department
American University in Cairo
P.O. Box 74
New Cairo 11835, Egypt
josephhill@aucegypt.edu
Abstract
In Sufi Islamic groups in West Africa, the position of muqaddam, one appointed as a spiritual
guide, is usually held by men. Although Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (1900-1975)
appointed many Senegalese women as muqaddams throughout his life, few of his disciples were
aware of these appointments. Since the 1990s a growing number of ‘Taalibe Baay’ (disciples of
Niasse) women have more openly led active communities of disciples. Several factors have made
it possible for these women to act uncontroversially as recognized leaders, including (1) Baye
Niasse’s popularization of mystical knowledge and authority, making them available to the gen-
eral body of disciples, (2) the urbanization of the Taalibe Baay movement and (3) global and
local processes raising Muslim women’s visibility as objects of discourse and as active religious
and economic actors. While these women sometimes draw on global discourses of gender equal-
ity, to a much larger extent they base their religious authority on embodying and performing the
interiority and submissiveness conventionally associated with pious women.
Keywords
Islam, women, Sufism, Senegal, gender, feminism
Introduction
Adja Moussoukoro Mbaye is the official spiritual guide or ‘mother’ (mère) of a
large religious federation of students at Dakar’s university and other institu-
tions of higher education. Additionally, she leads a daayira1 (religious associa-
tion) that totals over one hundred young people—slightly more men than
women—whom she has personally initiated into the Tijānī Sufi order and
taught to ‘know God’ through tarbiya (spiritual education). Her disciples, or
‘spiritual children’ as she calls them, meet several times a week at her house or
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/157006610X540735

376 J. Hill / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 375-412
that of a disciple for various religious activities, such as chanting the name of
God (dhikr). Two students affiliated with the student federation,2 along with
her son-in-law, whom she has appointed as a spiritual guide (muqaddam), led
me to her Dakar apartment, where she welcomed us warmly. Sitting across
from us in her living room, her face framed in a dark, gold-embroidered scarf
draped over her shoulders, she spoke with a measured and calm voice, exuding
confidence and gentleness. During the 1990s Adja Moussoukoro received
written authorization (ʾijāza) from a male religious leader to act as a muqadd-
ama (feminine form of muqaddam), or a spiritual guide representing the Tijānī
Sufi order. Yet she remained silent about her appointment for at least five
years, she says, until God ‘revealed’ ( feeñal) her by guiding disciples to her. She
has since given similar authorization to several men in her daayira, including
one of the men who accompanied me on my first interview with her. In 2009,
she gave an ʾijāza to her own mother. Over several subsequent visits, I encoun-
tered many young disciples who had come to receive tarbiya, to socialize with
one another, or to plan upcoming activities for their daayira. During one of
our conversations in 2009, a medical student accompanying me told her, ‘You
are our mother, you are our spiritual guide (sëriñ), you are our everything’.
When I asked Adja Moussoukoro whether anyone had opposed her acting
as a muqaddam, a leadership role typically reserved for men in Senegal, the
fifty-something holy woman immediately shook her head. To the contrary, she
said, prominent male muqaddams often send young people to her to be initi-
ated into the secrets of divine knowledge. She told us that these leaders recog-
nize that, like childbirth, the perilous process of Sufi initiation requires a guide
naturally inclined to nurture and care for new initiates, who are most often
young people particularly in need of guidance. ‘A muqaddam is your spiritual
parent’, she told me. Another prominent muqaddama in Dakar similarly told
me that ‘muqaddam is just a name, but all women are muqaddamas, because
all women are educators (yarkat)’. Other female religious leaders in the Fayḍa
(flood)—the global movement within the Tijānī Sufi order of those who fol-
low Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (1900-1975)3—invariably agreed that
being a woman and being a spiritual guide naturally went together.
Although Shaykh Ibrahim, better known in Senegal as ‘Baye’ (‘Baay’:
‘Father’ in Wolof ), appointed numerous women as muqaddamas throughout
his life—some report as early as 1940 during the Fayḍa’s initial rural boom—
most of these women’s appointments were never widely publicized. Women
only began openly to lead large disciple associations (daayira) in the late 1990s,
when the Fayḍa transformed from what most Senegalese perceived as an
obscure regional group to a ‘veritable vogue among urban youth’ (Seesemann
2009, 226). Over the past ten years, I have interviewed fifteen muqaddamas in
J. Hill / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 375-412 377
Figure 1. Two muqaddamas, Aïda Thiam (center) and Bousso Dramé (right),
with a disciple in Thiaroye, a suburb of Dakar.
Dakar, Kaolack and other Senegalese towns, often accompanied by Senegalese

members of a research association,4 and other association members have inter-
viewed several others in my absence. All of these muqaddamas are ‘Taalibe
Baay’—‘Disciples of Baye’, as Senegalese members of the Fayḍa movement
most often refer to themselves. It would be impossible to determine the exact
number of Taalibe Baay muqaddams in Senegal, male or female.5 The Fayḍa’s
expansion brings constant new appointments, many of which remain unknown
for several years or even a muqaddam’s entire life. Some of my collaborators
who freely introduced me to male muqaddams hesitated to mention muqadd-
amas, uncomfortable about bringing a proper Muslim woman out into the
open. I have observed, however, that thousands of disciples, male and female,
look to these muqaddamas as personal spiritual guides and as leaders of their
lay religious associations (daayiras). Unlike the handful of African Sufi women
leaders mentioned in the academic literature (Hutson 1999, 2001, 2004;
Cifuentes 2008; Boyd 1989; Coulon 1988; Coulon and Reveyrand 1990),
most Taalibe Baay muqaddamas are not daughters or wives of religious leaders
and therefore have no hereditary claim to baraka (divine blessing) or author-
ity. Indeed, many discovered the Fayḍa as adults and had pursued no more
than the same basic Qurʾānic education that nearly all of their peers had
attained. However, even those who lack the educational credentials conven-
tionally required of muqaddams are recognized by many mainstream disciples
and the highly literate central Taalibe Baay leadership as effective leaders and
spiritual guides.
Although these women describe the work of the spiritual guide as naturally
consonant with their characteristics as women, they profoundly unsettled my
assumptions about Islamic authority in Senegal. Around 94 per cent of all
Senegalese today are Muslims, of which 95 per cent identify with some Sufi
order.6 Much of the considerable body of scholarship on Islam in Senegal has
focused on the Senegalese state’s ‘exceptional’ political arrangement (Villalón
1995; Cruise O’Brien 1996), wherein high-profile Sufi leaders mediate
between the secular state and blocs of disciples, thereby contributing to the
state’s unusual stability (Behrman 1970; Cruise O’Brien 1971; Copans 1980;
Coulon 1981; Villalón 1995). Focusing on high-profile male (and overwhelm-
ingly Murid) religious personalities and their implications for governance, this
literature’s scant mention of women scarcely goes beyond general discussions
of marriage and other customs relating to them (for example Monteil 1980).
Until recently, the sole Senegalese woman leader extensively discussed was
Sokhna Magat Diop, who succeeded her father, an important regional khalīfa7
of the Murid Sufi order in Thiès who left no son (Coulon 1988; Coulon and
Reveyrand 1990; Creevey 1996). Such exceptions seem to confirm the rule
that Senegalese Islam is ‘thoroughly male-dominated in its public, religious
manifestations’ (Evers Rosander 2003, 5).
This article aims to explain how women have been able to present them-
selves openly as Sufi spiritual guides, especially in Dakar, despite prevalent and
longstanding assumptions that such positions of religious authority are
reserved for men. This question involves examining both larger historical
changes and how individual women cultivate and present themselves as moral
authorities. After briefly discussing anthropological approaches to Muslim
women as religious agents, I discuss two historical shifts that have enabled
Taalibe Baay women to exercise religious leadership more openly. The first is
Baye Niasse’s teaching, beginning in 1929, that all could directly know God
through a relatively short mystical education (tarbiya); this has attracted mil-
lions worldwide while opening the door of Sufi authority to many who did
not have years of textual specialization and mystical apprenticeship. Although
few of the many women Baye Niasse appointed as muqaddamas were widely
known, his descendants and other close disciples have continued his prece-
dent. The second shift is the movement’s accelerating growth and urbanization
since the 1990s. Not only have larger economic and political conditions led
women into more prominent positions during this period, but the Fayḍa’s
accelerating growth during this period has created leadership opportunities,

and in Dakar’s diffuse space of religious authority many religious specialists
can operate in the same territory.
It is in this context that women actively cultivate, legitimate, and practice
religious authority. The final section of this article focuses on one muqaddama
in Dakar who illustrates muqaddamas’ paradoxical task of making hiddenness
visible while veiling acts of showing. If muqaddamas are to cultivate moral
authority their possession of hidden knowledge must somehow appear, and
they must publicly demonstrate the reserved piety expected of proper Muslim
women. Many muqaddamas I have interviewed not only cultivated but accen-
tuated the ‘interiority’ (Boddy 1989; Masquelier 2009) and submissiveness
conventionally associated with women’s piety, performing these qualities as
icons (Peirce 1955) of hidden Sufi knowledge and of the submission to God
that is the very meaning of the term ‘Islam’. Many also assimilated the nurtur-
ing process of spiritual tutelage and women’s natural mothering inclination.
However, interiority and submission can only heighten moral authority when
differentiated from mere social withdrawal and subservience. Women leaders
must show enough to be recognized as authorities while cultivating and
performing the hiddenness that indexes a Muslim woman’s piety. They con-
stantly navigate between and even mobilize the tensions between multiple
oppositions—the hidden (bāṭin) and the apparent (ẓāhir), the distinctions of
God’s law (Sharīʿa) and the unity of mystical reality (ḥ aqīqa), humility (suufe
bopp) and prestige (daraja), a sense of restraint/shame (kersa) and showing
oneself (wonewu).
Islam, Authority and Women’s Agency
Muslim women’s religious agency has gradually become a central question in

scholarship on West Africa since Boyd and Last (1985) called on scholars to
examine women’s religious lives and to explain rather than take for granted
their absences from available records. Commenting on a broad pattern of
women’s marginalization from formal and legalistic Islamic authority in West
Africa, Coulon concludes that mystical tendencies are better able than ‘reform-
ist or fundamentalist Islam . . . to tackle [women’s] particular problems and to
give expression to their own sociability’ (1988, 117-118). Indeed, many have
observed women gravitating toward more unofficial and ecstatic practices in
which behaviors ordinarily defined as incompatible with feminine decorum
can be sanctioned (Strobel 1979; Lewis 1989). Spirit possession practices
throughout much of Africa are largely a women’s affair since men often favor
exorcism over possession in the name of Islamic orthodoxy (Lambek 1981;

Boddy 1989; Rasmussen 1995; Kenyon 1995; Masquelier 2001). Male stu-
dents have often been the driving force behind reformist8 movements (Launay
1992; Masquelier 1999; Gomez-Perez et al. 2009), whose condemnation of
‘wasteful’ life-cycle rituals that move income into female-dominated spaces
has resonated with struggling young men (Masquelier 1999, 2009; Janson
2005). In Senegal, where the male-dominated hierarchy is Sufism, Murid
women have found many ways of obtaining blessing (baraka/barke), merit
(thawāb/tuyaaba) and prestige (daraja) in their religious communities outside
the masculine spaces of formal religious authority from which they are largely
excluded (Evers Rosander 1997, 1998, 2004; Buggenhagen 2001, 2008,
2009a).
However, women’s participation in a range of Islamic movements compli-
cates generalizations claiming one tendency or another as more responsive to
women’s needs. Urban Taalibe Baay women’s increasingly prominent roles
within this Sufi movement since the 1990s have coincided with women’s
increasing prominence in numerous Islamic movements throughout West
Africa, from Salafī-inspired Islamist reformism (Loimeier 2003; Augis 2005,
2009; Schulz 2008), to reformist daʿwa (preaching) (Janson 2005, 2007,
2008), to Sufi revival movements (Kane and Villalón 1998; Villalón 2003;
Schulz 2006; Masquelier 2009) and local movements that defy such categories
(Schulz 2003; Soares 2004). Despite the pervasive tendency of religious con-
troversies to present a clear opposition between reformism and Sufism/tradi-
tionalism (Soares 2004; Masquelier 2009), movements that prominently
involve women span this divide and often share several characteristics: invok-
ing textual authenticity against entrenched traditions and authority structures,
emphasizing individual Muslims’ self-cultivation as pious subjects, actively
involving women as fully accountable members and religious agents (while
upholding gendered division of labor and roles), and preaching the universal
availability of Islamic knowledge. Taken together, recent studies suggest that
women’s commitment to a movement depends less on how ‘liberal’ its atti-
tudes are toward them than on the degree to which it assumes their moral
agency and actively involves them in religious life. The most ‘conservative’
reformist movements with regards to women’s dress, seclusion and patriarchy
often work to expand women’s education, involve them in preaching, and task
them with publicly modeling proper attire and piety (Loimeier 1997; Umar
2001; Schulz 2008), even encouraging men to share in domestic work in order
to allow women more time to preach (Janson 2008).
Consequently, the question of women’s self-realization as pious Muslim
subjects—which for many women involves cultivating submissive dispositions
toward men and God—has required scholars to ‘parochialize’ the feminist

subject’s assumed universal struggle for autonomy and freedom against domi-
nation (Mahmood 2001a, 203). At the same time, Muslim and Western
women’s subjectivities and struggles do not exist in separate universes but are
‘intertwined’ (Abu-Lughod 1998; Deeb 2006), especially as liberal discourses
of ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘equality’ have globalized. Muslim women situate
themselves using ‘hybrid’ discourses (Bakhtin 1981) drawing on multiple tra-
ditions. A hybrid utterance, according to Bakhtin, combines contrasting
points of view while maintaining the tension between them, refracting them
through an authorial purpose that may contrast sharply with those implied by
the voices it utilizes. For example, like Islamist Shi’i women in Lebanon (Deeb
2009), many Taalibe Baay women condemn Western values in terms of grand
‘civilizational binarisms’ while simultaneously using Western optics to defend
Islamic values. Like many Taalibe Baay women leaders, Adja Moussoukoro
defends feminine modesty and veiling as a path for ‘women’s liberation’ from
sexual exploitation and invokes women’s interiority and motherhood as justi-
fications for women’s more public roles as Sufi leaders.
To say that women appropriate conventional attitudes toward demure fem-
inine piety as they challenge a male monopoly on religious authority is not to
posit autonomous agents applying tactics of resistance (Certeau 1984) or
‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1987) against patriarchy. None of the Senegalese
muqaddamas I interviewed, regardless of educational or career background,
suggested that they viewed themselves as resisting a patriarchal system. Con-
versely, their acute insights into the complexities of gender dynamics rule out
that they are passively, blindly, or despondently upholding such a system. To
understand these women as agents I bring into conversation three comple-
mentary notions of subjectivity that studies of Muslim women have invoked,
often separately from one another. The first is that of the subject of larger
social norms and regimes of knowledge and authority that shape the subject’s
dispositions and preferences. Thus, Janice Boddy (1989) observed that Suda-
nese women embodied a largely tacit and stable habitus (Bourdieu 1977) of
interiority or enclosure that shaped their practices, preferences and discourses
(on femininity as interiority see also Hirschon 1981; Laqueur 1990; Young
1990; Morris 1995). In other contexts, anthropologists have noted similar
habitual associations between the oppositions of male/female and up/down
(Gilmore 1996). A second tendency, questioning the notion that habitus is
determined by relatively stable objective structures, has shown that religious
subjects, as members of communities oriented toward religious change, culti-
vate their own dispositions and experiences—their habitus—through discipli-
nary religious practices (Starrett 1995, 1998; Hirschkind 2001; Mahmood
2001a, 2001b, 2005). Approaching the habitus as a malleable object of disci-

plinary practices, these scholars draw less on Bourdieu than on Foucault
(Foucault 1997a, 1997b, 1997c) and Talal Asad (1993, 2000, 2006). A third
sense is that of speaking and acting subjects who improvise, perform, and
engage in practical situations. For example, Lara Deeb (2006, 2009) has
shown how women draw on multiple moral models and discourses to engage
in local and transnational publics and institutions.
I see these approaches not as competing but as complementary. From a
young age, like the Sudanese women Boddy observed, both urban and rural
Taalibe Baay women embody ‘feminine’ behaviors of interiority and domes-
ticity that subtly shape their inclinations. An urban Senegalese mother repeat-
edly tells her small daughter ‘Sit! Girls don’t stand!’ The girl sits, her arms
clasping her folded knees, on the floor with several other women, neither up
on a chair nor with legs extended like the boys. Another mother chides her
daughter, ‘Kneel when you bring your father water!’, a behavior that I observed
women repeat for her husbands even if they had far more economic and social
capital than their husbands. Girls in almost every Taalibe Baay household
I visited spent much of their time performing domestic tasks. While running
errands, both boys and girls might walk similar distances from home (see Katz
1993 on Sudan), yet boys are typically allowed much more free time to play
and socialize with friends, often outside the home. The Qurʾān is widely
understood to prescribe that the husband go out and work to support the fam-
ily while the wife stays in to take care of domestic matters. Even women who
earn far more than their husbands manage all cooking, cleaning, and child-
care, even if they delegate to maids or daughters. In practice, sharing domestic
work with several other women in a large, often polygynous household makes
it easier for many women to work outside the home than Western counter-
parts in nuclear families—and a husband’s inability to provide may demand
it. Yet despite important exceptions, I have found that the expectation of
opposing roles and behaviors of men and women are nearly universal among
Taalibe Baay.
However, making sense of Taalibe Baay women’s active use of interiority,
submission, and motherhood requires looking beyond binary oppositions,
stable norms and a purely tacit habitus. First, interiority is not a uniquely
feminine moral attribute any more than exteriority is an unambiguously posi-
tive masculine attribute. Respectable men and women must both cultivate the
moral quality of kersa, which anthropologists have translated as ‘nobility’,
‘honor’, ‘restraint’, and ‘sangfroid ’.9 Perhaps most generally, it means ‘shame’:
‘to have kersa’ can mean both ‘to have a sense of shame’ and ‘to feel ashamed/
embarrassed’. Kersa demands a degree of interiority of both men and women,
requiring them not to put themselves ‘out there’, for example, through speak-
ing too loudly and openly or dressing immodestly. Still, the bar of kersa for
women is relatively higher than for men: ways of acting, dressing, or speaking
that are acceptable for a man may show a lack of kersa for a woman in a simi-
lar situation. In religious contexts, however, the more pious and mystical a
man is the more his behavior tends to approach the level of interiority exem-
plified by a decent woman. Many of the most charismatic Taalibe Baay
muqaddams veil in public, at least to the same degree that pious women are
taught to cover themselves (albeit not in the same way), make elaborate shows
of submission to other leaders (albeit not to their wives), sit close to the ground
and speak quietly through animators (jottalikat, someone of lower status who
broadcasts to an audience the speech of someone of higher status—see
below),10 all of which enhances their aura of piety and mysticism.
Furthermore, if the interior dispositions girls embody from an early age
tacitly shape their attitudes in many unconscious ways, such behaviors are also
the object of constant talk and painstaking disciplinary practices to refine one’s
piety and good behavior. Baye Niasse explicitly presented Sufism as a system
of discipline, as clearly shown in his first work, The Spirit of Good Morals (Rūḥ
al-ʾAdab, Niasse [Ñas] 1998), whose title could well be translated as The Spirit
of Discipline.11 In it he describes the behaviors and thoughts the disciple should
focus on while reciting the daily Tijānī litanies (wird) in order to bring about
correct attitudes and experiences. After describing how the disciple must find
and submit to a ‘complete shaykh’ in order for the shaykh to perform poten-
tially painful operations on his or her soul, Niasse exhorts the disciple: ‘Be
God fearing, a man of humility’12 for ‘you will not by humility be in abase-
ment’. To illustrate, he contrasts several ‘low-pitched’ Arabic words for desir-
able things (knowledge, wealth, fertility) with their ‘high-pitched’ opposites
(ignorance, poverty, infertility), and states that floods settle in low places
(Niasse [Ñas] 1998, 53-54).
The potential confusion between humility and abasement engenders a
dilemma for Sufi women leaders: the social roles they play involve submission,
domesticity, and withdrawal from publicity, yet they must differentiate these
behaviors from social inferiority, servitude, and a lack of confidence. Like
Muslim women in many other communities (for example Mahmood 2005;
Augis 2009), Taalibe Baay women leaders describe acts of wifely submission
as expressions of submission to God’s law (Sharīʿa) and of their sincere desire
to care for husbands and family. Yet they also emphasize a deeper reality
(ḥ aqīqa) behind this law according to which all social distinctions are illusory.
Sayyidah13 Khady Diop,14 a muqaddama in Dakar, demonstrated that negoti-
ating these opposing principles is an ongoing process. She once described her
exasperation when, as she was busy helping a client in her successful business,
her husband sat and asked her to bring him water. She complied. Sayyida
Khady’s initial explanation of this practice suggests a conscious ‘patriarchal
bargain’ (Kandiyoti 1988)—a pound of flesh she was willing to give in
exchange for peace and autonomy. Her previous husband, she explained, a
member of the reformist ʿIbād ar-Raḥ mān (Ibaadu) movement, was ‘liberated’
and forbade kneeling before anyone but God and did not expect these provin-
cial (‘Saalum’) behaviors, and she agreed with him. However, despite recogniz-
ing that kneeling or curtsying while serving men water is not an Islamic
prescription, she advises disciples to comply if in a context where such behav-
iors are viewed as synonymous with good manners (yar). What matters is the
intention, which should be to show respect and not veneration for the person.
In a conversation a year later, Sayyida Khady seemed less resigned than com-
mitted to distinctions between men’s and women’s roles: modern society’s
problems would go away, she said, if everyone played their role, especially
women giving their children a proper upbringing. Her import business was
still growing, yet she described dividing her attention equally between three
tasks—God, her family, and her business—emphasizing especially her atten-
tion to serving and pleasing her husband. Her account of playing one’s role
well in whatever situation one may find oneself, including kneeling when serv-
ing water, suggests that cultivating a single set of pious dispositions may some-
times be less important than adjusting one’s behavior to the situation and
assigning it a proper meaning.
Sayyida Khady’s position may seem a mere bargain with or capitulation to
patriarchy if one were not aware of the myriad ways in which she and other
muqaddamas signal that in a deeper (bāṭin) sense playing a submissive role
might mean the opposite of what it appears to mean. Some muqaddamas
explicitly describe acts of submissiveness and interiority as ritual performances
demonstrating obedience to God’s prescriptions, highlighting the opposition
between the performance’s apparent (ẓāhir) meaning and the hidden (bāṭin)
truth behind it. Such a ‘performance’ is neither a disingenuous charade nor a
naïve reproduction of social roles but rather an act presented as an act intended
to have multiple interpretations. Of course, whether such a performance suc-
cessfully raises a woman’s moral standing and religious authority depends on
its ‘felicity’ (Austin 1962)—on whether viewers perceive and accept the hid-
den meaning. As the final section of this article shows, muqaddamas’ ongoing
efforts to present feminine kersa and related practices of submission and inte-
riority not as indexes of ‘abasement’ but of moral authority depend not only
on disciplined mastery of a pious habitus but also on improvised, performative
engagement in publics where such behaviors can be evaluated.
The use of the term ‘publics’ in this context requires some clarification.
These leaders may seem the very opposite of public: few speak in large Taalibe
Baay meetings held in streets and public squares, many do not even address
their own daayiras’ outdoor weekly meetings, and only senior daughters of
Baye Niasse are occasionally recognized by the government and news media as
religious leaders. Yet their domestic spaces become ‘internal public spaces’
(Cooper 1997a) in which disciples assemble to learn about and discuss reli-
gious and other matters. Muqaddamas use such spaces to move into or influ-
ence ‘external public spaces’, for example, organizing daayira meetings and
conferences or running Qurʾānic schools and large Islamic institutes. Women’s
relative absence from the visible publics of religion and politics stems not only
from their relegation to more private roles but on their exclusion from the
male-dominated inner spaces—‘hidden publics’—such as patronage networks
on which those visible public spaces depend (Beck 2003). Male religious lead-
ers often receive male guests and plan public events in their bedrooms but
meet with women only in their courtyard or larger receiving room (for a prec-
edent, see Niyās [Ñas] 1993a, 111). Thus, the categorical association of men
with public and women with private is not as straightforward as it sometimes
seems. Yet women leaders’ general absence from exterior spaces has concrete
consequences: despite growing awareness of their existence, many Taalibe
Baay still know little about them and assume that they do not (or should not)
initiate disciples as men do.
Before discussing a specific example of how contemporary Taalibe Baay
women present and exercise religious authority, the next two sections outline
some of the historical conditions in which they are operating, including
Fayḍa’s origins, women’s long but hidden history of participation and leader-
ship, and the movement’s rapid urban growth, which has more recently led
women to take on more visible leadership roles.
Women in the ‘Flood’ (Fayḍa): Universalizing Mystical Knowledge
Although accounts of the Fayḍa’s history, both within Taalibe Baay circles and
in the academic literature, tend to name few or no women, women have a long
history of appointment as muqaddams and of largely hidden leadership. Only
since the 1990s and especially since 2000, however, have women openly led
daayiras and been generally known as spiritual guides. Contemporary women’s
increasingly visible leadership has been facilitated both by contemporary con-
ditions and by specific teachings and actions of the Fayḍa’s founder, Shaykh
Ibrahim (Baye) Niasse. First, Baye popularized mystical knowledge, promising
any disciple, male or female, religious specialist or non-specialist, to have per-

sonal, mystical knowledge of God. Additionally, he appointed many women
as muqaddamas, even though few disciples are aware of these women’s appoint-
ments and Baye himself seems to have thought it more proper not to speak of
them openly and to protect pious Muslim women from the public gaze. This
section briefly outlines Baye Niasse’s complex approach to women and reli-
gious knowledge and authority, and the following section outlines conditions
that set the stage for contemporary women’s more visible leadership.
In 1929 in the village of Kossi Mbitéyène near the city of Kaolack, twenty-
eight-year-old Ibrayima Niasse, announced to his small group of disciples that
he had inaugurated the Fayḍa, or ‘Flood’ of Divine Knowledge, an event pre-
dicted by the founder of the Tijānī Sufi order.15 Through a new and relatively
quick process of tarbiya, or mystical education at his hands or through one of
his muqaddams, the Fayḍa promised to enable all disciples, male or female, to
attain a direct, mystical knowledge (maʿrifa) of God without a lengthy textual
or mystical apprenticeship (Hiskett 1980; Gray 1998; Hill 2007a; Seesemann
2009). As a junior son of El-Hadj Abdoulaye Niasse (d. 1922), the preemi-
nent Tijānī leader in Saalum, Baye’s claim to be the Khalīfa of the whole Tijānī
Sufi order, a position superior to his elders, led to a rift in his family and their
disciples. Additionally, the Fayḍa raised controversy wherever it reached,
largely because disciples often entered a state of jadhb (ecstasy or insanity)16—
a loss of self-consciousness as one is overpowered by an awareness of God—
and pronounced apparent blasphemies such as ‘I am God’ (Hiskett 1980;
Seesemann 2004).
Yet it is precisely this promise of universally available, direct, ecstatic, mysti-
cal knowledge of God that has attracted millions of disciples worldwide.
Meanwhile, Baye’s erudition and eloquence in Arabic prose and poetry
appealed to religious elites and safeguarded the movement’s reputation as more
than a popular charismatic movement. Until recently the Fayḍa had spread
little within Senegal beyond Baye Niasse’s home of western Saalum (see Hill
2007a for an explanation). It fared much better abroad, first reaching Mauri-
tania, then Northern Nigeria and other parts of Sudanic Africa (Paden 1973;
Hiskett 1980; Seesemann 2004, 2000). While the most eminent muqaddams
still tended to be (almost always male) Islamic scholars, a particularly dedi-
cated disciple of any social background could now reach a high level of spir-
itual knowledge and be given a formal appointment (ʾijāza) as a muqaddam.
Women’s access to the kind of lengthy textual education typically required
of muqaddams was and remains limited. Not only did families most often
compel girls to leave school earlier than their brothers to help with housework
or marry (still a common pattern), but girls could not leave the protection of
their home to participate in the itinerant religious education that was gener-
ally a prerequisite to becoming a religious specialist. Baye Niasse set the unu-
sual example of supporting women’s education by having all his daughters
memorize the Qurʾān and classical texts of Islamic pedagogy alongside his
sons, although they generally left their formal studies around the time they
married (generally in their late teens) while their brothers traveled to Morocco
or Egypt for their secondary and university education. His attention to his
daughters’ education was unheard of at the time: daughters of Senegalese
shaykhs had scarcely been required to learn more than a small part of the
Qurʾān (Ṣamb [Sàmb] 1979, 39). His disciples have in part followed his exam-
ple: nearly all Taalibe Baay girls in Senegal study the Qurʾān for some time,17
although few have studied Islam to the degree of his senior daughters, and
many still face family pressure to drop out of school early.
Thus the Fayḍa’s appeal to most women was not so much Baye’s emphasis
on women’s textual education but his offer of a relatively short path to mysti-
cal knowledge without textual prerequisites. Women of all backgrounds could
pursue mystical knowledge—and occasionally religious leadership—alongside
their domestic duties. Moreover, like spirit possession practices across Sudanic
Africa (Boddy 1989; Masquelier 2001; Kenyon 2007), dreams and ecstatic
states (ḥ āl) allowed women, within certain bounds, to flout rules of feminine
decorum.
As today, the movement’s initial growth was driven overwhelmingly by
youth. Baye Niasse’s first muqaddams were his peers and juniors. The most
widely repeated oral and written accounts, which list only men as the first
tarbiya initiates (for example, Ñas n.d.), omit the fact that, as the Fayḍa began,
Baye Niasse assigned a childhood friend, Ibra Fall,18 to initiate any women
who asked for tarbiya. Fall’s son El-Hadj Abdoulaye Fall reports that Ibra Fall’s
first initiates were Baye Niasse’s mother, Astou Diankha followed by three of
Niasse’s wives. After initiating a string of five other women, Ibra Fall refused
the tenth. Baye Niasse had initiated only five at this point, he reasoned, and
since Islamic law weighs two women’s testimonies against that of one man,
initiating ten would rival his leader.19 Although this story only represents the
Fayḍa’s opening moment, it suggests that the Fayḍa initially attracted twice as
many women as men.
After this point, however, there were no restrictions on the number of
women initiated or on who could initiate them. One interviewee, Ummi Géy,
described walking to Kossi against her husband’s orders to be initiated by Baye
Niasse himself.20 Although women were not allowed to leave home without
their husband’s permission, families that accepted the Fayḍa excused these
women retroactively as following God’s will and not their own. Many women
returned to their villages to play leading roles in the religious community—
organizing meetings, recruiting new disciples and either working in fields
whose harvest was dedicated to Baye or staying home to cook meals for those
engaged in such work.
Baye Niasse’s many statements on women consistently affirm their spiritual
equality to men while insisting on Sharīʿa’s strict separation and distinction
between men and women in worldly matters. A 1941 fatwā (legal opinion)
declares that muqaddamas can initiate both men and women but also forbids
women from shaking male disciples’ hands and even suggests they should not
see one another during instruction—restrictions not typically followed today
([Ñas] 1969, 159). Nearly all the muqaddamas we interviewed cited a line
from his poetry (generally translated into Wolof ): ‘Oh daughters, vie [with
men] to attain the loftiest places, but not in material things’.21 Elsewhere in
the same work Niasse explains that he receives unrelated women only during
public visiting times because women are the ‘world’s ruination’ since their
allure destroys many learned men (Niyās [Ñas] 1993a, 111). Other poems
similarly uphold women’s potentially high spiritual level despite seclusion in
the domestic realm and the fact that silent worship is preferable for them over
chanting aloud (for example [Ñas] 1969, 131; Niyās [Ñas] 1993b, 87). Taken
together, Baye Niasse’s sayings and actions suggest a complex outlook toward
women: they should preferably be kept from public view, partly to avoid
potentially destructive contact with men, yet in spiritual matters they can
attain the same stations as men. By insisting that his own daughters seek
advanced learning—albeit while staying at home rather than accompanying
his sons to study in Cairo or Morocco—and taking them with him on pil-
grimage, Baye Niasse demonstrated a commitment to women’s religious and
intellectual development under close supervision. Like Islam’s foundational
texts, Niasse’s double-edged teachings have lent themselves to a range of posi-
tions regarding women.
Throughout his life Baye Niasse appointed many women as muqaddamas,
of whom only his daughters are well known, and many disciples I spoke with
were quite certain that Baye never intended even them to act as spiritual
guides. These daughters include Faatumata Zaara, Maryaama, Umm Kalsuum,
Umm al-Khayri, Roqiyata (‘Yata Baye’), and Nafisatu (‘Nafi Baye’). Many
other daughters and granddaughters have appointments from others. The
elder daughters married to muqaddams generally refrained from giving tarbiya
during their husbands’ lifetime, citing respect for their husband’s senior posi-
tion as a muqaddam much as junior muqaddams in villages do.22 Yet today all
of Baye Niasse’s muqaddam daughters whom I met give tarbiya to men and
women, except Faatumata Zaara because of her failing health. Nearly all also
head daayiras or federations of daayiras, appoint muqaddams, host students
from West African countries, and tour these same countries. Several run inter-
nationally known Islamic schools.
While it is beyond this article’s scope to discuss Baye Niasse’s daughters in
detail, it is important to mention that, even if formal titles such as khalīfa are
reserved for senior sons, senior daughters are still recognized in many (often
hidden) ways as the highest authority. Shaykh Hasan Cissé, Imam of the
Medina Baye mosque from 1982 until his death in 2008, was by far the most
prominent global Tijānī leader despite not bearing the title of Khalīfa. His
renown stems largely from his outstanding erudition and leadership skills, as
well as his father, Baye Niasse’s spiritual heir Aliou Cissé. Yet although Aliou
Cissé had older sons through other wives, Shaykh Hasan was Faatumata Zaara
Niasse’s oldest, and it is certainly no coincidence that this uniquely influential
Tijānī was Baye Niasse’s oldest child’s oldest child. Shaykha Marième Niasse’s
status as Baye Niasse’s oldest child in Dakar also suggests that seniority trumps
gender. Shaykha Marième describes herself as Dakar’s highest Taalibe Baye
authority despite her younger brother Baaba Lamin’s official title as the family’s
Khalīfa there. Not only did some disciples confirm this verbally but I saw
many cases where disciples around Dakar approached her as a uniquely beloved
and esteemed leader. While neither of these women is formally appointed as
the highest authority, both suggest that many disciples approach them as the
highest bāṭin authority nonetheless.
Baye Niasse appointed many other muqaddamas as well. In interviews,
Roqiyata Niasse and Shaykha Marième Niasse listed several, both rural and
urban, Senegalese and Nigerian, some of whom they knew gave tarbiya and
others who apparently did not. What all these women share is that their
appointments were generally hidden, even to many who knew them. Perhaps
most controversial, several credible informants reported that Baye Niasse
appointed four muqaddamas in the village of Darou Mbitéyène, probably dur-
ing the early 1940s.23 These women, we were told, actively gave wird and tar-
biya to women and organized sikkar meetings. Subsequent interviews in Darou
Mbitéyène produced contradictory statements. Some elders affirmed these
reports during one interview24 but later25 denied that the women had been
formally appointed. It appeared that they had conferred between interviews
and decided not to repeat this unusual story about women leaders.
While the available testimony regarding these early women is limited and
contested, their described roles are consistent with roles Baye Niasse would
have observed Tijānī women playing elsewhere. In 1937, Baye performed his
first pilgrimage and met a group of Tijānīs residing in Medina who had already
appointed muqaddamas to lead the Tijānī women there. During this eventful
pilgrimage, this same group appointed a Nigerian woman, Hajiya Maymunatu
Iya, part of the entourage of the Emir of Kano Abdallahi Bayero (Hutson
1999). The Emir and his entourage quickly became disciples of Baye Niasse
(Paden 1973; Loimeier 1997), and Hajiya Iya thus became the first Nigerian
muqaddama affiliated with the Fayḍa, although she was neither the first nor
the last Tijānī muqaddama in Kano (Hutson 1999, 2001, 2004). Like the
described Darou Mbitéyène women, Northern Nigerian and Saudi Arabian
muqaddamas led in segregated women’s spaces. Appointing muqaddamas
in these places did not move women into men’s places but allowed them to
study and worship apart from men. Baye Niasse’s early writings encourage the
gender segregation and seclusion he observed among Tijānīs in Northern
Nigeria, Mauritania,26 and Saudi Arabia but that have never been common
in Senegal.
Yet possibly because of his general policy of going along with locally accepted
practices wherever possible, Baye Niasse made no sustained attempt to imple-
ment within Senegal the longstanding practice in Northern Nigeria of having
women instruct other women in texts and Sufism. Largely due to strict gender
segregation, women’s religious leadership and scholarship within women’s
spaces are far more established in Northern Nigeria than in Senegal, especially
in cities like Kano and Sokoto (Mack n.d.; Boyd and Last 1985; Boyd 1989;
Sule and Starratt 1991). Senegalese women only began to act as spiritual
guides more openly when the Fayḍa became an urban movement there as it
had long been in Northern Nigeria.
The Fayḍa in Dakar: Creating Spaces of Religious Authority
Women’s rising visibility in the Fayḍa is connected to global developments

that have increased public awareness of Muslim women as both subjects and
objects of discourse. From Islamists to secular activists to Western heads of
state, every side holds Muslim women up as a ‘barometer’ of civilization (Deeb
2009); ‘saving’ them even became a pretext for the United States military inva-
sion of Afghanistan (Abu-Lughod 2002; Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002).
International institutions (United Nations programs, the World Bank, and
the International Monetary Fund) have allied with state policies, local non-
governmental organizations, and the news media to place women at the center
of development policies (Klenk 2004; Rathgeber 1990; Razavi and Miller
1995), especially since these institutions have shifted their focus to local
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) since the 1990s.27 West African
Islamic leaders have founded NGOs that focus significantly on women’s
issues—education, maternal health, domestic abuse28—and organize regular
conferences on such topics as ‘Women, Islam, and Development’. Several
crises since the 1980s related to structural adjustment, most concretely felt in
the 1994 devaluation of the West African CFA Franc, have robbed male
household heads of prestige as youth and women surpass them in education
and earnings (Mustafa 2001, 2006; Perry 2005, 2009). Transmigrant men’s
absences leave women back home with more prominent roles (Buggenhagen
2004), while transmigrant women, who often earn authorities’ trust and
therefore travel more easily than men (Bava 2000), gain prestige by contribut-
ing financially to kin networks, religious leaders, and religious associations
back home (Evers Rosander 2004). In this context, Taalibe Baay women lead-
ers have found wide acceptance in Dakar.
More particularly, youth flooding into Dakar from smaller towns and vil-
lages have turned to the Fayḍa to provide a new urban community and sense
of moral order as they venture outside their families’ social and religious net-
works. This has created a large demand for leaders to guide these youth. It is
perhaps no coincidence that, like the Fayḍa, Islamic reform movements in
Senegambia began in the 1930s (Loimeier 1994, 1996, 2000; Gomez-Perez
1998) yet have only become highly visible and popular since the 1990s (Augis
2005, 2009; Janson 2006, 2008). While reformist movements and the Fayḍa
have often presented themselves as antitheses (in other parts of Africa long
before in Senegal—see Hiskett 1980; Loimeier 1997; Seesemann 2000; Kane
2003), their shared concern with universalizing religious knowledge, cultivat-
ing individual piety, and involving women have made both popular with
newly urban youth. A number of Taalibe Baay muqaddams in Dakar had been
active in the reformist Jamāʿat ʿIbād ar-Raḥ mān (Ibaadu) before entering the
Fayḍa, including two women we interviewed, Maam Jaara Buuso Daraame,
who was born to a Murid family, and Adja Moussoukoro Mbaye. Despite
contrasting conceptions of religious knowledge and authority, both kinds of
movements offer a sense of community, individual fulfillment, and intellec-
tual stimulation to urban youth. Like Sunnite reformists in Dakar (Augis
2005), Taalibe Baay hail from diverse educational and social backgrounds,
although they are most concentrated in suburbs with a high proportion
of immigrants from other regions of Senegal, such as Parcelles Assainies,
Géjawaay, and Pikin.
From my initial research in Senegal in 1998 to my most recent visit in
2010, I have seen the Fayḍa change its reputation from that of a provincial,
allegedly low-caste ‘brotherhood’ generally called the ‘Ñaseen’ (on the Ñaseen’s
disputed ‘blacksmith’ caste origins, see Seesemann 2004, 2009; Hill 2007a) to
that of a highly dynamic urban movement. The Fayḍa’s public presence in
Dakar has depended not only on numeric growth but also on plugging into
the nation-state and the mass media as other Sufi groups had done long before
(Hill 2007b). It has also involved myriad acts of publicity by disciples and
daayiras. Reproduced images of Baye Niasse and other Taalibe Baay, once rare,
have become ubiquitous, and Taalibe Baay cassette reproducers have set up
market stalls alongside those of competing Sufi groups. Some of Senegal’s fore-
most rappers have become Taalibe Baay and praise Baye in their most popular
songs. When walking through a suburban neighborhood at dusk, I now often
hear the distinctive Medina Baye tonality of the Tijānī waẓīfa, something
I rarely heard previously. Many disciples reported hearing such meetings and
going back later to find out more about them.
Many of the daayiras I visited in Dakar’s suburbs were ethnically mixed
youth groups of mostly recent urban immigrants, especially Pulaar speakers
from the Senegal River Valley and Wolof and Serer speakers from Saalum
(where the Fayḍa was born but has historically been a minority). Most had
undergone tarbiya at some point within the previous two or three years, often
shortly after arriving in Dakar. In such an environment, there is a great demand
for a large number of muqaddams to initiate the many young people entering
into the Fayḍa. The rate of muqaddamas’ appointments correlates directly with
the Fayḍa’s urban growth, with several appointed in the 1990s and new
appointments accelerating since 2000.
Additionally, cities disentangle religious specializations that in villages are
combined in a single leader, allowing non-traditional categories of people to
act as muqaddams. Baye Niasse established a practice in villages of assigning a
single shaykh to represent him and to act as an all-around religious authority,
a status normally passed on to his sons. Other muqaddams I met in villages
refrained from acting as spiritual guides to show respect for this shaykh. In
Dakar’s more flexible space, one needs only an ʾijāza and, ideally, direct or
indirect authorization of Baaba Lamin Niasse to act as a spiritual guide. In
many neighborhoods, many muqaddams operate without any sense of
encroaching on one another’s territory.
Thus a confluence of factors has led to both an acceptance of and demand
for women’s religious leadership in Dakar. As women cultivate and exercise
religious authority in this setting, they confront paradoxes such as making vis-
ible pious qualities of interiority and submissiveness. The following section
builds on a single ethnographic vignette to illustrate how women use rather
than challenge prevalent gender distinctions as they perform the roles of pious
women and religious authorities.
Making Hiddenness Visible: Sayyida Zeynabou Mbathie
After the late afternoon prayer (ʿasr, tàkkusaan) a research associate and I vis-
ited with Sayyida Zeynabou Mbathie and her husband, a white-collar bank
employee, as a string of young men and women came through her receiving
room to greet her before heading back out to the street, where other young
people had begun to spread several large woven plastic mats for the Friday
ḥ aḍra (group litany). The youngest Taalibe Baay muqaddama I have known,
thirty-five-year-old Sayyida Zeynabou Mbathie describes herself as working
‘two jobs’. Her day job since 2007, when a friendly jinne (spirit) began visiting
her, has been to mediate for this jinne to perform divinations and to cure prob-
lems, mostly caused by less friendly jinnes. Her second job came six months
later (although not directly connected), when Baye Niasse’s Khalīfa in Medina
Baye, Ahmad ‘Daam’ Niasse (d. 2010), signed and sent through his son an
ʾijāza appointing her as a muqaddama. She describes the jinne as a close friend
and benefactor. He not only personally teaches her how to cure people but
advises her on how to run her daayira, and even bought her a house in Medina
Baye and in Dakar so that she could serve her growing number of disciples
and clients without inconveniencing the rest of the family.
After conversing with us for a few minutes, she stretched her hands out
palms up (the motion one makes to ‘accept’ [nangu] a prayer) and asked her
husband to pray for us before we all joined the disciples outside. Conven-
iently, this street in Dakar’s middle-class Derkilé neighborhood was under
construction, and a large pile of sand blocked cars from interrupting her
daayira’s street meeting. A larger-than-life portrait of Baye Ibra Fall, the legen-
dary disciple of the rival Murid Sufi order, overlooked the meeting place from
a nearby wooden kiosk. A couple of young men were busy running an exten-
sion cord from inside her house to an amplifier in the middle of the seating
area as several others attached two conical, gray loudspeakers to nearby electric
poles. Several youth wore the daayira’s uniform: lime-green cotton trousers
and a short, white xaftaan (robe) with an image of a mosque and the name of
the daayira, ‘Chifa Al Askham’29 (‘Healing afflictions’), stenciled in green on
the back. Those without uniforms wore similarly colored outfits, and all the
women have draped their heads and shoulders in flowing, white scarves.30
Around fifteen men sat in a rectangle around the edges of a large mat. The
muqaddama’s husband sat at their head on the east side, where he would need
to be when it came time to lead the sundown prayer. The women, roughly
equal in number to the men, sat in a smaller section facing east toward
the men’s circle. Sayyida Zeynabou sat at their front and center. Whereas in
other ḥ aḍrahs I have attended men have closed a circle with women sitting
outside, in this case they left the west side open so that their leader could face
into the circle from the women’s section. She motioned her husband to begin
leading the ḥ aḍra (because women lead neither ḥ aḍra nor prayer), and all
joined in chanting the litany, counting off each short prayer formula on their
prayer beads (kurus). Meanwhile the sound men tweaked the sound level and
speakers’ direction to minimize microphone feedback, then passed the micro-

phone between several male disciples to carry the chants through the neigh-
borhood. The chant tune distinguished this Taalibe Baay meeting from those
of other branches of the Tijānī order. Finishing the Friday ḥ aḍra just before
sundown, the men formed lines behind Sayyida Zeynabou’s husband and the
women behind them for the prayer. Following the sundown prayer, the par-
ticipants resumed their places for the second litany, the waẓīfa, which disciples
are to be recite as a group every evening. A nearby street lamp dimly lit the
meeting as the sky quickly blackened.
Following the two litanies, two male sikkarkats (chant leaders) led a core
group of men in sikkar (from dhikr Allāh or ‘naming God’), repeating
‘Lā ʾilāha ʾillā Allāh’ (‘There is no god but Allāh’) and ‘Allāh’ interspersed with
Baye Niasse’s poetry praising the Prophet Muḥammad. A leader called a slow,
sustained sikkar into the microphone then held it out to several other men,
who rocked back and forth as they called back the leader’s tune. Not long after
they began chanting, a woman discretely arrived and sat next to Sayyida Zey-
nabou, dressed not in the daayira’s colors but in a multicolored Mauritanian-
style malaffa, a wrap that covers all but the face and hands and obscures the
body’s form. Over the past two or three years Aïda Faye, a childhood friend of
Sayyida Zeynabou, has become the biggest superstar of the Taalibe Baay sikkar
circuit. In addition to being the first woman to become a widely known Taal-
ibe Baay sikkarkat in Senegal, Aïda Faye received an appointment as muqadd-
ama from a son of Roqiyata Niasse one year ago. Although I had never met her
before, her voice had been a daily presence through my friends’ cell phone
ring-tones, portable MP3 collections and boom boxes.
Aïda Faye bowed her head listening as the men led the chant for nearly an
hour, after which they handed her a microphone. She spent the next two
hours alternating with—and at times engaging in virtuosic contests with—the
male sikkar leaders. Between melismatic sikkar and staid Arabic poetry, she
sang more syncopated Wolof praise songs for Baye composed by his early dis-
ciples, eliciting calls of appreciation (ëskëy!) from the audience. Her eyes
remained closed throughout, her penetrating voice echoing throughout the
neighborhood yet her face vacant as if she were somewhere else. Minutes into
Aïda Faye’s chant, a young man entered a state of jadhb (ecstasy or insanity),
leaping up, screaming and thrashing about fiercely. Several other men use all
their force to hold down the majdhūb (one experiencing jadhb, literally, one
who is seized or dragged along) to prevent injuries, and a woman brought a
cup of water for the men to give the majdhūb. One by one, several young men
and women went through the same state, and on several occasions the same
man who had mustered all his calm and strength to hold down one disciple
Figure 2. Sayyida Aïda Faye (with microphone) chanting sikkar with Sayyida
Zeynabou Mbathie (right) and female disciples.
suddenly became the majdhūb. Only occasionally have I witnessed so many

people exhibiting such powerful states (ḥ āl) in weekly daayira meetings,
although Sayyida Zeynabou had told me before the meeting that this was
what usually happened when she and Aïda Faye share a meeting.
Shortly before midnight, Aïda Faye culminated her chanting with an inter-
pretation of a rousing Mauritanian sikkar as many disciples chanted along. She
then gave a short speech thanking Baye Niasse (repeating several times ‘jërëjëfee
Baay Ñas! ’—‘thank you Baye Niasse!’) and apologizing to the neighbors (sev-
eral of whom had been watching attentively from their windows) for the dis-
turbance and the length of the meeting. This was one of the very few times
I had heard a woman either lead the sikkar or directly address a Taalibe Baay
meeting. Her gentle, friendly tone sounded less like that of the typical impas-
sioned male orator than that of a gentle young mother. After a short speech
from the male daayira president, Sayyida Zeynabou gave the closing speech,
speaking almost inaudibly as a male disciple positioned himself at the edge of
the women’s section to relay her words through the microphone. The very
few other women I have heard address Taalibe Baay assemblies have similarly
spoken through an animator (jottalikat). Directly addressing my research
topic, she discussed how Islamic law (Sharīʿa) introduced the idea of women’s
equality ‘in the visible’ (ci zaahir), and how the deeper reality of Islam abol-
ishes the very distinction between men and women ‘in the hidden’ (ci baatin).
She then had a male disciple ‘seal’ the meeting by reciting a prayer in Arabic.
Any observer could see that the two leading figures in this meeting were
Zeynabou Mbathie and Aïda Faye. The latter was the most powerful voice
during the chanting, even if her speaking voice was gentle, and was the first
speaker, while the former was the final and longest speaker. Several who arrived
after the meeting had begun made sure to kneel and bow their heads to greet
her before taking their seats. Yet both women also engaged in many rituals of
deference and self-effacement, which ultimately served as indexes of piety,
thereby enhancing their moral authority. Throughout the meeting, both
women navigated in multiple ways between the shown and the hidden, the
public and the private, society and the domestic sphere, restraint (kersa) and
assertiveness. Rather than merely steer a middle course, they played up the
tensions between these opposites, shaping their outward image through behav-
ior that presented itself as inward-looking, restrained, and submissive.
In numerous ways Zeynabou Mbathie demonstrated her submission to her
husband as master of the house: she asked him both to pray for us visitors
rather than pray for us herself as a religious figure normally does for all visitors,
and then to lead the congregation in prayer and the litanies. On previous visits
when her husband has been absent, she was always sure to have us greet him
over her cell phone, fulfilling the religious obligation to seek a husband’s con-
sent to talk to other men. However, despite her rituals of submission, she was
clearly the one delegating, and attendees doubtless perceived his more visible
position as deriving from her more subdued position. She managed the meet-
ing in other ways while remaining properly enclosed, asking a male disciple to
pray for the congregation at the end of the meeting and then speaking almost
inaudibly through an animator. By orchestrating a highly visible meeting
heard throughout the neighborhood without anyone hearing her voice, she
demonstrated that restraint is power. Her silent message about empowering
women through Islam was heard through the animator and seen through the
meeting as a whole.
Her choice to speak through an animator could only be understood as a
performance of this notion of silent piety and self-effacement as power and
nobility. This requires a brief explanation of oratory, gender and status in Sen-
egal. Traditionally in Senegal, a person of high status must always speak with
restraint (kersa), with neither high volume, speed nor pitch. To address an
assembly while maintaining restraint, one must speak through an animator of
lower status, whether by age, class, or birth—often a géwal (praise singer or
‘griot’) (Irvine 1989; Heath 1990; McLaughlin 1997). Men have typically
been the ones delivering the speeches that an animator then transmits pub-
licly, since most speeches are made by the public representatives of a family or
religious group. Yet the animator’s role is no longer essential to religious ora-
tory. First, a microphone can stand in for an animator, carrying a subdued
voice to a large audience (Irvine 1974; Heath 1990), although many senior
male leaders still opt to perform kersa by speaking through an animator. More-
over, the old rules of kersa are often suspended in today’s religious meetings. If
a high-status Islamic leader speaks with forcefulness and wide dynamic and
tonal range, a skill some of Baye Niasse’s sons are famous for, this underscores
not a lack of kersa but the importance of the message.
If men’s kersa sometimes binds them to address a public only through medi-
ators, in religious contexts, women’s kersa more often leads them not to address
the public at all or to address them in such an indirect way that they appear
not to be addressing. Just as forms of sartorial covering serve as ‘portable seclu-
sion’ that mediate women’s presence in public spaces while maintaining their
‘mystery and remoteness’ (Papanek 1971), various kinds of non-sartorial veils
mediate Taalibe Baay women’s addresses to their publics outside their homes.
It is important to remember that in many contexts practices of women’s seclu-
sion and veiling have marked a family’s social and economic distinction
(Papanek 1971; Tucker 1993; Cooper 1994, 1997b). A certain degree of seclu-
sion and veiling is common among women from clerical households in Sen-
egal, and many disciples understand these practices as ideals for pious women
even though few practice them. Going further than the handful of women
I had seen speak quietly and through an animator, when Baye Niasse’s daugh-
ter Ndey Aïda organized a conference in Kaolack in 2010 on women in Islam,
she remained in her seat as a younger brother read a statement she had written.
Although one could perceive her as subordinating herself to him by staying in
the shadows while he represented her publicly, as her jottalikat he was actually
assuming a less prestigious position. Many muqaddamas directly address small
groups of disciples in their home but decline to speak outside in larger gather-
ings, instead assigning disciples or male relatives to speak on their behalf.
When I asked them why none of them gave a moral or religious explanation;
most answered that they were simply uncomfortable speaking in public.
However, Baye Niasse made a number of statements suggesting that he
more or less accepted the view, widespread throughout the Muslim world, that
a woman’s voice is part of her ʿawra, or that which—like her body (aside
from her face and hands)—should be veiled from the public. For example, he
writes that while women can be given all the secrets of Sufism and that a
woman who truly knows God is the same as a man. Yet he also suggests that it
is more beneficial for women to perform dhikr silently ([Ñas] 1969, 129-31).
Although Baye Niasse did request that girls at his Islamic Institute in Kaolack
speak at their demonstrations in front of foreign dignitaries,31 the only woman
I have heard of speaking in a public religious meeting in his presence is his
daughter Roqiyata.32 As a counterexample, several interviewees described a
wife of Baye Niasse who was a gifted sikkarkat but only performed for Baye in
his bedroom.
When I asked his daughter Roqiyata whether Baye Niasse considered a
woman’s voice ʿawra, she said, ‘There are some who say so’, then responded
with an ambiguous story. While traveling in Sierra Leone with her husband
(Ma Abdu Niang, a major muqaddam of Baye), she was introduced to a large
group of people who wanted to convert to Islam. She addressed the gathering
despite some local clerics’ protests that a woman’s voice was ʿawra. On her
return, Baye told her that she had done the right thing, because the good deed
of guiding a group of people into Islam certainly outweighed any sin. While
to some this story might suggest that women must not speak publicly unless
some compelling reason outweighs the sin of doing so, Roqiyata Niasse has
since given dozens of public speeches in Medina Baye and around the world.
In a movement where personal religious narratives take the form not of per-
sonal whims but of inexorable callings, women are increasingly defending
their speaking and acting in public as part of a mission. Zeynabou Mbathie
describes both herself and Aïda Faye as carrying out missions that Baye Niasse
personally gave them, saying that in matters of God ‘there are no men, there
are no women’. Another described Baye appearing in a dream and telling her
to found a daayira and what to name it.
An overwhelming tendency among Taalibe Baay women leaders is to insist
that a woman’s voice is not ʿawra while acting as if it were, suggesting that
those who veil their voices do so not as a moral imperative but as a perform-
ance of restrained piety and kersa. Considering Sayyida Zeynabou’s confidence
and eloquence when speaking inside her house before numerous non-relatives,
one cannot say that she lacks the confidence to speak publicly or believes that
a woman’s voice must be concealed as part of her ʿawra. Rather, her confident
display of silence and use of male intermediaries to represent her to the public
served as part of a public performance of a proper Muslim woman’s demure
piety and withdrawal from worldly affairs. Sayyida Zeynabou thus amplified
conventional notions of feminine interiority and submissiveness to heighten
her spiritual authority and mystique.
Of course, publicly performing submissiveness can augment one’s moral
authority only if one already has sufficiently high status that such acts appear
as optional acts of piety and not as obligatory acts of subservience. Submissive-
ness can exemplify what Bourdieu (1991) calls ‘condescension,’ a disavowal of
the very hierarchies from which one benefits in a way that enhances one’s sta-
tus. The legendary models of feminine piety widely known in Senegal are
those of the mothers of saints, who are celebrated for their absolute devotion
and submission to their husbands. Murids say that the mother of Amadou
Bamba Mbacké, Maam Jaara Buuso, was asked to hold a wooden beam by her
husband, who then forgot to tell her to stop holding it and left her standing
all night in the rain (Augis 2005, 314). Pape Amadi (‘Baye’) Diouf ’s popular
song praising Baye Niasse’s mother Astou Diankha gives little concrete bio-
graphical information about the holy woman, instead listing qualities that
could describe any pious woman: ‘She never fought and never harmed him
[Baye] . . . she had no use for sitting around complaining. . . . she never yelled
or laughed out loud. . . . Ever pure for her leader [husband], she never left
without permission. . . . May every lady imitate her’ (Diouf 2004). Drawing
on such models, Zeynabou Mbathie consecrates acts of wifely submission as
acts of piety before God, using submission to God’s ẓāhir prescriptions to
reveal a contrasting bāṭin truth. To count as pious humility rather than abase-
ment, such acts must be perceived as a choice made by someone who could
have set herself above everyone else.
When I asked Zeynabou Mbathie to explain why, if women were equal in
Islam as she insisted, they do not lead prayer, she lowered her voice and said:
You know, in the Fayḍa of Shaykh Ibrahim, if we were to talk about, as they say, the
‘bāṭin,’ it would be a bit surprising. But we keep the best behavior, in that we follow
Sharīʿa and take women and place them behind [in prayer]. Because Sharīʿa has placed
women behind. . . . That’s how we make it [our behavior] beautiful [taaral ], how we
give it a pleasing form [rafetal ]. But it’s not something that women can’t do [leading
prayer]. Everything that a man can do, a woman can do too. . . . A woman, if we are
talking about the true, true, true, true ‘reality’ [ḥ aqīqa]—God—truly—a woman can
be Imam. Because once you’ve gone to the point of hitting your chest and reaching
God, there is no man or woman there.
Here Zeynabou Mbathie explicitly describes adherence to Sharīʿa, God’s

prescribed laws of correct Islamic practice, as a performance of distinct roles
that God has commanded despite the fact that distinctions are on a certain
level illusory. This is not to say that gender roles are a merely superficial
performance—like Adja Moussoukoro, Zeynabou Mbathie elsewhere
described such roles as necessary for cultivating piety and society’s function-
ing. Instead, she uses a technique common in Taalibe Baay discourse to main-
tain two apparently contradictory truths simultaneously (Hill 2007a): gender
distinctions are an apparent (ẓāhir) truth while absolute equality is a hidden
(bāṭin) truth.33 This opposition and its analogs, such as sharīʿa (God’s law) and
ḥ aqīqa (mystical reality), pervades Taalibe Baay orations and routine discus-
sions touching on religious values. While ẓāhir truths are no less true than
bāṭin truths, their juxtaposition always favors the hidden truth. Thus Zeyna-
bou Mbathie describes gender distinctions—a ẓāhir (apparent) truth—as a
means to an end but lack of distinction—a bāṭin (hidden) truth—as an end
in itself.
This juxtaposition of acts of submission and their deeper meaning suggests
that authority requires not only a pious disposition but also the successful
performance of a role through which such a disposition takes on meaning. All
Sufi leaders confront the paradox of having to show enough to be recognized
without being perceived as ‘showing oneself ’ (wonewu), ‘lacking shame/
restraint’ (ñàkk kersa), or being a ‘person of appearances/the world’ (nitab
zaahir). Any deliberate show of piety risks appearing as the opposite of piety
(Niasse [Ñas] 1998; Soares 2004). Both male and female muqaddams’ author-
ity depends on recognition of their ability to educate disciples about hidden
(bāṭin) truths, yet those perceived as actively publicizing their access to hidden
truths are regularly castigated as false Sufis. Many muqaddams, male and
female, emphasized their own silence regarding their spiritual gifts, saying
they unexpectedly received an ʾijāza (appointment) but remained silent until
God brought someone to them and made their calling appear ( feeñal).
Muqaddamas face this paradox doubly, facing higher standards of kersa
and self-effacement than men. Whereas a man might show kersa by not appear-
ing to show himself, a woman will more likely show it by appearing to hide
herself. The question, then, is not merely how much to show but how to show
in such a way that denies that one is showing—how to perform an act of
not showing.
Many Taalibe Baay muqaddamas approach this paradox as a potential
advantage. Mobilizing the consonance between the hidden nature of Sufi
knowledge and the interior dispositions of the pious woman can be an alchem-
ical act consecrating a self-effacing and submissive woman as an icon of Sufi
knowledge and authority. Moreover, as Adja Moussoukoro’s remarks in the
introduction show, equating spiritual guidance with motherhood can natural-
ize women’s leadership in terms of spiritual birth and nurturing. Adja Mous-
soukoro contrasts women leaders’ nurturing disposition to some men’s
tendency to neglect disciples’ spiritual progress after tarbiya, which is like ‘giv-
ing birth and throwing away’ the child (‘jur rekk sànni’). Women’s great power,
she says, derives from their ability to shape others into moral or immoral
beings: ‘One good woman can make a thousand men; a bad woman can ruin
a thousand men’.34 Adja Moussoukoro’s equation of the domestic space of
birth and nurturing and mystical education is not a mere figure of speech.
Mothers with parenting experience easily transition to guiding young people

from within their domestic space, and many prominent male muqaddams
regularly refer disciples to them for tarbiya.
Disciples commonly refer to muqaddamas and other esteemed women by
the title meer bi (the mother, from French), suggesting both affection and filial
respect. Even the most formidable woman leader of the Fayḍa, Shaykha Mar-
ième, the only one known in formal settings as Shaykha, is most commonly
called Yaay-bóoy (Mommy) or, for additional respect, Sayyida Yaay-bóoy
(Lady Mommy). Rather than bristle at their inability to transcend the mater-
nal role, muqaddamas generally welcome this association, assimilating new
spiritual leadership roles with the leadership roles women have always had.
Although they perform tasks typically reserved for men, muqaddamas do not
act as if obtaining power requires breaking into a male sphere or transferring
power from men to women. Instead, they approach power and influence as
something inherent, although perhaps latent and hidden, in their God-given
roles as women (Altorki 1977; Barnes 1990).
Conclusion
I have not attempted to evaluate whether Taalibe Baay muqaddamas are effec-
tively resisting the structures of patriarchal domination, a question that most
of these women would surely find meaningless. This is not because they con-
sider liberal notions of equality to be foreign impositions—indeed, many use
liberal language to debunk claims that Islam oppresses women and to describe
Islam as the true path to women’s liberation. Despite speaking of gender equal-
ity and liberation, none hinted at overthrowing patriarchal structures or tak-
ing power for women. Rather, they depicted power and authority as things
that God has given women as well as men. The question was how to cultivate,
present, and exercise it.
Although religious authority affects each woman differently, it is still pos-
sible to make a few observations about the implications of women’s religious
authority for the muqaddamas themselves and their disciples. A glass-half-
empty argument might point out that appointing women as muqaddamas
does not reflect women’s promotion to previously male roles as much as the
creation of a new category of leader—male or female—needed by the central
(largely male) leadership to initiate large numbers of youth and to act as coun-
selors to these youth’s daayiras. This might imply a devaluation of the title
‘muqaddam’ accompanying the popularization of Sufi knowledge, while the
role of what colonialists called ‘grands marabouts,’ who act as political brokers
between disciples and state authorities (Villalón 1995; Robinson 2000), has
almost always remained a male role. Indeed, many Taalibe Baay shrugged off
talk of muqaddamas, saying that anyone can be a muqaddam these days and
that only an elite few—generally highly literate men closely connected to Baye
Niasse—really mattered. Furthermore, although muqaddamas frequently
speak of equality and liberation, they most often prescribe a more or less patri-
archal practice of Islam as the best way to bring such goals about. They do not
oppose men being the head of the house—every car must have one driver, the
say, and every country one president. The married majority went to great
lengths to demonstrate their devotion to serving their husbands.
However, their description of bāṭin realities behind these ẓāhir appearances
must not be dismissed as mere mystifications. Just as the community agrees on
who bears the title of Khalīfa even as other leaders often exercise considerably
more influence than the Khalīfa, muqaddamas acknowledge their husband as
the household head even though most are far better known and more influen-
tial outside the household than their husbands. A woman’s social capital out-
side the household cannot fail to affect a muqaddama’s status within the
household. One muqaddama, whose husband was later appointed as a
muqaddam, is a high-ranking member of the Fédération Ansarou Dine encom-
passing all Dakar Taalibe Baay daayiras. While she makes sure she performs
the requisite rites of wifely submission, it is no secret that she is far more influ-
ential in the Fayḍa than he is, a fact that does not seem to bother him. In
short, Sayyida Zeynabou Mbathie’s suggestion that women’s wifely submis-
sion is a performance—a true and socially necessary performance, but one
that contrasts with a deeper truth—is consistent with many powerful women’s
self presentation.
At times Taalibe Baay women seem to ‘bargain with patriarchy’ (Kandiyoti
1988), maneuvering from a position of relative weakness within a given set of
constraints. Wifely submission is not a mere act but can require significant
compromises. However, in certain circumstances, acts of submission and self-
effacement can bolster moral authority. Muqaddamas use established gender
norms to reverse the hierarchies these norms often uphold, accentuating the
equivalence between submission and ‘Islam’ (submission in Arabic), interior-
ity and hidden knowledge and motherhood and spiritual leadership. Partly
because most of them have been appointed by and depend on male leaders,
muqaddamas do not openly challenge the overwhelmingly male-dominated
Islamic institutions. Yet like male muqaddams I interviewed, many trace
spiritual knowledge and legitimacy partly to otherworldly sources, whether
jinne, visions of Baye, or dreams. Several—for example, Zeynabou Mbathie
and another woman in Medina Baye who called her neighbors to come wit-
ness Baye’s appearance in her bedroom—were appointed after reporting such
miracles. These sources provide alternative narratives of religious authority

that only partially depend on the movement’s hierarchy.
By naturalizing ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘equality’ as the application of
uncontroversial Islamic principles, Taalibe Baay muqaddamas join a diverse
group of voices presenting Islam and its foundational texts and practices as
fundamentally feminist (see, for example, Wadud 1993; al-Hibri 1997, 2000;
Ali 2003, 2006; Badran 2005). These women refract both liberal and Islamic
traditions through their hybridized conceptions of equality and piety, experi-
menting with new ways of thinking about and modeling liberation in Islamic
and Sufi terms.
Acknowledgments
This article would not have been possible without the help of Alioune Seck, Cheikh Baye
Thiam, Abdoulaye Niang, El-Hadj Abdoulaye Bitèye and other Medina Baye Research
Association members. Thanks to Thomas Gibson, Emil Homerin, Anthea Butler, Ruediger
Seesemann, Richard Payne, Andrew Conroe, and Omolade Adunbe, Mark Westmoreland,
John Schaefer, Amy Holmes, Agnes Czajka, Marwa Ali Sabbah, Sarah Michelle Leonard,
Adeline Masquelier and many others for their comments. Many thanks to Kamari M.
Clarke, Joseph Errington, Eric Worby, and Leonardo Villalón for their insights and sup-
port. Stages of this research were funded by Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research
Abroad and Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellow-
ship grants. Its writing was supported by fellowships at the University of Rochester’s Fred-
erick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies and the American
University in Cairo. Above all, thanks to all the Taalibe Baay women and men who so
generously shared their stories with me and my collaborators.
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Notes
1. Throughout this paper, I distinguish non-English terms through different typefaces:
Wolof, Arabic. Wolof transliterations follow Centre de linguistique appliqué de Dakar
(CLAD) conventions. Notable differences from English: the letter ‘ŋ’ is pronounced like
‘ng’ in English; ‘c’ is pronounced like ‘ch’; ‘ñ’ is pronounced like ‘ny’ (as it is in Spanish); ‘ë ’
is pronounced like the ‘u’ in ‘put’; ‘x’ is pronounced like ‘ch’ in the German ‘ach’; ‘q’ is
similar but more guttural.
2. Both students, Cheikh Baye Thiam and El-Hadj Abdoulaye Bitèye, are members of
the Medina Baay Research Association, on whose collaborative research this article is based.
Abdoulaye Niang and Alioune Seck also accompanied me on relevant interviews.
3. Taalibe Baay constitute a major branch of the larger Tijānī Sufi order, a branch often
called ‘Tijāniyya ʾIbrāhīmiyya’ in Arabic. Outsiders in Senegal usually call them ‘Ñaseen’
(‘Niassène’ in French), which roughly means ‘of the Niasse family’. Taalibe Baay generally
prefer ‘Taalibe Baay’ or ‘Ahl al-Fayḍa’ (‘People of the Flood’) or ‘Jamāʿat al-Fayḍa’ (‘Associa-
tion of the Flood’).
4. I founded the Medina Baay Research Association along with fifteen Taalibe Baay in
2004 while conducting doctoral dissertation research in Kaolack.
5. Hutson (2001, 736) is confident that she identified all the contemporary female
Tijānī muqaddams in Kano. Among Taalibe Baay in Senegal, this seems impossible given
the private and often sensitive nature of appointments.
6. The 2002 census counted 93.8% Muslims, of which 94.9% (89.0% of the total
population) identified themselves with a Sufi order. 50.5% of Senegalese Muslims (47.4%
of all Senegalese) identify as Tijānī (République du Sénégal 2002).
7. A ‘khalīfa’ (‘successor’ in Arabic; Wolof: xalifa) is the formal representative of a reli-
gious family, either as a whole (bearing the title ‘khalīfa ʿĀmm’/‘Caliphe général ’) or over a
region. The ‘general’ title almost by default goes to the founder’s oldest surviving male descend-
ant, although some Sufis (including Baye Niasse) have appointed non-relatives as their spir-
itual heirs, leading to ambiguity about this successor’s and their own sons’ relative status.
8. In this paper I use ‘reformism’ to designate literalist movements, including both
Islamist/Salafī-style movements that ultimately seek an Islamic state and Islamic daʿwah
(preaching) movements such as the Tablīgh Jamāʿat for whom this is not explicitly part of
their program.
9. Scholars have glossed kersa variously as ‘honor’ (Heath 1990; Buggenhagen 2009b),
‘restraint’ (Heath 1990), ‘docility’ (Buggenhagen 2004), ‘reserve’ (McLaughlin 1997),
‘sangfroid ’ (Irvine 1995).
10. I gloss jottalikat (literally ‘one who hands on’) as ‘animator’ because it precisely fits
the role of animator described by Goffman (1981) and also because Senegalese often use
the French word ‘animateur’ (‘presenter’) to designate someone leading or presenting to an
assembly.
11. ʾAdab is not an easily translated term, but as an attribute it can be translated ‘good
morals’, ‘good behavior’ or ‘etiquette’, and the transitive verb ‘ʾaddaba’ can mean to disci-
pline, punish or chastise. Shaykh Hasan Cissé translates ʾadab as ‘discipline’ in the line
describing how one is to perform the wird (Niasse [Ñas] 1998, 19).
12. Cissé’s translation of ‘ʾakhā tawāḍuʿ’, literally ‘a brother of humility/lowliness’.
13. Sayyidah (Arabic: a noble woman): A title for a woman of high spiritual rank. I use
the Arabic spelling for this and other Islamic titles because it is widely recognized as an
Arabic term and its pronunciation is not standardized in Wolof, where its most common
pronunciation is probably ‘Zeydaa’, the ‘s’ being changed to a ‘z’ as an overcorrection for
Wolof ’s lack of native ‘z’, and the last vowel being elongated.
14. This is a pseudonym due to the personal nature of the account.
15. ‘Fayḍa’ is a rare feminine form of the word ‘fayḍ ’, which can mean ‘overflow’, ‘abun-
dance’, ‘flood’, or ‘effusion’ and is common in Sufi literature. In the Tijānī Sufi order,
it refers to an event foretold by the order’s founder, Shaykh ʾAḥmad at-Tijānī. For expla-
nations and alternative translations of the word ‘Fayḍa’ in connection to Baye Niasse’s
movement, see Hiskett 1980 and Seesemann 2009.
16. Literally, ‘being pulled along,’ i.e. by something outside oneself, this term can carry
the meaning ‘insanity,’ ‘ecstasy,’ or ‘possession.’
17. The surveys we conducted in Islamic schools in the Kaolack area showed approxi-
mately two thirds of students to be boys, suggesting that they study the Qurʾān on average
longer than the girls. While around a third of the boys lived lived in the school away from
their families, none of the girls did (Hill 2007a, 5).
18. Not to be confused with the most famous Murid disciple of Aamadu Bamba Mbacké
of the same name.
19. Interview with Ustaaz El-Hadj Abdoulaye Fall, Mbuur, 27 July 2009.
20. Her name is a pseudonym, For her more extended story, see Hill 2007, 155-56.
21. ‘Yā ʾayyuhā al-banātu zāḥ amna ʾilā nayli l-ʿulā, ʾammā bi-ʾabdānin fa-lā’ (Niyās [Ñas]
1993a, 115). Female muqaddams generally rendered this passage ‘You women, compete
with men!’ (‘Yeen jigéen ñi, nangeen rëjrëjloo/buuxante ak góor ñi! ’), then continuing illus-
trating the second part with examples of worldly things of little value to women.
22. Sayyidah Maryaama Niasse listed this as one reason, and the current imam of
Medina Baye, Shaykh Tijānī Cissé, said the same of his mother, Faatumata Zaara.
23. Two early disciples from the village, El-Hadj Bitèye and his wife Astou Thioub,
discussed these four women in several interviews with Younoussa Thiam and me in 2004.
In 2009, Abdoulaye Niang and I separately interviewed El-Hadj Bitèye shortly before his
death.
24. In interviews with Abdoulaye Niang in Darou Mbitéyène in March, 2010.
25. I interviewd the same elders with Abdoulaye Niang again in June, 2010.
26. Britta Freda (personal communication) has identified many Mauritanian Tijānī
muqaddamas, both inside and outside the Fayḍa, some of whom gave the wird to other
women and occasionally to men, yet none acting as leaders of groups.
27. The ‘Women in Development’ paradigm dominated international development cir-
cles in the 1970s. Yet this association between women and a country’s development became
much more hegemonic at a local level worldwide during the mid-1990s, when the World
Bank shifted its emphasis to local level NGOs directly addressing the ‘human development
index’.
28. Cheikh Hassan Cissé’s African American Islamic Institute is a prime example (see
Renders 2002).
29. A local Romanization of Arabic shifāʾ al-ʾasqām.
30. I have noticed a growing number of similar daayira uniforms—typically involving
Islamic green—since 2005.
31. Interview with Jéynaba Géy, Kaolack, 2009.
32. Interview with Arabi Ibrahim Niasse, Dakar, 21 July, 2009.
33. This opposition pervades Senegalese Sufi culture more generally (Allen F. Roberts
and Mary Nooter Roberts 2000, 2002; Buggenhagen 2008).
34. This saying seems to echo the saying by the poet Sanāʾī that, for the same reason,
‘a good woman is better than a thousand men’ (qtd. in Schimmel 2003).

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Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 375-412 brill.

‘All Women are Guides’: Suﬁ Leadership and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/157006610X540735

Dakar, Kaolack and other Senegalese towns, often accompanied by Senegalese

accelerating growth during this period has created leadership opportunities,

Islam, Authority and Women’s Agency

Muslim women’s religious agency has gradually become a central question in

exorcism over possession in the name of Islamic orthodoxy (Lambek 1981;

toward men and God—has required scholars to ‘parochialize’ the feminist

2001a, 2001b, 2005). Approaching the habitus as a malleable object of disci-

Women in the ‘Flood’ (Fayḍa): Universalizing Mystical Knowledge

any disciple, male or female, religious specialist or non-specialist, to have per-

The Fayḍa in Dakar: Creating Spaces of Religious Authority

Women’s rising visibility in the Fayḍa is connected to global developments

Making Hiddenness Visible: Sayyida Zeynabou Mbathie

speakers’ direction to minimize microphone feedback, then passed the micro-

suddenly became the majdhūb. Only occasionally have I witnessed so many

Here Zeynabou Mbathie explicitly describes adherence to Sharīʿa, God’s

Mothers with parenting experience easily transition to guiding young people

miracles. These sources provide alternative narratives of religious authority

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