Abdal Hakim Murad – Ahmadou Bamba Paradigms of Leadership
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AI: Transcript ©
Perhaps what we're seeing is an unusual example
of a fully traditional
style of Islamic scholarship and spirituality
that can actually cope with, the rigors
of,
foreign occupation
and the challenge of modernity.
It
seems
to
work.
Fraternal encounters that we've been having at, Cambridge
Muslim College over the last
few years when we ponder
in a way that is,
real rather than just theoretical,
the implications
for our current situation
of
the,
classical legacy which produced not just books,
but also men and women.
The actual outcome
of this civilization of books, this civilization of
scholarship
is the proof
which comes about when human beings demonstrate in
their own luminous lives,
the
beauty of the prophetic example.
We always teach things at CMC or we
seek to
with the holy prophet alaihis salatu sallam in
mind.
What is fiqh after all, but,
faithfully
resourced and transmitted
art of prophetic compliance.
Ultimately, an exercise
in sorting out good practice from
ego practice
and identifying the good practice with the way
of the chosen one.
Sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
And we've noted in the course of these
paradigms
lectures the
unity that exists in the diversity of this
Ummah and its various storied
figures,
women as well as men,
people from the east, people from the west,
converts,
born Muslims,
educated people, not so educated people,
scholars,
warriors.
It's a
diverse image of what it is to be
an exemplar,
perhaps a better word
more congenial to our tradition than,
leader,
which has a slightly, sort
of, management science
feel to it.
We're looking for those who are following the
leader who is Uswatoon Hassana,
an excellent example.
To lead in Islam is to be led
by the chosen one, sallallahu
alaihi wasallam. And whether one person follows you
or no people follow you or millions of
people follow you is not quite the point.
The point is
overcoming the lower self,
conforming oneself to the way of the ultimate
leader who is the chosen one, alaihi salatu
as salam.
Now this is not an academic talk, but,
let's just begin with
a reflection on some recent statistics.
Some of you will have noticed that the
media was buzzing with reports on the religious
changes which are happening
in the United Kingdom.
Last year's census
data have been crunched,
and lo and behold, the latest tranche of
data to be uploaded from the Office of
National Statistics
indicates that we're in the middle of a
massive religious
transformation.
Decline in some senses, but in other ways,
transformation and uplift.
The Christian population
is now less than half
of the total population of the United Kingdom
for the first time since the 5th century.
Right now, we're living through that
13%
decline since the previous census in 2011.
Other religions seem to be holding their own
or
spreading their wings, and
many journalists have furrowed their brows at the
fact that most Muslims are quite complacent about,
which is that the Muslim population, it seems
to have grown by about 40%.
We're now somewhere around 4.54,600,000,
probably more if you include people who weren't
there on census night. It was after
all
the pandemic
and things were strange.
So we have to think, and CMC tries
to think,
what this means,
this huge transformation and being here in what
was once a thriving church and now has
a dwindling congregation, but is now full of
Muslims,
Saracens,
Ishmaelites is perhaps a context to reflect on
this.
What kind of leadership is required
in order to lead this growing flock?
As well as the raia, there must be
a raia. As well as the sheep, there
must be a shepherd. Otherwise, the sheep
will do what sheep do,
either charging in an unthinking herd in whatever
direction instinct takes them
or doing not very much and we regard
both of those outcomes as potentially threatening. So
we need leaders.
What is Cambridge Muslim College? Training the next
generation of Muslim leaders.
But unlike some leadership programs which address the
Muslim community,
we try and develop paradigms of leadership that
are rooted in our culture.
Leadership is not culturally neutral,
it's very specific
and many of the existing leadership programs it
seems to me are drawing on managerial or
managerial
or ecclesiastical
or secular models of what it is to
be a leader of men and women and
importing that uncritically into the Muslim context, but
Muslim leadership is different.
Cambridge Muslim College is trying to create
Muslims that do not have a Western half
of their brain and an Islamic half of
the brain and are walking around in a
slightly schizophrenic state that have a single unified
brain, a single worldview
that is
apt to become
a leadership community.
That's the nature of the Ummah,
but at the same time, doesn't feel torn
between different ways of being Muslim or being
human.
In any case, one thing we've learned from
this journey through these paradigms is that there
isn't one single way of doing that,
but perhaps a thought that we can begin
with today is the thought that those who
are more recent
are likely to speak to us a little
more audibly
than those who are from a very distant
time.
Those who are from distant times, well we've
looked at several of them already in this
series,
but you have to decode their context and
try and take your mind in a time
machine to a very different place.
And the Ummah is after all an ongoing
story.
We are not just Sunni Muslims.
We are the people of Ahlus Sunnah wal
Jama'ah.
In other words, our interpretation
of the
unsurpassed
and unsurpassable
exemplar, sallallahu
alaihiwasallam,
is something that is faithfully handed on through
generations of scholars who pass it on through
the ijazah system, to more scholars, and so
on until it reaches our poor worm like
selves.
This is tradition.
That's the nature of scholarship. That's the nature
of what we do.
We don't try and get in some imaginary
time machine again and go back and see,
oh, this is the sunnah.
No. The sunnah is what it has been
interpreted as being in the purest way by
the best scholars down the centuries. And that
means that the more recent the scholar and
the more recent it gets, the more relatable
it becomes,
as a general rule.
So the scholar that we're looking at today,
scholar,
saint that we're looking at today,
is somebody who is from not our lifetime,
but one of his honored descendants has come
from Senegal and is with us today, and
we're really delighted and humbled that so many
of the the the honorable Murid brotherhood could
be with us today, and we'll be sharing
some casedas at the end of this
presentation.
Is from the 19th century, the early 20th
century, when modernity is beginning to impinge on
the traditional Islamic world and certain solutions are
found
in the tradition
that are purely authentic within the tradition and
don't represent some kind of strange hybrid
that isn't properly modern and isn't properly Islamic
either.
One of the things we might want to
bear in mind as we go through this
sometimes quite dramatic even harrowing story
is the extent to which modern Islamic leadership
by wittingly or unwittingly
modernizing, that is to say, westernizing itself,
has not proved adequate to the task. And
so many places in the Muslim world today
have a leadership deficit.
Either scholars who are stuck in their madrassas
and have no knowledge of what's going on
outside
or people who have reformed,
changed, rationalized,
or fundamentalized the religion in ways that again
seem to lead only to dysfunction.
So, let's begin with a thought then that
what we're looking at today
is a potential alternative,
an exemplary,
and still massively successful model
whereby a fully traditional
100%
classically formed
Islamic figure
can hold together his people in the face
of very extreme internal
and external threats
and produce,
generation
that produces another generation that leads to the
fluorescence which allows our brothers to be here
today, and more fluorescence insha'Allah in years to
come. It's a successful model
which deserves our respect and consideration
in a time where so much else seems
to have failed.
Sheikh Ahmad Abu Bamba is, of course, from
the west of the Islamic world almost further
west than we are here in England,
a long way from Medina,
but a place that has a very distinctive
Islamic heritage.
We don't have time to look at that
often glorious spectacular history
in detail, but it in detail, but it
does help to set the scene,
to understand
what is going on as the Europeans start
to impinge upon the traditional
lifestyle of the people of West Africa.
The story of Islam in Africa, of course,
is coterminous with Islam itself. The first Hijra
was to Africa not to Medina.
The early prophet alaihis salatu sallam says
to his
companions when they go to Egypt, you'll find
people with dark skin and crinkly hair and
you should honor them because they are the
relatives of Hajar.
Where is she buried?
The African matriarch
in the Hajar next to the holy Kaaba.
No other African in history has been honored
like that. Hardly any other person in history
has been honored like that. With her son,
Ismael, according to Azraqi and all of the
historians, that's a kind of
indication
of Islam's later
African
extension.
We have an African matriarch
who gives us the sai
and zam zam and that great story.
We have
a biracial patriarch,
her son Ismail
alaihis salam who introduces and spices that African
possibility into the whole Abrahamic story.
The holy prophet alaihis salatu wa sallam is
very aware of this. Honor them.
And then you have the actual reality of
Muslim history, some of it trading, some of
it conquest, some of it just conversion.
And you have the kingdom of Takror or
the lands of Takror emerging sometime the 11th,
12th century.
And if you imagine
that hardly anybody lives in the Sahara, you
go south of Sahara, you come into savannah
country. There's trees, there's dry grass, there's seasonal
rains. Some agriculture is possible, but it's a
bit marginal. And then beneath that, you get
the rainforests,
pretty impenetrable.
So Islam flourishes in that wide band that's
between
the Sahara Desert
and the rainforest to the south, and that's
approximately the land that the Muslim geographers call
Takror.
And,
the Maliki Madhab has always been predominant
there. This was cemented when the Murabiton,
the great Al Murabit dynasty, who we think
of of building those amazing things in the
city of Seville, far to the north, also
down as far south as the the Senegal
River.
They were staunch Maliki's
and the region has always been very devoted
to the madhab of Imam Malik,
Radiallahu an.
So the Murabiton
are there
and then you get further dynasties and then
you get the famous story of the
great African king Mansa Musa, who's a little
bit further east.
Remember, travel tends to be east west in
that area because to the north is the
desert, to the south is the rainforest,
to the east there's the Hajj. So that
tends to be the axis of communication and
we'll see how that
influences the evolution of this story today.
Mansa Musa in 13/24,
I think it was, did a really spectacular
Hajj. He's the King of Mali
and he spends some time in Egypt, and
everybody is quite amazed by his wealth.
They say he gave away so much that
the price of gold in Egypt started to
go down. People had never seen that before.
He goes, according to the historians,
with 70,000
followers,
on Hajj.
It's a very spectacular thing. Ibn Khaldun notes
him and says, well, he was a good
and a just king.
So it's already become not a marginal place
even though it's geographically far away, but a
center of very considerable civilizational
important scholarship and excellence. And it's Mansa Musa
who incorporates the city of Timbuktu into his
empire. He visits it on his way to
the Hajj and on his way back incorporates
it and founds the great Sankore University, which
is in all of the cities of the
Sahel, perhaps the best known and most ancient
of the great centers of Islamic
higher
learning. The building is still there,
along with the great mosque that, Nelson also
built there with the help of Andalusians
and a major civilizational
center. So it might seem to some of
us that we're looking at somewhere that's kind
of on the edges,
but it's not in fact. It's very incorporated
into the world of very mobile
traveling Islamic civilization,
and the scholars are scholars of a high
level.
And then the Europeans show up. The Europeans
first of all the Portuguese,
the first of the kind of troublemakers because
they bring the inquisition with them they're quite
fanatical,
really. So the Portuguese,
appear
in 14/45
on the coast of Senegal, and then there's
a tussle between the European powers.
The Dutch are there for a while, and
they occupy the island of Gore, which becomes
the great slave trading island for the Europeans
as they take Africans across the Atlantic. The
Dutch are there first, and then the British
turn up, and then the French turn up.
And what they find is this world
of the Sahel
where people are educated, but in a very
different kind of tradition and where there's a
kind of
balance sometimes disrupted but sometimes real between traditional
forms of religion,
Islamic forms of religion. It's kind of there's
local skirmishes, but it's not like Europe where
you have the walls of religion
and the reformation and great explosions
of religious hatred, a third of the population
of Germany
dying during this period as a result of
wars between different Christian factions.
So what
becomes known as Senegal is caught between
different
civilizational
spaces
and takes some time before it really catches
up, you could say.
So to the north, you have the scholars
of Mauretania, which is desert, and the scholars
are often nomads, but scholars of a very
high degree.
To the east you have Timbuktu,
Gao, and the other centers of learning along
the Niger River and then further to what
we call Sudan and
beyond, very high degree of scholarship there as
well, but to the south also there's a
region called the Futajalon,
which also has an impact in, the shaping
of Senegambia and Islam. This is a plateau,
a high mountainous region in what's largely in
what's now called the Republic of Guinea.
Sometimes they call it Africa Switzerland because it's
really high, so it's relatively cool,
agricultural
prosperous area and absolutely a citadel of Islam
for at least 600 years.
And the Fotojallon,
still famous for its scholars,
produces a class of olema called the jahankay,
who are Maliki olema with certain particular
dispositions. They tend to be relatively tolerant
of traditional religion and give people time in
order to complete their Islam.
A very tafsir focused,
they have a high degree of these it's
a very indulgent endogamous group, they marry amongst
themselves and it's kind of a caste.
They're very interested in spreading Islam to the
north and to the south.
They're generally not jihadists,
unlike some of the other Muslims in West
Africa at the time,
they're scholars,
and
engage in the jihad of the pen.
And, being just to the south of Senegambia,
of course, they have an influence as well.
After Seko Tore and his Marxists took over
in Guinea at the beginning of the 1960s
on independence, quite a lot of the Jahanke
and their descendants went into Senegambia, where they
continue to contribute to the religious mix there.
So Senegal to the north, to the east,
and to the south, you have these Islamic
citadels. It's not it's not really on the
edge and part of the story of Ahmed
Obamba is,
the story of finding ways which are compassionate
but successful of helping people over the watershed
between traditional pagan religion
and into his very kind of sunnah compliant
interpretation
of
Islam. So
the French end up becoming the preponderant
power
in what ends up being called,
Senegambia.
None of those borders, really make a lot
of sense locally. The predominant language in Senegal
is Wolof, but there's Wolof speakers in Mauritania,
some in Southern Mali, some in Northern Guinea.
It's the usual case of colonialists
putting borders in,
destabilizingly
wrong places.
And the French create a capital for themselves,
Saint Louis, which is today on the coast
in the north of, Senegal and to indicate
their intentions they name it after the most
famous of all French crusading kings, who is
given the title saint by one of the
Popes for his exploits,
during the Crusades. The town is still called
Saint Louis to this day, and it becomes
capital of what they call, French West Africa
and is quite, still quite a smart, sort
of, colonial town with a lot of old
buildings and nowadays
kind of being gentrified a little bit. Some
of the buildings are bought by foreigners and
locals and being done up, and it has
quite a kind of prosperous air to it
in many ways. Still, predominantly Muslim town these
days.
So,
San Luis is the capital and continues to
be so until
1902
and the French are there not just for
glory, but also for
money and along the Senegal River you have
the the cash crop that's the staple in
Senegal at this time, which is gum Arabic,
an ingredient of Coca Cola, so obviously
of great strategic significance nowadays.
They're still producing it.
So after various wars with the British in
18/14,
the the French finally establish their control and
start to move inland from the coast.
And inland they find a kind of patchwork
of smaller kingdoms. The large kingdom of Jolof
has just disintegrated and there's,
minor towns with their own kings and their
own rulers.
Some of them Islamic, some of them non
Islamic, some of them kind of halfway between
the 2. Usually the pagan kings would have
Muslim advisors, accountants, and so forth because they
could read and write, kind of rather strange
symbiosis.
And so it's in this time of the
decay of the old unifying political order that's
indigenous
and the appearance of the French coming in
from the coast with, mission civilatrice.
They saw themselves as,
pacifying the country.
It wasn't a war, it was a pacification.
That kind of colonial,
mindset was at work. And in the 18/53,
that's when our Sheikh, Sheikh Ahmed Al Bamba,
was born, in the village of Khurumbakeh.
And all of the events of his life,
key moments are still commemorated
and form parts of local pilgrimages to this
day in in Senegal.
Lots of stories, as you can imagine, of
him as a baby.
We're told how he liked to spend time
in the prayer room in the house,
how he always cried when he was in
a dunya situation, when people were talking about
worldly things. People could see from an early
time that this is obviously a child with
natural righteousness, and the family, the B'akhi family,
already
established scholars. So he was born into a
family of Elemer.
His his great grandfather, Mame Mara Mohammed Al
Khairi,
who's actually,
famous as the ancestor of quite a lot
of modern Senegalese,
Olamat,
was
somebody who in many ways establishes the family
tradition of trying to avoid rulers as much
as possible. This, as we'll see in this
story, is one of the key tensions
that the olema have to deal with, and
he also begins a tradition that becomes important
for Sheikh Ahmed Aubamba, which is the founding
of villages in this semi arid
region,
and this is of course facilitated the Maliki
madhab, like other madhabs,
has the principle of Ihia al Mawwat.
Ihiya al Mawwat basically means that as the
hadith says, man ahiya ardan mayita fahyala,
Whoever gives life to dead land
becomes its owner.
So in Sharia, if you go off to
the desert and there's nobody there, nobody's laying
claim to land and you start to cultivate
it after a few seasons, and the different
olema have different specifications for that, it becomes
your legal inalienable property in Sharia.
And this principle, which is prophetic,
has done a lot historically to allow,
the cultivation of hitherto neglected
wilderness
areas. It's a very practical incentive.
So, the sheikh's father, Muammar Antesali, and his
mother, Mamediara Bousso, are both scholars. That's a
tradition of female party and scholarship,
which continues. His father becomes a Qadi,
and also seems to be the first member
of the family
to have formally practiced the tariqaqadiriya,
and links,
himself to,
a Zawiya in southern Mauritania,
across the river to the north, and the
Mauritanian scholars are themselves. Their Qadiri lineage goes
back to Timbuktu to the Kuntar Qadiris of
of Timbuktu. So it's not to the north,
to Morocco as you might expect, but it's
kind of to the north, but then to
the east. That's the kind of deep
Sizzile or lineage that these people are being
transformed by.
And then his mother, whose nickname, who is
honorific to this day is still Jari'atullah,
our last female
servant, is,
from a famous family of Quran lovers.
It's even said in the tradition
that Allah loved her so much for her
love for his book that he gifted
her with,
this this faithful Quran loving daughter and that
becomes again, as we'll see, a key theme
in Senegalese Islam, which is very Quranic rooted
spirituality,
and and subsequently.
She's famous for the traditional virtues
hospitality,
tahajjud,
zuhud.
She's his first teacher.
She sings songs to him when he's a
baby, tells him the stories of the Awliya
and of the Seera and so on, but
she dies when, she's only 33.
This becomes one of the early,
watershed moments in in his life, very significant,
teacher that he had, his his mother.
And in fact her hometown, Porohan, is actually
kind of literally her town, she's called the
Queen of Porohan. There's a mazar there, there's
a second biggest pilgrimage in Senegal is to
her town,
and, it's kind of flourished in a very
classically Islamic way as
a place of of Barakah.
So the the child clearly destined for a
life of piety
and Qur'anic orientation
brought up with these
blessed parents, his early education follows the traditional
pattern which is focused on the memorization of
the Quran.
His uncle, Serene Mohammed Abu Boso,
teaches him the Quran in the traditional way,
which is the wooden lauch, and you write
the verses on it. And then when the
child has memorized the verses, you wash them
off and you write them again.
Things like books would not have been widely
available, certainly not for children's education at the
time.
Education through stories of the saints, always hugely
important in the upbringing of children in the
traditional Islamic world.
Studies with him, with a local imam, and
also many of the olamat who are based
in the towns there would also have a,
kind of, country house or a farm,
where they would go during the wet season,
where they would concentrate on the growing of
millet. It's a very, kind of, agriculturally based,
society. So very often people are, kind of,
migratory between the cities and and and the
hinterlands.
And on his journeys to the hinterlands,
he acquires a taste for Kalwa,
seclusion.
He kind of likes being alone
with his Lord
under a tree,
by a hill, in some secluded place that
he feels there's some kind of particularly
serene
presence,
this is what he loves.
At the same time, he acquires teachers,
not just from his father's Qadri, Tariqa, but
also from the the the Tijaniyah
and from,
the Sheydaliya who also spread in,
Senegal. One of the features of his way
is that it's kind of inclusive
of a range of
tawruk.
So an idyllic life
dedicated to God and to the Quran as
a young child, but the age of 8,
war comes.
Remember this is a very unstable kind of
region with rival rulers, with their militias,
often quite brutally raiding each other, carrying off
their livestock,
their families, and so forth.
And this is exacerbated by the fact that
the French on the coast are trying to
establish their
control of the hinterlands by backing some rulers
against others, sometimes deliberately inciting feuds to weaken
both sides, so the French can then go
in and and mop up
classic colonial
divide and rule policies.
In the middle of this, scholars often had
to decide which side to take.
Were you on the side of this king
or that king? The consequences could be quite
extreme, and as we've seen,
very often the olamat like to cultivate
the traditional virtue of detachment,
but sometimes if you're a Qadi, for instance,
it's not so easy to just ignore the
fact that ultimately you are part of the
the territory of a ruler.
Some of these rulers decide that this is
time for Jihad
either against each other or against the French,
and the famous president for this was,
Sheikha Martel,
who had, launched a large jihad against the
the French, which was defeated in 1857.
The natural instinct of any people confronted by
foreign occupation,
whether you're Ukrainian, for instance, or others, is
that you take up arms
and you fight against them. Problem is, of
course, the extraordinarily,
sophisticated
weaponry and sometimes the quite merciless techniques that
were deployed by the French.
Jihad, against overwhelming
odds,
is not allowed in Sharia.
So this is his childhood.
The French are appearing,
wars of conquest, destruction of villages, populations are
being expelled,
moved
around, French schools appearing in order to create
a local elite that the French can then
work with and work through. It's the mission
civilatrice,
the civilizing mission
of the French Empire, which by and large
is anti Islamic.
The usual view inculcated in colonial administrators was
that Islam is backwards, it's a fanatical force,
and it must give way to the superior
civilization
of France, which is based on science,
and
reason.
As Muslim authorities
weaken, some traditional pagan authorities, such as the
Soninke, who are down right in the south,
start to persecute or maltreat the, Muslim
villagers,
drinking openly,
scoffing at them,
beating them up and so forth, and taking
them from their land and giving them really
marginal bad land to farm.
So these individuals, these refugees, really, from their
homes, do start a jihad against the French,
led by somebody called Maba Jabbar,
and there's a major conflict.
The French send in their,
latest troops with the latest,
rifles,
and the jihadists
are massacred,
and
some of,
Ahmed Al Bamba's family are also killed, martyred
during this conflict.
His sister was sold into slavery and so
forth,
And many,
militant groups that have been kept in order
by the traditional balance of power between the
different kings are kind of released and become
marauding bands in the countryside.
One of these is the group known as
the Tiedo,
who are kind of a bit like the
Mamluks of the Middle East in that they
originate as slave soldiers,
owned by kings or major
landowners.
And some of them are nominally Muslim, many
of them are not Muslim, they are famous
for drink, they tend to behave badly with
women, they encounter, they're kind of,
ruffians
and part of the process
of spiritual pacification which Sheikh Ahmed Obamba,
launches later in his career in Senegal, is
to try and bring those very difficult people,
once their kind of aristocratic associations have been
done away with and the new French order
to bring them towards Islam. This proves one
of his biggest
challenges.
So
this,
jihadist movement,
forces the olamat to move from major centers
in Central Senegal,
Jollof, Baul, and so forth, areas around where,
Sheikh Ahmed Obamba is is is growing up.
To the main city of the Jihad is
Saloum. Ahmed Aubamba continues his studies, he's completed
his hifs, and then you have the, the
final,
massacre, 18/67.
Maba is killed and the French have consolidated
their control.
So you have the city, Salom, where you
have these, as it were, refugee olema of
different orientations. One of the things about the
life of the sheikh is that is quite
open to the different tendencies and understandings
present in, Sahelian Islam.
One of the big arguments is, of course,
the validity of jihad
as opposed to some kind of scholarly persuasion.
What was the chance of succeeding when the
French have got modern artillery
and grapeshot,
and most of the mujahideen
are armed with bows and arrows and swords,
what what should be the strategy?
In the same town of Salom there's a
range of tariqas, there's tijanis, kaldris,
and also an interesting group,
you can see them on YouTube, the Layen
Brotherhood.
Senegal's small, smallish country that has a lot
of interesting internal Islamic differentiations.
If you drive north of of Dakar,
on a Friday morning or a Saturday night,
just before Jum'ah,
you can, see some of the most amazing
thikr you'll ever encounter in the main mosque,
which is kind of on the beach in
this fishing town. And they're all fishermen and
their dhikr is the kind of thing that
they would be doing while they're rowing oars,
hoisting,
hay sails and things. Very beautiful sounds and
everybody is dressed in white and,
another interesting thing about these Senegalese movements is
they, they conserve relics of French compromises
with local local sovereignty.
So that town of Yough is technically not
fully part of the Republic of Senegal, but
it has its own laws
and,
it's dry of course, no alcohol and so
forth and it's an interesting kind of module
within the larger
Senegalese
state. But these are not followers of Ahmed
Rubamba, this is Lion Brotherhood.
They all have the same name, Lai, which
is incredibly confusing. I mean, on one hand,
you're not embarrassed by forgetting people's names.
It's also a bit confusing. Anyway, I went
there. It was a beautiful place on the
beach.
So, 1868,
another Jihad starts,
this time,
under somebody who seems to be making Mahdist
or Messianic claims for himself from the Tijani
side of things,
and Ahmed Aubamba's father is the Firk adviser
to this new king, and that's one reason
I think why the subsequently always,
throughout his life, suspicious of Ahmed Aubamba, because
his father has been the chief mufti of
this,
rebel group.
So in this time he moves to the
city of Khayur,
by the age of 20 he's moved into
higher education, tafsir, baidawi,
and so forth, more advanced texts, strong emphasis
on on Arabic.
He writes a, a book, Mullahib al Qutuz,
which is a commentary
aqidah work, Umar Barahin of Asa Nusi,
starts to give fatwas
works with his father as his kind of
katib or his scribe.
And clearly now beyond the stage of,
education and moving into the realm of teaching
himself.
Then you have another of the kings, a
certain Lat Dior changes side, supports the French
against this rebel Jihadist, Ahmed Auba, and you
have,
the bat Battle of Sambasadio,
which is at, where the French actually defeat,
once again, the Jihadists.
On all sides, there's cynical alliances,
treachery,
is a very unstable and ugly world and,
as usual, in war zones, it's the weak,
who suffer the most.
Now Ahmed Aubamba in the midst of this
has
taken the traditional fiqh position
that the scholar is better off distancing
himself from rulers,
And in particular he is telling
Muslim rulers,
that they need to be freeing
Muslims who they've enslaved
in these internecine
conflicts
and that,
gets him into trouble. So,
La Dior
summons him saying, who is this trouble making
jurist who's telling me what to do? And
he refuses to attend his court,
saying the ruler should visit the scholar
and the scholar should not visit the ruler.
Ahmed Obamba is also, it seems at this
time, reminding his father that this is the
best policy, he shouldn't be associating with rulers.
On one occasion, he apparently left a little
note to this effect underneath his father's pillow.
It's a very polite society, and directly confronting
your father would not be possible, but this
has
been recorded.
This time he marries his brother's widow,
Fati Jatore,
which cements his connection to the family.
The next milestone is at the age of
30 in 1882,
when his father is dying,
and his father entrusts the Mbake family
to him.
And the Janaza is
obviously an event that attracts a large number
of people
and in the time before Internet
gatherings such as that were an opportunity to
make an announcement
and to get the word out on something
important.
And here he publicly
declares
his belief that one should not associate with
rulers.
So he says at the janazah, it is
not my custom to keep company with rulers.
I look for no help from them. Allah
alone is the one to whom I look
for the granting of honor.
This is pretty badly received. The Wolofs are
generally polite
and discreet people,
and this kind of frankness is
disconcerting, so he writes to King La Dior
and says, an alim in a king's court
is like a fly eating impurity.
The king doesn't like this too much.
And he retreats, he goes off into the
savannah on Kalwa
and here he develops
another aspect of his spirituality which is a
very close spiritual connection to the Sahaba,
particularly
those Sahaba who refused to associate with fitners
of any kind,
or to associate with with rulers.
18/83,
he leaves for 8 months,
visits various olellah and awliya, attains
Ijazas,
and, Al Hajj Kamara in Saint Louis gives
him Ijazah to be Muqaddam and hands him
the ritual turban and staff of that role.
He goes to a sheikh Sidiyeh, who is
in Mauritania,
who is from that line of Qadir is
connected to the Quntas of Timbuktu.
Here he finds many manuscripts, he's able to
improve his learning because educational standards are pretty
high in
Mauritania,
is also initiated into the shared villa, and
is making very considerable
spiritual
progress.
He gets back, and by now there's tensions
between King La Dior, who is annoyed, and
the French.
In 18/86,
Ahmed Aubamba and La Dior supposedly meet and
it's said that La Dior actually repents at
that meeting.
Ahmed Aubamba tells him to lay down his
arms and to stop fighting
suicidally
against these overwhelming
odds.
That Dior ignores him and dies in a
battle, and the French now are able to
occupy
the interior of Senegal
and destroy the traditional court structure, the traditional
matrix of society, the tiedoor, these kind of
samurai warriors of the courts.
And
in the midst of this chaos, Ahmed Ol
Bamba goes back to his birthplace, Mbake Ba'ul.
So, Senegal is really kind of devastated at
this time, there's smoking towns and women have
been abused,
and a lot of people have been taken
into slavery. The French thing is very
arrogant and difficult to deal with, so he's
looking at a kind of ruined country.
And as part of his strategy for rebuilding
this post Jihad landscape,
he creates what he calls Da'iras.
Da'iras is like a zawiyah or a settlement,
where religious teaching
can take place. And each one is named
after one of Allah's beautiful names, so Da'iratul
Qutuz,
Da'iratul Qafur,
Da'iratul Manan, and so forth. Each one is
named after one of the names, and in
each of these little colleges,
there's 3 stages of education which he calls
Tarbia,
which he calls Tahlim,
Tarbia and Tarqiya.
And I did want to share with you,
we've got time
some of his amazing poetry because his words
are going to have
more impact than mine
They say, Biddikri Him 10zilor Rahma.
By mentioning these people,
mercy descends.
That's why I said this is not an
academic encounter if you are orienting yourself towards
the fragrant memory
of 1 of the men of Allah then
some of that barakah will insha'Allah not escape
you.
And so on. What he's saying in this
poem
and his form of instruction, basically, in this
pre internet world is by composing
easily memorized
poems in a simple meter.
Why is it in Arabic? Because Arabic is
the kind of language
that unites the Muslims of Senegal.
There are so many different local languages.
So here he's saying,
according to the olema,
knowledge
divides into external
and internal knowledge, and there's a secret in
this which has been concealed.
The outward knowledge is that which correct actions,
and the inward knowledge is that which corrects
states.
And the first
is known by the name of Fich,
and the second is known by the name
of Tasawwuf.
Tasawwuf.
And then,
the student should always put firkh before tasawwuf.
This is a obvious obligation.
Whoever
is guilty of neglecting the Fiqh will be
destroyed in this dunya according to the olamah,
And whoever is neglectful of the second,
shall be destroyed in the next world.
That is the decree of the almighty.
So a a very classical understanding
of the relationship between
Zaher and Barton.
And this,
informs his, famous
educational
reforms.
So he's trying to deal with this shattered
landscape,
with this
policy of planting little colleges and lodges
everywhere.
And another feature of these da'iras is that
quite often they're in quite remote places, they're
settlements,
that he's establishing
on the basis of this Ehiya al Muwat
sunnah principle,
and so he encourages the students to spend
much of the day in khidma
and also in cultivating
crops,
particularly ground nuts and millet.
18/85,
he moves from Mbake
Baol to Dar es Salaam, just to the
north with his brothers and 200
disciples,
and is joined,
by some defeated
unemployed warriors,
refugees,
people who are fleeing from the Frenchification
of the schools and looking for something authentic
and Islamic.
During this time, he says that he is
looking for
his special place, which he is already calling
Tawba.
What's the meaning of Tawba? He's looking for
a place, nobody's heard of it, they don't
know what he's talking about. Well, even the
origin of the name it sounds as if
it's the Tawba tree in paradise,
Sidratul Muntaha.
There's a certain
verticality
and
sheltering,
associated with the Mi'raj
that,
makes a tree a kind of holy place,
but he's looking. And another of the things
that has come down to us in his
writing is that he's very interested in sacred
geometry and geomancy
and
the spiritual luminescence
of landscapes
This is something that,
spiritual souls have always perceived.
Native Australians are amazed
by Uluru, and they're right. Muslims are amazed
by Mount Uhud, they're right. Some of the
Nakshbandis in this country like to visit certain
places in the countryside
of particular
spiritual intensity. So that's why there's an Aqshbandi
Zawiya in Glastonbury, for instance. It's something Muslims
traditionally did
to intuit to a kind of tafaros
a particular spiritual,
potentiality
in certain particular places. So he's doing this,
he's looking for his place. It's not gonna
be necessarily the place of his birth.
All kinds of stories,
some of them no doubt legendary about how
he was beset by hyenas and lions as
he wandered through the the the the wilderness
looking for this place.
And then an angel tells him, when he's
on his journeys, to retrace his steps,
and he finds a tree and he prays
under the tree hoping for guidance,
And then he says afterwards during his sedge,
he experiences an incredible flash of divine luminosity.
This is the year 18 186,
and that place is now the site of
his famous mosque, which is said to be
the largest mosque in Africa, and it's a
amazing place.
And he makes his famous Du'a al Khabir,
his great Du'a. By thy bounty, by the
name of he who guided me to you,
oh, holy prophet,
I petition you to make this a place
of purity and peace.
And visitors to the city of Torba,
wherever they come from, if they have a
particular spiritual sensitivity, do notice the very strong,
sort of, prophetic fragrance of the city,
which you can also find in, for instance,
the Dala'il Khairat recitation in in Marrakech. There's
a few place where the distinctive
fragrance of the Mostafa is particularly,
imminent.
So in his famous poem about this Motl
Bil Fawzaine,
and so on.
So it's like a dua in this poem.
And make this place of my residence
a place of forgiveness
and of guidance
and of knowledge and of your approval.
An abode of sincerity,
truthfulness,
scrupulousness,
an abode of sunnah
that is,
free from bidah,
and make it constantly a place of learning,
and a place of thought
and the acquisition of knowledge,
and a place of guidance and instruction
and a place of correction
and of the inculcation of understanding.
It's a little bit like the famous,
Duat for Makkah in the Quran,
oh Allah make this
city a place of security and serenity.
But this is a really remote place. It's
kind of nowhere where he's had this experience.
There's nothing there except a little well. If
you go to Torba now, one of the
things that visitors like is to visit the
the well, Birarama,
the well of mercy.
Otherwise,
there's nothing, but he becomes known. His title
is Serine Torba. It's one of his names,
the the the lord of the city of
Torba.
And it's a long way from any of
the traditional rivalries, because there's nothing there, it's
a long way from the French colonial thing,
takes about
3 hours now to drive there from Dakar.
It's like a rebat, it's in the traditional
idea of a rebat, a kind of fortified
sanctuary miles from anywhere.
So he stays there and he evolves an
increasingly prophetic form of devotion
and in 18/95
he has his famous vision in Ramadan a
waking vision of the holy prophet, sallallahu alaihi
wasallam. And according to the historians, he makes
his bay'a directly to him
and dedicates his life
to
Khidma, which is why another of his titles
is a sheikh of Khadim,
the servant sheikh, the servant of the holy
prophet, so,
again, in his poetry does bring a certain
fragrance, so I'm going to share a little
bit more.
So he's saying, today, I have made Be'a
of the chosen messenger.
My
Be'a is on the basis of my service,
and I ask Allah to make me faithful
in that service.
He is of all creation the one who
deserves my service the
most. In my prose and in my poetry,
he is the messenger of mercy.
Now that I have seen the sun rise,
I have no need of the stars and
of the moon.
I shall continue to be
devoted
and a servant to the messenger
from this time until the day of my
death. It's very famous,
few lines, which indicates
the particular fragrance of his spirituality. It's a
very direct and intense,
connection with the Holy Prophet, and much of
his writing is is simply prophetic Amdar
and Mada'ir.
So
you have this city which is bringing up,
as people start to move to this place
where the sheikh is kind of in his
little hut, still under the tree, just doing
his Ibad and people want to be with
him and so they start to build, although,
this isn't really a city for for some
years.
And for those who come to be with
him, to study with him,
he imposes 2 overall rules.
Firstly, they have to learn the Islamic Sciences.
Secondly, they have to avoid ever being paid
for religion.
So if you don't accept those two principles
you're not really going to fit in in
in Porbat.
And to this day it's a center of
madrasas and scholars and there's a whole street
that I've been to with bookshops and it's
a it's a city of of serious scholarship.
Another thing that's going on with this kind
of new tariqa
is that
it's unlike a lot of traditional West African
societies, which are quite hierarchical,
he's accepting just about anybody
and appointing anyone
simply on the basis of their taqwa.
So there's travelling singers, the griots, who are
kind of rather low cast in traditional West
Africa. He's very happy to have them as
his Murids.
Slaves, former slaves,
that's fine. Sometimes they even become sheiks.
It's very Ghazalian, this kind of upending of
the traditional order, which for the traditional people,
you know, is not acceptable. And there's a
lot of opposition, a lot of envy at
this kind of
reform.
And as a result some of the traditionalists
and the former rulers
and the French employees warned the French, saying
Ahmed Aubamba out in the desert there, he's
dangerous.
He's getting an army together, he's preparing for
war, this is going to be like Al
Hajj or Martell, it's going to be jihad
all over again, watch out. This kind of
whispering begins.
In this time he acquires his 3 major
deputies, who are still kind of known loved
figures,
amongst their descendants and others in Senegal. Serenoit
Birahim, who's well known for his kind of
religious rigor,
Fekman,
and then his friend, confident adviser,
his half brother, Sheikh Antambakeh.
And then Sheikh Ibrafal, who is from city
of Kayor, not far away, central Senegal,
who is kind of his majordomo,
his official representative, his ambassador,
and he calls him Bab al Muradin, so
he's kind of threshold. You just talk to
him before you go in to see the
sheikh and he's famous for converting a lot
of the kind of difficult, very traditional people,
including the Tiedor, these kind of ex Samurais
who are wandering around
not really being Muslim or continuing to drink
or whatever,
this this guy,
Ibrafal,
is bringing them towards
Islam.
And something he finds is effective with them
is that some of them say we're not
going to prostrate, we're not going to do
those Muslim things, we're Muslims now, yeah, and
so he he utilizes their martial, energy by
turning them into agriculturalists.
So all of these new Da'iras, these settlements
that have been created
all over, he sends them out to those
places and say till the earth,
make it fertile,
produce crops and
this kind of aura et libora
ethos,
becomes quite,
a successful way
of sedentarizing
these people.
But he's an odd person and to this
day, kind of, people in Senegal,
of course, love him, but
it's not clear that he's really Sharia compliant.
He's kind of on the bridge between
the two worlds. It's a big controversy in
Senegal, but his,
spiritual descendants the Bayafallah,
you can see them quite,
quite spectacular,
because they have patched robes,
they have dreadlocks.
Often they're musicians. Sheikh Law, who's a famous
Senegalese musician,
is is from from that group and very
Khidma oriented,
so if you go to a big iftar
gathering in Dakar it's likely to be
they're the ones who are cooking and bringing
the food
they also physically help with the construction of
the mosque in Toaba
and one of the part of the greatness
of Sheikh Ahmed Aubamba is that he's not
enforcing
complete compliance on everybody immediately, but is bringing
them in in a compassionate, understanding way and
helping them to progress
at their own pace.
So these rumors are reaching the French sitting
behind their desks in Saint Louis,
reports coming in from spies, and they're getting
anxious.
And they're thinking, why would he go off
to this nothing place if not to prepare
for jihad?
And because his father had been associated with
La Dior,
the French send,
colonial administrator to write a report.
That report has been preserved,
turns out the guy goes to his house,
looks around, talks to him, doesn't find this
army in the making.
He writes this back to Saint Louis, during
my mission, I inquired in numerous places
about the Marabot Ahmed Aubamba,
but everywhere I heard nothing but good. He
is a devout and calm person whose only
failing is that he accepts many useless people
as disciples,
and if those types are not carefully watched,
they are likely to cause trouble.
So the most you can do is to
say that there are these kind of ruffians,
ex soldiers,
slaves and so forth, who are hanging around
his encampment and that might be a source
of,
worry.
The sheikh is aware of this, so he
disaggregates a bit, sends his disciples off to
different, places
and
Ahmed Aubamba himself goes to Saint Louis to
tell the governor, I'm not a militant,
I'm just a teacher, I'm an educator.
The French are suspicious and would do anything
to try and find some kind of evidence,
but they can't pin anything on him.
Still, the rumors persist, He's a troublemaker,
he's appointing
sheiks who are from kind of lowborn
families, he's disrupting
the social order.
A lot of money, of course, is coming
into him. People love the sheikh and he's
dishing it out and is becoming a significant
economic force that's not really under the control
of the central tax authorities in Saint Louis.
So some Morides are banished from the French
towns,
these tirdos, these kind of samurai types often
turn against him,
some of them gang up, on his communities,
on the and they burn their villages, it's
an unstable situation,
and the French can't work out why despite
all of this
Sheikh Ahmed Aubamba is still incredibly popular and
people are going to see him and sacrificing
so much in order to be in his
presence. They can't imagine in their secular way
that all of this could be,
for anything other than some kind of political
ambition.
Though in May 18/95,
the old French governor,
Henri de Lamotte goes back to France, and
a new governor who doesn't really understand the
situation comes and listens to these grievances from
these Tiedor types, the old kings.
And a French official notes that Ahmadre Bamba,
if he wanted, in one day could put
5,000 warriors into the field.
So the French go to all the diaries,
the soldiers break in, they can't find a
single weapon, there's nothing.
Still,
the situation is regarded by the French as
unsustainable.
So on August 10, 18 95,
he's arrested
at Joao de Caixol Province,
and the French take him to Saint Louis
and put him in a dirty,
tiny
cell.
And his,
he has a memoir, Jazza e Shakur, which
is about the the journey.
It's such an amazing text that I do
want to read a little bit of it.
It's, relatively short but I can only
read a little bit, it's kind of an
autobiography.
Now, during this time
he's actually treated really badly.
He's humiliated,
the French are trying to
to discredit him in the eyes of the
ordinary Senegalese,
and
after a trial which has last a couple
of hours, it's a kind of show trial
really, he's
put onto a
boat, dirty Portuguese
steamer,
which sails down the coast and is taken
to a prison
in Gabon
where he remains. But let's let's let him
talk about this because this is so unlike
the usual prison memoir,
the kind of ballad of Reading Jail, I'm
the poor victim, my oppressors are so evil.
This is coming from an arish pila
and what he recounts of it, what he
wants people to know about it is
really quite,
disorienting. One of the great things about being
with the Auliya and traveling with the Auliya
is that everything is kind of a surprise,
because the ego does predictable things,
but the Ruh does whatever is spontaneously right
and good in every situation.
Very often that surprises us. Anyway, so this
is what he writes
afterwards.
So he begins,
by saying 'Alhamdulillah'
who brought
the author of this little book to him
and upon all of the,
prophets and the sent ones
that great honor.
Shukran lahu ta'ala alla koni khadimalhardilamin
alayhi
bi'alihi wa sahabi assalahtawasalam
abadhanamin
This is how he begins his kind of
prison memoir,
this is my discussion of some of Rubbel
Al Amin's blessings upon me
out of gratitude to him,
and gratitude for his having appointed me to
be the servant
of the guide and the trustworthy one. May
peace and blessings be upon him.
The whole thing is absolutely not
a victim account
but,
the account of somebody who is absolutely full
of
the divine.
No. My righteous brother, may Allah
protect us all from every miscreant
that I departed
on Saturday, 4th of Safar,
on such and such, a year. This is
when he's arrested.
From the Dar, which I built in the
land of Jollof,
Badama atetni bi rowayati amirandar,
alladijarabeinuwabeinu
homajaraminu
qadar,
after the representative
of such and such a governor came to
me and between me and him that it
happened what there had happened.
So I went out to meet him at
his rep representative outside,
who brought his army,
to this dar, which I had built for
learning and for teaching.
On the evening of that day in a
place that is called
Shortly after our meeting we separated
wabituhunalika
laylatl Ahad,
bi idhni manhuataaalal
Ahad
and where I spent the the the evening
of the
following Sunday there by permission of the one
who is Ahad.
And after the dawn prayer I left.
And I was during that time you have
to imagine, he's under arrest, he's being taken
away by the soldiers. This is how he
describes it.
So,
I was,
taken away
after the dawn prayer and I was at
that time reciting Quran
and reciting blessings upon the one
on whom
the most profitable blessings could be said.
And I said in the village which is
called Cook, Darasheikh Muhtar al Adhikan Avizamanihi Sayid
Kolaman kana
Murtal.
On that day, I occupied myself by recollecting
and listing the names of the people who
died at who'd fought at the Battle of
Badr.
Alayhim Ridwanu
manbihim Katherni koladi Radr.
Upon
them be the the
good pleasure of the one who has kept
me safe from every source of treachery.
And I occupied myself with blessings and peace
upon Sayna mohammah, Muhammad who is the one
who lifts all sorrows.
Manlam yazal bahren neda walathan filhhorub,
the one who continues to be the dewdrop
and the lion in the wars,
So on that night we then traveled on
and it was though I was traveling alone,
he said, And we got before Fajr
to this other village.
So again, he's making dhikr, and all he
remembers of the journey is the dhikr that
he's making.
And I was blessing the one,
through whose blessing,
I was saved from all
conspiracies and plots.
We came to the land ship, by which
he means to train. The French had built
a railway line in land.
Etcetera, and the ship set sail.
And as I set sail on this ship,
these words came to me
So all of this for him is just
an opportunity, he's under arrest is in this
little train all he can think of is
just beer
and gratitude.
And then he describes very briefly
the affair of his
arrest, it would be good if we could
continue but,
he talks about what it was like on
the ship and how he came the ship
put into islands and to ports where there
was nobody who remembered God and there was
no positive relations
between people.
And then he comes to this island where
he's imprisoned.
Wafitir Koljazeera,
he's not going to tell us about how
the cell was or the chains or this
remember is 19th century France, this is the
time of Papillon,
Desert Island, you remember Steve McQueen,
Dreyfus and so forth, these must have been
terrible conditions. You don't get any of that,
instead what does he want to tell us
about the island? Well, when he reaches the
island,
the first thing he does when he gets
to the prison is to pray sola to
Janazah.
And he's asked afterwards, why does he do
this? Auliya always doing surprising things. I said,
Sollat of Janaza, for all the Muslims who've
died in this this prison and nobody said
Jannazzar for them.
So he's just thinking about people who he
hasn't met and he prays Jannazzar for them
and then he says,
and in that island,
what did he do?
I composed 2 introductions to the blessings on
the holy prophet, may Allah bless him and
give him peace, he who has saved me,
from left and right from all misfortunes,
one of them
is in prose,
and the other
is in poetry.
So he's talking about the various adkar and
praises that came to him during these
months. And at that time, I had no
reliance on anybody other than Allah.
Once I stood on the beach of that
island,
and I was spontaneously
composing
without any idolatry and without any lack of
sincerity.
So
what's he saying? What is the poetry that
naturally comes to his mind?
I bear witness
that I am the slave of he who
forgives sins,
and that I am the servant of the
chosen one,
at the Bahar of Mayonba, Mayonba is this
island in southern Gabon, far for many Muslims,
it's almost on the border with Congo,
very unhealthy,
dreadful place, and the French probably had sent
him there to die. This was their way
of getting him out of the way, because
not many people came back alive.
So I can't translate all of it but
basically it's a kind of ecstatic point poem
he seems to be very joyful.
He's saying thanks be to Allah who's protected
me
from tribulations.
I hope that Allah will forgive my sins.
I'm honored to be the servant of the
chosen one
The Iblis has failed to,
overcome me or to determine my enemies. It's
a very
lovely thing and,
there is, if we have time perhaps we
just about have time, this is a nice
book by, an American Muslim, Sheikha Mariam Kabir,
A Journey Through 10,000 Veils.
And she describes, it's kind of her spiritual
journeys,
her own trip to,
that island which is not in the Muslim
area,
it's kind
of beach town,
and she goes there with with the moreids.
So I'll just read a little bit from
her narrative
by By the grace of Allah, subhanahu wa
ta'ala, I've been blessed to pray in the
cave where the holy prophet received the revelation
of the holy Quran.
I prayed in the garden of Gethsemane,
where Jesus, alayhis salaam, had prayed with his
disciples.
On my first trip to Senegal, I prayed
in the prison cell where Sheikh Ahmed Ubamba,
radia Allahu An, had been imprisoned.
Because all these experiences had affected me so
deeply
when I saw the word walk where he
walked I was moved to go
So this is the reason that I went
on the journey to Gabon and to other
places where Sheikh Ahmad Abu Bamba
had spent many years in exile and endured
many trials for the sake of Allah, subhanahu
wa ta'ala, and the love of his messenger.
My purpose for going to these places was
to access and develop within myself the qualities
that I perceived in him, such as profound
faith, determination,
fearlessness,
acceptance,
and contentment with the divine decree.
These were all divinely inspired qualities that enabled
the chief to live through the tribulations he
experienced
with ever increasing faith,
gratitude,
and joy.
Then she talks about the journey to this
remote place.
In the evening, dressed all in pilgrimage whites,
we were transported to a huge tent.
Dressed in the whiteness of the purity of
the path, I felt tiny in the immense
regal gathering, but also empowered to the grace
given to us by god to focus the
energy of that beautiful assembly.
Nasihai very sweetly sang a few verses from
the Khazida called Sindidi,
that sheikh Ahmed Lubamba,
wrote for his mother, Maria Mbusul, and the
people in the audience were overwhelmed with joy.
I spoke then about the women of God.
I looked out over the vast field of
human beings and beheld a great sea of
love and grace and we were sitting in
the center of it
the next morning we set out on the
pilgrimage
there were many red vans filled with pilgrims
setting off in a column on the widening
road heading into the lush equatorial jungle
The vegetation in this part of the world
around the equator is spellbinding.
But while we had the luxury of riding
in vans, driving along paved roads, he had
walked through those jungles and been exposed to
continual dangers, challenges, and profound tests.
It was the power of the light of
his faith, his taqwa, that had carried him
through all difficulties.
He was unimpaired, on the contrary, spiritually strengthened
by every challenge he faced and surpassed.
In this sense, he is an excellent role
model for all of us who are facing
challenges and tests.
Further, we must never forget that it was
the prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, who was
the inspiration for all that the sheikh did
and was just as he is the primary
example for us all. She talks a little
bit more about the visit to the island
but gives a good sense of how these
places are still
considered to be almost
positively radioactive
with the memory of the sheikh. So
the French have put him in this island,
out of the way, and they think the
Murid thing is going to calm down. They
disperse them, they move them around, they consolidate
their control. By 1900, the colony is more
or less solidly under French control, its borders
of, are fixed.
Well Ahmed Aubamba is often this penal colony
at Mayumba.
So
nobody in Senegal knows whether he's still alive,
but there's one Senegalese
jailer there
who takes some of his papers, sends them
back to Senegal so people do at least
know that that he's alive, and he composes
here some of his great prophetic
praise poems,
the Senegalese jailer brings him pen and paper
so he's able to
compose these.
But the Moridiers, despite the expectations of the
French, are actually continuing to consolidate and to
become
strengthened, and the French realize all they've done
is to create a martyr.
So in 1902,
they release him.
Vast crowds as he comes back to Senegal,
and this event of his imprisonment is commemorated
every year in the city of Torba, and
it's now a really big city, that place
where he prayed his rakas under the tree
is the 2nd biggest city in Senegal now,
maybe a 1000000 people,
by the great event called the Magal, which
is the big thing
in the Senegalese
calendar,
where people go on the anniversary of this
imprisonment,
in order to visit his tomb, to pray
in his mosque, to drink from the Well
of Mercy, to learn to study with sheikh,
and very interesting scene,
it's,
the biggest gathering
anywhere in Africa
about 3,000,000 people now are said to attend,
It's quite colossal. Obviously, the logistics are immense.
And if you're thinking about,
this is almost the size of the Hajj
in a poor country,
But it's obviously difficult,
but it's well organized and there isn't a
hotel there. They don't really have restaurants.
It's a quite austere religious place,
so there's no alcohol obviously. They don't allow
hotels because hotels can bring
facade of various kinds,
they don't like instrumental music, it's an austere
place but full of joy
And they managed to organize this event,
even though technically speaking Torba is kind of
extraterritorial
and not properly speaking part of the Republic
of Senegal, it's a complex thing that they
argue about. It's very traditional, self governing.
They manage to cope with 3,000,000 people every
year,
and
it's televised throughout Senegal. It's the big event
in the Senegalese character. Quite an impressive achievement,
really.
In any case,
he's back, but 5 months later the French
think this is going to get difficult again,
so they send him
away again. This time to Mauritania.
They think if we send him to a
Muslim place this will look like study leave
and he won't be a martyr any longer.
And also the Senegalese they think they're kind
of white Arab Muslims, they look down on
him, they have better scholarship, he'll feel a
bit small there. But in fact, some of
the Senegal some of the Mauritanian leaders take
Baya with him, and the tariqa starts to
spread amongst the Hassani Arabs of Mauritania
as well. And people are constantly coming to
the Mauretania border, in order to see the
Sheikh. So,
finally,
he is released,
and
is able to go back, the French don't
allow him to go back to Torba,
they sent him to a little village, Tian,
where he creates a new dara.
He's more or less under house arrest, he's
under house arrest for the rest of his
life, all kinds of rules, he's not allowed
to have more than 50 guests at a
time,
though Zaweir has to be a particular size,
everybody who visits him has to have a
written permit, the French bureaucratize the thing because
they really see this as the principal challenge,
to their establishment of the mission civilatrice in
France.
Then the last 20 years of his life,
through this process of the gradual enculturation of
semi Islamized communities,
through providing institutions that can take in
widows, orphans, ex slaves and so forth and
provide them with a context in these agricultural
settlements,
they become an economic powerhouse.
And that ultimately is the reason why the
French don't shut them down completely,
even though it's
not their idea of what Senegal should become,
because,
Senegal is spared famines as a result of
the judicious cultivation of millet,
the groundnut exports become the most significant foreign
exchange earner for the new colony of Senegal,
and the French, like most people,
regard money as being the bottom line, and
so they kind of
even though he's under house arrest and all
kinds of indignities are imposed upon him, allowed
to continue
and in 1924
they finally give permission to build his mosque
in Toaba, which is now this,
completely
amazing place, said to be the biggest mosque
in Africa, etcetera.
1927,
he's found dead in the morning, having died
in his sleep.
Secretly taken by night,
from this place where he's settled
to the city of Torba, where he is
buried and succeeded by Serene Mustafa Mbake, who
is his oldest
son.
So
what is the kind of
leadership lesson of all of this?
Well,
French colonial rule in West Africa might seem
to be an alien situation to what we're
facing, being 6% 6.5%
of the modern British population.
But nonetheless
it is interesting that Senegal
remains
a successful
country that has never had a military coup,
not many African or Muslim countries can claim
that, that has a generally decent level of
conviviality
between Muslims, Christians, and the remaining followers of
indigenous
religions, but at the same time is very
intensely
and devotedly
Islamic.
Just about everybody there has a tariqa affiliation.
So perhaps what we're seeing is an unusual
example of a fully traditional
style of Islamic scholarship and spirituality
that can actually cope with the the rigors
of,
foreign occupation
and the challenge of modernity.
It seems to work.
It's not a reformed Islam, it's not really
a modern type of Islamist
political party,
it's not a fundamentalist Islam, it's something that
would have been recognizable a 1000 years earlier
and yet it provides something that clearly is
successful.
We tend to think of
football at the moment, perhaps, when you think
of Senegal, but it's a it's a lot
more than that. And even though it's a
country without oil and many
natural resources,
it has managed to maintain itself and a
degree of balance, in a way that I
don't think any Arab country has done in
recent times.
So it's an example that certainly deserves further
study and reflection.
One of my main sources for this, has
been a book which I can commend
to you,
Michelle Kimball who's a Muslim, Sheikh Ahmedu Bamba
a peacemaker for our time it's quite a
good accessible
not to,
bookish or academic,
biography
of the life of the sheikh.
So that essentially is what I wanted to
share with you and I hope that this
hasn't just been words, but that we have
felt something of the,
uncanny but reassuring presence of the sacred, somebody
whose life was totally forgotten his messenger,
and who lived through tribulations which for us
would be unbearable,
but who in the depths
of those,
prison circumstances,
dei profundis,
produced this literature of such joy and such
hope,
something that for us in our various tribulations,
should be,
a sobering inspiration
but also inshallah a source of hope.
So thank you for your patience, I commend
learning more about the sheikh to you and
a visit to
Tawba, Dar es Salaam, definitely a transformative
experience.
But
enough of my words and inshallah we'll be
hearing the real thing now, when the Murids
themselves will be sharing some of the words
of the sheikh, in their inimitable style and
we are very honored, that you would be
with us today.