This is a history of intersections. An analysis of the development of the Murid Sufi order in Senegal in West Africa necessitates a certain blurring of historical and geographical boundaries and paradigms. This is at once a study of West African history, Islamic reform, Sufism, and European colonization. More specifically, this book examines the history of one branch of the Murid order, its founder, its primary town and environs, and its disciples in relation to Murid perceptions of their place in multiple intersecting histories. Furthermore, this Sufi order is presented as a participant in modernization rather than an opponent or a passive recipient. The Murid order and its leadership served as conduits to their disciples of modern trends coming from outside West Africa via European colonial rule and as authors of an indigenous form of modernity. Murid perceptions of modernity thus arise from disparate sources and are reflected in the production and interpretation of Murid historical narratives by notables and common disciples alike.

The Muridiyya was founded in the latter decades of the nineteenth century by Shaykh Amadu Bamba M'Backé, a descendent of a prominent family of local Muslim scholars. At the time that the Murid order began to coalesce, the Senegambian region was entering a new chapter in a history of conflict and change. Although the Atlantic slave trade had ceased to exist by this time, the social, political, and economic effects of the trade endured in the interior of West Africa.