Introduction

In his influential book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson examined the emergence of Western nationalism as a cultural artifact that was spawned as the result of the coming together of different historical forces. It was imagined because the community was so large that not all of the members knew each other and therefore had to trust in a common image or ideal that bound them together in the absence of personal relationships. It was a community because in spite of individual differences and inequalities within the group, a feeling of belonging in an ultimately egalitarian sense existed among all members of the group. Anderson identified the spread of a capitalist print media in various European vernacular languages, as opposed to Latin, as instrumental in the formation of the English, French, Spanish, and other imagined communities. His analysis positioned books, newspapers, and religious tracts in the vernacular as the medium by which the speakers of different dialects of the same general language began to see themselves as related and started to identify with each other as English, French, Spanish, and such. This chapter considers the extent to which the Murid order is an imagined community and how, as an artifact of sorts, it was built and has been maintained as such by its members. In our case, a vital “medium” by which this imagined community has been built and sustained is the preservation, transmission, and accompanying interpretation by Murids of the life histories of the original taalibe who founded Darou Mousty in 1912.