In a cemetery in Montluçon, a town in central France not far from Vichy, there is a grave that many take to be that of Shaykh Hamallah, one of the most renowned Muslim religious figures in twentieth-century West Africa and head of a branch of the Tijaniyya Sufi order or brotherhood – the Hamawiyya – that bears his name. In the first half of the twentieth century, many living under French colonial rule in West Africa recognised Hamallah not only as a living Muslim saint or wali (Arabic), but also as the highestranking saint of the day. Hamallah attracted a wide range of followers and admirers from all sectors of society, including Muslim scholars, colonial civil servants, the newly urbanised, and recent converts to Islam from throughout French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, hereafter AOF). His appeal was so great that he seemed poised to supplant those Muslim clerics favoured by the French, or so the colonial authorities and some of Hamallah's African detractors thought. It is perhaps no coincidence that members of the French colonial administration suspected Hamallah of anti-colonial and ‘xenophobic’ proclivities. Indeed, the administration eventually accused Hamallah and some of his followers of subversive intent.

In 1941 on a day remembered as Black Thursday, the French colonial administration – under pro-Vichy control – arrested Hamallah and forced him into exile, ostensibly for a ten-year period. Hamallah's arrest came after violent attacks on a group of Muslims in the region of the Sahel. Although Hamallah took no part in these attacks, he was held ultimately responsible for them. Two of his sons who did take part in the attacks were tried and executed along with more than two dozen others, and many of Hamallah's followers in West Africa were subsequently persecuted. Hamallah was eventually taken to France and interned in a concentration camp where his health deteriorated. After his death and burial in Montluçon at the beginning of 1943, the French colonial administration kept his death secret until after the war, not least because of the fear that the news might have caused unrest among his followers in West Africa.

In the mid-1940s, when the French colonial administration in West Africa circulated the news of Hamallah's death, many refused to accept this news as true. At that time, many insisted that Hamallah had instructed his followers he would leave Nioro but would eventually return.