Following two days of interviews in Wolof with a Murid intellectual and archivist in Darou Mousty, my research assistant and I were exiting his compound when our host shook my hand and said to me in English, ‘I know your country very well.” The man with whom we had been discussing Murid history then laughed and told me that he had driven a taxi in the Bronx for a number of years. After earning enough money, he had returned home to devote himself to studying and preserving the history of the order and that of Darou Mousty and Maam Cerno, in particular. Such a story may seem striking at first. It goes against the standard conception of rural and, in this case Muslim, villages and towns in Africa as locked into tradition and outside of Western modernity. Yet, the signs that the opposite was true were to be found across Darou Mousty. Posters advertising a Murid gathering in Italy had been brought back by a returning Murid expatriate and hung in telephone booths as mementos of the sense of Murid community abroad. Such signs were also present in the surrounding countryside. When I visited Taif Joob, one of Darou Mousty's satellite villages, a great deal of construction was going on in the middle of the community. I was informed that a new modern mosque was being constructed under the ndigal of the khalifah of Darou Mousty, at that time, Sëriñ Abdu Quddüs M'Backé.