Is Senegal still the African exception? Sufism and democracy revisited

Abstract

Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal is the edited volume resulting from a 2008 conference held at Columbia University to celebrate the reopening of the Institute of African Studies, directed by Mamadou Diouf. The 10 chapters, including an introduction, reinterpret Senegal’s history and politics in terms of the so-called “Senegalese exception” of a stable African democracy among neighbors plagued by military coups, civil wars, and ethnic conflicts. Senegal managed to have a peaceful and democratic transition of power, making the West African country a positive example of good African leadership. First put forward by Donal Cruise O’Brien, the “social contract” theory between marabout (Sufi Islamic leader) and talibe (disciple), as well as between the marabouts and the state, is the foundation of Senegalese stability. The volume revisits this theory with fresh interdisciplinary analysis and an acknowledgement of the agency of talibes (often undermined in the earlier scholarship). The Introduction highlights Sufi Islam as an “antidote to political Islam,” in particular the Senegalese model of pluralism, cooperation, coexistence, and tolerance. This volume offers a “longue durée perspective” that traces the development of what Diouf refers to as Senegal’s “Islamo-Wolof model”, the “political, social, and cultural arrangements (infrastructures and ideologies) that have been supporting the operations of the colonial and the postcolonial states and providing the sources and resources for the legitimacy of their power” (ch. 1, n 27). This began in the French colonial period with the marabouts becoming vital intermediaries, religiously and administratively, between the colonial state and rural masses. Chapters deliver a variety of approaches grounded in different disciplines and methodologies and ranging from Senegal’s past to the present day. Chapter 2 presents Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s philosophical contribution on the assumed challenges presented to Muslim societies by secularization, which emerged as a criticism of Islam by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Ernest Renan who regarded Islam as incompatible with science. Diagne traces the foundations of the “spiritual socialism” of Senegal’s first president Leopold Sedar Senghor and his prime minister Mamadou Dia. Senegal’s founding fathers played a crucial role in defining the Senegalese state’s laïcité (a specific French-inspired brand of secularism), which Catholic Senghor modeled after the intellectual discourse of Muslim elites such as Al-Afghani, Muhammad Abdu, and Muhammad Iqbal. Diagne concludes with a quote from Senegal’s second president, Abdou