To Educate: the Greatest Jihad

[From the French language press]:

Jamais penseur et Soufi n’a laissé dans la postérité sénégalaise et de la sous-région, une bibliographie aussi diversifiée que celle produite par Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba ainsi qu’une biographie sur lui aussi considérable.

Sud Quotidien, Sénégal - mercredi 26 décembre 2007 - par Madior Fall

Never a thinker and a Sufi has left in the Senegalese and in the subregion posterity a bibliography as diversified as that produced by Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba, as well as a substantial biography.

Just like a patient and passionate archaeologist, his biographers continue to search his works, his itinerary, his actions, his thoughts, his teachings.

Among them: Cheikh Anta Mbacke Babou, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

His work: Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853-1913; Ohio University Press, October 2007, has now been translated into French.

The French translation: «Le Jihad Supérieur ou Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba et la Fondation de la Mouridiyya au Sénégal, 1853-1913 » (Ohio University Press, 2007) will hopefully arouse an instructive "dialogue", not sterile polemics, but documented exchanges on approaches and attitudes that would certainly gain by a cleansing of their fanatics slag.

Editorial review:
In Senegal, the Muridiyya, a large Islamic Sufi order, is the single most influential religious organization, including among its numbers the nation’s president. Yet little is known of this sect in the West.

Drawn from a wide variety of archival, oral, and iconographic sources in Arabic, French, and Wolof, Fighting the Greater Jihad offers an astute analysis of the founding and development of the order and a biographical study of its founder, Cheikh Amadu Bamba Mbacke.

Cheikh Anta Babou explores the forging of Murid identity and pedagogy around the person and initiative of Amadu Bamba as well as the continuing reconstruction of this identity by more recent followers.

He makes a compelling case for reexamining the history of Muslim institutions in Africa and elsewhere in order to appreciate believers’ motivation and initiatives, especially religious culture and education, beyond the narrow confines of political collaboration and resistance.

Fighting the Greater Jihad also reveals how religious power is built at the intersection of genealogy, knowledge, and spiritual force, and how this power in turn affected colonial policy.

Fighting the Greater Jihad will dramatically alter the perspective from which anthropologists, historians, and political scientists study Muslim mystical orders.

[Review from http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Greater-Jihad-Muridiyya-1853-1913/dp/0821417665].