Highlights the role of transnational space making in the construction of diasporic Muridiyya identity. The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal disciples’ conflicting politics and challenge the notion of the order’s homogeneity. While some insist on the universal dimension of Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke’s calling and emphasize dawa (proselytizing), others prioritize preserving Muridiyya identity abroad by consolidating the linkages with the leadership in Senegal. Diasporic reimaginings of the Muridiyya abroad, in turn, inspire cultural reconfigurations at home. Drawing from a wide array of oral and archival sources in multiple languages collected in five countries, The Muridiyya on the Move reconstructs over half a century of the order’s history, focusing on mobility and cultural transformations in urban settings. In this groundbreaking work, Babou highlights the importance of the dahira (urban prayer circle) as he charts the continuities and ruptures between Muridiyya migrations. Throughout, he delineates the economic, socio-political, and other forces that powered these population movements, including colonial rule, the economic crises of the postcolonial era, and natural disasters.

The Rastafari Movement: A North American and Caribbean Perspective provides a historical and ideological overview of the Rastafari movement in the context of its early beginnings in the island of Jamaica and its eventual establishment in other geographic locations. Building on previous scholarship and the author's own fieldwork, the text goes on to provide a rich comparative analysis of the Rastafari movement with other Black theological movements, specifically the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites in the context of the United States. The text explores the following topics: • Pan-Africanism, Black nationalism and Rastafari; • gender dynamics; • globalization; • concepts and symbols; • other Black theological movements. This text is ideal for students of religious studies, sociology, anthropology, African Diaspora studies, African American studies, and Black studies who wish to gain an understanding of the history and beliefs of the Rastafari Movement.

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 Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke. 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.

Muridism is a Sufi order which originated in Senegal, West Africa, at the end of the 19th century and is now in rapid expansion with the Senegalese emigrants around the world. Among the Murids the belief is strong that the founder Shaykh Amadou Bamba and his mother Mame Diarra Bousso can help them gain a better life on earth and entry into Paradise. The book gives an account of some Murid women the author has met in Senegal and on Tenerife. Their various paths of life are described with a focus on trade, religion and gender relations. In what ways do women's conditions of life differ from those of their own country? What do the women strive for? And how does Muridism influence their daily life in Senegal and in the diaspora? Eva Evers Rosander has been Associate Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, until 2014. She is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, and has done extensive anthropological fieldwork in Spain, Senegal and Morocco.

This book brings together scholars for their fresh perspectives on religious conversion, transnational migration, economic globalization, and the politics of education, power, and femininity in African Islam in Senegal.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Shia Ismaili Muslim communities were repeatedly displaced. How, in the aftermath of these displacements, did they remake their communities? Shenila Khoja-Moolji highlights women's critical role in this rebuilding process and breaks new ground by writing women into modern Ismaili history. Rebuilding Community tells the story of how Ismaili Muslim women who fled East Pakistan and East Africa in the 1970s recreated religious community (jamat) in North America. Drawing on oral histories, fieldwork, and memory texts, Khoja-Moolji illuminates the placemaking activities through which Ismaili women reproduce bonds of spiritual kinship: from cooking for congregants on feast days and looking after sick coreligionists to engaging in memory work through miracle stories and cookbooks. Khoja-Moolji situates these activities within the framework of ethical norms that more broadly define and sustain the Ismaili sociality. Jamat--and religious community more generally--is not a given, but an ethical relation that is maintained daily and intergenerationally through everyday acts of care. By emphasizing women's care work in producing relationality and repairing trauma, Khoja-Moolji disrupts the conventional articulation of displaced people as dependent subjects.

Spiritual and Mental Health Crisis in Globalizing Senegal explores the history of mental health in Senegal, and how psychological difficulties were expressed in the terms of spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, spirit possession, and ancestor worship. Focused on the effervescent and fruitful early post-colonial years at the Fann Hospital, situated at the famed University of Dakar, Cheikh Anta Diop, this book reveals provocative treatment innovations via case studies of individuals struggling for health and healing, and thus operates as a suspension bridge between scholarship on witchcraft and magic on the one side and the history psychiatry and psychoanalysis on the other. Through these case studies, this book creates a new route of exchange for healing knowledge for a broad array of West African spiritual troubles, mental illness, magic, soul cannibalism, witchcraft, spirit possession, and psychosis.