Exploring the Philosophy of Africa’s Muslim Gandhi
The following is a brief background on Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba. In the coming weeks, I hope to continue a series of posts exploring his philosophy of non-violence and culture of peace. May his story and light be illuminating to you.
Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba is an African Muslim Sufi master, born in 1853 in Senegal (West Africa), during French colonization, just after the official abolition of slavery in the colonies. He was born into a renowned Muslim clerical family, the Mbacke, well-known for their deep-rooted attachment to learning and teaching religious knowledge. Islam had then nearly a thousand years of history in Senegal.
Showing precociously gifted inclination towards learning and imitating the noble devout Sufis he heard about, Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba started, in his early youth, to write books devoted to the fundamentals of religious knowledge any believer is compelled to know—Islamic Law (Fiqh), Theology (Tawhĩd), Spiritual education (Tarbiyya), Sufism (Tasawwuf) etc. His high concern to preserve and to spread in an easier form true knowledge and the valuable Islamic principles among his people led him to put in verses many of the reference prose books of that time he found too hard-learning for most of his contemporaries.
After his father’s death, Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba founded the first Muslim brotherhood ever been founded by a black man in all Islamic history (the Muridiyya) and settled new forms of teaching he thought more suitable to his disciples and more likely to rekindle their human dignity depreciated by long years of political and intellectual domination. Many from all around the country, from all social classes, came to join the revival movement he initiated through teaching and worshipping God in accordance with the Sunnah of the Prophet (PBH) and with the rules of Sufism. Thanks to his charismatic virtues and to the spiritual lights his disciples were shining, his reputation soon expanded and crowds towards his daaras (schools) fast took larger proportions.
Such a trend aroused a libelous campaign against Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba, from some native colonial representatives, and provoked strong mistrust to the French colonial power who suspected him of preparing his disciples to Jihad (holy war). This bias was all the most unfair if we consider the nonviolent philosophy of the Sheikh as well as his concept of Khidma (Rendering Service to the Prophet) which excluded any violence, even against the vilest creature. Indeed the kind of spiritual and intellectual jihad the Sheikh was carrying on was quite different from all what was known by western people about Muslim leaders’ resistance.
Sheikh Bamba wrote on this purpose: “I am waging my Jihad through Knowledge and Fearing the Lord”.
However, regardless of such kind of concern, the colonial authorities decided to arrest and deport him to Gabon (Central Africa), in September 1895. After eight years of a very trying exile, during which the Sheikh wrote, in loneliness, an impressive number of poems all dedicated to the Lord and His Messenger (PBH), the French decided to let him go back home, in November 1902. But, in fearing his growing charisma over the masses aroused by his success, they exiled him again to Mauritania, afterwards they maintained him in house arrest in Senegal until his death in 1927. However history proved later that colonial strategies of “containment” did not succeed in holding back Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba’s teachings and work from shaping deeply the thoughts and the culture of his nation and of millions of people all around the world.
