Labor and Creativity in the Muridiyya

The narratives on Murids and their labor have largely emphasized two aspects of their history: groundnut harvesting beginning in the colonial era, and travel and trade coinciding with Senegal’s first steps toward liberalization. In both cases, scholars have shown how shaykhs, sitting at the top of hierarchical networks, mobilized laborers to take advantage of market opportunities while simultaneously maintaining spaces for the proliferation of Brotherhood values. The initial agricultural component was developed in conjunction with a French demand for soap-making oils in the nineteenth century, with shaykhs establishing agricultural villages populated by young male (usually bachelor) disciples, maximizing groundnut production and providing an economic engine in the early years of the Brotherhood’s development (Couty Reference Couty1969). Murid involvement in international trade increased in the 1980s as droughts and the devaluation of peanut oil coincided with the loosening of Senegal’s market restrictions on commerce. Here again, the mobility of young Murid men facilitated by their shaykhs was important in helping the Brotherhood establish itself within a growing economic sector. Only this time, rather than settling in the Senegalese interior, Murids established communities in New York, Rome, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.Footnote ⁴

The labor performed by Murids serves multiple purposes, including increased autonomy for the Brotherhood as well as a pedagogical function. With regard to Murid autonomy, the labor power of disciples produces capital, which in turn produces enough political power to allow the Brotherhood to operate with a degree of independence from external pressures. Brotherhood founder Shaykh Amadu Bamba Mbakké (henceforth Bamba or Sëriñ Touba) is quoted as telling his followers, “Collect your own means and limit your needs according to your means to avoid depending on anyone. This is how you can preserve your RELIGION and your DIGNITY” (Sylla et al. Reference Sylla, Wadoud and Diattara2013:133; emphasis in original). These words are largely interpreted to apply to the collective body of the Muridiyya. According to Cheikh Anta Babou, the oppression that characterized the French treatment of Bamba softened as Murid industriousness led the regime to understand the Brotherhood as “politically innocuous and economically beneficial” (Reference Babou2005:426), paving the way for concessions in colonial policy, including the continuation of Qur’anic schooling as the main mode of childhood education in Murid villages.

Regarding pedagogy, Bamba promoted the experiential knowledge gained through laboring as a means to instruct the Muslim values of patience, generosity, and decency, while keeping disciples from arrogance, going astray, or excessive desires. Thus, while Murid belief is often glossed as “work as a form of prayer,” a more accurate formulation is that laboring activities form an important part of a program for the pedagogy of the self and the pedagogy of the soul.Footnote ⁵ When Murid agriculture and trade is understood beyond its capacity for producing wealth and instead seen through the lenses of cultural autonomy and spiritual pedagogy, the continuum between these laboring practices and the creative life of the Brotherhood becomes more apparent. As in agriculture and trading, the energy that Murids pour into the creative activities of the Brotherhood ensures the reproduction of Murid lifeways and helps disciples to become better Muslims.

When disciples speak about how they understand their relationship to the Muridiyya’s central figures, they often focus on their creative labor. Alhassan Lo, a young singer in a top neighborhood poetry recitation circle in Médina, explained that the great care that he put into learning qasaïd was inspired by the great amount of work that Bamba spent writing them. “Seriñ Touba worked hard on his writing. He wrote while he was traveling, while he was sitting. The Seriñ made himself tired from writing. What I’m trying to say is that we should try to master his qasaïd.”Footnote ⁶ According to an often-repeated phrase, Bamba produced “seven and a half tons” of writing over the course of his lifetime. Bamba’s ability to focus on this creative and intellectual work, even throughout trying episodes of exile and house arrest, inspires a hard-working attitude for Murids in their own creative endeavors. Furthermore, like proponents of the “10,000 hours” theory, Bamba’s supporters understand his persistent work ethic as the source of his mastery. Bamba’s spiritual status is thus connected to his dedication to scholarship and writing and not exclusively derived from his spiritual lineage and miraculous feats. Although many early colonial observers understood the Brotherhood’s structure as divided between disciples whose labor produced material wealth and shaykhs who accumulated capital while bestowing metaphysical benefits on their followers, many Murid disciples are more inclined to understand their value, dignity, and sometimes their spiritual status in relation to their ability to uphold Bamba’s model of creative industriousness.

In addition to his writings, Bamba is credited with establishing an educational system that addressed the needs of a population both upended by colonial conquest and marginalized by a regional religious establishment that prized Hassaniyya Arab descent. According to Ngom, formative experiences in Bamba’s life led him to sharpen his critique of indigenous African institutions, including those that benefitted Muslim elites. Bamba believed that “many clerics failed to uphold the ideal constructive role of Muslim leaders in society and their Islamic education system also failed to produce model ethical Muslims as directed by Islam: racially unprejudiced and selflessly committed to social stability, spiritual illumination, and justice for all (especially for the ostracized masses)” (Ngom Reference Ngom2016:74). Establishing his first village, Darou Salam in 1884, Bamba instituted a system of education in which book learning (njàngum téere) would be secondary to experiential education, a system which he called the daara tarbiyya or “working school” (literally, “school for the education of the soul”).

For Bamba, the tendency of Muslim leaders to prize scholarship to the exclusion of other paths toward pious behavior was both an insufficient form of instruction and one that widened the divisions between an educated Muslim elite and much of the population in Senegal. Significantly, Bamba’s daara tarbiyya accepted voluntary male conscripts of all ages. By 1888, there were roughly 200 talibes in the village; these adherents came from diverse social backgrounds, including former “crown soldiers” (ceddo) of the defeated indigenous aristocracy, freed domestic slaves and their children (jaam), men who wished to avoid the French and French military conscription, and educated young men interested in Bamba’s experimental education. As Babou notes in reference to the archetypal image of childhood Islamic education in Senegal, the new talibes, many of them illiterate and of working age, “could not be sent to a Quranic school with a wooden board to start learning the alphabet” (Reference Babou2007:106).

Beyond Bamba’s instruction, the daara tarbiyya provided a framework from which other disciples could add to the program of experiential education. Best known among these disciples is Shaykh Ibrahima Fall who, among other things, instructed arrogant former ceddo (crown soldiers) to return to their home villages with begging bowls as a way of instructing them in humility (a practice known as majjal). For contemporary followers of Fall’s legacy, the incantation of the words “lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh” (known in Islam as the shahada) also plays a central role in spiritual education. “Lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh is the weapon of the Baay Faal” states Baye Demba Sow, spokesman for the khalif of the Baay Faal sect; “Shaykh Amadou Bamba said it’s the highest form of worship, where it takes the disciple in direct contact with Allah, our creator” (Zips & Zips-Mairitsch Reference Zips and Zips-Mairitsch2013:13:32). These disciples elevate the expression of the shahada to an art form: “thousands of melodies, but one word,” according to Sow, often singing it together a capella in antiphonal arrangements (a practice known as sam faal), or to the accompaniment of xiiñ drums (thiant), a type of drum with a history of use in agricultural labor.

Wolof poets writing in ‘Ajami (indigenous languages written in Arabic script), including Mbay Jaxate and Muusaa Ka, were also an important part of the emerging cultural project of Muridism during Bamba’s lifetime. These poets translated many of Bamba’s ideas into Wolof verse. In keeping with Bamba’s pedagogical vision, the Wolof poems could function “as a practical didactic tool to educate the masses” (Ngom Reference Ngom2016:24). The early Ajami’ poets also wrote praise poems for Bamba, wanting to celebrate him in his native Wolof in the same way that Bamba wrote praise poetry in the Prophet’s native Arabic. Ngom’s book on the ‘Ajami tradition highlights the creativity of this group. Muusaa Ka, for example, adapted a Wolof wedding rhythm called bahr njuuj njaaj in some of his praise poems to Bamba. Another poem was co-written by Jaxate and Ka on the occasion of their first meeting in Bamba’s compound in Diourbel, each contributing alternating verses (Ngom Reference Ngom2016:24).

Another key figure in Bamba’s entourage was his father’s youngest son, Seriñ Masamba Mbakké (b. 1883). At a point when the project of learning and diffusing Bamba’s spiritual poetry was growing in importance, Sëriñ Masamba learned the melodies (daaj) that Bamba used to recite his poems in private and arranged them for a twelve-person recitation circle (henceforth kuréel). After Bamba’s death, Seriñ Masamba and his disciples created a “conservatory” where new kuréels were trained and new daaj were composed by Seriñ Masamba and his followers. Now a cornerstone of any dahira chapter, singers in kuréel qasayidi take their role of spreading the divine grace contained in Bamba’s poetry seriously. “Bamba said the qasida is like a pigeon ascending to heaven,” Oumar Ngalla Gueye explained to me, “Bamba is the body, the kuréel singers are the wings, and the listeners are like the feathers.”Footnote ⁷

Early colonial observers of the Muridiyya often mistook the nature of Murid labor, perceiving an absolute division between disciples and guides. In these interpretations, the job of the disciples would be to produce exchange value through their agricultural labor, whereas the guides would be strictly involved with metaphysical concerns. But by failing to see the pedagogical function of Murid industriousness in agriculture and trade, observers have also failed to see what this labor has in common with Murid creative practice. All of these activities organize the movements of disciples, instructing them in pious comportment and equipping them with zeal (himmah) to lead pious lives. Creative work also belies colonial narratives that strip disciples of power and agency in metaphysical aspects of religious life. Poetry recitation and composition, thiant, majjal, and other acts performed among co-disciples produce a great deal of the divine grace (baraka/barké) that these disciples experience in their daily lives.

The Activities of Two Urban Dahiras

For young men in the city’s popular quarters, the legacy of these Murid artists is carried on through activities in associations called dahiras. In this section I profile two contemporary Murid dahiras in Dakar named Wakana Khakane and Diwanou Galass. The dahira is a voluntary association of co-disciples to a single shaykh. These associations collect dues, meet regularly, and are often highly localized, with most members living within a few city blocks of the group’s seat. Unlike the daara tarbiyya, the dahira is not an all-encompassing “school”; the shaykh is often sought to give his blessing to the group’s activities, but these activities are independently organized by the disciples themselves.

These profiles show not only how dahiras organize artistic labor, but also how they structure the disciples’ time. As the locus of Murid discipleship has shifted from the rural daara tarbiyya to the urban dahira, disciples’ spiritual time commitments have shifted on multiple scales. Weekly activities in the traditional daara tarbiyya are divided between Qur’anic study, agricultural labor, and (often in the evenings) expressive forms of worship such as dhikr (Babou Reference Babou2007:81–85). In some urban dahiras, the proportion of time that some disciples spend working on expressive practices throughout the week has grown to eclipse the time spent doing other kinds of labor. (In some cases, other labor is simply not available). On a larger time scale, disciples within the daara tarbiyya were often given a plot of land to help them start a family after a few years of study, but in dahiras, the commitments of disciples to organizing musical life in the city can last for decades.

Wakana Khakane

Wakana Khakane is known in the neighborhood for their kuréel qasaïd (poetry singing circles). While most dahiras have one, possibly two kuréels, Wakana Khakane has four, each with at least twelve reciters (kuréelkat) and sometimes as many as twenty. The dahira rents an apartment on the first floor of a building at Rue 19 x 4, and most nights of the week, disciples who sing in the different kuréel can be found rehearsing in an interior room or on the roof. On Tuesday evenings, the top kuréel performs from ten to eleven o’clock in the building’s interior courtyard, while the rest of the dahira assembles for their weekly meeting. Men who are not performing sit in rows on mats, drinking café touba, scanning the Arabic text of the qasaïd in small photocopied booklets, most of them wearing robes in the style of the Brotherhood’s third leader after Bamba’s death, Abdoul Ahad Mbakké, a champion of Bamba’s writings. On a slightly elevated platform in one corner of the courtyard, a dozen women sit, scanning texts as well. The kuréel singers face inward, seated around poetry books which are propped up by wooden stands, often with a collection of microphones raised just above ground, at the center of the circle. They sing in near unison (momentary harmonies sometimes occurring), their melodies (daaj) moving between two registers: a mid-tenor, projected firmly, infused with persistent but subtle melisma and ornamentation, and a less-melismatic forcefully-projected high tenor. One designated leader in the kuréel gives signals to the reciters, letting them know when to shift registers, whether to sing louder or softer, when to repeat certain lines, and when to change modes (scales) within the daaj.

Performers rehearse the melodies extensively by themselves and hone their ability to sing them while scanning page after page of Bamba’s Arabic texts. Many reciters in the kuréel begin reading lines of qasaïd in Arabic reading courses offered by the dahira, some of which are oriented toward high school students and adults. Once a disciple has reached a certain level of competence, he can audition to be placed in one of the four kuréels. In their weekly joint rehearsals, kuréel leaders listen intently to their fellow disciples, correcting their peers’ pitch, melisma, and tone, often singling out each member of the circle to perform certain lines and receive feedback. Beyond the kuréel rehearsal, the disciples spend their time preparing alone (a practice known as druss), some of them trying to perfect their voices while singing toward the ocean, many of them relying on circulated recordings of recognized singing authorities such as Seriñ Mahib Guèye and the dahira Hizbut Tarqiyya.Footnote ⁸

The work of learning and reciting qasaïd is more than a personal endeavor of self-improvement. It is in many ways a kind of affective labor, aimed at engendering care and community. As the soundtrack to much of Murid life, qassaïd index a broad range of collective experiences, including dahira meetings, frequent all-day dahira-organized journées culturelles, weekly dhikr sessions, bus rides to retreats and visits to shaykhs, and the annual pilgrimage to the holy city of Touba, where kuréel qasaïd recordings are played at a high volume throughout the day and night. Beyond conferring spiritual benefits through their singing, kuréelkats also create an aural reference to these experiences, producing heightened feelings of comfort and solidarity.

Singing qasaïd is also a form of caring labor. As defined by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher (Reference Tronto, Fisher, Abel and Nelson1990), care consists of “everything we do to continue, repair and maintain ourselves so that we can live in the world as well as possible” (41). Caring labor has typically been viewed as work such as nursing and childcare, including work performed in both personal and professional domains, but musical labor can be caring labor as well. During the period of my fieldwork, Wakana Khakane’s kuréels were often dispatched to funerals and death anniversaries, an act which was met with profound gratitude. Certain qasaïd are said to help the soul ascend to heaven and, in addition, being there to sing is a significant demonstration of the community’s support for the friends and family of the deceased. The unfortunate frequency of such gatherings means that disciples make significant time commitments throughout their week to provide this form of care. The value and dignity of caring labor tend to be overlooked when men’s work is conceptualized, but the activities of dahiras such as Wakana Khakane show that this conceptualization is not universally shared. Singing in a kuréel can be considered as worship, care, creative practice, and labor, all at the same time.

Diwanou Galass

Shortly after the conclusion of a weekly late-night dhikr session organized by the dahira Diwanou Galass, the dahira’s leader (Wo: jewriñ) Badou Ndiaye stood in front of his co-disciples and made the following exhortation:

Ndiaye’s speech highlights two important aspects of this dahira. The first is that through their dhikr they produce social life that stands in opposition to the vices of city life (“those who don’t dance for God…”). The second is that doing so is their work (“tie back your loose clothes, double your efforts, and respect your work [ligeey]”).

Fifty-one weeks a year for nearly two decades, Diwanou Galass has held a Thursday night event at Rue 37 x 22, resting only the week after Eid al Fitr. The dahira has roughly fifty regular dues-paying members. Within the neighborhood, they have a reputation for having a number of gifted musicians and artists as members, including the singer Ndiougou Afia, who is well known throughout Senegal and the diaspora. While it may appear that the Murid form of dhikr is a timeless tradition in Dakar, in fact, Diwanou Galass was among the first groups to regularly hold these events, beginning in the early 2000s. Previously, many of the members who formed the dahira had been involved in other kinds of music (mainly hip-hop), and Murid practices were associated with rural migrants from the country’s interior.

Each weekly gathering follows the same format. At ten o’clock at night, before the crowds start to assemble, a kuréel qasaïd of roughly eight disciples sings Bamba’s poems into a collection of microphones, while two other disciples begin performing màjjal, shaking the change in their bowls towards passing cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians. At eleven o’clock, the recitation concludes with a prayer. Then the first dhikr singer (Wo: sikarkat) picks up a microphone, gives thanks to Amadu Bamba and Shaykh Ibra Fall, and begins singing “lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh.” Soon he is joined by xiiñ drummers (Wo: xiiñkats) who play several variations of the bàkk (unison rhythm) Ya Ñu Moom, Bamba (You own us, Bamba). Two talibes set up a metal barricade at the far end of Rue 37 to prevent traffic from turning up the street. At first, the sung phrase floats over the top of the drummed rhythm, but around ten minutes into the routine, the sikarkat pauses then shouts out the phrase “jërëjëfe Boroom Touba” (“thank you Master of Touba [Amadu Bamba]”) on eight consecutive beats, which is followed by an identical response immediately shouted back by a small handful of disciples who are now circled around him. The drummers change their rhythm to emphasize the eight-beat response:

Before concluding this opening sequence, the drummers switch back to the Ya Ñu Moom rhythm, accelerating before finishing with a composed flourish in unison. A second sikarkat takes the microphone and positions himself in the middle of the street, surrounded by three or four others. The xiiñkats begin a counterclockwise procession in a wide circle around the sikarkats; they are joined by other participants, most of them mbokk talibe (dues-paying members of the dahira), including six or seven women who, until that point, had been sitting together on a mat against the wall of a house on Rue 37. Other members of the assembled public—some of them members of Diwanou Galass, most of them not—filter in gradually over the course of the next hour, until the procession surrounding the sikarkats numbers over fifty and the outer ring of spectators numbers a few hundred. The melodies form an intricate antiphony between the lead sikarkat and the response singers in the procession. Repetitions of “lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh” are strung together with praises of the Prophet, Amadu Bamba, his descendants, and his disciples (especially Shaykh Ibra Fall).

As the event progresses, the procession surrounding the sikarkats becomes increasingly animated. The xiiñ drums play an especially important role, driving the footsteps of the procession: first, they play a simple three-beat shuffle which gradually builds to a more energetic kind of step called dukkat, with choreographed sequences of kicks and arm movements. Dukkatkats (dancers) form multiple chains throughout the procession; as one invents movement sequences, the dancers immediately behind catch on and mirror the steps, while in other parts of the circle, other groups are mirroring the sequences of other leading dukkatkats. As the event reaches a climax, the xiiñkats are brought into the center while the dukkatkats continue to invent and perform sequences in the counterclockwise-moving procession. A final unison bàkk is played, and then most of the attendees disperse. Those who stay (generally members of the dahira) crouch or sit while listening to a single sikarkat singing concluding praises to Bamba, unaccompanied. Before the closing prayer, the dahira’s leader (jëwriñ) makes announcements to the assembled group, offering words of welcome, news of friends and calls for support, times and places of other dahiras’ events, and ndiggal (religious instructions from the shaykh).

The weekly production of a dhikr such as this involves a great deal of coordination and energy from the dahira’s disciples. The delegation of duties for Diwanou Galass, for example, includes singing qasaïd (kuréelkats), leading the dhikr (sikarkats), playing drums (xiiñkats), leading chains of dancers (dukkatkats), performing majjal, rigging lights and speakers, blocking off the street, preparing and serving coffee, candy, and water, and for the jëwriñ, overseeing the whole operation. For the generation of disciples who have been doing this work for decades, many credit the dhikr with making them who they are. Elimane Tine (who often sings the opening lines of the dhikr), for example, said that “I am a pure product of the dahira. When I joined, I couldn’t read one letter of Arabic… The dahira opened the door for us to work for Sëriñ Touba. If it wasn’t for the dahira, I would only be a spectator. But now I feel like an actor, I feel like a disciple of Sëriñ Touba who can advance things the way he wanted.”Footnote ¹⁰

Tine’s testimony speaks not only to the effect of a sustained commitment to the dahira’s work, but also to the extent to which the association creates spaces for people to be creative. The dhikr is structured as an open platform which invites people to contribute, to “feel like” actors and disciples through the ways that they move, sing “lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh,” and perform majjal and other duties. Indeed, Tine himself presents a distinctive way of singing the opening lines of each week’s dhikr—“jerejef Borom Touba” and “lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh.” The choreographies of dukkat dancing are important in this regard as well. Rather than being centralized around a set sequence of movements, different dancers can spontaneously put together innovative combinations, counting on their friends behind them to follow, all of these actors producing the dance circle as an intricate patchwork of different groupings. In this way, the dahiras create spaces which allow them to be creative. Many sikarkats and dukkatkats at the weekly dhikr are not directly associated with Diwanou Galaas, but they spend much of their week moving between similar events produced by different dahiras throughout the neighborhood each night. Ultimately, the creative work of dahiras such as Wakana Khakane and Diwanou Galass extends a particular legacy within the Muridiyya. This legacy values poetry and expressive practices, highlighting the work of figures such as Shaykh Ibrahima Fall, Sëriñ Massamba Mbakké, and Muusaa Ka as part and parcel of an experiential program that instills Muslim values, and looking to Amadu Bamba as a writer and teacher and not simply a miracle worker.

The two dahiras profiled in this section demonstrate key distinctions from the daara tarbiyya. In regard to the nature of work performed, the dahira skews more toward creative labor. Concerning the relationship between disciples and the organizational structure, dahira members accumulate years and decades of voluntary service, rather than beginning as students then graduating to land-tenure and head-of-household status within the village.

Another feature distinguishing the urban dahira is that it must accommodate a broader variety of immediate circumstances facing its disciples. Murid creative labor in the city exists within a matrix of attitudes and possibilities around the value of different kinds of work. The Brotherhood’s discourses and practices around labor thus need to be examined not only within the context of the Muridiyya itself, but also within the city more broadly.

Social Reproduction in the City

When urban dahiras partake in the work of enculturating, educating, nourishing, and caring for the population, the work that they perform can be included within the category of “socially reproductive labor.” This category is generally theorized through its relation to production—some work (productive labor) provides goods and services that create exchange value, while other work (socially reproductive labor) takes place in more private domains, often unpaid, playing a key role in sustaining physical and social health. These categories have long had gendered associations, with productive labor being a predominantly male domain, and reproductive labor that of women. Such a formulation has always been oversimplistic, but it does reflect a dimension of the colonial order that was transferred to the African labor force in Dakar. Frederick Cooper, for example, showed how Senegalese civil servants in the colonial era fought to be given family allowances equal to those of their French counterparts, implying that “the needs of an African family were similar to those of a European one and that the state should pay the cost of reproducing its African civil service” (Cooper Reference Cooper2005:210). These workers’ demands, predicated on the sameness of Africans and Europeans doing the same jobs, also advanced a particular division of labor within the household, where the breadwinner subsidizes the socially reproductive work of others, particularly women.

As a capital city, the status of civil servants is especially important to the economy of Dakar. Post-independence, the civil servant model of family structure was extended to artists in the city as well. During the Senghor presidency (1961–1980), while employment was largely driven by an array of local and national infrastructure projects, a great deal of patronage also flowed from the Ministry of Culture (and from Senghor himself) to artists. Elizabeth Harney writes:

The ability to make a living through creative work framed “the artist” as a particular kind of laborer. In the Senghor era, this framing focused less on artists’ socially reproductive role in the community and more on their imaginative, interpretive, and publicity-generating potentials for the nation. Through state patronage, a sizable cadre of artists and musicians could assume the same kind of head-of-household status that was enjoyed by ranking members of the civil service.

The onset of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s had a profound effect on the relationship between productive and socially reproductive labor in the city. Structural adjustment dealt a severe blow to state employment and patronage, and it precipitated a sharp decline in social services on every level. Residents of the city often responded with voluntaristic campaigns aimed at overcoming the administrative shortfalls. In many instances, such as that of sanitation and garbage collection, the civic response to this emerging crisis was widely celebrated, but it also entailed transfer of public services to the domain of socially reproductive labor. Rosalind Fredericks explains:

At the neighborhood level, the work of maintaining a livable environment is increasingly understood as a broadly shared civic responsibility, often performed in an associational context. In this model of sustaining life in the city, some actors might expect some payment, but such compensation generally involves piecemeal payouts for piecemeal work. More often it is performed altruistically. The size and financial power of the civil service which formerly provided city services has been greatly diminished, and in households where the civil-servant head-of-household model remains, salaried workers have become responsible for a greater number of dependents. Elsewhere, households increasingly rely on remittances, women’s business endeavors (especially “petite entreprises” such as food stalls or soap making), and ever-widening networks of emergency support beyond the immediate household.

The Experiences of Murid Disciples

While it is easy to point to the ubiquity of youth unemployment in places like Médina, the dynamics of socially reproductive labor, voluntarism, and the already ambiguous status of much artistic labor in the city’s popular quarters present an opportunity to rethink the categories relevant to youth labor in urban life. These ambiguities are best understood through the lives of individuals. In the brief sketches of four disciples presented below, I aim to bring about an understanding of the neighborhood, the Brotherhood, and its disciples that does not simply resort to tropes of “unemployed young men.”

Alhassane Lo had aspired as a teenager to play sabar drums in mbalax (Senegalese popular music) bands. He first sang in a kuréel qasaïd in 2008 and saw it as a way to engage youths like himself who spent their days on the street with nothing to do. For a time, he went back to playing sabar, but around 2010 he decided to devote himself to studying qasaïd full time. When I spoke to him in 2017, he had been promoted into one of the top kuréels of Wakana Khakane. Daaj (kuréel melodies), Alhassane told me, are not easy. “There are people that study for twenty or thirty years without achieving a good level… There’s no secret to it. You just have to accept being tired [from rehearsing], accept studying, and accept working on your voice.” Alhassane was one of many Murids to describe their work for their dahiras as khidma, or “service.” “Khidma means respecting your job… People who are studying have to respect their studying; people who work have to respect their work. In the dahira, you have to work to pay your dues… sitting in the kuréel is working for Seriñ Touba [Amadu Bamba].”Footnote ¹¹

Most days, during my fieldwork in Médina, Papa “Papa Afia” Diouf could be found selling used sneakers at Rue 6 x 27. Often, though, he could earn more by singing dhikr. “People get excited and they give me phones, money, rosary necklaces, fabric for me to give to my mother.”Footnote ¹² From what he makes, he gives the biggest portion to his shaykh (Afia Mbakké at the time of our interview), some to his mother, then 3000CFA each (around five dollars) to the others who sing with him. His parents did not approve when he first started to sing, but they have come around, and he wants to move forward with his singing career. Still, this can require an investment (in such things as clothes for performances and renting spaces for showcases) that sometimes outweighs the amount that he has been able to save. So he continues with other endeavors, such as selling shoes and doing majjal (soliciting donations with a calabash bowl). Papa Afia’s situation might be compared to that of the New Orleans musicians of whom Matt Sakakeeny writes, “Pursuing a career as a … musician opens up the possibility of social mobility, but the process is highly selective and the outcome is always provisional” (Sakakeeny & Birch Reference Sakakeeny and Birch2013:60). Achieving success through singing dhikr in the contemporary urban setting gives some singers a glimpse of possibilities for social mobility that might not otherwise be available to them. However, even a reasonable degree of success offers only a temporary respite from the systemic disinvestment faced by the city’s youth.

Majjal is the primary duty of Ma Fall Seye of Diwanou Galass. At their weekly Thursday night events (described above), he alternates between roaming the margins of the event shaking his bowlful of change (kël) and singing with the inner circle of responsorial dhikr participants. On weekdays, he often stands at the corner of Rue 37 x 22 performing majjal as well. The shaykh (Afia Mbakké at the time of this research) can give directions on what to do with the money, often suggesting that it be used to help people with illnesses, funerals, or baptisms, or directing it toward larger projects within his network of dahiras. “Before you do majjal,” Ma Fall explained, “you should be clean. You should clean your teeth, check yourself in the mirror, and trim your nails… Majjal is a kind of education [tarbiyya]… Not everyone can do it. If you are full of yourself, you can’t do it. Its first aim was to get people to get rid of their pride. After that, you will become prepared to deal with any kind of situation in life.”Footnote ¹³ Seye’s understanding of majjal is a reminder that many disciples continue to understand themselves as students, and that what they learn through their activities is the humility to persevere in their faith under trying circumstances. A similar sentiment was echoed by sikarkat Elimane Tine: “A young person wakes up and he doesn’t even have 20 cents, but when you talk to him he says ‘I thank Sëriñ Bamba’ and it’s the dhikr that brought that to him… The more you keep going, the more you thank Sëriñ Touba, which is to say, today what you are thankful for is your existence.”Footnote ¹⁴

Ibrahima Sy is better known by his pseudonym “Khalil’Art.” He participates in sam fall (a capella dhikr) with his dahira, Touba Darou Mousty, but his main occupation is decorating tents and creating expositions about the lives of Murid figures at various events in the neighborhood. Khalil dropped out of school when he was fourteen and worked for a time at a nearby fish market, but without having enough to do, he turned to an artist named Baba Diawara to be trained in making art out of recycled items. People whom I spoke with tied his success as an artist not to his capacity to sell tableaux, but rather to the frequency with which he gave them away. “People will tell you that a ‘boy Médina’ never does anything benevolently, but you can attest to this,” one friend told me while giving a testimonial of Khalil. “Everything he does, he does it for free.” Baye Mapate Mbaye, a Murid elder in the neighborhood who was an important spiritual leader for younger talibes like Khalil, also had a great deal of praise for the artist.Footnote ¹⁵ “He’s a true talibe. He respects his work, he respects himself, he respects his peers. Whatever you need when it comes to decorations, when you do something or when you organize something, whatever he promises, he’ll do it. He does the work of Sëriñ Touba.”Footnote ¹⁶ While financial success is certainly prized by many Murids on a global scale, the great degree to which many Murids value Khalil’s work also demonstrates how disciples in economically precarious environments decouple the impetus to labor from the promise of wealth. “I don’t wait for anything from anybody,” Khalil explained to me; “I want to start with the means that God helped me with.”Footnote ¹⁷

The binary of employment/unemployment fails to capture the broad array of labor and livelihood arrangements that many young people in Médina experience. Among Murid disciples in the neighborhood, the artist who gives away everything that he makes is celebrated, as is the student who excels and finds his way to a good job. Some disciples spend a significant amount of each day devoted to creative projects within the dahira, while others make time for such activities after spending the day working other jobs or pursuing their studies. Some rely on the dahira to structure their days while waiting for an opportunity to join the workforce, and still for others, creative labor promises income that is otherwise hard to come by.

Two concepts are useful in understanding the varied lives of these young men. The first is the notion of “distributive labor,” which has been recently furthered by the work of anthropologist James Ferguson. Distributive labor describes how a growing number of activities in the developing world are aimed not at the creation of wealth, but instead at the distribution of wealth, with people seeking “to secure a transfer of resources from those who have them to those who don’t” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015:101). Ferguson and other scholars argue that mitigating precarity ought to rely on global structures of redistribution that provide greater income to local distributive activities, regardless of their capacity for wealth creation. When money flows into Médina, through remittances, residents with reliable earnings, NGO-funded cooperatives, and other sources, it is inserted into a distributive infrastructure that stabilizes the neighborhood and creates value for the associational activities that foster solidarity and mutual aid. Murid disciples are not necessarily inclined to talk about global redistribution, but like Ferguson, many of them have come to value systems where work and pay are independent of one another. A disciple such as Ma Fall Seye “works” majjal not for sustenance, but as part of his spiritual education. Papa Afia might receive more “gifts” after singing for an hour than he could make selling shoes for a week. Khalil’Art and Alhassan Lo pursue their creative endeavors as service, and largely rely on an extended network of family, friends, leaders, and co-disciples for many of their day-to-day concerns. Khalil is similarly involved in redistributional networks during the month of Ramadan, when he collects money from supporters around the neighborhood and buys bread, butter, coffee, Nutella, and dates to hand out to anyone in need of a meal in the minutes after sunset.

The second important concept in understanding the labor of these urban disciples is khidma, which is often paraphrased as “working for Sëriñ Touba” or “the work of Sëriñ Touba.” The most straightforward translation of khidma is “service,” but it also carries implications of servitude. Amadu Bamba, for example, is often referred to as Khadim Rassoul, or “the servant of the Prophet.” Religious scholar Aziz Mbacké Majalis elevates this concept of khidma to a foundational essence of Murid political life. Mbacké writes that “[k]hidma, in reality, is to work for the City. To search for the approval of the Creator by working for His creatures… Khidma is a model of development… the type of complete progress that elevates man morally, spiritually and intellectually, and puts him in the ideal conditions… to live fully in his faith with dignity” (Mbacké Reference Mbacké2010:60–61). In a context where religious life and urban life each offer a variety of models for how people can engage in work, khidma calls on a civic orientation to serving, educating, comforting, and empowering. After generations of marginalization from the labor force, the Murid valorization of khidma allows a large number of disciples to pursue these objectives with dignity and through creative practice while they move in and out of opportunities that might secure their own material status.

Toward a Theory of Creative Labor in the Postcolonial City

The socio-cultural analysis of musical practice often takes the form of an exegesis of musical texts, interpreting contextual references, sonic messages, and “structures of feeling.” The analysis of music and other creative practices as labor has been somewhat more limited, in part because the professional lives of artists do not resemble those of other workers. Some notable writings have indeed examined the working lives of professional musicians, focusing on aspects such as personal and state patronage, racialized divisions of labor, and the changing implications of stardom.Footnote ¹⁸ But musical forms practiced in predominantly voluntary and participatory settings have tended to be understood using other categories besides labor, including ritual and recreation. In this article I have described several instances where Murid disciples and their spiritual guides frame their creative endeavors as their labor, whether or not these individuals operate as true music “professionals.”

Labor is a useful lens for understanding how the arts can structure social life and how creative practice shapes the way people understand themselves, their relationships with others, and their capacities for change. For scholars such as Kathi Weeks, labor is especially consequential for social relations and subject formation for several reasons, including: (1) the sheer amount of time that we spend laboring (within and beyond work-sites); (2) the somewhat compulsory character of labor (“few would mistake labor for a practice that can be freely taken up or easily refused”); (3) the ways that labor organizes cooperation; and (4) the performativity of labor in the way that it perpetually recreates social relations, day after day, in such a way that they become sedimented as social fact (Reference Weeks, Saree, Cesare and Rebecca1996:96). In these respects, music performed in a Murid associational context is no different from other forms of labor. This creative labor structures artists’ time commitments, their capacities for collaboration, their roles within a group, and their perceptions of how they can affect the life of the city.

The experiences of Murid disciples also highlight the possibilities that the particular laboring form of musical activity brings to the equation. Far from merely reflecting existing social orders and values, music creates spaces in which constantly evolving sets of shared ideals can be imagined and enacted (see Sugarman Reference Sugarman1997; Turino Reference Turino2008). Reciting qasaïd in a singing circle, for example, is not so much a representation of discipline and learnedness, but more significantly the means through which discipline and learnedness are achieved, and the sensory and behavioral reference through which these concepts are understood, even beyond the musical sphere. As an activity that is often framed as a separate domain from normal daily activities, and as a space where heightened sensory registers make participants and audiences especially sensitive to subtle cues regarding comportment and cooperation, music holds enormous potential as a site of social reproduction.

Murids are not alone in acknowledging the labor involved in a growing range of socially reproductive activities such as music. In different contexts across the globe, the labor concept is being revisited and expanded in significant ways. Recent artist collectives that understand their socially reproductive work as labor have been confronting the art market—with its manufactured scarcity supported by finance-capital imperatives—by producing in a certain mode (collectively, with an emphasis on participation) and by explicitly referencing the market’s contradictions in their work (Sholette Reference Sholette2016). For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2009), social reproduction as labor is significant because this labor is increasingly central to the direct production of capital; industries thrive on commodifying desire, providing “service with a smile,” and tapping into social communicative possibilities that increase efficiency and connect markets. The discursive shift across multiple fields toward viewing social reproduction as labor is not simply academic. It is taking place in tandem with changes to a global labor landscape where Fordist, worker-firm occupational identities are being replaced by job flexibility on the one hand, and on the other, by habituation to job insecurity.

For Murid thinkers such as Aziz Mbakké Majalis, the most significant Murid contribution to this global conversation is the political and developmental philosophy of khidma. Khidma is not simply a stand-in for “labor,” just as Murid industriousness should not simply be seen as an African Muslim iteration of the protestant work ethic. Khidma is done with an intent (to adore God by serving his creations) and with a set of goals (“the moral, spiritual, and intellectual elevation of man… to live in his faith with dignity”) that presents a more wholistic vision of development than that of mere “employment.” Within the structure of many youthful dahiras, this vision of khidma is extensively practiced through creative labor.

Khidma as a theory of labor differs in important ways from ubiquitous “productivist” discourses that index African progress to the availability of waged labor. Franco Barchiesi has mounted an important critique of these discourses, pointing out:

Barchiesi further elaborates on a number of problems with this productivist developmental focus. First, as a substitute for redistribution, “job creation” suggests that political stability can be achieved with limited burdens to the global upper class. Second, by equating dignity with a capitalist work ethic, working classes in precarious contexts are taught to value any and all employment, even if it brings little value (financial or social) to the household or community. Third, while indifference toward employment has been cited as a root cause of moral and political failure, it has often been the desire for employment that has spurred troubling instances of “nationalist closure, cultural resentment, xenophobia, and anti-immigration hysteria” (Barchiesi Reference Barchiesi2012:240). Might khidma and other concepts focused on creativity and social reproduction offer an alternative way of addressing labor among precarious populations of the postcolonial city?

The example of Murid dahiras suggests a few starting points. Within the burgeoning metropolis of Dakar, a space marked by enormous population density and varying levels of economic precarity, Murid dahiras are more than an internally bound religious community; they also partake in the structuring of the commons.Footnote ¹⁹ By creating spaces on urban streets where a broader public can exercise their creativity, these associations foster an environment where new kinds of sociability can multiply. Once disciples are in the orbit of the dahira, they are put to work, often in service of the association’s creative goals. Such creative work is not bound by the laws of scarcity and the forms of resentment that scarcity gives rise to. The work also serves to reshape the redistributive networks of the city, eliciting new forms and sources of patronage.

Some Senegalese observers make an important critique of the Muridiyya’s distributive practices: struggling disciples often make great sacrifices to enable money to flow upward in the Brotherhood hierarchy to shaykhs, many of whom live comfortably, not in Dakar, but in the vicinity of the holy city of Touba. The degree to which redistribution occurs laterally throughout the local community and hierarchically towards shaykhs is a balance that many dahiras negotiate in their internal discussions. But clearly some of this redistributional activity differs from Ferguson’s vision for a global system aimed at moving cash unidirectionally down the economic ladder toward precarious populations. Another contradiction for creative young men laboring in the dahira is that while men have been the target of narratives that perniciously attach dignity and empowerment to productivism, they also remain the beneficiaries of many forms of patriarchy that proliferate locally and internationally.

Despite these contradictions, the prolonged absence of consistent employment for many urban youths necessitates new ways of thinking through how their labor contributes to the production of social life in the city and beyond. Creative labor both within and beyond religious movements is critical to discussions of political imagination within a precarious urban class. Associations of Murid disciples promote the dignity of labor while moving beyond a strictly productivist orientation, and they create an infrastructure which institutionalizes their attitudes and practices on a grassroots level, giving rise to new possibilities for social integration within the city.