A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Elizabeth Harney

A Saint in the City Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal

Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts With Gassia Armenian and Ousmane Gueye

UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, 2003. Distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. 284 pp., 274 color illustrations, map, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. $45 softcover.

A vast corpus of scholarly materials addresses the cultural and political history of Senegal. These works can be read alongside those concerned with traditions of postcolonial literature, film, and, to a lesser degree, fine arts to give a fascinating picture of an exceedingly complex and rich society. It is therefore noteworthy that with this publication and exhibition (shown at the UCLA Fowler Museum from February 9 to July 27, 2003), Allen E Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts have carved out a distinctive niche within this literature by taking a much-needed look at the visual imaginary and practices of the Mourides of Senegal.

The Mourides are the most influential of the Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal and have created a cultural system of beliefs, practices, myths, narratives, imagery, and socio-politico economic structures which surround and support their devotion to their saint, Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927). In this catalogue the Robertses seek nothing less than to envelop the reader in what they call an "imagorium" of Mouridism--a neologism they apply primarily to the architectural and built spaces in which the devotees surround themselves with images of the saint. Through their intense research efforts and abilities to find and display a vast array of visual practices related to a "Mouride Way" of seeing, the authors have created their own sanctum.

One becomes aware almost immediately upon opening this publication and glancing through the wide-ranging chapters and the innocuously titled but extremely important "Notes to Readers" that this book is much more than a catalogue, a mere documentation of a visual presentation. In fact, as I shall argue below, it is the Robertses' desire for it to play a double role as catalogue and scholarly work that causes frustration at times for its readers and leads one to question if two publications might have been better than one. (It is worth noting that a number of the chapters within the catalogue have already been published in scholarly journals.)

The authors situate their work within reflexive visual anthropology and focus our attention upon systems of visuality, addressing the profound connections between visual piety, devotion, and practice. The variety of images and practices presented within the publication is truly impressive, ranging from glass painting, scripted forms, and contemporary arts in a number of media, architecture, textiles, and murals. As Maria Berns, director of the Fowler Museum, notes in her foreword, the authors are clearly concerned with "relinquishing art-world hierarchies," gathering together images of devotion "whether they are categorized as urban, popular, tourist, devotional, or international" (p. 9). As one leafs through the images, it is refreshing to see that an exhibition and research project such as this can result in such an impressive collection of arts for the Fowler's permanent collection.

The publication is divided into ten chapters, all generously endowed with good-quality color images and multiple "sidebars" which carry comments and testimonies of devotees, artists, and informants whose views the Robertses, as the main narrators of the book, seek to present. The chapters do vary significantly, however, in the depth of analysis and the strength of linkage to the central premises of the research. With a diverse set of approaches and a collection of multiple voices, the authors hope to vary the rhythm of the book and achieve the greatest breadth of audience.

Before engaging with the main body of the text, one must first turn briefly to "Notes to Readers" (p. 18) in order to comprehend the immensity and complexity of the project the authors set for themselves. They write:

   We hope to present Mouride views in
   this book as Mourides themselves might.
   In "seeking new ways to represent adequately
   the authority of informants,"
   as James Clifford (1988, 45) has urged
   and many others have achieved over the
   course of the last fifteen years, we are
   only acknowledging that Mourides have
   a right to speak for themselves....

Few would argue with this admirable goal, but achieving it is a tricky process, and one is led immediately to question why there are not more Senegalese contributors to the catalogue beyond Mamadou Diouf, who writes a short, endorsing preface. Surely there are numerous Sufi scholars who might have contributed beyond sidebars.

While hoping to present "Mouride views" (p. 18), the authors quickly acknowledge that such a project is fraught with potential misreadings, for immediately they must deal with the assumptions that the writings ad dress the views of all Mourides or indeed all Senegalese Sufis, when, in fact, they "reflect the views of a very few individuals and the deductions we have drawn from what they have told us and what we ourselves have observed and experienced" (p. 19). While this disclaimer may be found in any reflexive anthropological endeavor, it does have special emphasis here, as the crux of this project is essentially to present an encompassing "world view" of a set of people--a project which in and of itself is at the heart of anthropological tradition.