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| Crowds gather to celebrate the Magal in Touba, Senegal. Source: http://www.biyokulule.com/sawiro/sawirada_waaweyn/Senegal-Touba2.jpg |
Once a year, millions of visitors from near and far converge on the city of Touba, Senegal to celebrate the Magal. This Muslim festival commemorates Sufi leader and founder of the Mouride Brotherhood, Cheikh Amadou Bamba’s exile by the French colonial authorities in 1895 due to fear over his growing influence in the area. Clearly, French efforts to subdue the Mouride movement were in vain, as today, the Mourides constitute the most powerful and largest Muslim brotherhood in Senegal, with well over a million members.[1] In spite of this, it seems quite strange that the capital of this Sufi religious movement would be located in the middle of rural Senegal, miles away from its coastal capital city of Dakar, and, more importantly, hundreds of miles away from what is considered the geographic and ideological center of Islam: Mecca, Saudi Arabia. As is true for most religious movements, politics and economics have a lot to do with how much influence religious groups can exert and where they can expand their power. After gaining independence from France, the Senegalese government quickly established diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia to help support the annual pilgrimage of many of Senegal’s Muslims to Mecca. In 1970s, Senegalese president Léopold Senghor welcomed financial assistance from oil-rich Arab nations following a drought and soaring oil-prices due to the 1973 Arab oil-boycott.[2] At the same time, Arab nations set up the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa and the Islamic Development Bank to provide aid to Muslim African states. While the Muslim influence in Senegal has been shaped by a variety of other factors, it is clear that politics and economic necessity have led to the drastic ascendance of Islam in the West African nation.
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| Sufi leader Cheikh Amadou Bamba. Source: http://www.blackpast.org/files/blackpast_images/Bamba_Ahmadu.jpg |
While I have expounded on some of the factors leading to Senegal’s prominent role in the development of Islam in Africa, it still remains perplexing why a small, rural city in the middle of Senegal would become the capital of the Mouride Brotherhood and an important convergence point for millions of pilgrims worldwide. Legend has it that Sufi leader Cheikh Amadou Bamba established the town of Touba under God’s guidance. When he came to the site where the city was to stand, he sat beneath the shade of tree to rest and experienced a moment of illumination that indicated to him that it was here that God’s town was to be built. The landscape was indeed to embody the city’s spiritual beginnings. In this paper, I will attempt to show how the archetype of the tree is used as a sign for the both the spiritual and the material worlds in Touba, and ultimately underscores how Sufism has been anchored in the larger landscape of the city, making it a traditional city in a modern setting.
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| Baobab Tree, Senegal. Source: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01520/baobab-gett360_1520903c.jpg |
The tree is a symbol used in many religious and secular spheres because of its universality and prototypical form. In Christianity, Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and condemn the rest of humanity to original sin. In Buddhist theology, the Buddha is said to have been sitting under a pipal tree when he was enlightened or “awakened.” Examples outside of the explicitly religious realm in which the symbolism of the tree is evoked include the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. As the tale goes, a young George Washington was outside testing out his new hatchet when he accidentally chopped down the cherry tree that his father had planted and that he had been caring for for so long. When his father confronted him about it, questioning whether it was indeed him that had chopped down his tree, George felt an immediate obligation to tell the truth in spite of the significance he knew the tree held for his father. His father was elated that his son was telling the truth and reassured him by letting him know that telling the truth was worth much more than his cherry tree. There are various levels of symbolism in this tale of morality, but it is obvious that while the point of the story was to demonstrate the importance of telling the truth (and how the Father of this country was an upstanding citizen, even at a young age), the tree held a special value that was highlighted specifically in the story. This story, and the pervasiveness of the archetype of the tree through different cultures and religions, begs the question of what a tree really represents and what makes it such a powerful symbol. For one, the tree is the ultimate symbol of growth, decay, and resurrection; in short, it represents the cycle of life which every person and thing of nature is subject to, automatically making it a universal symbol. It gets its nutrients from the earth; grows sturdy and strong as the years pass; changes as the seasons change; and finally loses its leaves, representing the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. I contend, however, that there is something more than its biological qualities that make it so symbolic and attractive to religious symbology. Perhaps it is that a tree is the physical manifestation of these principles of life. A tree is grounded in the earth by its roots that spread throughout the ground, while at the same time reaching skyward in a straight path that eventually splits into many branches. Those branches grow leaves that change colors and fall and then grow again in a seemingly endless cycle of renewal: “The meaning which the tree form conveys—though it varies from one religion to another—revolves around its essential physical property, i.e., the fact that it rises from earth to sky. In cosmological terms, the tree stands at the “center” of the world; it also transcends the world as an axis mundi, linking this earth to that which is above and below it.”[3] As Eric Ross observes, the tree has the quality of evoking multidimensional qualities of being; it represents transcendence. The tree inhabits the underworld through its roots, the earthly world through its trunk, and the heavenly realm through its spread of branches in the sky. Given its symbolic yet easily accessible form, it not only symbolically, but physically occupies the realm of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the created, the religious and the secular, and the modern and the traditional.
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| Grand Mosque, Touba, Senegal. Source: http://frysingerreunion.org/africa/senegal508.jpg |
Because a tree can physically occupy different realms of nature, at once, it is no surprise that the archetype of the tree is also of high symbolic importance in the Islamic tradition. There are various designations of the tree that take different forms in the many sects of Islam—in Sufism, one of the designations of the tree is the tree of paradise, or the Tûbâ. The Tûbâ is described in Sufi literature as a tree that is a hundred years wide, has great shade, magnificent fruit, roots of pearl, a trunk of ruby, and many other extraordinary features.[4] Etymologically speaking, the name of the city Touba comes from the word Tûbâ, denoting this Sufi tree of paradise. Having established this basic connection between the city of Touba and the symbol of the tree, we can look at how the symbol of the tree functions in the ordering and the landscape of Touba and serves as a representation of the connection between spiritual and material worlds.
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| Touba, Senegal designated by red arrow. Source: Africa Map |
As I mentioned earlier, Ross asserts that the tree stands as an axis mundi, being both in the center of the earth and representing the connection between the earthly and spiritual worlds. The first, obvious way in which this idea is played out in Touba is through the presence of actual trees in places of importance: “For the Sufis especially, actual trees continue to be the locus of pious or devotional acts, including spiritual and burial, and these have much to do with their relation to the archetypal tree…”[5] The legend of the founding of Touba is, as already mentioned, centered around the idea of an actual tree standing as a symbol for the place where the city was to be built. This shows, in a very real way, that the tree was to be the literal center of the city, as well as to represent the spot where Cheikh Amadou Bamba connected with the spiritual realm for guidance. While the exact location of this spot is a detail lost to history, at the center of the city is the Great Mosque, a shrine representing what is the spiritual center of the city, once denoted by a tree. Next to the Great Mosque is Touba’s cemetery, which, until 2003, had a baobab tree as its center point. The tree was personalized by a proper name in Wolof (the most commonly spoken ethnic language), Guy Texe, which translates to “Baobab of Bliss.”[6] This name emphasizes the connection between the “tree of paradise,” showing that this tree is the the physical manifestation of the idea of the tree as axis mundi. This argument is strengthened when one considers the function of a cemetery. The cemetery is the earthly gate to the spiritual sphere. Physical burial in Touba itself, because of its spiritual significance in Sufi belief, is supposed to bring the dead in even closer contact with the spritiual realm than being buried in an ordinary cemetery located elsewhere. The placement of the tree in the center of the cemetery epitomizes and makes real this connection between the earthly and spiritual realms. One other place in which the connection between the spiritual and the earthly is actualized by the presence of trees is the tree-lined boulevard that encloses the city of Touba. The Rocade, as it is commonly called, surrounds the entirety of the city and delineates the spiritual and political limits of the city. It keeps out things like alcohol and drugs that go against the “Straight Path of Islam,” while creating a safe, protected space in which people can meditate on the state of their spiritual lives without material interruptions. The fact that it is surrounded by trees physically shows that the city is grounded in the earth by virtue of being a built urban environment, while occupying a space closer to the spiritual realm.
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| Map of Touba showing the Rocade enclosing the city. Source: http://www.daaramouride.asso.ulaval.ca/images/Touba2.jpg |
Not only is the idea transcendence and of occupying multiple realms of being actualized by the presence of real trees, but it is also symbolized by the layout of the city. Touba is organized around a main square that contains the famous Great Mosque. The Mosque is the ubiquitous Mouride symbol and is famous around Senegal and greater Africa for its commanding central minaret: “The distinctive minaret represents all that the city signifies for Mouides, but it also stands as a physical, tangible, concrete manifestation of the paradisiacal Tûbâ.”[7] Ross asserts that the minaret is the physical representation of the tree of paradise, a representation that operates on a formal as well as a symbolic level. Formally, the Mosque adopts the qualities of tree roots spreading out in all directions and covering a wide stretch of ground. The minaret then rises up above all of this in the center and points skyward much like the trunk of a tree would. In this way the Mosque channels the grounded quality of tree roots while at the same time channeling the spiritual character of a tree through its tall minaret. Additionally, the city is laid out in such a way that all major streets emanante outwards from the central square. This reinforces the idea that the Mosque, representing the archetype of a tree, is the the axis mundi from which all roads or roots originate.
Touba is a city that straddles the border between the spiritual and the earthly. This quality of transcendence is actualized through the use of the tree as both a mental symbol and the physical manifestation of this property. This multi-dimensionality serves to emphasize the city's position as a traditional city in a modern world. Touba was founded in 1887, but the Grand Mosque, which baptized the city as a spiritual center for Sufism, was not completed until 1963. This makes it different from the majority of other religious centers in the world which are hundreds if not thousands of years old. Touba has all the amenities of a modern city and was planned by modern architects and builders, but remains traditional in a non-Western sense. While its urbanization has been planned in accordance with Sufi spiritual beliefs and customs in the way a Western city is planned in accordance to theories of urban planning and growth, it has remained connected to the idea that urban growth is a spontaneous process that changes as the culture of a city changes. This is again reinforced by the symbol of the tree as ever-changing and evolving while remaining rooted in the ground and sturdy.
[1] Sheldon Gellar, Senegal: An African Nation Between Islam and the West, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 112.
[2] Ibid., 98.
[3] Eric Ross, Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 15.
[4] Ibid., 15.
[5] Ibid., 29.
[6] Ibid., 72.
[7] Ibid., 71
Bibliography
Gellar, Sheldon. Senegal: An African Nation Between Islam and the West. 2nd ed. Boulder: Westview
Press, 1995.
Ross, Eric. Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006.
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