Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba

A different view of colonization from the eyes of the colonized.

I was just reading about a Muslim philosopher who led a successful nonviolent struggle for peace within the last century. Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba, who stated that “My religion is the love of God,” emphasized his spiritual heritage and wrote that he merely transmitted the messages of many great spiritual masters before him.

He was a founder of Mouridism, one of four Sufi movements in Senegal with several million followers. Faced with tourture and deportation, he responded with prayer and peaceful resistance, always emphasizing the virtues of pacifism and hard work in life. His followers aspire to live closer to God, following his example of living in peace, a Sufi philosophy.
His life reminds us of the adaptability of religion to different cultures, people and geographies throughout the world.
Ahmadou Bamba led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism in Senegal attempting to restore the practice of Islam away from French colonial influence. By doing so, Bamba led a spiritual struggle against this colonial domination of his culture.

It is always interesting to find these historic leaders who have remained in the shadows of our texts yet bring so much richness and life to our perspective of the cultural struggles that we have viewed from our Western lense. We have viewed west Africa from our colonial lense and rarely have we viewed its history from the perspective of the colonized. Richness abounds!