Focus on Arts and Ecology

DIORBEL IS AN OASIS in arid scrub brush about a hundred miles inland from Senegal’s Atlantic coast. Here, a century ago, the ascetic pacifist preacher Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba spent the last fifteen years of his life under house arrest for advocating nonviolent opposition to the French colonial occupation of West Africa. Today Bamba is revered as a saint and a hero of anti-colonial resistance, and the small slat shack to which he was confined is encased within a windowed marble shrine that stands roughly in the center of a massive sandy compound, which itself is surrounded by a tall white wall. You take off your shoes at the main gate, as you would entering a home, or the courtyard of a mosque. You pass through other, smaller gates in a succession of tin walls that partition the compound into smaller sandy sections, each quieter than the last. Then you reach it, the shrine, and through a window you can see the saint’s house, can see into the house.

For Bamba, Diourbel was both a prison and a place of creative flourishing. Here he wrote some of his twenty thousand devotional verses, and treatises on theology, Islamic jurisprudence, Sufism, religious sociology, and Arabic literature; here he fostered and directed the Mouride Sufi brotherhood he himself had founded on the principles of devotion and hard work. More than two hundred thousand people live in Diourbel now, but a century ago the town was a whistle-stop on the Dakar–Niger Railway, which the French were building to transport peanuts from the hinterlands to the port of Dakar. If I imagine gone the grandiose marble reliquary that ensheathes Bamba’s prison-shack, and the austere walls that surround his compound, and all the new homes built in Diourbel since his death, then what remains is a dun semidesert with a few trees to throw imperfect shade, and all around the kind of silentium ingens, quies magna that, I suppose, early anchorites sought out in the Eastern Desert of Egypt—Abba Agathon, who spent three years with a stone in his mouth to help him refrain from speaking; and Abba Bes, who “lived a life of the utmost stillness”; and Saint Gebre Menfes Kidus, an Egyptian monk who brought Christianity to Ethiopia, and who during his desert tenure lived among sixty lions and sixty leopards for so long he developed thick, white hair that covered his body like a coat. I think: in such quiet Bamba worked for fifteen years.

It was here—in this place, in confinement—that he envisioned, through the morality of his work, what would counter the degradation of the human spirit, and hoped into existence an entirely new, tangible place and way of living in devotion: the city of Touba, thirty miles to the northeast of Diourbel, a model of a perfect Islamic society, an autonomous city-state where all sin is forbidden and rigorous earthly labor coexists with religious scholarship, where the laws of lay governments do not apply, and where, since the beginning of its construction in 1926—a year before Bamba’s death—the population has swelled, so that it is now the third-most populated metropolis in Senegal. He also envisioned and designed Touba’s opulent Great Mosque, which the Mouride hold second in importance only to the Grand Mosque of Mecca. Whereas the Desert Fathers chose their desert solitude so they could focus on their relationship to God, powers of white supremacy forced the Sufi cheikh into his, and he dedicated it, barely half a century after the formal abolition of slavery in the French colonies, to imagining paths toward spiritual and cultural sovereignty for a people who would remain under occupation for decades after his death. I traveled to Diourbel because—like many pilgrims, I suppose—I hoped to see a place where hope was born.

THE PHILOSOPHER Jonathan Lear describes courage in the face of cultural collapse as “radical hope.” “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it,” he explains. “This is a daunting form of commitment: to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.” Lear talks specifically about the predicament of the Crow Nation in the face of settler colonialist expansion in the United States, but also, more broadly, about the vulnerability of the human condition. Ruin, he writes, “is a possibility we all must live with—even when our culture is robust…. It is a possibility that marks us as human.”

Ours is the era of unprecedented man-made geological changes; of historically unmatched migration and concomitant fencing-in; a hyper-informed time when chronicles of one another’s lives are numbingly accessible yet our hostility toward one another persists; and when more people than ever in history are living alone. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin. How do we hold on and what do we hold on to as we are continually coming to terms with the world we have made, are making, a place that contains both joy and hurt, a thaumatrope ever flicking between sacred and profane; and how do we honor and hold both the delight and the grief at a time of historical reconsideration? How can we soberly and responsibly counter despair, and dare hope for an emotional vocabulary against depravity? It awes me that Bamba transformed his confinement into a creative sanctuary, and I think it is no accident that the cheikh’s hagiography focuses on miracles of transformation: when his French captors locked him up in a cage with a hungry lion, Bamba prayed the beast to sleep; when they threw him in a furnace, he used the fire to make tea and invited the Prophet Muhammad to join him for a cup. There is something almost quantum about this kind of hoping.

I SET OUT for Diourbel from Dakar, in a taxi. The June morning sky was white with haze that was part pulverized desert, part engine exhaust, and things appeared as stage flats, shadow puppets: the tinfoil sheet of the Atlantic; the cardboard cutout of a highway overpass on which a silhouetted horse dragged a cart toward a discolored market; the sudden goats staccatoing across the tarmac to disappear into the faded voile of thorn that trims the continent all the way to the Red Sea; the two-dimensional baobab, itself as big as a house, stapled with to-let notices. In such enchanted light, all had the air of a fairy tale, so that when highway patrolmen materialized out of the murk to collect tolls, swift and merciless, the taxi driver joked that they were latter-day roadside genies, that you half expected them to ask for your firstborn. But two hours into the drive, an egret atop a concrete police shelter unfolded to preen, and somehow, by the grace of its wingflick, the sky lifted and faint cirrus anointed the blue, and when a little past ten o’clock the taxi pulled into Diourbel, the hot air was still and brilliantly clear and held the place in a kind of reverent showcasing.

“There is a place,” writes Iris Murdoch, “… for a sort of contemplation of the Good … which is not just the planning of particular good actions but an attempt to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection…. This is the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important.” I walked through the compound barefoot on hot ochre sand, and stood before the marble structure that encased Bamba’s shack, and peered through the window. After my eyes adjusted to the crepuscle, I could sort of make out dusty things, a trunk with notebooks, a blanket, maybe a zinc washtub—I had read somewhere that Bamba often dumped all together into a washtub his correspondence and his receipts and the donations he received, either out of his detachment from worldly things, or perhaps to ablute them—and I stood awed by what these objects represented: the wickedness, the vision, the mystic rectitude of purpose.