Transnational Mouridism and the Afro-Muslim Critique of Italy

Founded in the 1880s by Cheick Amadou Bamba, the Mouride brotherhood has its capital in Touba, Senegal, where Mourides have constructed the largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa. The brotherhood’s vertical and horizontal ties and a culture of migration have been readily reproduced within transnational networks. Most Mouride migrants are men, who are involved in circulatory migration. They have left their families in Senegal where their transnational social networks are ‘anchored’. In addition to exploring their transnational networks in both receiving and sending contexts, I consider Mouride attitudes towards and discourses about the society of migration. Their Afro-Muslim critique of Italy offers methodological lessons. Indeed, it demonstrates the need to combine analytic anti-essentialism with the ethnographic exploration of prosaic essentialisms.