Muridiyya: Din al-Fellahin

Amadou Bamba understood the connections between labor, earthy organicism, and disillusioned piety. He taught that honest labor of any kind was a form of worship. As with Tolstoy's Nabatov, "He loved work and was always employed on some practical business..." Intellectual work is labor and, in the words of Cheikh Anta Babou, Bamba was a Gramscian organic intellectual. His pen was a plow to break the soil of Wolof privilege and French colonial rapacity. He engaged elite literatures (the writings of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali for example) and drew from them practical applications for his community of Senegalese farmers. He developed a pedagogical schema that was thoroughly Ghazalian.

Hear Gramsci:

Intellectuals of the rural type are for the most part "traditional", that is they are linked to the social mass of country people and the town (particularly small-town) petite bourgeoisie, not as yet elaborated and set in motion by the capitalist system. This type of intellectual brings into contact the peasant masses with the local and state administration (lawyers, notaries, etc.). Because of this activity they have an important politico-social function, since professional mediation is difficult to separate from political. Furthermore: in the countryside the intellectual (priest, lawyer, notary, teacher, doctor, etc.), has on the whole a higher or at least a different living standard from that of the average peasant and consequently represents a social model for the peasant to look to in his aspiration to escape from or improve his condition.

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 14.

Gramsci is, of course, writing from his knowledge of the European peasant, not the sub-Saharan West African. Nevertheless, there are many parallels to be remarked between the two types.

Today, many of the Senegalese Muridiyya who belong to Bamba's tariqa in the diaspora are urban dwellers, tradespeople and pedlars.