R E V I E W S

A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal. UCLAFowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles February 9-July27,2003.

J O S E P H N E V A D O M S K YCalifornia State University, Fullerton

A photograph can be a powerful weapon. As Susan Sontagonce said, the basic unit of memory is the image. All of uscarry around a library of single images in our heads as a formof remembering. Think My Lai or Kent State. If memoryfreeze-frames images, what about meanings? The spaces be-tween the subject and its representation get reinterpreted,meanings shift, so photographs may have unintended con-sequences. Take, for example, the photograph of SheikhAmadou Bamba (1853-1927), an Islamic holy man in Senegal.Posed for at age 60, while he was under house arrest for al-leged sedition against the French colonial authorities, it is amemory snapshot—the only one known of him (Figure 1).Amateurish and innocuous, it was taken, one supposes, toshow that he is still alive or to offer evidence of the photog-rapher's visit. Yet it provides the pivot around which a religious movement later emerged, and an art tradition nowflourishes with that photograph as its signifier.

The photograph that inspired thousands of paintings,prints, and murals, and now CD covers and T-shirts is thatof a full-length figure, robed in white, and with a long whiteshawl wrapped round his head and thrown over his leftshoulder partially hiding his face. The contrasts of shade andsun obscure his shadowed eyes and give the robe an etherealquality. No hands emerge from the ghostly sleeves, andonly one foot can be glimpsed at the hem of the garment;the other leg is hidden by the figure's cast shadow, creatingan ambiguous visage that seems to mediate between twoworlds, the visible foot in the mundane and the shadowedone in the spiritual—an anomalous apparition in suspendedelevation stepping in and out of obscurity. In its opacity thephotograph generated the necessary posthumous transitionfrom holy man to patron saint, marabout to mystic. In thatconversion Sheikh Bamba becomes the revered founder ofthe Mouride Way, a complex form of Sufism within Islamthat offers a pacifist rather than jihadic worldview, espous-ing hard work as a palliative against the corruption of thesoul rather than war as a means of its salvation.

A Saint in the City1: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal makes gooduse of this ambiguous image to show how it works as a pow-erful medium of devotion and prayer for over tour millionSenegalese—roughly half the Muslim population of Senegal—and followers elsewhere. Its iconic function as an image cen-tral to contemporary Senegalese social life allows us to get a

FIGURE 1. Copy of the only known photograph of Sheikh AmaduBamba, taken in 1913 in Djourbel, Senegal. Published in Etudes surI'lslam au Senegal by Paul Marty, 2 vols., 1917:222. Paris: ErnestLeroux. (Courtesy Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA)

glimpse of the visual culture of the Mouride Way and its maintenet of salvation through labor, an Islamic version of We-ber's Protestant Ethic. Except here the desire is pacifism in-stead of capitalism, though the end result nowadays is prob-ably the same because commercial success comes in manyideologies. One of many variants of Islam, the Mouride Wayreminds us that Islam is not monolithic but interwoven withregional diversity and multicultural complexity. It is alsocosmopolitan. The duplication and recreation of that 1913photograph in the visual arts of Senegalese urban culturealso directs us to reconsider the popular misconception thatthe Qu'ran (Koran) prohibits representations of human images,and to contemplate the meanings of images—photographs

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paintings, electronic, and abstracted— in contemporary Is-lamic cultures.

Just as important, the exhibition attests to the remarkableproliferation of urban religious art in Dakar, Senegal's capi-tal city. Sheikh Bamba's image appears in many forms andon just about everything from wall murals to glass paint-ings, commercial products to devotional statues, a testi-mony to the transforming power of the photograph and itsextended meanings (Figure 2). The first in the United Statesto examine the visual expressions of Islamic Senegal, the exhibition underscores the connections between art and soci-ety or, in Geertz's terms, the cultural significance of art. Italso examines global networks and the transnational influ-ences of new media. Curated by cultural anthropologist Al-len Roberts (director of the James S. Coleman African Stud-ies Center and professor of World Arts and Cultures atUCLA) and art historian Polly Nooter Roberts (deputy direc-tor and chief curator of the Fowler), the exhibition removeshierarchies of distinction among various forms of creativeexpression, giving street and popular art equal legitimacywith the art of the gallery, and makes a compelling case forblurring such shop-worn categorical oppositions as tradi-tional versus contemporary, arts versus crafts, in favor of an

FIGURE 2. Portrait of Sheikh Amadu Bamba composed of the holynames Allah and Mohammed, from the studio of Mor Gueye, 1998,after a photocopy of a calligram by an anonymous artist, In turnderived from a portrait of the saint by Assane Dione. Fowler Mu-seum of Cultura History, UCLA. (Photographer: Don Cole)

emphasis on matrix images and image construction (e.g,the famous poster of Che Guevara), graphic manipulations(e.g., calligrams and computers) and visual hagiography(e.g., myth making and media spin).

Visual culture is the forum through which meanings areconstituted or, in this exhibition, how an image becomesinstrumental as prayer for solving problems, addressingmisfortunes, or achieving a blessing power called baraka, akind of spiritual charge that like grace brings one closer toGod as life gets sorted out through the contemplation of thereplicated photograph. Both the visual reproduction ofBamba's image and pious reflection on it are turned into ac-tive prayer, while the active nature of urban art accounts forits creative manifestation. Reproduction takes thv form ofdevotional icons similar to Our Lady of Guadaloupe souvenirsin Mexico, concrete wall murals with social messages notmuch different from street art in downtown L.A., commer-cial advertising on freeway billboards, emblems of groupidentity on T-shirts, religious inscriptions printed on gar-ments, drawings and sketches in kids' school books, colorfulglass paintings for sale in city shops and virtual worship onwebsite domains.

Its overwhelming ubiquity partly accounts for its allureLike Saddam Hussein's portraits in Baghdad, Sheikh AmadouBamba's image appears in every guise throughout Senegaland in the Fowler exhibit. Of special note is the repetitiveAndy Warhol-like paintings by Assane Dione, each one saidto be subtly different although they look like copies and Icould not tell them apart. They remind one of prayer beads:mesmerizing in their redundancy In other depictions, thesaintly visage of Bamba appears as a small portion of thepainting, like the agent icon in Microsoft Windows, offeringa reminder of religious contemplation. Sufis who follow theMouride Way incorporate figural imagery with calligraphyand now Internet technology. Abstracted patterning andelectronic simulacra more perfectly reflect the Mouride Wayunconsciously achieved in the Bamba photograph: self-ef-facement.

Designed by David Mayo, Director of Exhibitions, the showof over two hundred objects is divided into 12 galleries, a to-tal of 6,500 square feet. (A catalog accompanies the exhibi-tion and Betsy Quick, the Fowler's Educational Director, hasadded a curriculum study guide and organized a lecture seriesto support it. Both Mayo and Quick visited Senegal in prepa-ration for this exhibition.) The entrance features a true-to-size sectioned photo replica of a mural on a Dakar factorywall by an artist named "Papisto Boy," a montage of subjectsthat include Kwame Nkurmah, Che Gue\ara, and MartinLuther King. There are places here for other global greats likeNelson Mandela and Bill Clinton and the musicians BobMarley and Chiekh Lo, a pantheon of pacifists, freedom lov-ers, resistance fighters, nationalists, ideologues, and musi-cians. This is followed by a quick introduction to Islam inSenegal via a strange set of atmospheric photographs meant tosuggest the otherworldly qualities of Islam but, instead,leaves one worldly, given the wall mural of the entrance sec-tion that incorporates portraits of global leaders and pop

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FIGURE 3. Glass painting from the studio of Mor Gueye (c. 1998) of the ship of exile and the miracle of Sheikh Amadu Bamba praying on thewaters in 1895. Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA. (Photographer: Don Cole)

culture heroes, and the burgeoning commercial applica-tions of Mourides Way art suggested by the other galleries.

Sufism adapted the contemporary West African traditionof glass paintings including Biblical themes (Figure 3).Noah's ark is popular as is the parable of Abraham's willing-ness to obey God's command and sacrifice his son. Anothercommon theme is al-Burag, the prophet Mohammed's wingedhorse (with a woman's head) that carried him to heaven.The al-Burag glass-painting theme derives from those mass-produced chromolithographs found in every poster-sellingmarket stall all over the Islamic world. Today, new glasspaintings are sought after as souvenirs, the way chromolitho-graphs once were. (They are on sale in the museum gift shop.)

Next comes an explication of Bamba's life, preceded bythe singular photograph, and a suite of glass paintings depicting "stations" of the saint's life Most of them catalogSheikh Bamba's exile, trial, and house arrest by a Frenchgovernment that feared he might stir up political turmoil inthe colony, and even foment rebellion (jihad). Like the Biblical Daniel they include an encounter in his cell with a lion;he is troubled by firms (genies), and succored by angels, andsurvives these tribulations to build the holy city of Toubawith the help of his favorite disciple Sheikh Ibra Fall. Thepaintings are narrative and luminous, delicate and fragile. Adevotional sanctum follows. This is an astonishing display,

what the curators call an "imagorium," a holy memoryroom adorned with posters, wall and ceiling paintings, ban-ners, artifacts, and rugs, something akin to the warmth andrich clutter of the interior embellishments of an Eastern Or-thodox church in which one's mind cannot stray far. It rep-licates a follower's private chamber and meeting room, forconversation, prayer, and meditation.

A thought provoking section on mass-produced technol-ogy focuses on Bamba's image as it appears on storefronts,fences, juxtaposed amidst icons of popular culture fromMike Tyson to Madonna, and in the popular media of televi-sion and documentary (Figure 4). The saturated reproduc-tion of Bamba's image begs for commentary on the MourideWay of seeing and the ethical pronouncements of Islam. Formost adherents, Sheikh Amadou Bamba's image serves as atalisman, an apotropaic device for assuring protection ofprivate and commercial property, employees and familiesalike. The propriety of depicting human beings is open tointerpretation however. To man) Muslims worldwide therendering of the human form transgresses God's province tocreate life, \et every day religious leaders appear on televi-sion to exhort, uplift, and guide, and they are savA) enoughto knows that the immediacy and intensity of commercialreligious programs gets the message out to adherents, forti-fies beliefs and gains followers.

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FIGURE 4. Restaurant doors depicting Sheikh Amadou Bamba.Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA. (Photographer: Don Cole)

A submovement of the Mouride Way (Baye Falls) fostersmonasticism and hard work—religion in the workplace—

featured in this exhibit by market stalls (Sheikh Bamba asbackground to a display of Mercedes-Benz hubcaps) and anaccompanying video of a Dakar junkyard (where youngmen recast discarded aluminum engine blocks into pots andpans). The Mouride work ethic espoused by the discipleSheikh Ibra Fall whose followers, because they sport dread-locks and patchwork clothing, are sometimes mistaken forRastafarians, resulted in the "cleanliness and prosperity"program of the 1980s in which young people, unemployedand frustrated by the deterioration of their city, took to thestreets in a campaign of beautification, changing street names,and replacing colonial monuments.

Sections on work and prayer are followed by examples ofclothing inscribed in organic ink with prayers and geoman-tic designs. Patched from used fabric remnants in blocks ofcolor, these bold garments embody fana, the physical com-munion with God through word and touch. That sense ofspiritual interconnection in both their materials and meth-ods of assembly is illustrated in the photographs of a laby-rinthine building complex composed by the apostle SerigneSy of reeds, straws, and sticks bundled into geometric pat-terns and magic squares, an architectural arabesque ot holywords. It is a rustic counterpart to the Great Mosque ofTouba (also pictured) in which Sheikh Bamba is buried.

Nowhere is the global network more evident that in thetwo sections on women and contemporary art. Mouridewomen rarely produce visual arts, preferring group devotional singing, but some achieve fame locally and interna-tionally through vocal music, recorded on cassettes, videos,and CDs. The last section is Sufism Westernized, displayingart by five contemporary Senegalese artists in various media.Said to embody Mouride Way Principles, their work is hardto distinguish from the conceptual and abstract forms ofWestern artists. Yet the contemporary idiom of Modernismis but another example of how Mouride principles are trans-lated into every conceivable Senegalese and internationalvisual medium.