The city of Touba, in Senegal, has attracted the attention of researchers for a variety of reasons. Touba is a Muslim holy city, and it is brand new. The city was founded in 1887 by Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké, the Sufi who established the Mouride brotherhood. Its construction was initiated in 1926, and its great mosque was inaugurated only in 1963. It is since that event that Touba has become a large city (Guèye 2002, Ross 1995). In fact, today, with approximately half a million inhabitants, it is Senegal's second largest city, after Dakar. Moreover, the Mouride brotherhood, for which Touba serves as spiritual “capital,” is an increasingly global institution, with members and associations throughout West Africa, the Indian Ocean, Europe, and North America; Touba has thus become a global city. Finally, Touba is also an autonomous city. Ever since its inception it has remained under the absolute control of the Mouride brotherhood—to the virtual exclusion of the state and of civil administration. It is the Mouride brotherhood which has planned, promoted, and developed Touba, and which has obtained an autonomous legal status for it. Yet Touba is not completely unique; it is the largest and most recent node in a network of more or less autonomous Muslim towns in Senegal, large and small, and it marks the leading edge of a long and dynamic process of Muslim urban practices in that country. The purpose of this article is to explain how and why a modern Sufi town such as Touba has managed to achieve and maintain a strong measure of administrative autonomy within what is otherwise a unitary nation-state, and to relate this phenomenon to the historical precedent.

This study will explore the phenomenon of autonomous Muslim towns in West African and Senegambian history. It aims to contribute to the current effort of both Anglophone (Anderson & Rathbone 2000) and Francophone (Triaud 2002) scholars to rewrite the history of urbanization in Africa by highlighting the role of Muslim institutions in establishing towns and configuring urban networks. Islam has been a factor of change in West Africa, the Western Sudan, and Senegambia for nearly one thousand years. In that time, the people of these areas have moved from being overwhelmingly rural and religiously traditional to being increasingly urban and majority Muslim. Various Islamic institutions and agents have contributed to this process.