Overview: A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal

Introduction

This module contains a sequence of digital learning activities in UCLA’s Bruin Learn (Canvas) to provide historical and geographic context to help you understand objects from the exhibition A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal, including an extraordinary cultural artifact and object of veneration entitled “Restaurant doors depicting Sheikh Amadou Bamba and Ibra Fall,” which is featured in the Fowler Museum’s Vital Matters project. The learning activities focus on the Sufi Muslim saint Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853–1927) who is depicted on the doors alongside his closest disciple Ibra Fall (c.1858-1930).

Senegalese Mourides, devotees of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, ground their faith in following his example and teachings, which stress dignity, pacifism, diligence, and industriousness. In the late twentieth century, depictions of Bamba proliferated throughout the urban fabric of Dakar. Homes and places of work there are still adorned with images of the saint and his lead disciple. The module and related resource build upon a prior exhibition, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal at the Fowler Museum (February 27, 2003 – July 27, 2003), curated by the late Mary Nooter Roberts, deputy director and chief curator of the Fowler Museum, and Allen F. Roberts, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA.

Visual culture expresses devotion, memory, and communal identity in modern Senegalese life. The repeated image of Sheikh Amadou Bamba—across religious spaces, streets, markets, and homes—reinforces spiritual authority and collective memory, showing how art shapes lived religious experience and sustains shared histories. Focusing on painted doors with their images that once formed the threshold of a restaurant in Dakar, we will consider how everyday architectural features can become sites of Mouride devotion. The two figures blessed patrons while simultaneously serving as reminders of Bamba’s perseverance and the central Mouride belief in self-reliant work as a form of prayer.

The doors’ journey from a restaurant in the capital city of Dakar to the Fowler museum also raises important questions of provenance, community consent, and cultural exchange, prompting reflection on how institutions represent devotional art and practice. By engaging with these materials we seek to recognize how visual devotion can infuse daily life—through doors, glass paintings, and murals—as a source of teaching, identity, and spiritual and economic solidarity.

Learning Goals & Outcomes

After completing the module and viewing the related material on Vital Matters you will:

Better understand key aspects of Mouride devotional practice
We will examine how acts of prayer, labor, pilgrimage, and artistic production express devotion to Sheikh Amadou Bamba and his disciple, Sheikh Ibrahima Fall, and consider how these practices shape Mouride religious life in Senegal and throughout the diaspora.
Be able to relate imagery with contemplative practice
We will consider how Images of Sheikh Amadou Bamba and Sheikh Ibrahima Fall—painted on restaurant doors and displayed in public spaces—serve as aids for contemplating prophecy, righteousness, and community cohesion. We will explore how such imagery integrates faith into everyday environments and reinforces shared spiritual values.
Evaluate provenance and community consent
You will learn about the journey of these painted doors from a Senegalese restaurant in Dakar to a museum setting, consider how provenance research and community consultation inform ethical exhibition practices, and reflect on the responsibilities of museums to represent devotional art with respect and accountability.

Unit Activities

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