Glass painting of Shaykh Ibrahim (Baay) Ñas, flanked by Shaykh Ahmad at-Tijani and the Prophet Muhammad. Click here for more photos.
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Current Research
I am an anthropologist interested in the relationships between religious knowledge, modern states, and transnational community. My research is on the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationships between religious practices, secularism, modernity, globalization, and emerging cosmopolitanisms.
My primary research project, which I began in 2001, focuses on a global Sufi Islamic network, the disciples of Shaykh Ibrahim Ñas, who call themselves “Taalibe Baay” in the Wolof language of Senegal. Although Ñas’s disciples are scattered around the world, my fieldwork has primarily concentrated on Senegal and Mauritania, and I have more recently become acquainted with the Taalibe Baay community in Cairo, Egypt and in New York.
The Medina Baay Mosque, Kaolack, photographed in 2001. Click here for more about the Medina Baay Research Association.
During my dissertation research in 2004, I formed a research group called the Medina Baay Research Association with over a dozen residents of Medina Baay, the Taalibe Baay religious center. I have been compiling the results of our research into an on-line database and multi-media website (medinabaay.org), which I am still putting back together after I lost the server I was using when I moved to Egypt. I hope to have more documents and multi-media on line soon about our research.
I am currently writing a book on female religious leaders in Senegal.
Geographic interest
- West and North Africa (Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia, Morocco)
Thematic interests
- Islam and society
- Ritual and religion
- Transnational movements and communities
- Disciplinary techniques and technologies of the self
- Knowledge production
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