Ramatoulaye Brotherhood in Transition

Abstract

Religious movements are playing a new role of social consolidation in many African countries. In these contexts of “insecure modernization”1 religious groups and images provide followers new bases for social solidarity, as well as identity and moral references. Similarly, new expressions of African Islam which, while founding themselves on the old tariqas, carry out modernizing transformations in an attempt to respond to contemporary situations and expectations. This is the case for the “eleven bead” variant of the Tidjani Sufi Order, whose spiritual centre is the “city” of Ramatoulaye in western Burkina Faso.