Circuits and movement in religious transnationalism: a Tijani community between Mbour (Senegal), Fez (Morocco) and Mantes-la-Jolie (France)
Abstract
This paper examines the transnational circuits of travel and pilgrimage created by a Senegalese Sufi religious leader on a mission to preserve the orthodox Muslim and Sufi identity of his co-ethnics in France. Following Cole and Groes’s work on affective circuits and James Clifford’s work on travel, I propose in this paper to widen the ethnographic frame beyond the field tied to specific locations to explore the interstices, the transient and the transit connecting locations. The metaphor of a circuit is used to indicate the continued circularity of travel, reciprocity and exchanges between various nodes in the expanding geography of global Sufi networks such as the one under study here.
Fields of Study & Subjects
African Studies and Geopolitics
Diaspora
migration
transnational identity
Religious Tourism and Spaces
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines
- Volume
- 60
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 175–194
- Publication date
- 2 January 2026
- Language
- EN