![]() ![]() ![]() Large portraits of Bamba were held aloft by many in the crowd (Figures 1 and 2). Hundreds of Mourides-that is, men and women devoted to the teachings and life lessons of Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), the Senegalese Sufi saint-joined the throng to listen to interviews and exhortations, some of which were simultaneously broadcast via cell phone to an FM radio station in Senegal. The festivities began with a parade from Little Senegal to the Adam Clayton Powell Federal Building on 125th Street in Harlem. On July 28, 2003, Sheikh Amadou Bamba Day was celebrated for the seventeenth time in greater New York City. Keywords: Sufism in Senegal, optical technologies, visual epistemology, visual piety, visual hagiography, the materiality of images Some Mourides are uncomfortable with portrayal of the Prophet in this manner, and especially as a lenticular image flickering between His picture and that of Amadou Bamba yet the image does exist, and it raises intriguing intellectual and spiritual issues broached here. From these ancient times the image has somehow floated to contemporary Iran, where it is said to have been a favorite of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and on to Senegal. When Bahira encountered Muhammad as a 12-year-old boy, he recognized that he would become the Prophet, and Bahira is now assumed to have limned Muhammad's likeness. Despite such history, visual hagiography has it that the portrait was drawn by a sixth-century Syrian monk named Bahira. This latter picture has been traced back to a photograph of a Tunisian boy taken around 1904 by the Orientalist Rudolph Lehnert and published in a 1914 issue of National Geographic. ![]() Astonishingly enough, one of these shifts from a portrait of Bamba to an image of "the Prophet as a boy," underscoring their spiritual proximity. In 2003, lenticular images of the saint were introduced as an optical technology new to Mourides. Portraits of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), the saint around whose writings and life lessons the Mouride movement has been created, appear in every imaginable medium, but all are derived from the only known photograph of Bamba, taken by French colonial authorities in 1913. A Sufi movement of Senegal known as the Mouride Way possesses a vibrant visual culture made manifest in all manner of popular, devotional, and healing arts. ![]()
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