Paper short abstract:

A couple of years ago, colonial photographs of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba resurfaced in the Senegalese public sphere. This paper examines the subsequent debate on the Internet and explores the epistemic doubts evoked by alternative readings of the images that unsettled canonical beliefs in the saint.

Paper long abstract:

A couple of years ago, photographs of the Sufi saint Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba resurfaced in the public sphere. While the cult around this Senegalese saint habitually focuses on one colonial mug shot that is infinitely reproduced in various media -- from graffiti to behind-glass paintings – thus providing a canonical image of the saint, the found photographs presented the saint in new contexts. The circulation of the photographs on the Internet raised a public debate in Senegal about the authenticity of the images.

The found images offered possibilities for new imaginaries of the saint but also posed a threat to his iconic image that has authorised a decolonial imaginary of the saint’s life. In this paper I will explore to what extent certain conventional understandings and beliefs around the Sufi saint were challenged. I will argue that the new discoveries did not only present a challenge to established Sufi epistemology, but to the hierarchy of the Sufi order and to Sufi aesthetics. This will lead us to question the relationship between the colonial archive, Muslim epistemologies, and the decolonization of colonial heritage.

In my recent book I argued that decolonization is not a unilinear process (De Jong, Decolonizing Heritage, 2022). In this paper, I will demonstrate that every decolonization of the colonial archive inflicts its own epistemic doubts, casting doubts upon received decolonial histories. These doubts, I argue, are grounded in deeply held racialised convictions on the trustworthiness of the colonial archive.