By Eric S. Ross
Sufi urban: city layout and Archetypes in Touba is a geographical learn of the trendy Muslim holy urban of Touba in Senegal, capital of the Mouride Sufi order. Touba was once based in 1887 by means of a Sufi shaykh in a second of mystic illumination. because the dying of the founder in 1927, the Mouride order has designed and outfitted the full urban. Touba is called for Tûbâ, the "Tree of Paradise" of Islamic culture. This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of righteous lifestyles in the world, divine judgment, and entry to the Hereafter; town of Touba actualizes this non secular build. very important points of its configuration, resembling the vertical and horizontal alignment of its enormous vital shrine complicated, its radiating avenues and encircling ring roads, and the particular timber that mark its panorama relate on to the archetypal tree of Sufi theosophy. the connection among the religious archetype and its earthly actualization as a urban is defined via recourse to Sufi technique. The booklet employs a semiotic research of city shape, cartography, hermeneutics, box research and research of satellite tv for pc imagery so as to relate modern city layout concerns to overarching metaphysical strategies. Sufi urban additionally explores the background of city networks in Senegal because the emergence of self sustaining Muslim cities within the 17th century. ultimately, the format of Senegal's sleek Sufi towns is expounded to the huge palaver timber that marked that country's old settlements. Eric S. Ross is a cultural and concrete geographer who holds a level in Islamic reviews. considering that 1998 he has been assistant professor of Geography at Al Akhawayn college in Ifrane, Morocco. except learn on Sufi orders and Muslim cities in Senegal, he has studied cultural tourism and concrete making plans in Morocco.
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Extra info for Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba
Sample text
Upon discovering the site of Touba, marked by the mbéb tree, “the Shaykh did his prayers. Then the mysteries of the visible world (Mulk) and the invisible world (Malakut) were unveiled to him. ”32 Finally, Touba is a qutb in the sense that Mircea Eliade distinguishes sacred places from homogenous profane space: A sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space; this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the underworld); communication with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi, pillar (cf.
He returned until he reached a baobab tree and then he stopped to accomplish his prayers. 56 28 Archetypes The 1963 version of the legend was recorded in Touba and goes as follows: Often, he [Ahmadou Bamba] would roam the surrounding forests. He would sometimes be gone for entire days, lost in the forest. As he was returning one day from one of these retreats, a revelation informed him that the place he was seeking for his meditations, the place which would be the spiritual hearth of the religious movement he was to create, was located somewhere, in the brush, between the provinces of Baol and Jolof.
God’s Word exists in all three dimensions of reality, with God, as the archetypal book in the malakût and as “recitation” on Earth, where it takes oral and written form. The Koran is all of these at once. 1. Cosmology of the World Tree. Tûbâ the tree of paradise is but one manifestation of the Tree of the World postulated by Sufi theosophists. The World Tree is a cosmological construct that aims to explain the created universe and its relation to the Creator. This diagram attempts to situate the Sufi city of Touba within this cosmology but it can only begin to approximate the spatial relationships involved.