Islam and the Creative Imagination in Senegal

Abstract

In few other places in the creative traditions of sub-Saharan Africa is the factor of Islam more prominent and influential than in Senegal. Manifested on the level of form and subject-matter and spanning a wide cross-section of talent in both the traditional and modern media of creative expression, this prominence and influence can be attributed toa number of factors ranging from the artistic maturity, religious sensibility, intellectual astuteness and ideological orientation of individual artists to the more general impact that Islam, as a dominant religious force, is perceived to have had on secular life in Senegal. These factors, to a large extent, determine the various ways in which individual Senegalese artists define themselves and their art vis-a-vis Islam, in particular, and society, in general, definitions which creatively translate into formal choice, thematic focus and, to use a cliche, “message”. Two opposite sets of equally militant attitudes constitute the polar extremes that bracket the range of Senegalese artists’ creative response to Islam, thus paralleling or ‘reflecting’ similar patterns that obtain in the society at large. This is hardly surprising, given the conception that Senegalese, and indeed, most African artists, have of the nature and function of art in society. On one pole is that ensemble of attitudes shaped by a zealous embrace and vigorous advocacy of the primordiality of Islam as the most, indeed, the only, legitimate and effective vehicle for the totalization of the individual and the society. Art in the hands of individuals on this end of the creative spectrum becomes an instrument of propagation of religious ideals, in this case Islamic religious ideals. But beyond this religious vision or in conjunction with it, cultural and ...