I began this study with Shaykh Hamallah, the absent religious leader, who retains a strong hold on the social imagination, especially of those living in the town of Nioro, but also elsewhere in Mali and beyond. Shaykh Hamallah also seems to exert a hold on the imagination of scholars, both African and Western, as the number of works that invoke him seems to suggest. It is this history of Shaykh Hamallah and the earlier nineteenthcentury history of al-Hajj Umar Tall in the town and the broader region that has helped to guarantee a special place for Nioro in the social imagination. A relatively small and economically marginal town, Nioro has remained an important Islamic religious centre for well over a century. To be an inhabitant of Nioro or its neighbouring villages today almost automatically means that one is Muslim. However, the association between this place and Islam is so strong that many regard the town as actually blessed and its inhabitants as more pious Muslims. Some of the descendants of Hamallah and Umar Tall have been central to the reshaping of Nioro's reputation as an Islamic religious centre, and they too have a prominent place in the contemporary social imagination.

One of the central premises of this study has been that what it means to be a Muslim has changed considerably from the nineteenth century through the colonial period and closer to the present. In trying to understand some of the shifts and transformations in ways of being Muslim, I have found it analytically useful to talk about different traditions of Islam. Although I have identified three traditions – the Sufi, the reformist and the postcolonial – that have appeared chronologically in this region, these traditions currently co-exist. In this final chapter, I would like to return to the question of the changing ideas about and practices of Islam and some of the ongoing tensions around Islam and authority in this setting. In this way, I want to reflect on Nioro as a profoundly transformed Islamic religious centre in postcolonial Mali.

A major thread running through this study has been the figure of the exceptional Muslim religious leader or Muslim saint. The juxtaposition of the absent colonial-era shaykh with the town's two presumed living Muslim saints to whom a coterie of businessmen, civil servants and politicians regularly turn for blessings, prayers and amulets is rather instructive.