In some of the previous chapters, I explored power and authority as they have related to Islam before the onset of colonial rule and during the colonial period. In this chapter, I focus more explicitly on the shifts in power and authority from the colonial to postcolonial periods, and the contemporary organisation of religious practice in the town of Nioro. If the most obvious of shifts came in the wake of independence with the departure of the French, I consider perhaps the most dramatic of such shifts in religious practice in the postcolonial era. This is the development of what I call, following Murray Last (1988), the prayer economy in this religious centre. The prayer economy is, in effect, an economy of religious practice in which people give gifts to certain religious leaders on a large scale in exchange for prayers and blessings. I argue that certain processes of commodification – the exchange of blessings and prayers for commodities, the proliferation of personal and impersonal Islamic religious commodities – have proliferated and intensified around such religious leaders in the postcolonial period. Such processes of commodification have helped to transform the relations between religious leaders and followers. In fact, they have facilitated the personalisation of religious authority in certain Muslim religious leaders with reputations as saints, to whom many ordinary and elite persons have turned for succour. That is, religious authority has come to be centred on a few individuals rather than institutions like the Sufi orders with which they have historically been associated. Two religious leaders in particular have become major actors, on a regional and sometimes international scale, attracting numerous followers. While the vast majority of their followers are ordinary Muslims, some of the elite followers include prosperous merchants, high-ranking government officials, politicians, even African heads of state and their kin, including some from much further afield. The religious leaders attract these elites, offering spiritual and political guidance, blessings and petitionary prayers, which are rendered in exchange for large gifts, further reinforcing their power and authority. I show how these religious leaders have become more privatised religious figures – effectively free-floating sanctifiers – in a religious economy that has come to be more like a market.