Over the past few decades, several studies of Muslim societies in subSaharan Africa have emphasised the appeal and potential of Islam for resistance, proto-nationalism, or anti-colonialism. Most notably, some have interpreted Islam in Africa as the basis for various kinds of ‘counter-society’ movements both during and after the colonial period (for example Coulon 1988). Some of the postcolonial interpretations of the rise of the Sufi affiliation around Shaykh Hamallah have, indeed, followed such a model, tending to privilege the colonial encounter and placing considerable emphasis on the purportedly anti-colonial and proto-nationalist features of the Sufi order, its leader and followers (for example Alexandre 1970). Aside from the works of some of Hamallah's followers that we might characterise as hagiographic (for example Ibn Mu’adh 1988) and those that have emphasised Hamallah's status as a Muslim mystic whose concerns were largely spiritual and other-worldly (for example Ba 1980; Dicko 1999), the historian Traoré (1983) has offered the most sustained discussion of Hamallah and the Hamawiyya. Although he presents a rather nuanced view of Hamallah as what he calls a ‘man of faith’ as well as a resistance figure, his study nonetheless falls within what can be called anti-colonial, if not nationalist, historiography. The overall cast of Traoré's study is that Hamallah and his followers were anti-colonialists, an orientation that obscures the complexity of the movement around Hamallah and contributes little to an understanding of the importance of the Hamawiyya and its transformation in the postcolonial period.

The interpretation offered here is somewhat different, though it too stresses the importance of the colonial context. In my view, Shaykh Hamallah and the Hamawiyya arose at a time when some Muslims in AOF were looking for Muslim leadership, specifically exceptional Muslim leadership, within the new colonial context. It was precisely the new colonial context that allowed the Sufi affiliation that centred around the charismatic Hamallah to spread in unprecedented ways. The colonial economy, the expansion of travel and improved communications helped to create a new space in which the practice of Islam was different to that in the past. Under colonial rule, the standardisation of religious practice that accompanied Islamisation included mass affiliation to Sufi orders and to the Hamawiyya in particular.