Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T04:08:04.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The politics of the Hajj organisation in Senegal: security, legitimation and clientelism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2021

Cédric Jourde ,
Marie Brossier  and
Muriel Gomez-Perez
Cédric Jourde*
Affiliation:
School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Marie Brossier*
Affiliation:
Interdisciplinary Research Center on Africa and the Middle East (CIRAM), Department of Political Science, University Laval, Quebec City, Canada
Muriel Gomez-Perez*
Affiliation:
Interdisciplinary Research Center on Africa and the Middle East (CIRAM), Department of Historical Sciences, University Laval, Quebec City, Canada
*
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article analyses how the state in Senegal has managed the hajj since the liberalisation era in the early 2000s. Although the essence of the hajj is religious, it is also deeply political and requires that the state manages complex relations with pilgrims, religious leaders, private travel agencies, politicians and Saudi authorities. This article argues that three inter-related imperatives structure the conduct of the Senegalese state: a security imperative, a legitimation imperative, and a clientelistic imperative. Security concerns lead the state to monitor and control pilgrims travelling to Mecca. Legitimation is seen in the collaborative relations with Sûfi orders and in the framing of the hajj organisation as a ‘public service’. Finally, given the magnitude of financial and symbolic resources attached to the hajj, clientelistic relations are constitutive of state officials’ actions. Overall, despite the post-2000 liberalisation of the hajj, the state has maintained its role as a gatekeeper, regulator and supervisor.

Keywords

PilgrimageHajjStateSenegalIslamliberalisation
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 1 - 20
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We acknowledge the invaluable help of our research assistants: Djiguatte Bassène, Samuel Breton, Audray Fréchette and Mohamed Lemine Sakho. And finally, the late Ida Ahoueya Ep Klissou. Our thoughts are with Ida's family. This work was funded by an Insight Grant from the SSHRC [435-2016-0682, 2016–2022] and has been granted ethical approval from both Laval and Ottawa universities.

References

Adama, H. 2009. ‘Pèlerinage musulman et stratégies d'accumulation au Cameroun’, Afrique contemporaine 231, 3: 119–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexanderson, K. 2014. ‘‘A dark state of affairs’: Hajj networks, Pan-Islamism, and Dutch colonial surveillance during the interwar period’, Journal of Social History 47, 4: 1021–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexanderson, K. 2019. Subversive Seas: anticolonial networks across the twentieth-century Dutch empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ali, H.M., Basir, S.A. & Ahmadun, M.. 2016. ‘Implementation of the Islamic quality management system MS1900 and its benefits: a case study at the department of Hajj’, Global Journal Al-Thaqafah 6, 2: 85–98.Google Scholar
Audrain, X. 2004. ‘Du «‘ndigël’ avorté» au Parti de la vérité’, Politique africaine 96, 4: 99–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayart, J.-F. 2004. Le Gouvernement du Monde. Une critique politique de la globalisation. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Beck, L.J. 1997. ‘Senegal's ‘patrimonial democrats’: incremental reform and the obstacles to the consolidation of democracy’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 31, 1: 1–31.Google Scholar
Bianchi, R.R. 2004. Guests of God: pilgrimage and politics in the Islamic world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, R.R. 2015. ‘The Hajj and politics in contemporary Turkey and Indonesia’, in Mols, L. & Buitelaar, M., eds. Hajj: global interactions through pilgrimage. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 65–82.Google Scholar
Bianchi, R.R. 2016. ‘The Hajj by air’, in Tagliacozzo, E. & Toorawa, S.M., eds. The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 131–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, R.R. 2017. ‘Reimagining the Hajj’, Social Sciences 6, 2: 1–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brossier, M. 2016. ‘Senegal's Arabic literates: from transnational education to linguistic and political activism’, Mediterranean Politics 22, 1: 155–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, E.I. 2014. ‘The ‘pilgrim question’: regulating the Hajj in late imperial Russia’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 56, 3/4: 239–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chantre, L. 2013 a. ‘Entre pandémie et panislamisme’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions 163, 163–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chantre, L. 2013 b. ‘Le pèlerinage à La Mecque comme culture coloniale: le cas du protectorat tunisien (1881–1956)’, Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain 10. <https://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/1298>, accessed 19.5.2020.Google Scholar
Chantre, L. 2018. Pèlerinages d'empire: Une histoire européenne du pèlerinage à La Mecque. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chiffoleau, S. 2005. ‘Le Pèlerinage à La Mecque à l’époque coloniale : matrice d'une opinion publique musulmane ?’ in Chiffoleau, S. & Madoeuf, A., eds. Les pèlerinages au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient: espaces publics, espaces du public. Damas: Presses de l'IFPO, 131–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chiffoleau, S. 2011. ‘Les pèlerins de La Mecque, les germes et la communauté internationale’, Médecine/sciences 27, 12: 1121–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chiffoleau, S. 2015. ‘Economics: agents, pilgrims, and profits’ in Tagliacozzo, E. & Toorawa, S., eds. The Hajj: pilgrimage in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 155–74.Google Scholar
Chiffoleau, S. 2016. ‘Des pèlerins et des épidémies. Recomposition des flux «dangereux» sur la mer Rouge et le Golfe’, Arabian Humanities. Revue internationale d'archéologie et de sciences sociales sur la péninsule Arabique/International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula 6: 1–21.Google Scholar
Cissé, C. 2014. ‘Islam, État et pouvoirs politiques en Côte d'Ivoire: l'organisation du Hadj au défi de la laïcité’, in Holder, G. & Sow, M., eds. L'Afrique des laïcités. État, religion et pouvoirs au sud du Sahara. Alger: IRD-Éditions Tombouctou, 139–49.Google Scholar
Cour des Comptes. 2012. Rapport public 2012. Dakar. <http://www.courdescomptes.sn/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Rapport-public-2012.pdf>..>Google Scholar
Cour des Comptes. 2013. Rapport public 2013. Dakar. <http://www.courdescomptes.sn/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Rapport-public-2013.pdf>..>Google Scholar
Cour des Comptes. 2014. Rapport public 2014. Dakar. <http://www.courdescomptes.sn/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/RapportPublic2014.pdf>..>Google Scholar
Cruise O'Brien, D. 1992. ‘Le ‘Contrat Social’ Sénégalais à l’épreuve’, Politique Africaine 45: 9–20.Google Scholar
D'Agostini, A. 2017. ‘French policy and the Hajj in late-nineteenth-century Algeria: Governor Cambon's reform attempts and Jules Gervais-Courtellemont's pilgrimage to Mecca’, in Ryad, U., ed. The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire. Leiden: Brill, 112–41.Google Scholar
Darmadi, D. 2013. ‘Hak Angket Haji: pilgrimage and the cultural politics of Hajj organization in contemporary Indonesia’, Studia Islamika 20, 3: 443–66.Google Scholar
Diawara, M.A. 2012. ‘Islam and public health: French management of the Hajj. From colonial Senegal and Muslim responses beginning in 1895’. PhD thesis, Michigan State University.Google Scholar
Donnan, H. 1989. ‘Symbol and status: the significance of the Hajj in Pakistan’, The Muslim World 79, 3–4: 205–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elfenbein, C. 2015. ‘Contingency in the age of Religion: the Hajj and Religion-Making in Colonial and Postcolonial India’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 27, 3: 247–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flynn, N. 2020. ‘The inexorable rise of the pandemic State? Second-Guessing the Long-Term Political Repercussions of COVID 19’, Irish Politics Forum (blog), 18 March. <https://politicalreform.ie/2020/03/18/the-inexorable-rise-of-the-pandemic-state-second-guessing-the-long-term-political-repercussions-of-covid-19/>, accessed 12.5.2020.,+accessed+12.5.2020.>Google Scholar
Frowd, P.M. 2017. ‘The promises and pitfalls of biometric security practices in Senegal’, International Political Sociology 11, 4: 343–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, F. & Semin, J.. 2009. ‘Fissabilillah! Islam au Sénégal et initiatives féminines: Une économie morale du pèlerinage à La Mecque’, Afrique contemporaine 231, 3: 139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heaton, M.M. 2007. ‘Globalization, health, and the Hajj: the West African pilgrimage scheme, 1919–38’, in Falola, T. & Heaton, M.M., eds. HIV/AIDS, Illness, and African Well-Being. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 243–68.Google Scholar
Hibou, B., ed. 1999. La privatisation des États. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Huber, V. 2015. ‘International bodies: the pilgrimage to Mecca and international health regulations’, in Tagliacozzo, E. & Toorawa, S., eds. The Hajj: pilgrimage in Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 175–95.Google Scholar
Ichwan, M.N. 2008. ‘Governing Hajj: politics of Islamic pilgrimage services in Indonesia prior to reformasi era’, Al-Jami'ah: Journal of Islamic Studies 46, 1: 125–51.Google Scholar
Inspection Générale d'État (IGE). 2013. Rapport public sur l'État de la gouvernance et de la reddition des comptes. Dakar: Présidence de la République du Sénégal.Google Scholar
Jourde, C. 2007. ‘The international relations of small neoauthoritarian states: Islamism, warlordism, and the framing of stability’, International Studies Quarterly 51, 2: 481–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kane, E.M. 2015. Russian Hajj: empire and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, S. 2019. Mobilizing the Hajj in Southwest Nigeria: Pilgrims, Technologies, and State Regulation 1914–1980. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Laffan, M.F. 2002. ‘‘A watchful eye’; the Meccan plot of 1881 and changing Dutch perceptions of Islam in Indonesia’, Archipel 63, 1: 79–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lecocq, B. 2012. ‘The Hajj from West Africa from a global historical perspective (19th and 20th centuries)’, African Diaspora 5, 2: 187–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lombardo, N. 2016. ‘Controlling mobility and regulation in urban space: Muslim pilgrims to Mecca in colonial Bombay, 1880–1914’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, 5: 983–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Low, M.C. 2008. “Empire and the Hajj: pilgrims, plagues, and pan-Islam under British surveillance, 1865–1908’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, 2: 269–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Low, M.C. 2017. ‘‘The infidel piloting the true believer’: Thomas Cook and the business of the colonial Hajj’, in Ryad, U., ed. The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, Leiden Studies in Islam and Society. Leiden: Brill, 47–80.Google Scholar
Madore, F. & Traoré, Y.. 2018. ‘L'organisation du hadj en Côte d'Ivoire: entre facteur de cohésion et source de rivalités au sein de la communauté musulmane (1993–2010)’, Cahiers d’études africaines 229: 179–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, G. & Lecocq, B.. 2007. ‘Between empire, Umma, and the Muslim third World – the French Union and African pilgrims to Mecca, 1946–1958’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, 2: 267–383.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mbacké, K.M. 1991. ‘Le pèlerinage à la Mecque. Le cas du Sénégal de 1886 à 1986’. Thèse d'État, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal.Google Scholar
McDonnell, M.B. 1990. ‘Patterns of Muslim pilgrimage from Malaysia, 1885–1985’, in Eickerlman, D. & Piscatori, J.P., eds. Muslim Travellers: pilgrimage, migration, and the religious imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 111–30.Google Scholar
Miller, B. 2006. ‘Pilgrims’ progress: the business of the Hajj’, Past & Present 191: 89–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miran, J. 2015. ‘‘Stealing the way’ to Mecca: West African pilgrims and illicit red sea passages, 1920s–50s’, Journal of African History 56, 3: 389–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mishra, S. 2011. Politics and the pilgrimage: the Haj in the early twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naganawa, N. 2012. ‘The Hajj making geopolitics, empire, and local politics: a view from the Volga-Ural region at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Papas, A., Welsford, T. & Zarcone, T., eds. Central Asian pilgrims: Hajj routes and pious visits between central Asia and the Hijaz. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 168–98.Google Scholar
Ndiaye, A.I. 2013. ‘Le partenariat social dans les années 2000: une décennie perdue?’, in Diop, M.C., ed. Sénégal (2000–2012): les institutions et politiques publiques à l’épreuve d'une gouvernance libérale. Paris: Karthala, 313–46.Google Scholar
Oubda, M. 2003. L'islam au Burkina Faso. Problématique de l'organisation du hadj, Ouagadougou. Ouagadougou: Centre africain de diffusion islamique et scientifique.Google Scholar
Pérouse de Montclos, M.-A. 2017. ‘Pilgrimage to Mecca and ‘radical’ Islam: new trends from Sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of the Middle East and Africa 8, 3: 273–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, D. 2000. Paths of Accommodation: Muslim societies and French colonial authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Roff, W.R. 1982. ‘Sanitation and security: the imperial powers and the nineteenth Century Hajj’, Arabian Studies 6: 143–61.Google Scholar
Ryad, U., ed. 2017. The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire. Leiden Studies in Islam and Society. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandor, A. 2016. ‘Border security and drug trafficking in Senegal: AIRCOP and global security assemblages’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10, 4: 490–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savadogo, M.B. 2014. ‘L'organisation et la gestion des pèlerinages religieux en Côte d'Ivoire: les paradoxes de la laïcité ivoirienne’, in Holder, G. & Sow, M., eds. L'Afrique des laïcités: État, religion et pouvoirs au sud du Sahara. Alger: IRD-Éditions Tombouctou, 150–8.Google Scholar
Schmidt, V.A. 2009. ‘Putting the political back into political economy by bringing the State back in yet again’, World Politics 61, 3: 516–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Slight, J. 2013. ‘Book review: the longest journey: Southeast Asians and the pilgrimage to Mecca’, Reviews in History, <https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1484>, accessed 12.5.2020.Google Scholar
Slight, J. 2015. The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slight, J. 2017. ‘British colonial knowledge and the Hajj in the age of empire’, in Ryad, U., ed. The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire. Leiden: Brill, 81–111.Google Scholar
Tagliacozzo, E. 2015. ‘The Hajj by sea’, in Tagliacozzo, E. & Toorawa, S.M., eds. The Hajj: pilgrimage in Islam. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 113–30.Google Scholar
Tangban, O.E. 1991. ‘The Hajj and the Nigerian economy 1960–1981’, Journal of Religion in Africa 21, 3: 241–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tantri, E. 2016. ‘Hajj transportation of Netherlands East Indies, 1910–1940’, Heritage of Nusantara: International Journal of Religious Literature and Heritage 2, 1: 119–47.Google Scholar
Traoré, Y. 2015. ‘L'organisation du pèlerinage à La Mecque en Côte d'Ivoire: contribution de l’État et des associations islamiques de 1973 à 2006'. Mémoire de master II, Abidjan, Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny.Google Scholar
Villalón, L.A. 1994. ‘Sufi rituals as rallies: religious ceremonies in the politics of Senegalese State-Society relations’, Comparative Politics 26, 4: 415–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar