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 ...