Among the curls and swirls of Arabic calligraphy, a pair of sleeping eyes stand out, themselves watched over by Shaykh Amadu Bamba (d.1927) and a minaret from the Grand Mosque of Tuba, the third most visited pilgrimage site in Islam. The words come from his praise poem the Mimiyya which relies on the Arabic letter ‘mim’ for its rhyme. Yelimane Fall based the image off of the only existing photograph of Shaikh Bamba, the founder of the Muridyya Tariqa and a master poet of the Arabic language. It was taken in 1913 by French colonial officers occupying Senegal. Shaikh Bamba was arrested and deported multiple times because the French colonial occupation saw him as a threat. As a member of the Muridiyya, Fall saw his artistic practice as khidma, service, a key tenant of his Sufi order’s beliefs.

The text is in Arabic:



نَوْمِي عِبادَةُ رَبي لا شَريكَ لهُ

قلبي يُدّبِرُ آيات ورثِ الحكمة


Its translation reads: My sleep is a form of adoration for a Lord without a partner, my heart (in this state) meditates on the verses that provides wisdom.


Fall often created his own borders for his work, made of thicker paper (here a grey cardboard-type of paper), to help protect his works when he put them on view at universities, art galleries or elsewhere. Some of his works even have small pin pricks where they were directly applied with push-pins to walls.

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