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ANDREW F. CLARK and LUCIE COLVIN PHILLIPS, Historical Dictionary of Senegal, second edition. Metuchen, N.J., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1994, 353 pp., ISBN 0 8108 2747 6.
MOMAR COUMBA DIOP (ed.), Senegal: essays in statecraft, trans. Ayi Kwei Armah. Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993, 500 pp., ISBN 2 86978 032 X.
ANTHONY KIRK-GREENE and DANIEL BACH (eds.), State and Society in Francophone Africa since Independence. London: Macmillan, in association with St Antony's College, Oxford, 1995, 280 pp., ISBN 0 333 54058 1, and New York: St Martin's Press, ISBN 0 312 12112 1.
LEONARDO A. VILLALON, Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal: disciples and citizens in Fatick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 332 pp., ISBN 0 521 46007 7.
Senegal is exceptional among African states for several reasons: obviously for its particularly long colonial experience of French sovereignty, and its special position in the post-colonial world of la francophonie; also for its preservation of a form of multi-party democratic politics since independence, more accurately a semi-democracy of the political elite; and the country is exceptional above all in seeing the elaboration of a peculiarly effective institutional network for the assertion of an authentic ('empirical') statehood over most of the national territory, involving rural masses as well as elites, through the intermediary auspices of the Sufi brotherhoods or orders. The books reviewed here cast different lights on this instance of statehood, while Leonardo Villalon insists on the notion of 'Senegalese exceptionalism' as an organising theme for his study.
In the opening pages of his closely argued and carefully researched study Villalon isolates two dimensions of Senegalese exceptionalism in the politics of religion, the two being significantly interrelated. The first exception is in the extent to which Islam in that country has adapted to the political realities of the modern nation state: thus one finds virtually no opposition to the secular state in a country with a 90 per cent Muslim population, and (again, virtually) no socio-political struggle based on conflicting religious identities-neither around the position of the small but influential Christian minority nor between the different Sufi orders. Such Muslim adjustment to state realities may of course be as globally widespread as James Piscatori suggests (Islam in a World of Nation States), despite the often noted...