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A Sufi movement of Senegal known as the Mouride Way possesses a vibrant visual culture made manifest in all manner of popular, devotional, and healing arts. Portraits of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853–1927), the saint around whose writings and life lessons the Mouride movement has been created, appear in every imaginable medium, but all are derived from the only known photograph of Bamba, taken by French colonial authorities in 1913. In 2003, lenticular images of the saint were introduced as an optical technology new to Mourides. Astonishingly enough, one of these shifts from a portrait of Bamba to an image of “the Prophet as a boy,” underscoring their spiritual proximity. This latter picture has been traced back to a photograph of a Tunisian boy taken around 1904 by the Orientalist Rudolph Lehnert and published in a 1914 issue of National Geographic. Despite such history, visual hagiography has it that the portrait was drawn by a sixth-century Syrian monk named Bahira. When Bahira encountered Muhammad as a 12-year-old boy, he recognized that he would become the Prophet, and Bahira is now assumed to have limned Muhammad's likeness. From these ancient times the image has somehow floated to contemporary Iran, where it is said to have been a favorite of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and on to Senegal. Some Mourides are uncomfortable with portrayal of the Prophet in this manner, and especially as a lenticular image flickering between His picture and that of Amadou Bamba; yet the image does exist, and it raises intriguing intellectual and spiritual issues broached here.
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