According to Crawford Young, "Islam represented the most comprehensive ideological challenge to hegemony available to Africa at the moment of subjugation ... it offered a transcendental justification for resistance and a religious imperative for politico-military organization on a scale beyond ethnos and polity as these then existed. "3 Unfortunately, academic literature contains few actual examples of the participation of African Muslim intellectuals in the discourses of African nationalism.4 This paper concerns a large community of Muslims in West Africa, the followers of the Senegalese Sufi Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975), who articulated an Islamic vision of African liberation and political engagement at the time of decolonization.