Serigne Babacar Sy

Babacar Sy received his Quranic education at Saint-Louis, then studied literature and Islamic jurisprudence. On his father's death in 1922 he succeeded him as khalifa-general of the Tijaniyya in Senegal, the first to hold that place after the order's local founder. In 1932 he founded the dahiras at Tivaouane — among them the Dahiratoul Kiram — associations that organised the order's followers and gathered them to deepen their religious practice.¹

Babacar Sy left poems and works on the life of the Prophet, on Ahmad Tijani and on his father Malick Sy. Among his children were Mansour Sy, Cheikh Ahmed Tidiane Sy, Abdoul Aziz Sy and Pape Malick Sy, some of whom succeeded him in the khalifa after him.¹

Babacar Sy died at Tivaouane on 25 March 1957, during one of his regular spiritual retreats there. A school and main streets in Dakar's Sicap-Liberté quarter bear his name, and his slippers are displayed at the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar. The French article speaks of him by his office and his descent — community head and his father's khalifa over the Tijaniyya — without stating his own initiation or bay'a into the order, and Wikidata carries no religion value for him.¹²