Members of Baye Fall are the Muslims who eat, cook and deliver food in grand processions.
The Baye Fall are a section of Senegalese-Muslims who work hard during Ramadan. Instead of fasting or praying 5 times a day, they enact their faith through their work and service to others.
- The Baye Fall gather once every year to cook all day, and in a huge procession of grand musical gesture, proceed to Touba’s largest Mosque and feed fellow Muslims.
- Many Senegalese view them as stereotypical hippies.
- The marabout is the sect’s spiritual leader, endowed with authority from the founder, Ibrahim Fall.
- Fall ensured the growth of Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba’s message by financing him.
- Portraits of both these men are adorned in various places even though they died over a century ago.
- Touba is the holy city for Baye Fall. The city sits in the tropic humidity and burning heat of the Sahara. Yet, hundreds of Baye Fall camp out in tents, preparing food for fasting Muslims.
- Kids are sent out to collect money for buying ingredients for the food to be prepared.
- The work is gendered, same as the dress code.
- Listening to non-Islamic music is forbidden in the city. Being a holy city, it has the second-biggest mosque on the continent.
