The breath of kinship: Marriage and transmission of "baraka" among Muslim clerics.

The master-disciple relationship, which we might liken to "godparents" in I slam, breaks with, or even reverses, forms of dynastic succession, as we ca n see through the example of the Fulani Satigi dynasty in the Senegal Valle y. In this region, Muslim clerics were taking power and moving their plural istic communities from areas on the borders of existing states to the cente r of the Valley. In parallel, the identification made between marriage and master-disciple relations when choosing the Almaami favored the emergence o f "circles of affinity" that stimulated Djihad in West Africa during the 19 th century.