The annual Magal (a religious feast) that attracts about three million people of different nationalities would be observed in Touba, a Muslim spiritual city in northern Senegal, on Thursday, March 8.

The historic event, as customary, would characterised by the recitation of the Holy Qur’an, prayers, and Hasayeeds (Mouride songs) in the Grand Mosque of Touba, alongside other religious activities.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Observer, Sereign Mbye Jobe, President of Diara Wilayaa (a religious group) in Serrekunda, said the day is reverence for the late Khadim Rassoul Sereign Touba Mbacke, who was tasked his mass followers, and disciples to remember and celebrate such a religious gathering. According to him, this is why the day is observed every 18th day of ‘Safar’ in the Muslim calendar.

He said the date coincides with a day, when Sereign Touba Mbacke returned from the captive of the white people, who took him in to captivity in 1895, because of his Islamic spirituality and swelling followers. “They feared that Khadim Rassoul was building soldiers and weapons to fight them, as well as this love and interest towards Islam, especially in Senegal,” Sereign Mbye Jobe explained.

In the mid of whites’ fruitless efforts frustrate his struggle to propagate Islam, Sereign Jobe recalled that Khadim Rassoul told the ignorant white occupationists that his weapon was the ‘Tawheed’ of Allah and then vowed to spread the Islam on the Senegalese soil. He further borrowed from history that Sereign Touba refused to be cowed and deviated from the cause of Islam, despite the attempts of the then whites’ supremacies to undermine him.

According to him, it was against this backdrop in the annual history that Sereign Touba Mbacke urged his disciples and followers to henceforth observe the day he was sent into exile in Gabon.