An African Muslim Saint and his Followers in France Benjamin F. Soares In this paper, I explore the practice of Islam among a relatively understudied group of Muslim migrants in France, the Halpulaaren, some of whom have been living in France for more than three decades. Drawing on ®eld research in Senegal, Mali and France, I consider a Halpulaaren Muslim religious leader with a reputation as a living Muslim saint and his followers in France as a way to try to understand some of the ways of being Muslim in the shadow of the global city with both its promises and constraints. Keywords: Halpulaaren; Islam; Racism; Transnationalism; West Africa Over the past decade and a half, scholarly attention has increasingly turned to research on migrants in France and Muslim migrants in particular. As the largest group of Muslims in France, North Africans have not surprisingly received much of this attention. Research on West African Muslims in France has largely focused on the Soninke, the largest group of sub-Saharan Africans in France (see, for example, Quiminal 1991; Timera 1996 and, for West Africans in France more generally, Diouf 2002). In recent years, some of this research on Muslims in France has become increasingly journalistic or impressionistic (e.g. Kepel 2000) or focused much too narrowly on such topics as Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves. In much of this research, the treatment of Islam has been rather super®cial. In this paper, I look at a relatively understudied group of West African Muslim migrants in France, the Halpulaaren (literally, `those who speak Pulaar'). Drawing on ®eld research in Senegal, Mali and France, I consider the contexts for Halpulaaren migration to France, including the West African background to such migration and the situation migrants face in France. I am particularly interested in understanding the practice of Islam and ways of being Muslim by Halpulaaren in what Hudita Mustafa has called `the shadow of the global city'. 1 I focus on a Halpulaaren Muslim religious leader with a reputation Benjamin F. Soares is a Researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. Correspondence to: Dr Benjamin Soares, African Studies Centre, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands. E-mail: bsoares@ fsw.leidenuniv.nl ISSN 1369±183X print/ISSN 1469±9451 online/04/050913-15 ã 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1369183042000245615 Cafax Publishing Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 30, No. 5, September 2004, pp. 913±927