Art: Have You Ever Prayed So Hard Your Shawl Glowed Like a Sunrise? On Laylah Amatullah Barrayn’s “Cheikh Bamba’s Tomb” (2014)

 Let’s get one thing straight right now: you’re not supposed to be looking at this.

Not because it’s off-limits, forbidden, or scandalous (though isn’t that always more interesting?), but because what’s happening in this photo—this hushed, golden, incense-thick hush of a moment—is not for you. It’s not performance. It’s not for Instagram. It’s not even for the art world, bless its wine-and-brie stuffed soul. It’s for God.

But Laylah Amatullah Barrayn—photographer, documentarian, spiritual ninja with a Nikon—lets you in anyway. Just barely. She leaves the door cracked open, gives you a peek into the spiritual engine room of Touba, Senegal, where the Mouride Sufi faithful sit before the tomb of their founder, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, and vibrate in stillness.

Yes, vibrate. Because silence isn’t empty in this photo—it’s loaded. With prayer. With presence. With centuries of Black Muslim resilience, resistance, and radiant, kaleidoscopic faith.

Barrayn, a Brooklyn-born, globe-traveling chronicler of the African diaspora, knows how to make a photograph feel like both a benediction and a brick through a stained-glass window. She’s not here for your Orientalist nonsense or your National Geographic exoticism. She’s here to say: “These women are sacred. Their space is sacred. And your gaze better come correct.”

In Cheikh Bamba’s Tomb, six women and girls sit with their backs to us, draped in sherbet-colored veils that could shame a Pantone chart. They face a gilded lattice enclosing the tomb of Amadou Bamba—a man so holy he made the French colonialists nervous just by existing. He preached submission to God and defiance to empire, and the Mourides still take him seriously. His tomb in Touba is basically Mecca for people with exceptional textile taste and unshakable dignity.

And these women? They are not “on display.” They are in audience—with history, with God, with the ghost of a man who resisted colonizers by writing poetry instead of picking up a gun (and still terrified them more than a rifle ever could).

You want symbolism? Try this on for size: Barrayn positions us outside the grille, the decorative ironwork acting as both barrier and metaphor. We don’t get to be “in there.” Not spiritually. Not socially. Not unless we shed some layers—of ignorance, of ego, of colonialist residue still clinging to our travel-guide brains.

So what is Barrayn doing here?

She’s giving us a lesson in reverence. And not the Hallmark kind. This is the kind of reverence that wears bright fabric, plants itself on a prayer rug, and sits still as the world turns sideways.

So here’s your question, you spiritually curious, aesthetically hungry, attention-deficient pilgrim:

What’s your sacred space—and when’s the last time you actually sat in it without needing to document the moment for likes?

Because maybe the truth is this: the holiest things aren’t the loudest. Maybe they’re just what happens when six women sit in a room together, not saying a word, and absolutely commanding the universe.

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