“May God preserve us from evil sicknesses”: Grammar, Arabic origin, and pragmatics of request prayers in Bambara (Mande)

Dùgawu, petitionary or request prayers, are ubiquitous in the lives of Bambara speakers. Leave-taking or good-night wishes, wishes of success, of quick recovery to a sick person, encouragement to accomplish a difÏcult task, the expressions of gratefulness, the call for divine protection or for a good fate for the dead are all uttered in the form of blessings. Even curses can be encoded as dùgawu. Imitating the pattern of request prayers in Arabic, dùgawu can be described as a genre of communicative exchanges including a request in a fixed syntactic structure, and a confirming response. This article provides a linguistic description of request prayers, focusing on two possible syntactic patterns of encoding that are perfectly equivalent to each other, as well as on their syntactic peculiarities in comparison to the syntax elsewhere in the language. Furthermore, we examine abbreviated request prayers. We suggest interpreting them as instances of a strong conventionalization that might also entail a secularization process. Finally, we discuss hypotheses of the origin of dùgawu, highlighting the role of traditional Islamic education as a probable source and illustrate request prayers used in different communicative situations.