The Great Mosque of Touba was founded by Amadou Bamba in 1887 and completed in 1963 and it is considered as the largest building in the city and one of the largest mosques in Africa and the site of a pilgrimage, the Grand Magal of Touba, the home of the Mouride Brotherhood, a Sufi order. and it rises up from the African soil with such confidence it can be seen from almost all vantage points within the holy city in Senegal and that was deliberate some say of the endeavours of Toshiko Mori, who as early as 1963 had already foreseen the African renaissance through religion with this robust piece of built art.

The immediate vicinity of the mosque houses the mausoleum of Amadou Bamba’s sons, the caliphs of the Mouride order. Other important institutions in the centre of the holy city include a library, the Caliph’s official audience hall, a sacred “Well of Mercy”, and a cemetery.

The Great Minaret of the Great Mosque of Touba is also commonly referred to as Lamp Fall, which was named by the second Mouride caliph in honour of Sheikh Ibrahima Fall (the founder of the Baye Fall community).

The completion of the Great Mosque was done in 1963 and since its inauguration, the city is believed to have grown at a rapid pace; from under 5,000 inhabitants in 1964 to a population of about 529,000 as officially estimated in 2007. The Great Mosque has been continuously enlarged and embellished since its completion. Since the death of Amadou Bamba, the grand mosque has constantly been developed and can now hold more than 7,000 worshippers.

One of the major obstacles he faced was the unavailability of means of transport to transport the materials from Diourbel where the train stopped in Touba over a distance of 45 km. Faced with the colonial authorities’ demand to pay all the site workers who were his followers and who had also agreed to make their sweat their participation in the project, Moustapha then fixed with the colonists the daily pay of each site worker but to his great astonishment the workers went to the cash desk to collect and immediately remitted the pay as a contribution. He then set about building the rails over this entire distance. When he died in 1945, the work was taken over by his successor Mouhammadou Falilou M’Backé, second son of Ahmadou Bamba. The mosque was inaugurated on Friday June 7, 1963 by Mouhammadou Falilou M’Backé.

The mosque has four minarets 66 meters high placed at the corners of the building, a fifth of 86.80 meters and is surmounted by large domes. In 2013, the califa serigne Sidy Moukhtar Mbacke added two minarets. These minarets can be seen up to 10 km from Touba, the highest of the minarets is called Lamp Fall in tribute to Sheikh Ibrahima Fall. The mosque has six large doors: the main entrance is on the east, one door on the west, and two on each lateral side. In the mosque, one reaches the mausoleum of Ahmadou Bamba, built at the northeast corner of the building, near the prayer hall. The tomb with an area of about 10 × 10 m. The Koran is read in the mosque 33 times every day.