This paper examines how one particular group of West African Muslims understood the relationship between Sufi friendship with God (wil?ya) and devotional religious practice (?ib?da). In doing so it joins with the growing scholarly trend to see Sufi terminology, not as fixed concepts or typologies but as loaded and contentious markers in debates concerning the nature of God, the Muslim community, and correct practice within Muslim societies. Specifically, my research focuses on the community that developed around two figures - S?di al-Mukht?r al-Kunt? and his son, S?di Mu?ammad, who rose to prominence as powerful Sufi friends of God and religious scholars in the Southern Saharan desert during the second half of the eighteenth century. With a community of students, followers, and clients gathered around them they ran a robust trading network; engaged politically with other Saharan groups; trained disciples; and composed a vast corpus of texts in Arabic on topics from jurisprudence and grammar, to theology and Sufism. Both their pedagogical activities and their written works represented a shift in the West African Muslim discourse surrounding acceptable and unacceptable practice and would contribute greatly to a notable change in the understanding of Muslim social authority in the region. My work focuses on those Kunta texts which pertain to the cultural sphere of Sufism, not only because these formed almost half of their output; but, more importantly, because it was within these works that this community debated the range and meaning of Islamic devotional practice. Through close readings of these texts this paper will first show how the Kunta shaykhs and their students presented their followers with ritual religious practices that ranged from reciting the names of God (dhikr) and supplicatory prayer (du?a?), to crafting protective amulets (?irz), and using numerology, magical charts and tables, and letter magic to heal illnesses and control the jinn, angels, and spirit beings (ru??niyyat). I will then demonstrate how the Kunta texts consistently position these practices within the field of devotional Islamic practice (?ib?da) and link them to a specific Sufi intellectual framework defined by the presence of the living friend of God (w?l?) within the community. In this fashion, I will illustrate how the Kunta shaykhs both presented Islamic versions of ritual practice with efficacious and theurgic results and defined Sufi friends of God as the source of efficacious religious praxis – in the process positioning themselves the central figures of Southern Saharan society.