Mali is overwhelmingly Muslim, around 90 to 95 percent Sunni per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Christian and indigenous animist minorities, and a form of Islam historically shaped by Sufi brotherhoods, particularly the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya orders, that has generally coexisted with pre-Islamic local custom rather than displacing it entirely.
Timbuktu, part of the medieval Mali and later Songhai empires, became one of the premodern Islamic world's most important centers of learning from the fourteenth century onward, home to major mosques including Djinguereber and to an estimated hundreds of thousands of historic manuscripts on theology, law, astronomy and other subjects, a scholarly reputation reinforced by Mali's fourteenth-century emperor Mansa Musa, whose lavish 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, distributing enormous quantities of gold along the way, remains one of history's most famous demonstrations of West African Islamic wealth and piety. Indigenous animist traditions among peoples such as the Dogon, centered on ancestor veneration and elaborate cosmological and mask traditions tied to agricultural and initiation ritual, persist alongside Islam in parts of central Mali, often blended with rather than replaced by Muslim practice.