Islam in Mozambique is old, coastal and largely Sufi. The sultanate of Angoche and the sheikhdoms of the Querimba islands belonged to the same monsoon world as Kilwa and Zanzibar, and when the Qadiriyya and Shadhiliyya brotherhoods arrived around the turn of the twentieth century they gave the north a devotional culture of dhikr gatherings, saints' commemorations and hereditary sheikhly families that endures today. That long establishment is what made the violence that broke out in Cabo Delgado in October 2017 so disorienting.
A youth movement locals called al Shabaab, the youth, with no connection to the Somali group of the same name, attacked police posts in Mocimboa da Praia, denounced the established sheikhs and the state alike, and later pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. The war that followed has killed thousands, displaced communities across the province in numbers that at their height approached a million people, and drawn in Rwandan and regional forces.
Mozambique's national Muslim councils condemned the insurgency from the start, and researchers broadly read it as feeding on the north's poverty and its distance from the ruby and gas wealth extracted there, with religion as its language rather than its cause. The distinction matters in a country where Muslims and Christians have shared towns, markets and families for generations without communal violence.