Pakistan is overwhelmingly Muslim, around 96 percent per Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, split roughly 85 to 90 percent Sunni and 10 to 15 percent Shia, with small Hindu, Christian, Ahmadi and Sikh minorities. Pakistan was created in 1947 through the partition of British India specifically as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, a movement led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League, and partition triggered one of history's largest mass migrations along with communal violence that killed an estimated one to two million people and displaced roughly fifteen million as Hindus and Sikhs moved to India and Muslims moved to the new state of Pakistan.
Lahore and the wider Punjab region hold major Sikh and Sufi religious heritage, including Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak's birthplace at Nankana Sahib, now a significant pilgrimage site for Sikhs traveling from India under special visa arrangements, and shrines of major Sufi saints such as Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore, whose Sufi shrine culture remains central to popular devotional practice across the country despite pressure from more scripturalist reform movements. Sindh province carries its own strong Sufi devotional current, centered on shrines such as that of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan Sharif, where an annual urs festival draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims for ecstatic dhamaal drumming and dance, a popular Islam that scripturalist reform movements have periodically targeted, including a 2017 suicide bombing at the shrine that killed dozens of devotees.