Religion and History in the United Arab Emirates

The territory of the Emirates was until the mid twentieth century a sparse coast of pearling ports and inland oases, and its religious history before oil is thin in the record but not absent: a Christian monastery excavated on Sir Bani Yas island dates to around the seventh century, evidence of the Nestorian church that stretched along the Gulf before Islam displaced it.

Islam arrived in the Prophet's lifetime, and the interior followed Maliki practice while the coast was shaped by trade with Persia and India. The transformation came after 1971, when the federation was formed and oil revenue converted a population of a few hundred thousand into one of nearly ten million, the great majority of them foreign workers. That inversion is the single most important fact about religion in the Emirates: the state is Muslim and Emirati, and most of the people in it are neither. Policy has responded by granting land for churches, temples and gurdwaras rather than by pretending the population is homogeneous, and by placing considerable emphasis on tolerance as an official value, with a dedicated ministerial portfolio and a Year of Tolerance in 2019. Emirati citizens themselves are overwhelmingly Sunni, with a Shia minority of perhaps a tenth concentrated in Dubai and Sharjah, and mosques are administered through the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowments, which sets the Friday sermon nationally.