Mozambique

Mozambique's religious geography was drawn by the Indian Ocean long before it was drawn by Europe. The gold and ivory trade tied its northern coast into the Swahili world, and Islam took root in ports such as Angoche and on the islands centuries before Vasco da Gama touched land in 1498; Sufi brotherhoods later carried the faith inland and gave northern Muslim communities their characteristic devotional life.

The Portuguese brought Catholic missions up the Zambezi, Jesuits and Dominicans among the prazo estates, and in the late colonial period the church operated much of the education system under a concordat with Lisbon, a closeness that cost it dearly when Frelimo took power in 1975. The new Marxist state nationalised mission schools and hospitals, discouraged worship, and watched congregations shrink into private life, before war and pragmatism softened the policy in the 1980s; John Paul II's visit in 1988 sealed the reconciliation.

Meanwhile Zionist and Apostolic churches, carried home by migrant labourers from South African mines, spread through the south with healing rites that spoke to older spirit beliefs. The 2017 census caught the result, a country of Catholic, Muslim, Zionist and Pentecostal quarters, none dominant, layered over ancestor obligations that most Mozambicans still honour.

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.