Mauritania

Mauritania's constitution declares it an Islamic Republic and names Islam, in its Sunni Maliki form, the sole religion of both the citizenry and the state, a designation that leaves essentially no institutional space for any other faith among its own nationals. The country sits at the historic meeting point of Arab-Berber Maghreb Islam and West African Sahelian Islam, a position that made it a center of Islamic scholarship for the wider region for centuries.

Towns such as Chinguetti, Ouadane, Tichit and Oualata, now largely eroded by the advancing Sahara, preserve manuscript libraries that made Mauritania a hub of Quranic scholarship, jurisprudence and Sufi learning from the medieval period onward, drawing students from across West Africa. The Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya Sufi orders, both widespread across the wider Sahel, remain influential in Mauritanian religious life today, carrying forward a scholarly and devotional tradition considerably older than the modern Mauritanian state itself, which gained independence only in 1960.

Mauritania's criminal code, revised in 2018, makes both apostasy and blasphemy capital offenses for Muslims, one of a small number of countries to codify a mandatory death sentence for leaving Islam. The government has never carried out an execution under the provision, and courts may treat an individual's repentance as a mitigating factor, but several blasphemy prosecutions in the 2010s and 2020s drew sustained diplomatic pressure from the United States and other governments, keeping the law a live point of international scrutiny even without an execution to enforce it.

Mauritania's other unresolved religious controversy concerns slavery, only formally criminalized in 2007 and, by the documented account of rights monitors, still practiced in isolated cases today. Hereditary slavery in Mauritania has historically been defended by some local religious authorities on grounds drawn from Maliki jurisprudence, an argument abolitionist Mauritanian scholars and activists directly contest as a misreading of Islamic law rather than an authentic application of it, making the country's own religious scholars central participants on both sides of the debate.