Gambia

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Gambia is one of the most densely Muslim countries in West Africa, close to 96 per cent Sunni with a small Ahmadi community, set against a Christian minority of roughly four per cent who are mostly Roman Catholic. The two communities share family ties across religious lines closely enough that intermarriage and mixed households are unremarkable, a closeness that has helped keep interfaith relations comparatively calm in a country whose religious demographics might otherwise suggest more friction than exists in practice.

The Supreme Islamic Council and the Gambia Christian Council maintain a standing interfaith relationship that both government officials and outside diplomats have leaned on directly to defuse local tensions, most visibly during a period of friction between Muslim and Christian residents in the Bakau and Tallinding areas. That institutionalized cooperation between the country's two main religious bodies gives the Gambia a model of interfaith coordination that goes beyond the ordinary constitutional guarantee of religious freedom into active, standing dialogue.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Gambia's constitution protects freedom of religious choice so long as it does not infringe the rights of others or the national interest, and it explicitly bars the establishment of a state religion and the formation of political parties organized around religious affiliation. That secular guarantee was tested directly in December 2015, when President Yahya Jammeh declared the Gambia an Islamic republic by decree, overriding the constitutional bar on establishment by executive action rather than through any amendment process.

The declaration was formally reversed after Jammeh's 2017 removal from office, restoring the secular constitutional order intact rather than leaving Jammeh's decree as a lasting change to the country's legal architecture. The episode stands as a clear case of the gap between a constitution's text and a government's practice: the bar on establishing a state religion held on paper throughout Jammeh's declaration, and it was the political transition, not any court ruling, that ultimately restored it in fact.