Kenya

Kenya is overwhelmingly Christian, around 80 to 85 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, split between Protestant and Catholic communities of roughly comparable size, with a Muslim minority of around 10 to 11 percent concentrated along the coast and in the northeast, and small indigenous traditional religion adherents among various ethnic groups.

Coastal Kenya's Islam arrived via Indian Ocean trade with Arabia and Persia from as early as the eighth century, producing the Swahili civilization, a Bantu-Arab-Persian trading culture centered on city-states including Mombasa, Lamu and Malindi that fused African, Islamic and Indian Ocean influences into a distinct coastal identity and the Swahili language itself, which carries substantial Arabic vocabulary. Christianity arrived substantially through nineteenth-century missionary activity under British colonial rule, and independent Kenya's founding president Jomo Kenyatta, raised Christian though of Kikuyu ethnic background, navigated a religious landscape that blended mission Christianity with strong indigenous religious currents, including the Mau Mau independence movement's partial use of traditional Kikuyu oathing rituals alongside its anticolonial politics in the 1950s.

Kenya's Muslim-majority coastal region has periodically expressed grievance over perceived economic and political marginalization relative to the Christian-majority interior and capital Nairobi, tensions that predate and have been sharpened by the rise of militant violence linked to al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based jihadist group that has carried out major attacks on Kenyan soil since Kenya's 2011 military intervention in Somalia, including the 2013 Westgate shopping mall siege in Nairobi and the 2015 Garissa University attack that killed nearly 150 people, most targeted specifically for being Christian. These attacks have strained relations between Kenya's Christian majority and Muslim minority, with reports of heavy-handed security force responses in coastal Muslim communities drawing criticism from human rights organizations even as the government frames its counterterrorism measures as necessary against a genuine cross-border militant threat.

Kenya's constitution guarantees religious freedom and maintains a secular state without an established religion, though Muslim communities have periodically sought greater recognition of Islamic personal law through the country's Kadhi courts, a colonial-era institution handling Muslim family law matters whose scope has been repeatedly contested in Kenyan courts and constitutional negotiations.