Guinea

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

Guinea is overwhelmingly Muslim, with Sufi orders and a strong Sunni majority shaping public religious life along the coast of West Africa, while a Christian minority and communities holding traditional beliefs persist alongside Islam rather than apart from it. About 84 per cent of the population is Muslim, nearly 11 per cent Christian and roughly 3 per cent follows traditional or folk religion. Islam arrived centuries before French colonization and has remained the dominant faith through every change of government since, most visibly at the Grand Mosque of Conakry, built with Saudi funding in the 1980s.

A 2021 military coup ended the elected government of Alpha Conde and installed a Transition Charter in place of a constitution, and religious leaders now sit by charter right among the members of the National Transition Council, a formal role for religious authority inside a government that came to power outside any constitutional process. Religious groups register with a State Secretariat for Religious Affairs that has overseen Islamic and Christian institutions since independence from France, a continuity of religious administration that has persisted through Guinea's several changes of government and constitutional order.

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 Transition Charter that has served in place of a constitution since Guinea's 2021 coup declares the country a secular state, and treats any act undermining that secularism, or an individual's religious freedom, as a high crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. That provision places religious neutrality among the charter's more seriously enforced guarantees, a notable choice for a document installed by a military government rather than an elected constitutional process.

Religious groups must be approved by the State Secretariat for Religious Affairs, submitting a written constitution and application along with their address and a fee of 250,000 Guinean francs, about 29 US dollars. The requirement applies uniformly across faiths rather than singling out any one religious community, and the Secretariat's oversight has continued without interruption through the 2021 transition, administering the same registration framework the elected government it replaced had used.