Somalia

Somalia is close to religiously uniform: nearly the entire population is Sunni Muslim, predominantly of the Shafi'i school, with a historically strong Sufi tradition expressed through tariqas such as the Qadiriyya and Ahmadiyya, whose saints' shrines and religious lodges once anchored local devotional life across the Horn of Africa. That devotional pattern, blending mainstream Sunni jurisprudence with Sufi veneration of saints, long defined religious practice among Somalis more than any rigid distinction between orthodox and mystical Islam.

The collapse of Somalia's central government in 1991 opened decades of clan-based civil conflict during which competing armed factions have contested state authority, in part through rival religious claims. The Islamist insurgency al-Shabaab in particular has pressed a stricter reading of sharia than the Sufi-inflected practice historically dominant among Somalis, and has waged violent campaigns against Sufi shrines and religious minorities as part of that project, turning a once largely uncontested religious identity into a site of ongoing armed conflict.

Somalia's Sufi orders, chiefly the Qadiriyya and Ahmadiyya tariqas, built a devotional infrastructure of saints' shrines and religious lodges that for generations anchored local religious life across the country, offering a form of Islamic practice that emphasized veneration of holy figures and communal ritual alongside mainstream Sunni jurisprudence. That infrastructure has come under direct and sustained attack since the rise of the Islamist insurgency al-Shabaab, which regards shrine veneration as a deviation from proper Islamic practice and has destroyed Sufi shrines and religious sites in areas under its control or influence as part of its campaign to impose a stricter interpretation of sharia.

The legal landscape has moved in a broadly similar direction at the state level. Somalia's provisional federal constitution, adopted in 2012 and still not finally ratified, names Islam the state religion, requires all law to comply with the general principles of sharia, and prohibits the propagation of any religion other than Islam. The regional administrations of Somaliland and Puntland maintain their own constitutions with similar provisions, including explicit bars on conversion away from Islam, so that Somalia's historic Sufi pluralism now operates within a legal and security environment considerably less permissive than it once was.