Tanzania

Tanzania is one of very few countries where Christians and Muslims are close to numerically balanced, and the balance is geographical before it is demographic. Zanzibar and the coastal strip are overwhelmingly Muslim; the interior of the mainland is majority Christian with a substantial Muslim presence in the towns.

The coastal Islam is old. Swahili civilisation grew out of Indian Ocean trade from at least the ninth century, and the stone towns of Kilwa, Songo Mnara and the Kilwa Kisiwani mosques are its monuments, inscribed by UNESCO. This is a settled Shafii scholarly tradition with its own literature in Swahili written in Arabic script, and it is among the oldest continuous Muslim traditions in sub Saharan Africa. Zanzibar was governed from Oman for much of the nineteenth century, which added an Ibadi ruling class to a Sunni population and made the island the commercial and religious hub of the whole coast, including for the slave trade that Anglican missionaries then built the cathedral at Stone Town to commemorate the ending of.

Christianity on the mainland is a nineteenth century mission product, Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican, with Pentecostal growth since.

Indigenous practice continues among the Maasai, the Sukuma and many others, in most cases alongside a world religion rather than instead of one. One consequence has to be named without euphemism: people with albinism have been attacked and killed for body parts sought by those making charms, a documented and prosecuted crime that the government, religious leaders and Tanzanian albinism organisations have campaigned against together.

Tanzania has not asked a religion question in its national census since 1967. The omission was deliberate policy under Julius Nyerere, whose project was to build a nation on Swahili language and ujamaa rather than on ethnicity or faith, and who judged that publishing an authoritative religious head count in a country this evenly divided would turn every subsequent political question into a confessional one.

The result is that nobody knows the ratio. Estimates from surveys and from religious bodies themselves differ, and both Christian and Muslim organisations have at times claimed a majority. That uncertainty is itself politically useful to everyone and politically dangerous to everyone, which is roughly the equilibrium Nyerere intended.

The live constitutional argument is about kadhi courts. Zanzibar, which retains its own legal system under the union, has kadhi courts applying Islamic personal law in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance for Muslims. The mainland does not; such courts were abolished shortly after independence, and Muslim personal law matters are handled in the ordinary courts. Muslim organisations on the mainland have pressed for their reinstatement for decades, arguing that the present arrangement leaves Muslims worse served than they were under colonial rule. Christian bodies have opposed it, arguing that a religious court system in a secular state creates parallel law and that the pressure would not stop at personal status.

Successive governments have promised and then dropped legislation, and the question has been one of the recurring obstacles in the long stalled process of writing a new constitution.