Algeria

Two religious histories occupy the same ground here and are rarely discussed together.

The first is ancient and Christian. Roman North Africa was one of the intellectual centres of Latin Christianity. Augustine was bishop of Hippo, in what is now Annaba, and the Donatist controversy, which split the African church for a century over whether clergy who had handed over scriptures during persecution retained valid orders, was fought out in these provinces. The question it raised, whether the holiness of a sacrament depends on the holiness of the minister, was settled against the Donatists and shaped Western sacramental theology permanently. That church did not survive the Islamic period, and its disappearance is one of the genuinely unexplained problems of religious history.

The second is the Islam that followed, Sunni and Maliki, with two features that mark Algeria out. There is an Ibadi minority among the Mozabite Berbers of the Mzab valley, whose fortified oasis towns around Ghardaia are inscribed by UNESCO and whose community regulates its own affairs through religious councils, a form of Islam distinct from both Sunni and Shia and shared with Oman and the Libyan Nafusa. And there is a very strong marabout and Sufi inheritance, in which the Rahmaniyya order and the emir Abd al Qadir, himself the son of a Qadiriyya shaykh, led nineteenth century resistance to French conquest.

The civil war of the 1990s, set off by the annulment of elections the Islamic Salvation Front was winning, killed well over a hundred thousand people and shapes every subsequent religious policy in the country.

Algeria regulates non Muslim worship through Ordinance 06-03 of 2006. Its structure matters more than its tone. Collective worship by a non Muslim faith is permitted only in buildings specifically authorised for the purpose by the state, and the authorising committee has in practice approved very few. Attempting to persuade a Muslim to change religion is a criminal offence carrying imprisonment and a fine, as is producing or distributing material for that purpose.

The community most affected is Algerian rather than foreign. A Protestant movement grew from the 1980s largely among Kabyle Berbers, and the churches associating in the Protestant Church of Algeria, a body with legal recognition dating from 1974, number in the dozens. From 2018 the authorities began sealing them for lack of the specific building authorisation the ordinance requires, and most of the association's churches have been closed since, with the association's own registration also contested. Individual believers have been prosecuted under the proselytism provisions and for possession of Christian literature.

Set beside that is an event that pulls the other way. In December 2018 nineteen Catholic religious killed during the 1990s civil war were beatified at Oran, among them the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine, whose abduction and deaths are the subject of a French judicial inquiry that has not fully resolved them. The ceremony took place on Algerian soil with the agreement of the Algerian state and with Muslim religious figures present, and the church deliberately framed it alongside the far larger number of Algerian Muslims killed in the same conflict. It is the first beatification held in a Muslim majority country.