Nigeria

Nigeria is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, each estimated at roughly 45 to 50 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, a division that broadly though imperfectly tracks a north-south geographic line, with the mostly Hausa-Fulani north predominantly Muslim and the Yoruba southwest and Igbo southeast predominantly Christian, alongside indigenous traditional religions, including Yoruba Ifa divination and Igbo Odinani, that persist both independently and blended within Christian and Muslim practice through syncretic movements.

Islam reached northern Nigeria via trans-Saharan trade and the Kanem-Bornu and Hausa city-state kingdoms from as early as the eleventh century, while the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate, founded by the Fulani religious reformer Usman dan Fodio in an 1804 jihad, established one of West Africa's most influential Islamic states and shaped the north's religious and political character into the colonial and postcolonial periods. Christianity took root chiefly through nineteenth and twentieth century missionary activity in the south, producing a religious landscape now home to some of the world's largest Pentecostal megachurches, and Nigeria's Yoruba diaspora religion, carried by the transatlantic slave trade, seeded major traditions including Santeria in Cuba and Candomble in Brazil.

Nigeria has experienced recurring intercommunal violence with strong religious dimensions, particularly in the Middle Belt states where Muslim herder and Christian farmer communities have clashed over land and resources in conflicts that have killed thousands over the past two decades, and more severely through Boko Haram, a jihadist insurgency founded around 2002 that seeks to establish strict Islamic rule and rejects Western education, whose escalating violence since 2009, including mass killings, suicide bombings and the internationally publicized 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions across northeastern Nigeria and the wider Lake Chad basin. An Islamic State-affiliated faction that split from Boko Haram has continued a parallel insurgency, and northern Nigerian states including Kano and Zamfara have implemented sharia-based criminal law codes for Muslims since the early 2000s, applying alongside the country's secular federal constitution in a dual legal system that has produced internationally covered cases involving capital punishment for offenses such as adultery and blasphemy, most reduced or overturned on appeal, and continuing tension between religious minorities and sharia enforcement in those states.