Mali

Mali is overwhelmingly Muslim, around 90 to 95 percent Sunni per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Christian and indigenous animist minorities, and a form of Islam historically shaped by Sufi brotherhoods, particularly the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya orders, that has generally coexisted with pre-Islamic local custom rather than displacing it entirely.

Timbuktu, part of the medieval Mali and later Songhai empires, became one of the premodern Islamic world's most important centers of learning from the fourteenth century onward, home to major mosques including Djinguereber and to an estimated hundreds of thousands of historic manuscripts on theology, law, astronomy and other subjects, a scholarly reputation reinforced by Mali's fourteenth-century emperor Mansa Musa, whose lavish 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, distributing enormous quantities of gold along the way, remains one of history's most famous demonstrations of West African Islamic wealth and piety. Indigenous animist traditions among peoples such as the Dogon, centered on ancestor veneration and elaborate cosmological and mask traditions tied to agricultural and initiation ritual, persist alongside Islam in parts of central Mali, often blended with rather than replaced by Muslim practice.

Northern Mali has experienced a prolonged jihadist insurgency since 2012, when Tuareg separatist rebellion combined with and was then overtaken by al-Qaeda and later Islamic State-linked militant groups seeking to impose a strict interpretation of sharia law across the region, prompting a 2013 French military intervention that recaptured major towns including Timbuktu from militant control. During their occupation of Timbuktu, militant fighters affiliated with Ansar Dine deliberately destroyed numerous ancient Sufi shrines and mausoleums, considering veneration of Muslim saints idolatrous, actions the International Criminal Court later prosecuted as war crimes in the landmark 2016 conviction of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, the first ICC case focused specifically on cultural heritage destruction.

Local custodians and scholars had smuggled tens of thousands of Timbuktu's historic manuscripts out of the city ahead of and during the occupation to protect them from destruction, an effort widely covered internationally as a race to preserve one of Africa's most significant Islamic scholarly heritages. The insurgency has continued in various forms since, with jihadist groups still controlling significant rural territory in central and northern Mali and continuing to target both government forces and communities practicing forms of Islam or animism the militants consider insufficiently orthodox.