Jordan is an overwhelmingly Muslim country: about 97.2% of the population was Muslim in 2022, almost all of them Sunni, while Christians made up about 2.1%. Islam is the state religion under the 1952 Constitution, which also requires the king to be a Muslim born of Muslim parents, yet the same document protects the freedom to practise any religion that does not violate public order or morality. The main minorities are the Christian churches (more than half Greek Orthodox), a small Shia population, an estimated 14,000 Druze (2020) and around 1,000 followers of the Baháʼí Faith, with very small numbers of Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians and Yazidis. The shares below are 2022 estimates; each community follows in turn.
Islam and the Hashemite Crown: 97.2% of Jordanians
Islam reached the land east of the Jordan River in the first generation after the Prophet Muhammad. In 629 CE an early Muslim force met Byzantine troops and their Ghassanid Arab allies at the Battle of Mu'tah, near present-day Al-Karak, and lost three of its commanders, among them Ja'far ibn Abi Talib and Zayd ibn Harithah. Seven years later, in August 636, the Battle of the Yarmuk was fought over six days near the Yarmouk River, on what is now Jordan's northern border with Syria. That decisive Arab victory effectively ended Byzantine rule in Syria and opened the region to the Rashidun Caliphate.
Today Sunni Islam is both the majority faith and part of the state's identity. The ruling Hashemite family claims descent from the Prophet, and the 1952 Constitution, adopted on 1 January 1952 under King Talal, keeps the throne for Muslims who are the sons of Muslim parents. The constitution also creates religious courts alongside the civil and constitutional ones, and the religious courts handle personal-status matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance under law partly based on the sharia. The legal asymmetry around conversion follows from this: a convert to Islam must change their religious identification on government records, while someone who leaves Islam is still registered as a Muslim. Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men unless the man converts.
The crown also gives Jordanian Islam an international role. In 1924 the Supreme Muslim Council of Mandatory Palestine chose Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, as custodian of Al-Aqsa, and the custodianship has passed down the Hashemite line ever since. Article 9 of the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty commits Israel to respect Jordan's "present special role" in the Muslim holy shrines of Jerusalem, and a 2013 agreement with the Palestinian Authority recognised the same role for both Muslim and Christian sites. Domestically, King Abdullah II used the crown's religious standing in November 2004 to launch the Amman Message, first delivered as a Ramadan sermon by Chief Justice Sheikh Izz-Eddine Al-Tamimi. At a follow-up convention in July 2005, some 200 scholars from more than 50 countries affirmed the validity of eight schools of Islamic law, Sunni and Shia, and condemned declaring other Muslims apostates.
The kingdom's best-known mosque is a modern one. The King Abdullah I Mosque in Amman's Abdali district, named after the state's founding monarch, was built between 1982 and 1989; its blue mosaic dome covers a prayer hall for about 3,000 worshippers, and modestly dressed tourists may visit. Two Sunni minorities with their own identity also sit inside the 97% figure: the Circassians and Chechens, descendants of refugees from the Caucasus who arrived in the late nineteenth century, after the Circassian genocide of the 1860s and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and settled in and around Amman and Jerash; Circassians are credited with refounding modern Amman, which had been abandoned. Jordan's election law reserves three seats in the House of Representatives for them, which marks them out as a recognised community even though they share the majority's faith.
Shia Muslims and the Shrine of Ja'far at Al-Mazar
Jordan's Shia community is small, and unlike the Christians or Druze much of it is recent: many Shia in the country are refugees from Syria, Lebanon and Iraq rather than long-settled Jordanians. There is no reliable published count of them, and they are folded into the 97.2% Muslim total.
The Shia heritage of the country is older than the community, however. Two of the commanders killed at Mu'tah in 629, Ja'far and Zayd, are buried at Al-Mazar, a district of the Karak governorate, where the Mausoleum of Ja'far ibn Abi Talib now forms the centre of a religious complex. Ja'far was a cousin of the Prophet and brother of Ali, the figure from whom Shia Islam takes its name, which gives the site particular meaning for Shia pilgrims. The Mamluk sultan Baybars commissioned the first mausoleums over the graves of Ja'far and Zayd ibn Harithah in the thirteenth century; they were rebuilt in the 1930s, and with the permission of King Hussein a new complex with a mosque and a madrasa was completed around them in 1997. The Amman Message is the other point of contact: by naming the Shia Jaʿfari and Zaydi schools among the eight valid traditions of Islamic law, the 2004–2005 declaration put Jordan's official religious voice on record against sectarian excommunication.
Jordan's Christian Churches: from 20% in 1930 to 2.1% in 2022
Christianity in Jordan is older than Islam by six centuries, and the country holds some of the faith's earliest buildings. In June 1998 archaeologists in Aqaba, the Roman port of Aila, uncovered a mud-brick church whose first phase is dated between 293 and 303. That makes it the world's oldest known purpose-built church, older than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, both of the late 320s. A bishop of Aila attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325, evidence of a sizeable Christian population at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. Arab Christian tribes such as the Ghassanids, Byzantine allies, are among the ancestors many Jordanian Christians claim today.
The town of Madaba, south of Amman, preserves one of the best-known early Christian artworks in the country. In the floor of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George lies the Madaba Map, a mosaic stretching from Lebanon to the Nile Delta. Because it shows Jerusalem's New Church of the Theotokos, dedicated on 20 November 542, but nothing built after 570, it is dated to between 542 and 570, and it is the oldest surviving original map of the Holy Land.
The Christian share of the population has fallen steeply: about 20% in 1930, about 4.2% in 2005, and 2.1% in 2022. Absolute numbers have grown over that period, and the decline in share is explained by high rates of Muslim immigration into the country, higher Muslim birth rates and Christian emigration. Estimates of the total range from about 250,000 (a 2014 Eastern Orthodox Church figure) to 400,000. More than half belong to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem; Catholics, split between the Latin Patriarchate, the Melkite Archeparchy of Petra and smaller rites, numbered about 115,000 in 2022. Anglicans, Armenian and Syriac Orthodox, Copts, Lutherans and several evangelical churches make up the rest, and a 2015 study estimated about 6,500 Christians of Muslim background, who remain legally Muslim.
Christians live throughout the country, but Amman, Irbid, Madaba, Salt and Karak have larger communities than average, and the towns of Fuheis and Al Husn have Christian majorities. The community has its own ecclesiastical courts for personal-status law, and Christian schools educate many Muslim pupils. Christians also have reserved seats in parliament: of the 138 seats in the current House of Representatives, nine are set aside for Christians and three for Circassians and Chechens, a combined minority quota of 12.
The holiest Christian place in Jordan is Al-Maghtas, "Bethany beyond the Jordan", on the east bank of the Jordan River, venerated as the site of Jesus's baptism since at least the Byzantine period. Mined and abandoned after the 1967 war, it was cleared after the 1994 peace treaty, visited by Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2015. About 81,000 people visited in 2016, with thousands arriving every 6 January for Epiphany, and in 2022 King Abdullah II announced plans to mark the 2,000th anniversary of the baptism there in 2030.
The Druze of the Hills North and West of Amman
The Druze faith began in the eleventh century in Fatimid Egypt, under the caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, and reached what is now Jordan through Arab families of the Tanukh, whose leaders had close ties to the Fatimid court. Druze call themselves al-Muwahhideen, "believers in one God"; they do not follow the Five Pillars of Islam, and conversion into or out of the faith is not permitted. Most Druze do not identify as Muslims.
The Jordanian state takes a different view: it classifies the Druze as Muslims and lets them hold public office on that basis, which is one reason estimates of their numbers vary. A 2005 US State Department report put them at no fewer than 20,000, a 2020 figure gives about 14,000, and a 2023 academic study counted roughly 15,000, about 7,000 of them in the desert oasis town of Azraq and some 500 in Umm al-Quttein, with most of the rest in and around Amman and Zarqa. No parliamentary seats are reserved for them, although Druze have served as members of parliament, cabinet ministers and generals.
Baháʼís, Jews and the Faiths Jordan Does Not Recognise
Below the Christian churches, the legal framework leaves smaller faiths with fewer rights. The government may deny recognition to a religion altogether. About 1,000 Jordanians followed the Baháʼí Faith in 2020. They may not establish schools, places of worship or cemeteries, and like other non-Christian minorities they have no courts of their own for personal-status cases. Small Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian and Yazidi communities were also noted in 2022.
Judaism has an unusual position. Jordan's territory is full of Hebrew Bible sites, from Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have looked over the Promised Land, to the Ammonite citadel above downtown Amman, yet in 2020 there were reported to be no Jewish citizens of Jordan at all.
Taken together, these restrictions shape how outside monitors rate the country. In 2023 Jordan scored 2 out of 4 for religious freedom, a middle ranking that reflects the gap between the Christian churches, which hold parliamentary seats, run schools and celebrate their festivals publicly, and the smaller unrecognised groups. In June 2006 the government published the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including its Article 18 on freedom of religion, in the Official Gazette, giving it domestic legal standing. How the 1952 Constitution's balance between a Muslim state and protected minorities works in practice is set out in more detail in our guide to the government of Jordan.