Islam is the state religion of Pakistan under Article 2 of its constitution, and the 2023 census recorded 96.35% of the population as Muslim, most of them Sunni of the Hanafi school, with Shia Muslims estimated at between 5% and 15%. The largest minorities are Hindus, at 2.17% or about 5.2 million people concentrated in Sindh, and Christians, at 1.37% or just over 3 million, mostly in Punjab. Smaller groups include Ahmadis, whom the constitution has classed as non-Muslims since 1974, Sikhs, Parsis, Bahá'ís and the Kalash of Chitral. That near-total Muslim majority is recent: as late as 1941, Hindus and Sikhs made up about a fifth of the people in what is now Pakistan.
How the land of the Indus became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a story of five thousand years, told here in order.
Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Valley, c. 2500–1700 BCE
The oldest religious traces in Pakistan belong to the Indus Valley Civilisation. Mohenjo-daro, in today's Larkana District of Sindh, was built around 2500 BCE and housed at least 40,000 people before it was abandoned around 1700 BCE. Its Great Bath and its stamp seals, some showing animals and seated figures, have been read as evidence of ritual bathing and early cult practice, although the Indus script remains undeciphered and nobody can say for certain what its people believed. The site became the first in South Asia to be inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 1980.
After the Indus cities declined, Indo-Aryan speakers settled the Punjab, and the hymns of the Vedas, the oldest texts of what became Hinduism, were composed in the land of the five rivers. The later Vedic Brahmana texts mention kings of Gandhara, the region around the Peshawar valley, and Jain sources claim one of them, Nagnajit, as a follower of their faith.
Gandhara and Taxila: Buddhism From Ashoka to the Kushans
From about 500 to 330 BCE the north-west was a province of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, whose kings followed the Zoroastrian tradition, and Alexander the Great received the submission of the king of Taxila in 326 BCE. The Maurya dynasty then took over, and according to Buddhist texts Ashoka served as governor at Taxila before becoming emperor. In the 3rd century BCE he built the Dharmarajika Stupa there over relics of the Buddha; it was rebuilt in the 2nd century CE under the Kushans, and the Ruins of Taxila were listed by UNESCO in 1980.
Between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE, Gandhara became one of the great centres of Buddhism in Asia. Its sculptors blended Hellenistic and Indian styles to produce some of the earliest human images of the Buddha, and monks from its monasteries carried the faith along the Silk Road into Central and East Asia. Buddhism faded after that, and from the 7th to the 11th centuries Hinduism revived under the Shahi dynasties. Hindu sites from this long era survive: the Katas Raj temple complex in the Salt Range, whose oldest temple dates to the 6th century CE, and the cave shrine of Hinglaj Mata on the Makran coast of Balochistan, whose spring pilgrimage draws about 300,000 people.
711–712: Muhammad ibn al-Qasim Brings Islam to Sindh
Islam arrived as a ruling faith from the south-west. Arab forces had already taken towns in Makran, but between 708 and 711 the Umayyad commander Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, then still in his teens, led an army into Sindh, defeated its Brahman ruler Raja Dahir and took his capital, Aror. He governed the new province of Sindh from 712 until his death in 715, and the fall of Aror is generally taken as the beginning of Muslim rule in South Asia.
The Punjab came under Muslim rule three centuries later. Mahmud of Ghazni conquered it in the early 11th century, and Lahore became the Ghaznavids' regional capital and, after they lost Ghazni in 1163, their main capital until Muhammad of Ghor took it in 1186. It was in this Ghaznavid period that the Sufi scholar Ali al-Hujwiri came from Ghazni to Lahore. His grave, Data Darbar, is now the largest Sufi shrine in South Asia and draws up to a million visitors to its annual Urs.
From the Delhi Sultanate to Aurangzeb's Badshahi Mosque, 1206–1707
For the next five centuries the region was ruled from Delhi, first by the sultanates and from 1526 by the Mughals. Conversion was gradual and owed much to Sufi orders whose shrines became centres of devotion for whole districts; the 13th-century dargah of the Punjabi poet Baba Farid at Pakpattan is among the most important in Pakistan. In Chitral, Muslim rule arrived in the 14th century, and most of the Kalash gradually converted; a small community in the Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir valleys keeps their own polytheistic religion to this day.
The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb built the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore between 1671 and 1673, opposite the Alamgiri Gate of Lahore Fort. Faced in red sandstone with marble inlay, it was the largest mosque of the Mughal era and stayed the largest in the world for more than three hundred years. The poet Muhammad Iqbal, revered in Pakistan as a founder of the movement that created the country, is buried near its entrance.
Guru Nanak, Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Punjab, 1469–1849
Sikhism was born in what is now Pakistan. Guru Nanak, its founder, was born on 15 April 1469 at Rai Bhoi Ki Talvandi, the town now called Nankana Sahib, about 91 km west of Lahore, and died in 1539 at Kartarpur on the right bank of the Ravi, the town he had founded and where he gathered the first Sikh community. Gurdwara Janam Asthan marks his birthplace; the present building was raised by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the 19th century. The Kartarpur Corridor, opened on 9 November 2019, let Indian pilgrims cross the border without a visa to reach Gurdwara Darbar Sahib, 4.7 km inside Pakistan, until India suspended its services on 7 May 2025.
Ranjit Singh captured Lahore in 1799 and was crowned in 1801, founding a Sikh Empire that stretched from the Khyber Pass to the Sutlej. It was religiously mixed and ruled by a Sikh court until the British annexed it in 1849 after the Second Anglo-Sikh War. British rule brought Christian missions to Punjab, and most of today's Pakistani Christians descend from Dalit converts of that colonial era.
1947 to 1974: Partition, the Objectives Resolution and the Ahmadi Amendment
The 1941 census, the last before independence, counted the region as about 77.3% Muslim and roughly 20.7% Hindu and Sikh. Partition in August 1947 changed that within months. Amid communal killing across Punjab, about 7.3 million Hindus and Sikhs left for India and 7.2 million Muslims arrived. The 1951 census found West Pakistan 97.1% Muslim, with Hindus and Sikhs together reduced to 1.7%. The large Sikh communities of Lahore, Rawalpindi and Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, left almost in their entirety.
On 12 March 1949 the Constituent Assembly adopted the Objectives Resolution, moved by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, which declared that sovereignty belongs to God and that Pakistan's constitution would rest on Islamic principles; all ten non-Muslim members voted against it. The 1956 constitution made the country an Islamic Republic. The present constitution of 1973 makes Islam the state religion, requires laws to conform to the Quran and Sunnah, and reserves the offices of president and prime minister for Muslims. On 7 September 1974, under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Second Amendment declared Ahmadis non-Muslims, a status they reject. Pakistan has the largest Ahmadi population in the world, and the community counts among its members the country's first Nobel laureate, the physicist Abdus Salam, and its first foreign minister, Muhammad Zafarullah Khan. Estimates of its size range from 0.22% to 2.2% of the population, because many Ahmadis avoid declaring their identity in official records; the 2018 electoral rolls listed 167,505 Ahmadi voters, alongside 1.77 million Hindu and 1.64 million Christian voters.
Zia-ul-Haq's Islamisation and the 2023 Census
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled from 1977 until his death in 1988, made Islamisation the centre of state policy. The Hudood Ordinances of 1979 added Islamic criminal penalties, a Federal Shariat Court was set up to strike down laws judged un-Islamic, and Ordinance XX of 26 April 1984 barred Ahmadis from calling themselves Muslims or using Islamic greetings and terms. Between 1980 and 1986 the colonial blasphemy laws were made far more severe, culminating in Section 295-C, which carries the death penalty. No court-ordered execution for blasphemy has ever taken place, but at least 89 people accused of it were killed extrajudicially between 1947 and 2021, among them Punjab governor Salman Taseer and minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti in 2011.
Today's map of faith follows these layers. Hindus are concentrated in Sindh; Umerkot became Pakistan's first Hindu-majority district in the 2017 census and was 54.7% Hindu in 2023, and Tharparkar has the largest number of Hindus. Christians cluster in Lahore District and Islamabad, each over 4% Christian in 2017. Ahmadis are centred on Rabwah in Chiniot District, their former world headquarters. The 2023 census added separate Sikh and Parsi categories for the first time, after a 2018 court ruling. The national mosque, the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, was begun in 1976 with a Saudi grant and is shaped like a Bedouin tent. The constitutional framework behind all this is set out in our guide to the government of Pakistan, the upheaval of 1947 in our history of the partition of India, and the contrasting path of the country's former eastern wing in our guide to religion in Bangladesh.