Sudan is around 97 per cent Muslim, almost entirely Sunni following the Maliki school, with a Christian minority of roughly three per cent concentrated among Coptic families in the northern cities and among the peoples of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile. That uniformity is recent. Until South Sudan seceded in July 2011, Sudan was Africa's largest country and contained several million Christians and traditional believers; secession removed them from the national total in one stroke.
Sudan Was Christian for Roughly a Thousand Years
The stretch of the Nile that is now northern Sudan held three Christian kingdoms — Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia — from the sixth century onward. They were converted by missionaries from Byzantium, built cathedrals of mudbrick and stone, and produced frescoes of extraordinary quality.
The cathedral at Faras, excavated before the site was flooded by Lake Nasser, yielded wall paintings of Nubian bishops and dark-skinned saints that now hang in museums in Warsaw and Khartoum. Old Dongola, the Makurian capital, had a substantial church complex. Christian Nubia was literate in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian, and it lasted longer than the interval separating us from the Norman conquest of England.
Islam Arrived Slowly, and Mostly Not by Conquest
The Arab armies that took Egypt in the 640s pushed south and were fought to a standstill by Nubian archers. What followed instead was the Baqt, a treaty regulating trade and movement between Muslim Egypt and Christian Nubia that held in some form for six centuries — one of the longest-lasting agreements of its kind anywhere.
Islamisation came later and gradually, through merchants, intermarriage and the migration of Arab pastoral groups into the Nile valley and the plains, and through holy men rather than armies. Makuria and Alodia weakened and dissolved between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Funj Sultanate of Sennar, established around 1504, was the first major Muslim state in the region, and it patronised the itinerant scholars and Sufi teachers who did the actual work of conversion.
The Sufi Brotherhoods Are the Real Institutions
Sudanese Islam is Sufi to a degree unusual even in Africa. Religious life is organised around tariqa — brotherhoods — each with a lineage, a founding family, a distinctive form of dhikr, and a network of lodges and schools across the country.
- The Khatmiyya, founded in the early nineteenth century and led by the Mirghani family, strong in the east and along the Nile.
- The Ansar, the followers of the Mahdi, led by the Mahdi's descendants, strong in the west and centre.
- The Qadiriyya, the oldest presence in Sudan, whose adherents gather for the Friday dhikr at the tomb of Hamed al-Nil in Omdurman.
- The Sammaniyya and Tijaniyya, both significant, the latter with wide reach across West Africa.
The Friday afternoon gathering at Hamed al-Nil is the best-known religious spectacle in the country: drummers, incense, green and red patchwork robes, and dervishes turning in the dust outside the cemetery until sunset. It is open to anyone, and its participants include people who would not describe themselves as particularly devout.
Khalwas, Moulids and the Zar
Religious education in rural Sudan has traditionally run through the khalwa, a Quranic school where children memorise the text by writing verses on wooden boards in ink made from charcoal, washing the board and starting again. Khalwas are attached to Sufi lodges and have historically been the first and often only schooling available in much of the countryside.
The saints' days, or moulids, fill the calendar. The birthday of the Prophet is celebrated in Omdurman with a fortnight of tents, sweets moulded into dolls and horsemen, and nightly recitation — an observance that Salafi currents elsewhere condemn as innovation and that Sudanese of all classes attend.
Alongside all of this runs the zar, a spirit-possession ceremony conducted largely by and for women, in which drumming and incense summon spirits that are negotiated with rather than exorcised. Religious authorities have periodically condemned it; it has continued for centuries regardless, and it is one of the clearest survivals of pre-Islamic practice in the Nile valley.
The Mahdi, and a State Founded on Prophecy
In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad, a Sammaniyya shaykh from an island in the Nile, declared himself the Mahdi — the guided one whose appearance in Islamic tradition precedes the end of days — and called for the expulsion of the Turco-Egyptian administration.
His movement defeated successive Egyptian and British-led forces, annihilated an army under William Hicks in 1883, and in January 1885 took Khartoum, killing the British governor-general Charles Gordon on the steps of his palace two days before a relief expedition arrived. The Mahdi died months later, and his successor ruled a Mahdist state for thirteen years until an Anglo-Egyptian force under Kitchener destroyed it at Omdurman in 1898 with machine guns against spears and swords.
The Mahdi's silver-domed tomb in Omdurman was shelled afterwards and his remains disinterred, an act that caused revulsion even in Britain. It was rebuilt in the 1940s and stands today. His great-grandson Sadiq al-Mahdi led the Umma Party and served twice as prime minister.
Why Sudanese Political Parties Are Brotherhoods
The two largest traditional parties of independent Sudan map directly onto the two largest brotherhoods: the Umma Party is the political expression of the Ansar, and the Democratic Unionist Party of the Khatmiyya. Party leadership has passed within the Mahdi and Mirghani families for generations.
This means Sudanese electoral politics has long been organised around religious allegiance without being about religious doctrine. Voters followed their shaykh's family; the rivalry between the two houses goes back to the nineteenth century, when the Khatmiyya opposed the Mahdist revolt. Both parties are broadly conservative and neither is Islamist in the modern ideological sense — a distinction that became crucial in 1989.
1983: The September Laws
In September 1983, President Jaafar Nimeiry, facing economic crisis and seeking a new base of support, imposed sharia as the law of the entire country, including the non-Muslim south. Alcohol was poured into the Nile. Hudud punishments were introduced, and amputations were carried out publicly.
The decision reignited the civil war with the south, which had been quiet since 1972, and it set the terms of Sudanese politics for the next three decades: whether a state containing millions of non-Muslims could apply Islamic criminal law to all of them.
The Execution of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
The most consequential single act of that period was the hanging of a 76-year-old engineer and religious thinker in January 1985. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha led the Republican Brothers and argued for a radical reinterpretation of Islamic law: that the Meccan verses of the Quran, universal and egalitarian, constitute the eternal message, while the later Medinan verses were provisions for a particular seventh-century society and need not bind a modern state.
The doctrine implied full equality for women and for non-Muslims, and it directly undermined the September Laws. Taha was convicted of apostasy and executed in Khartoum. The killing shocked Sudanese opinion and contributed to the uprising that removed Nimeiry three months later. His followers continue to publish his work, and his execution is still the reference point in Sudanese arguments about religious freedom.
Turabi's Islamist State
The 1989 coup that brought Omar al-Bashir to power was engineered by the National Islamic Front under Hassan al-Turabi, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer who had built an Islamist movement from the universities rather than from the brotherhoods. His project was the opposite of traditional Sudanese religiosity: modern, ideological, urban and impatient with shrine-visiting Sufism.
The state pursued Islamisation of the civil service, education and banking, prosecuted the war against the south as a jihad, and briefly made Khartoum a hub for transnational Islamist networks, hosting Osama bin Laden between 1991 and 1996. Turabi and Bashir fell out in 1999, and Turabi spent much of his remaining life in and out of prison. The Islamist apparatus he built, however, outlasted him inside the security services.
The 2020 Reforms, and the War That Undid Them
After the 2019 uprising that removed Bashir, the transitional government carried out the most significant religious liberalisation in Sudanese history. In July 2020 it abolished the apostasy offence, repealed the public order law that had been used to police women's dress, permitted non-Muslims to consume alcohol, criminalised female genital mutilation and ended flogging as a punishment. A clause in the Juba peace agreement committed the country to separating religion and state.
The military coup of October 2021 stalled the process, and the war that broke out in April 2023 between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has been catastrophic for religious life of every kind: churches in Khartoum and Omdurman looted or burned, mosques shelled, and the Sufi lodges that anchored community life in the capital abandoned as millions fled.
Sudan's Coptic community, present since antiquity and historically prominent in commerce, medicine and the civil service, had already dwindled through emigration and is now smaller still. The Nuba Mountains, where Christians, Muslims and traditional believers live in the same villages and have long done so without incident, remain the clearest counter-example to the idea that Sudan was ever religiously simple. Sudan's wider geography is in our Sudan country guide; the river these kingdoms grew along is traced in our complete guide to the Nile, and readers starting cold can begin with where Sudan is.
