| has gloss | eng: Religion plays an important role in Sudan, with most of the countrys population adhering to Islam, Animism, or Christianity. More than half Sudans population was Muslim in the early 1990s. Most Muslims, perhaps 90 percent, lived in the north, where they constituted 75 percent or more of the population. Data on Christians was less reliable but David Barrett's 2000 estimate of 16.7% in his World Christian Encyclopaedia is a fair indication. Most Christian Sudanese and adherents of local religious systems lived in southern Sudan. Islam had made inroads into the south, but more through the need to know Arabic than a profound belief in the tenets of the Quran. The SPLM, which in 1991 controlled most of southern Sudan, opposed the imposition of the Sharia (Islamic law). Christianity has grown from about 5% of the southerners to about 70% today with most of the rest still attached to the indigenous religions of their forebears. |
