ABSTRACT
East Africa, which includes the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti), the Swahili coast and Great Lakes region (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, and Malawi), and the island states of the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Mayotte, is a vast region encompassing tremendously diverse topography and supporting equally diverse lifestyles. The Muslim population of this region numbers today approximately 92 million, or about 26 percent of the entire population of these countries. Islam entered East Africa mainly via seafaring merchants from southern Yemen, particularly in the Horn of Africa, so Muslims are most concentrated along the coast, from Eritrea to northern Mozambique, with the proportion of the Muslim population diminishing as one goes inland. Somalia, which has a long coastline bordering both the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, is entirely Muslim, and this is nearly the case for Djibouti, a small country at the intersection of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and for the Comoros, Mayotte, and Zanzibar (the last of which joined with Tanganyika to form the nation of Tanzania in 1964). Nonetheless, the country with by far the largest number of Muslims (over 38 million) is the entirely landlocked state of Ethiopia, where Muslims constitute about half the population, despite Ethiopia’s historical identification with Christianity.
