Mozambique: Islamic Radicalization as a Factor of Political Instability

Abstract

The radicalization of Islam in Mozambique is rapidly changing the country’s religious landscape and contributing to the spread of religious intolerance. Before the 2000s, Mozambique had rarely encountered serious manifestations of interfaith tension, but since the mid-2000s, traditional Sufi Islam began to be supplanted by the ideology of Wahhabism amid a general destabilization of the socio-political situation in the north of the country, primarily in the province of Cabo Delgado. At the end of the 2010s, armed Islamist groups began to operate in Mozambique, coordinated by the umbrella organization Ansar al-Sunna, which in 2019 became part of the Central African province of the Islamic State, and in 2020 – an autonomous province of the Islamic State. The rise of extremism and terrorism in Mozambique is actively supported by Islamists in Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, as well as in the states of North Africa and the Persian Gulf, i.e. the activities of Ansar al-Sunna have already acquired a regional character. One of the triggers of the intensification of rebel activity in the 2010s was the discovery in Cabo Delgado of the large gas and ruby deposits.