Religion and History in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is almost entirely Muslim, with Pew Research estimating around 99 percent of the population as Muslim in its Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, split between a Sunni Hanafi majority and a Shia minority concentrated among the Hazara people and found also among some Tajiks and Pashtuns. Before Islam's arrival in the seventh through ninth centuries, the region sat at a crossroads of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Hinduism, and the Bamiyan valley held two monumental Buddha statues carved in the sixth century CE, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Ghaznavid and Ghurid rule from the tenth to twelfth centuries consolidated Islam politically, while Kandahar and Herat later became contested ground between Safavid Shia Iran and Mughal Sunni India, embedding sectarian geography into Afghan politics. Once sizeable Hindu and Sikh communities, and a small Jewish community centered in Herat and Kabul, have almost entirely emigrated over the twentieth century; the last known Afghan Jew left the country in 2021. Reform attempts under King Amanullah in the 1920s provoked conservative backlash, and the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 was framed internationally as a jihad, drawing fighters from across the Muslim world into a conflict that reshaped the country's religious and political life for decades after.