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thumb|Tunis Zitouna Great Mosque
Islam is the dominant religion in Tunisia. According to the United States CIA, 99.1% of its adherents are Sunni Muslims. The constitution of Tunisia states that the country's “religion is Islam”, the government is the “guardian of religion”, and requires that the president be Muslim. The predominant madhhab in the country is the Maliki. The Tunisian island of Djerba is home to a population of Ibadi Muslims.
Overview
The majority of Muslims in Tunisia are Sunni, following the Maliki madhhab. However, there are no reliable statistics on relative religiosity. Various Sufi orders are influential to Islamic practice in Tunisia - particularly the Shadhili Order, which is significant across North Africa.
Government and Islam
The January 2014 Constitution states the country's “religion is Islam.” It designates the government as the “guardian of religion” and requires that the president be Muslim.
Islamic religious education is mandatory in public schools, but the religious curriculum for secondary school students also includes the history of Judaism and Christianity from the Islamic perspective and sources. The Zeitouna Koranic School is part of the Government's national university system.
Generally, Shari'a-based interpretation of civil law is applied only in some family cases. Some families avoid the effects of Shari'a on inheritance by executing sales contracts between parents and children to ensure that sons and daughters receive equal shares of property.
According to the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report, there have been some reports as of 2004 that the married interfaith couples to register the birth of their children and receive birth certificates if the mother was Christian and the father was Muslim and the parents tried to give their children non-Muslim names.
History
The area that is now Tunisia came under the rule of Islam during the Umayyad Caliphate, (661–750/A.H.).
The Umayyads founded the first Islamic city in North Africa, Kairouan where in 670 AD that the Mosque of Uqba, or the Great Mosque of Kairouan, was constructed;. This mosque is the oldest and most prestigious sanctuary in the Muslim West with the oldest standing minaret in the world; it is also considered a masterpiece of Islamic art and architecture. Zitouna mosque-university, was created around 703 AD, and became the center of Tunisia's Islamic scholarship and preaching. Its capital Kairuan became the most important centre of learning in the Maghreb, most notably in the field of Theology and Law.
1800–2011
right|upright|300px|thumb|The Mosquée Ennasr mosque in [[Ariana, Tunisia|Ariana has contemporary architecture]]
Tunisia was influenced more heavily by Europe during the colonial era (it was a French protectorate and in 1945 had 144,000 colonialists living in it) and is considered the most westernized of Muslim North African states. Its first president, Habib Bourguiba, was committed to secularism,
and dismantled University of Ez-Zitouna, replacing it with a faculty of Shari`a and Theology He also named a Grand Mufti of the Republic.
His successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011), created a Higher Islamic Council.
In 2004, the US State Department reported that people were sometimes interrogated just for associating or being seen in the street with practising Muslims. The government allowed the construction of mosques provided they were built in accordance with national urban planning regulations, but upon completion, they became the property of the Government.
After the revolution
The fall of the Ben Ali regime has loosened religion repression and brought more religious conservatism, and sometimes more extremism. The 1988 law banning non-state approved activities and meetings at mosques was discontinued allowing much longer hours of operation.
For some months after Ben Ali's overthrow in the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, many of the imams his regime had appointed were replaced, "often by violent Islamists", accused of having collaborated with the old regime. By October 2011, the Ministry of Religious Affairs announced that it had lost control of about 400 mosques.
In March 2013, the minister of religious affairs at the time, Nourredine Khademi, called upon Tunisians to fight jihad in Syria. As of early 2015 about 3,000 Tunisians are believed to have gone to fight in Syria. Calls came for legalization of polygamy, from Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice
In August 2013, the Tunisian government declared Ansar al-Shari`a an illegal terrorist organization following its alleged involvement in the political assassinations of secularist politicians Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi in 2013.
Following an Islamist attack on July 16, 2014 killing 12 army soldiers, the prime minister's office created a “crisis unit” to coordinate efforts to combat terrorism.|group=Note devastating Tunisia's tourist industry.
Since 2017, Tunisian Muslim women can legally and officially marry non-Muslim men.
In June 2022, President Kais Saied said that the Tunisian draft constitution, which will be put to a referendum on July 25, will not describe Tunisia as "a state with Islam as its religion, but of belonging to an ummah (community) which has Islam as its religion."