Claim: Angola has banned Islam considering it an attack on the country’s culture and has destroyed mosques in the country.
Fact: The Angolan government denies banning Islam and only tore down mosques that they say were built without permission.
On 25 October 2024, a user on X posted an image (archive) of a destroyed mosque. The post is captioned, “Angola became the first African country to outlaw Islam. More than 60 mosques have already been demolished for being built without permission.
Who knew Africa would be ahead of Europe in this regard!”.
The X account frequently posts anti-Islamic content and posted the same claim in August 2024, with both posts garnering significant traction and over 1.3 million views.
Angola
Angola is a nation located on the west-central coast of Southern Africa. It is constitutionally secular with a population of nearly 30 million. Approximately 75% of Angolans are Christians, predominantly Catholics. But in rural areas, a small segment of the population still practices animism and indigenous religious beliefs. Currently, Muslims make up around than 1% of the population, with most being recent migrants from West Africa and the Middle East, particularly of Lebanese descent.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check first conducted a keyword search and found that this claim is not new and has been in circulation since 2013. We found multiple reports from 2013 by outlets apparently confirming this news such as The Daily Mail, News24, and India Today.
However, soon after these reports were published, the Angolan government denied any such ban. The Times of Israel reported that the Angolan Embassy in Washington DC denied any such ban in an official statement which said, “The Republic of Angola… it’s a country that does not interfere in religion. We have a lot of religions there. It is freedom of religion. We have Catholic, Protestants, Baptists, Muslims and evangelical people.” Al Jazeera corroborated the denial in a report from 2013, when speaking with Manuel Fernando, director of the National Institute for Religious Affairs, and part of the Ministry of Culture, who stated, “There is no war in Angola against Islam or any other religion”.
The publications that reported on Angola’s ban on Islam in 2013 quoted the Minister of Culture Rosa Cruz e Silva who apparently described Islam as a “sect” that would be banned as it was a counter to Angolan customs and culture. However, this quote has an unreliable source. According to the Daily Maverick, an independent news outlet in South Africa, and International Business Times, the viral quote and report first came from La NouvelleTribune, a French-language Beninese news outlet based in Morocco. However, when questioned officials in the Angolan Embassy in Washington DC denied knowledge of the comments made by the Minister of Culture, adding that they could not determine the veracity of the statements. An embassy official who spoke to IBTimes was quoted as saying, “I cannot confirm if the Minister of Culture said that. I cannot find that in our press”.
Another quote from initial reports of the ban was attributed to President Jose Eduardo dos Santos in which he reportedly said: “This is the final end of Islamic influence in our country.” However, embassy officials also denied this quote when questioned by the International Business Times. The official said that the President could not have offered such a statement as he was traveling at the time the remark was attributed to him.
While the Angolan government did deny any bans on Islam, the second half of the claim in the X post is true. The Angolan government had demolished several illegally built mosques. Voice of America reported back in 2013 that they obtained a government document telling officials to demolish a mosque in Viana Luanda province. The order explicitly stated that the mosque was built without authorisation and must be torn down. The outlet further confirmed this by seeing a video that showed the demolition of a mosque in the town of Saurimo.
Al Jazeera further confirmed this and wrote, “according to the ministry of culture, those closures were related to a lack of necessary land titles, building licenses or other official documents.” The report also found eyewitness testimony which said that the closed mosques were, “hastily built by expatriate communities from west and north Africa who needed a place to perform Friday prayers.”
The BBC also corroborated this in a 2016 report which included photo evidence of functioning mosques in Luanda, the capital of Angola. One Angolan Muslim, Adam Campos, told the BBC that his own mosque was closed a few years ago by the government which said they did not have permission to be built, but not all mosques were closed. He added that after a few months, lawyers got involved, and his mosque in Luanda was reopened.
While the constitution of Angola guarantees religious freedom, the country struggles with granting religious freedom to many minorities due to their requirement for a faith group to gain legal recognition. Without legal recognition, religious communities struggle to gain permission to build houses of worship. Anadolu Agency reported that the law requires a religious group to have 100,000 members present in 12 of the 18 provinces of Angola and have 60,000 signatories to be officially recognised. According to a 2013 report by the US Department of State, the Muslim community numbered only around 80,000 – 90,000 at the time, complicating recognition efforts.
But Muslims were not the only community that struggled with official recognition. The Angolan government recognises only 83 registered religious groups, all of which are Christian, while more than 1,000 organisations have applied for legal recognition and failed according to the Department of State. According to the same report, the Angolan government had also closed an unlicensed church in October in Kuando Kubango Province. Notably, in a 2023 report, the Department of State wrote that the Muslim population in Angola now numbered around 122,000.
While Soch Fact Check was not able to verify how many mosques were demolished, Mohammed Saleh Jabu, head of Islamic Religious Guidance/Irshad and Cooperation told Anadolu Agency that 60 mosques were built and operational in Angola. This would be the same number of mosques that were destroyed according to the claim.
The latest denial of this ban came from the X account @Angolans which describes itself as “a place for Angolans from all across the world”. The account quoted the false tweets and wrote, “Stop lying on our name, that one mosque was destroyed because the government said they did not have permission to build it. Islam is not banned in Angola!”
Finally, Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search on the image in the claim which shows the remains of a destroyed mosque. We found the exact image on Getty Images, Flikr, and Wikimedia Commons. All three sites confirmed that the viral photo is not from Angola but from Gaza. According to Getty Images, it was the Mosque of the Dar al-Fadilah orphanage and school, in Rafah, and was destroyed in 2009 during the First Gaza War.
The claim of a ban has been fact-checked multiple times throughout the years by outlets such as AFP FactCheck, Africa Check, and Factly.In.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the claim on X here, here, and here.
Conclusion: Angola has not banned Islam. Currently, Islam has yet to attain legal recognition in the country as a minor religion. While some mosques were demolished, it was only due to permit and legal permission issues and not because of a ban.
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