Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What is Algeria religion?
Islam, the religion of almost all of the Algerian people, pervades most aspects of life. It provides the society with its central social and cultural identity and gives most individuals their basic ethical beliefs.[3]
Most majority Muslim nations, however, recognize Islam as the official state religion. Furthermore, many states identify a specific derivative of the Islamic faith as their official religion. For example, sunni Islam is the official state religion of: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Somalia, and the United Arab Emirates. Shia Islam is the official religion of Iran, which is a theocracy. Some minority Islamic sects are official state religions as well.Ibadi, a minority school within Islam, is the official religion of Oman.
Freedom of religion in Algeria is regulated by the Algerian Constitution, which declares Islam to be the state religion (Article 2) but also declares that "freedom of creed and opinion is inviolable" (Article 36); it prohibits discrimination, Article 29 states "All citizens are equal before the law. No discrimination shall prevail because
of birth, race, sex, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance".
In practice, the government generally respects this, with some limited exceptions. The government follows a de facto policy of tolerance by allowing, in limited instances, the conduct of religious services by non-Muslim faiths in the capital which are open to the public. The small Christian and tiny Jewish populations generally practice their faiths without government interference. The law does not recognize marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men; it does however recognise marriages between Muslim men and non-Muslim women. By law, children follow the religion of their fathers, even if they are born abroad and are citizens of their (non-Muslim) country of birth.
Soon after arriving in Algeria, the French colonial regime set about undermining traditional Muslim Algerian culture. The French ideas such as freedom of religion, however, vastly differed from the Islamic way of living. For this reason, Islam was a strong element of the resistance movement to the French.[5]
Religious freedom in Algeria Ministry of Religious Affairs (Algeria)
The Bahá'í Faith in Algeria dates from 1952.[9] Though the religion achieved some growth and organization through 1967 including converts,[9] the period of the independence of Algeria when the country adopted Islamic practices in rejection of colonial influences[10] and subsequently the religion was effectively banned in 1968.[11] However more recently the Association of Religion Data Archives and Wolfram Alpha estimated the population of Bahá'ís at 3.3[12]–3.8[13] thousand Bahá'ís in 2005 and 2010.
Although Islam is the state religion of Algeria, the Holy See has maintained a comparatively good relationship with the Algerian authorities, with Léon-Étienne Duval being famously recognized as the "bishop of Muslims" after the departure of French colonists.
Currently, North Africa is primarily Muslim: Islam is the state religion of Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. While the practice and expression of other faiths is guaranteed by law, the same legal framework tends to restrict minority religions from actively seeking conversion to their religion, or even building or repairing churches. Converts to Christianity may be investigated and searched by the authorities as well as punished. There is some evidence that there has been an increase in conversions to Christianity among North African Muslims in recent years, even though in many cases the government will not change the religion from Islam on any citizens' identity cards. Despite this, the total number of Christians remains very low relative to the populations of these countries. In 2009, the percentage of Christians in Algeria was less than 2%. In this same survey, the UNO counted 100,000 Roman Catholics and 45,000 Protestants in the country. Although Christians are a religious minority in Algeria, churches built during French rule can still be found. 
Under the 1976 Constitution (as modified 1979, and amended in 1988, 1989, and 1996) Algeria is a multi-party state. All parties must be approved by the Ministry of the Interior. To date, Algeria has had more than 40 legal political parties. According to the Constitution, no political association may be formed if it is "based on differences in religion, language, race, gender, or region."
Religion in Algeria is dominated by Muslims at about ninety-seven percent of the population.[2] The vast majority of Muslims in Algeria adhere to Sunni Islam of Maliki school of jurisprudence. There are also almost 350,000 Christians, mostly Pentecostal Protestants. There are nearly 2,000 Jews still living in Algeria, according to the US department of State.
Algerian culture has been strongly influenced by Islam, the main religion. The works of the Sanusi family in pre-colonial times, and of Emir Abdelkader and Sheikh Ben Badis in colonial times, are widely noted. The Latin author Apuleius was born in Madaurus (Mdaourouch), in what later became Algeria.
The turuq, meaning way or path, or brotherhoods, were another feature of Islam in the Maghreb from the Middle Ages onward. Each brotherhood had its own prescribed path to salvation, its own rituals, signs, symbols, and mysteries. The brotherhoods were prevalent in the rural and mountainous areas of Algeria and other parts of North Africa. Their leaders were often marabouts or shaykhs. The more orthodox Sunni Muslims dominated the urban centers, where traditionally trained men of religion, the ulema, conducted the religious and legal affairs of the Muslim community.[4]
The Bahá'í Faith in Algeria began about 1952. In 1954 the first Bahá'í Local Spiritual Assembly of Algiers was elected. In 1963 a survey of the community counted 2 assemblies, 2 organized groups (between 1 and 9 adults) of Bahá'ís and hosted a regional National Spiritual Assembly for Algeria and Tunisia in 1967 however pioneers were expelled in late 1968 during the period of the independence of Algeria when the country adopted Islamic practices in rejection of colonial influences. However more recently the Association of Religion Data Archives and Wolfram Alpha estimated 3.3–3.8 thousand Bahá'ís in 2005 and 2010.
Abdul Wahab bin Rustam is the founder of the Wahhabism Ibadi Movement, in Tiaret, in Algeria. He was part of the Rustamid dynasty that ruled a theocracy in what is now Tunis and Algeria. He became ruler after the death of his father and founded an external movement of religion Islamic and disrupted the religious laws and called Wahhabism relative to his name Abd al-Wahab.
Islam is the predominant religion in Algeria, with its adherents, mostly Sunnis, accounting for 99% of the population according to a 2012 CIA World Factbook estimate, and 97.9% according to Pew Research in 2010. There are about 150,000 Ibadis in the M'zab Valley in the region of Ghardaia.
"No French writer from Algeria, the 'pied-noirs' as we ignorantly call them, with the possible exception of the poet Jean Sénac, accepted Algeria completely for what she is and for what she has always been the way that he did. No one so naturally felt like a son of Algeria in all her forms: Arab, Berber, Spanish, French ... as Jean Pélégri did, not Gabriel Audisio, not Emmanuel Roblès, not Jules Roy, nor Albert Camus. From his novel "Oliviers de la justice" to "Maboul", Pélégri sings a veritable 'cante jondo' of rural Algeria in all of its baroque complexity. With Kateb Yacine's "Nedjma", "Le Maboul" is the only Faulknerian novel of our literature."
Following its conquest of Ottoman controlled Algeria in 1830, for well over a century France maintained what was effectively colonial rule in the territory, though the French Constitution of 1848 made Algeria part of France, and Algeria was usually understood as such by French people, even on the Left. Algeria became the prototype for a pattern of French colonial rule which has been described as "quasi-apartheid".
The 1963 constitution of Algeria made Arabic the official language, and this was retained in the 1976 constitution. The 1976 constitution states in Article 3 "Arabic is the national and official language". Neither constitution mentions Berber. The Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN) stated "Arabic was chosen at the outset as the language which was to represent Algeria’s identity and religion, and official attitudes towards both Berber and French have been largely negative." The PCGN stated that French, not Arabic, is the actual lingua franca of Algeria. Arabic is not commonly used in the Kabylie region.
Religion in Algeria is dominated by Muslims at about ninety-nine percent of the population. The vast majority of Muslims in Algeria adhere to Sunni Islam of Maliki school of jurisprudence. There are also almost 100,000 Christians, mostly Pentecostal Protestants. There are nearly 2,000 Jews still living in Algeria, according to the US department of State.
More than ninety-nine percent of Algeria's population is Sunni Muslim. The Constitution of Algeria declares that Islam is the state religion but Article 36 of the Constitution provides for freedom of belief. The Constitution does not provide for Sharia courts in Algeria's court system. Article 35 guarantees freedom of conscience and of opinion. Article 41 says all citizens are entitled to the freedom of expression. Algeria has signed and ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The Roman Catholic Church was reintroduced in Algeria after the French conquest, when the diocese of Algiers was established in 1838. As of the last census in Algeria, taken on 1 June 1960, there were 1,050,000 non-Muslim civilians (mostly Catholic) in Algeria (10 percent of the total population including 130,000 Algerian Jews). 
Under French rule, the Catholic population of Algeria peaked at over one million. The country was divided into four dioceses, including one archdiocese:
During French rule, Christianity was used as a tool of assimilation. French colonizers attempted to convert the Muslim population to Christianity as a form of modernization. Laws were put in place to establish Algerians’ rights as citizens based on religion. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 denied Muslim Algerians full citizenship status while granting local Christian and Algerian Jewish inhabitants full citizenship. Very few Algerians converted because of this law. The religion-based citizenship divides established during the French colonial rule sparked animosity between groups that would impact the stance of minority religions in Algeria for years post-colonial rule.
Religion plays an important role in Algerian society, making it relatively homogeneous. For the average Algerian, being Algerian means being Muslim. However, this is not always so.
Those measures, however, did not satisfy everyone. As early as 1964, a militant Islamic movement, called Al Qiyam (values), emerged and became the precursor of the Islamic Salvation Front of the 1990s. Al Qiyam called for a more dominant role for Islam in Algeria's legal and political systems and opposed what it saw as Western practices in the social and cultural life of Algerians.[5]This proved to be the most difficult challenge for the immediate post-independent regimes as they tried to incorporate an Islamic national identity alongside socialist policies. Whereas the new leaders of Algeria saw Islam and Socialism as both compatible and features of Algerian culture and society; radical Islamists saw Islam as the only defining characteristic and in fact incompatible.[6]
Ménard comes from a Catholic French Pied-Noir family which settled in Algeria in the 1850s. Around the time of the Independence of Algeria and when he was nine years old, the family moved to Brusque, Aveyron. He studied religion, and planned on becoming a priest.
The culture of Algeria encompasses literature, music, religion, cuisine and other facets of the Algerian lifestyle.