Religion
The Government does not conduct census on religion, but estimates put the percentage of the majority Sunnis at 85-90% while Shiites, who comprise the largest Muslim minority, at 10-15% of the population. Shiites (Twelvers) are primarily concentrated in the Eastern Province, where they constitute over a third of the population. Other smaller communities (Ismailis and Zaidis) reside in the South, with Ismailis constituting around half of the population of the province of Nejran, and a small percentage of the Holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina.
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Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement—that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it—that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)