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:
“When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.”
—C.S. (Clive Staples)
“Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.”
—Ernest Renan (1823–1892)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)