Practice
The majority of Algerians are traditionally Muslim; resident Christians, numbering less than 1% of the population, are mainly foreigners. It is difficult to determine the number of atheists, agnostics and deists but they are concentrated in the larger cities and in Kabylie (Matoub Lounes or Ferhat Mehenni to name few are popular singers among Kabyle youth). Sunni Islam is universal apart from the small Mozabite community, concentrated in five Saharan oases, which instead follows Ibadhism.
The dominant madhhab is Maliki, although, at least until the last century, some families of Turkish descent followed the Hanafi madhhab. Sufi brotherhoods have retreated considerably, but remain in some areas. Saint cults are widely disapproved of as un-Islamic, but continue, as a visit to the shrine of Sidi Abderrahmane in Algiers quickly demonstrates.
The popularity of Islamism fluctuates according to circumstance; in the 2002 elections, legal Islamist parties received some 20% of the seats in the National Assembly, way down from the FIS's 50% in 1991. Conversely, strong anti-Islamist sentiment (typified politically by the RCD, which received 8%) is not unknown. Support for Islamist parties is especially low in the Kabylie region, where the FIS obtained no seats in 1991, the majority being taken by the Front of Socialist Forces, a secular party.
Read more about this topic: Islam In Algeria
Famous quotes containing the word practice:
“A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.”
—Mary Antin (1881–1949)
“If you leave your work for one day, you’ll be out of practice for three.”
—Chinese proverb.
“In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)