Ethiopia

Modern Ethiopia in East Africa was formed with the conquest of today's southern Ethiopia by the Christian Abyssinian king Menelik II during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Christianity was introduced into the Axumite kingdom, which later became Christian Abyssinia, at an early date through its commercial and maritime relations with the Byzantine Empire, but the actual founders of the Axumite church were Syrian brothers, Frumentius and Aedesius, although those early Christian merchants gave them a foundation on which to build. Orthodox Christianity was imposed on the conquered peoples of the south, southeast, and southwest by force during and after Menelik's conquest and the subsequent creation of the Ethiopian empire state.

Islam arrived in Ethiopia in 615 CE, brought by a group of Muslims counseled by Prophet Muhammad to escape persecution in Mecca by the Quraish and travel to Abyssinia, which some consider the first Hejira in the history of Islam. Islam then expanded gradually throughout modern Ethiopia, especially in the country's low-lying [Page 365]parts, with the expansion being more vigorous in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a resistance to the conquest by Christian Abyssinia. Nearly all Ethiopian Muslims are Sunni.