Ethiopia is roughly split between Christians, around 62 to 65 percent, chiefly the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church alongside smaller Protestant and Catholic communities, and Muslims, around 32 to 34 percent, mostly Sunni, per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Jewish-descended and traditional indigenous religion communities.
Ethiopia's Christianity dates to the fourth-century CE conversion of King Ezana of Aksum, making it one of the oldest continuously Christian nations in the world alongside Armenia, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains a distinctive tradition claiming custody of the Ark of the Covenant at Axum's Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, a claim central to Ethiopian national and religious identity though not independently verifiable and not open to outside inspection.
Islam reached Ethiopia remarkably early, with the Hijra-era migration of Muhammad's persecuted early followers to the Aksumite court around 615 CE, an event Islamic tradition treats as the first hijra and one predating Islam's own establishment in Arabia, and the historic city of Harar, one of Islam's holiest cities in Africa, developed as a major center of Islamic scholarship. Ethiopia's ancient Beta Israel Jewish community, with traditions of descent claimed variously from the biblical Queen of Sheba's line, emigrated almost entirely to Israel through airlifts in the 1980s and 1990s.