AS INDICATED IN THE INTRODUCTION, it is difficult to find a country in the world that has absolute uniformity in terms of religious identity. Whether it is the self-proclaimed Jewish state, the heartlands of Islam, or the Catholic states of southern and western Europe, no state today is completely devoid of religious diversity. In some countries, this has been the case for centuries, and it has not been seen as something extraordinary or undesirable. Indeed, this might be said of the predominantly Muslim countries of the past and present, whether within Europe (such as the Ottoman Empire) or outside (including the Abbasid Empire). In other countries, however, religious diversity was seen almost as a plague to be wiped out.

Lis latter view has persisted until recent history, with the advent of the nation state. One author comments on how the nation, after 1918, was theoretically succeeded by the state, but minorities within those states were ‘left out in the cold’; the majority and the minority assumed that the state had to be based on a nation, which generally had a single religion, and the obvious conclusion was that the majority's nation would be it. The minority nation or group would have to make do, sometimes in rather precarious positions, as seen in Nazi Germany.