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Religious segregation involves the separation of people on the basis of religion.

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Contents 1 Muslim world 2 Northern Ireland 3 The Netherlands 4 See also 5 External links

Religious segregation occurs in the Muslim world, where some nations deny non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians, some of the civil rights and voting privileges they grant to Muslims. Many Muslim countries consign non-Muslim monotheists to the status of dhimmis, both officially and by custom. Saudi Arabia in particular is notorious for very stringent religious laws banning the practice of non-Muslim religions, even prescribing imprisonment and the death penalty for attempting to convert Muslims to other religions.

The following links are to articles about discrimination against non-Muslims in

• Afghanistan,
• Iran,
• Malaysia,
• Mauritania,
• Pakistan,
• Saudi Arabia,
• Sudan.

Many Irish nationalists and republicans have described Northern Ireland as being a gerrymandered or even apartheid state, on the grounds that it was created to ensure a built-in Protestant majority, resulting in discrimination against Catholics in government, education, housing and employment. One legacy of this has been that most state schools in Northern Ireland are either Protestant or Catholic, although there now also a number of integrated schools. This has often exacerbated religious, political and cultural differences between the two communities.

Between 1921 and 1972, Northern Ireland was governed by the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which was Protestant-dominated, while at local government level, electoral boundaries were devised to create Protestant majorities. The outbreak of the Troubles led to the imposition of direct rule by the British government, which has since sought to introduce power sharing between unionists and nationalists.

Between (roughly) 1917 and 1966 Dutch society and politics were characterized by pillarization: a system of self-imposed religious segregation between Catholics, Reformed and atheists and liberal protestants. These three groups each had their own schools, political parties, labour unions, employers' associations and other forms of social infrastructure. Each religious group lived in its own separated "pillar". On the national level the elites cooperated in a consociational political system. This social and political system was based on a particular interpretation of the separation of church and state formulated by Abraham Kuyper called sphere sovereignty. According to Arend Lijphart it was this system of pillarization and elite cooperation which resulted in the strong democratic tradition in the Netherlands, a country characterized by religious cleavages.

Today, the importance of religion in the Netherlands has waned, but still some of these pillarized institutes remain: religious schools for instance still receive government finance and educate about half of the Dutch pupils. Some multiculturalist politicians, mainly members of the social-democratic PvdA, the christian-democratic CDA and the GreenLeft, have proposed that the growing Islamic minority would be allowed to form its own pillar, other politicians, like Pim Fortuyn and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have opposed such a system, because it would trap muslims in a restrictive community.

• Blood money laws
• Devşirme system
• Dhimmi laws
• Ghetto
• Jim Crow laws
• Jizyah tax
• Judenhut
• Mellah
• Ottoman Millet system
• Minority religion
• Nuremberg laws
• Racial segregation
• Second-class citizen
• Segregation in Bosnia and Herzegovina
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• Links to articles on apartheid in the Arab Muslim world
• Dhimmi.Com: Victims of Muslim Religious Apartheid
• religious apartheid in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
• Allegations of apartheid
• Directory of the Saudi Institute gives testimony to US House of Representatives on religious apartheid in Saudi Arabia