Geographically, Indonesia is the most splintered country in the world, with thousands of inhabited islands scattered over an expanse of 3,400 miles from west to east. For most of the last 2,000 years, there were indigenous states on some Indonesian islands. But none of them came to control most of the Indonesian archipelago, nor was there a name or a concept for what we know today as Indonesia. Linguistically, Indonesia is one of the world’s most diverse countries, with more than 700 different languages. It is also religiously diverse: while most Indonesians are Muslims, there are also large
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