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Curated playlist

Countries and territories where Arabic is an official language

  • Algeria9 minCountry in North Africa
  • Saudi Arabia11 minCountry in West Asia
  • Djibouti11 minDjibouti is a country in the Horn of Africa, and it carries the smallest population in mainland Africa. The 2024 census counted 1,066,809 people, recorded on the 20th of May. The nation takes its name from its capital, the City of…
  • Kuwait14 minKuwait sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have built their delta for thousands of years. This small country on the northeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula holds roughly 10 percent of the world's…
  • Tunisia16 minTunisia sits at the precise point where the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean Basin meet. From its northernmost tip, Cape Angela, you could theoretically scan the horizon toward Sicily and Sardinia to the north and Malta to…
  • Jordan15 minJordan sits at a crossroads few countries can claim: the meeting point of Asia, Africa, and Europe, bordered by Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine. At its western edge runs the Jordan River, flowing down into the Dead Sea,…
  • Sudan8 minAround 11500 BC, near Jebel Sahaba, people fought what scholars call the earliest known war in the world. That ground now sits inside Sudan, a country in Northeast Africa with 51.8 million people as of 2025. It spreads across 1,886,068…
  • Syria12 minSyria sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a country whose name carries the echo of an ancient empire it was never quite part of. The word "Syria" itself is a Greek corruption of "Assyria" - a northern Mesopotamian civilization…
  • Qatar16 minQatar is a country smaller than Connecticut that holds the world's third-largest natural gas reserves, and for a stretch in the early 2010s it was ranked the richest nation on earth by per capita income. It occupies a peninsula barely 100…
  • United Arab Emirates13 minThe United Arab Emirates sits at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, a place where stone tools from 130,000 years ago share the same soil as the world's tallest skylines. Seven emirates, each governed by a hereditary ruler, joined…
  • Iraq12 minIraq sits at the very point where human civilization first took hold. Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a region the ancients called Mesopotamia, the world's earliest cities rose as far back as the 6th millennium BC. People here…
  • Israel21 minThe Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian monument dated to the late 13th century BCE, bears the earliest known archaeological reference to Israel as a collective entity. This artifact predates biblical narratives and confirms that a group…
  • Egypt11 minEgypt covers the northeast corner of Africa and the southwest corner of Asia, joined by the Sinai Peninsula. Over 107 million people live there, making it the most populous country in the Arab world. Yet nearly all of them crowd into a…

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