Curated playlist
Member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
- AlgeriaIn 1827, Algiers's ruler struck the French consul with a fly whisk, and France later invaded.
- Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia is named after one family, the Al Saud. King Abdulaziz made the name official by decree in 1932.
- DjiboutiDjibouti, a tiny African country, has the United States, France, Japan and China all paying to keep soldiers there.
- KuwaitIn August 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and annexed Kuwait without warning. Retreating soldiers set oil wells on fire.
- UzbekistanUzbekistan touches no coast, and every country bordering it is landlocked too.
- Burkina FasoIn 1984, Captain Thomas Sankara renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso. The new name blends words from two local languages.
- NigerNiger is a landlocked country in West Africa, and more than 80 percent of its land lies in the Sahara. Yet it takes its name from a river, and nobody can say for certain where the river's name came from. The geographer Ptolemy described a…
- TunisiaA street vendor's self-immolation in December 2010 set off Tunisia's revolution.
- SenegalSenegal is named for a river, not the ocean it faces. Where the river's name came from is still debated.
- MauritaniaNear the town of Ouadane, on the Adrar Plateau in Mauritania, the desert floor is marked by a set of concentric rings. From above, the formation looks like a giant eye. It is called the Richat Structure, and it has been dubbed the Eye of…
- KyrgyzstanKyrgyzstan lies farther from the sea than any other individual country on Earth. Even its rivers cannot reach an ocean, because every one of them empties into a closed drainage system. Yet this landlocked nation in the mountains of Central…
- TajikistanTajikistan's capital, Dushanbe, was once a mountain town of roughly 1,000 residents. Now it has 1.24 million people.
- TurkmenistanTurkmenistan banned satellite dishes the same month it launched its first satellite. That was April 2015.
- OmanIn 2010, the United Nations Development Programme named Oman the most improved country in the world over the preceding 40 years. That is a striking verdict for a nation on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, facing the Arabian…
- LibyaLibya, now a country in North Africa, first appears in the record as a name carved into Egyptian stone. The Great Karnak Inscription describes a war fought in year 5 of the pharaoh Merneptah, in 1208 BC. King Meryey led a confederacy…
- Sierra LeoneSierra Leone is named for a line of mountains that Portuguese sailors saw from the water in 1462. The explorer Pedro de Sintra mapped that stretch of the West African coast and called the heights Serra Leoa, which means lioness mountains.…
- JordanJordan holds the world's oldest known evidence of bread-making.
- KazakhstanKazakhstan was the last Soviet republic to declare independence. It did so on the 16th of December 1991.
- GuyanaGuyana's economy grew 49% by 2020, after offshore oil was found in 2015.
- SudanNubians in Sudan beat back Arab invaders in 641 and again in 652. They were one of the few peoples to defeat the Arabs.
- MoroccoIn Turkish, Morocco is called Fas, after the medieval city of Fes. In Persian, Urdu and Punjabi it is Murrakush, a name that points to Marrakesh. In Arabic, the country is al-Maghrib, which means the west. Each name looks toward a…
- BahrainBahrain, officially the Kingdom of Bahrain, is an island country in West Asia, close to the western shore of the Persian Gulf. In 2024 its population stood at 1,588,670 people. Of these, 848,934 were expatriates, or 53.4 percent, and only…
- PakistanPakistan's name began as an acronym in a 1933 student pamphlet. Choudhry Rahmat Ali published it in Now or Never.
- MalaysiaMalaysia's king is elected by and from nine hereditary rulers, for a five-year term.
- AfghanistanPersians, Mongols, British, Soviets and Americans all marched into Afghanistan, and each marched out.
- QatarQatar is smaller than Connecticut but holds the world's third-largest natural gas reserves.
- AzerbaijanAzerbaijan's name once belonged only to a region of northwestern Iran. Before 1918, no country used it.
- The GambiaThe Gambia is the smallest country on the African mainland, and in 1964 its prime minister wrote a letter to protect a single word. Dawda Jawara asked a British committee on geographical names to let the country keep the definite article…
- MozambiqueIn 1995, Mozambique joined the Commonwealth of Nations. At the time, it was the only member that had never been part of the British Empire. Its traffic even keeps to the left, like that of its Commonwealth neighbours, although no British…
- CameroonIn 1472, Portuguese sailors reached the coast of Central Africa and found the Wouri River teeming with shrimp. They called it Rio dos Camarões, the river of shrimps, after the Cameroon ghost shrimp, Lepidophthalmus turneranus. English bent…
- IndonesiaMore than half of Indonesia's people live on one island, Java. It is the most heavily populated island in the world.
- United Arab EmiratesIn 2021, the United Arab Emirates sent a probe named Hope into Mars orbit. It was the first Arab country to reach Mars.
- IraqIraq's land gave the world writing, the wheel and the sailboat.
- Ivory CoastIvory Coast supplies more cocoa beans than any other country. It has also endured two civil wars and a coup.
- ChadChad is a landlocked country in Central Africa, and its capital, N'Djamena, lies 1060 km from the nearest seaport, Douala in Cameroon. That distance, together with a largely desert climate, gave the country a bleak nickname: the "Dead…
- LebanonLebanon takes its name from a Phoenician root, lbn, which means white. The word apparently describes the snow on its mountain peaks. The name is far older than the modern country. It turns up in Middle Bronze Age texts from the library of…
- BruneiBrunei, officially Brunei Darussalam, may owe its name to a shout of recognition. According to local tradition, a ruler named Awang Alak Betatar left Garang, in the Temburong District, and moved to the estuary of the Brunei River around AD…
- IranIranian students seized the US embassy in 1979 and held 52 hostages for 444 days.
- NigeriaNigeria's name was coined by a British journalist in 1897. Flora Shaw borrowed it from the Niger River.
- BangladeshBangladesh became a country only on the 16th of December 1971. Its land was once called the breadbasket of India.
- EgyptAbout 99% of Egyptians live on roughly 5.5% of the country's land. The rest is desert and scattered oases.
- TurkeyAlmost everyone in Turkey lives with some risk of earthquakes. Two major fault lines border the Anatolian plate.
- MaldivesOne Maldives president held a cabinet meeting underwater. Mohamed Nasheed did it in 2009 to raise climate awareness.
- UgandaUganda has the lowest median age of any country in the world, just 15 years. Its population grew from 9.5 million people in 1969 to 34.9 million in 2014. By the latest census figures, 49.5 per cent of Ugandans were under the age of 18. The…