Arab world

• 1. Introduction

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  The Arab world stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Indian Ocean in the southeast. As of 2021, the World Bank counted 456 million people living across it and a gross domestic product of $2.85 trillion. At its narrowest, it is defined as 19 states where Arabs form at least a plurality. At its widest, it is the 22 members of the Arab League. That gap between the smaller count and the larger one is not an accident. It hints at a deeper puzzle. What makes a country part of the Arab world at all? Is it ancestry, language, geography, or a shared political aspiration? The answer turns out to be messier than any single line on a map. Across the pages that follow, the region reveals itself through its languages, its draftsmen's rulers, its oil fields, and its long wars.

• 2. Drawing The Boundary

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  An Arab, the Arab League declares, is a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arab country, and who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arab people. That definition leans on language and politics rather than bloodline. Even within the Arab world, Arabs are not alone. Berbers, Kurds, Somalis, and Nubians live among them, and Arabic serves as the lingua franca that ties the region together.

  Membership in the Arab League is the standard test for inclusion, yet that test produces strange edges. The 22 members include the Bantu-speaking Comoros and the Cushitic-speaking Djibouti and Somalia, countries added beyond the 19 plurality-Arab states. Somalia names Somali as its first official language. The Comoros gives Arabic mainly religious significance, while Comorian is most widely spoken and French is tied to schooling.

  Malta tells the opposite story. Its national language, Maltese, descends from Arabic through Siculo-Arabic and is grammatically akin to Maghrebi Arabic, yet Malta is not part of the Arab world. Chad, Eritrea, and Israel each recognize Arabic as an official or working language, but none belongs to the Arab League, so none is counted in. Chad and Eritrea sit as observer states with possible future membership.

  Language scatters Arabic far past the League's roster. Iran has about 1.5 million Arabic speakers, mainly in Ahvaz in the Khuzestan Province. Mali and Senegal recognize Hassaniya, the Arabic dialect of the Moorish minority, as a national language. Greece and Cyprus recognize Cypriot Maronite Arabic. The 10th-century geographer Al Maqdisi, on page 9 of Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, already grouped the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Ash-Sham, Egypt, and the Maghreb together as the Arab regions.

• 3. Two Wings Of A Continent

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  More than 13 million square kilometers carry the Arab world across North Africa, North-East Africa, and South-West Asia. The eastern part is called the Mashriq, the western part the Maghreb. Despite the word Arab often summoning the Arabian Peninsula, the larger and more populous part of the region is North Africa, with its eight million square kilometers.

  Algeria, at 2.4 million square kilometers, sits at the center of North Africa and runs about three-quarters the size of India. Sudan covers 1.9 million square kilometers in the southeast. In West Asia, the largest country is Saudi Arabia at 2 million square kilometers. At the small end, Lebanon is the smallest autonomous mainland Arab country at 10,452 square kilometers, and Bahrain the smallest island country at 665 square kilometers.

  Nouakchott, Mauritania's capital at 18 degrees north and 16 degrees west, is the westernmost capital of the Arab world. It is far enough west to share longitude with Iceland. To its north, the Strait of Gibraltar narrows to thirteen kilometers, separating Morocco from Spain, where Spain still keeps two small enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla.

  Every Arab country borders a sea or ocean, with one exception: the Arab region of northern Chad, which is completely landlocked. Iraq comes close, holding only a very narrow access to the Persian Gulf. Far to the south, the Comoros islands sit off the coast of Mozambique, near Madagascar, forming the southernmost part of the Arab world, their presence explained by the monsoon trade winds that blow past Arabia toward India and then switch back.

• 4. The Rulers Of The Draftsmen

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  Straight lines on a map of the Middle East tell on the men who drew them. Efraim Halevy, former director of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, described frontiers drawn by British and French draftsmen with maps and rulers, where a shaking hand could move a border. He recounted a famous story about a British consul, Gertrude Bell, who drew the map between Iraq and Jordan on transparent paper. She turned to talk to someone, the paper moved, and considerable territory was added to the new Jordanians.

  Many modern borders of the Arab world were drawn by European imperial powers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some were settled without consulting the people who had served colonial interests. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed in total secrecy between Britain and France to the exclusion of Sherif Hussein ibn Ali, stayed hidden until Lenin released its full text. The Balfour Declaration was another influential document written without local consensus.

  Not every border is a foreign invention. The 14th-century Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi defined Egypt as reaching from the Mediterranean to lower Nubia, and from the Red Sea to the western oases. The modern borders of Egypt rest in part on such historically definable entities. Historian Jim Crow of Newcastle University judged that without the imperial carve-up, Iraq would not be in the state it is in today, and named Gertrude Bell as instrumental in creating Arab states favorable to Britain.

• 5. The Dream Of One Nation

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  In 1945, the Arab League was formed to represent the interests of the Arabs and to pursue the political unification of the Arab world, a project called Pan-Arabism. Its permanent headquarters sit in Cairo, though they moved temporarily to Tunis during the 1980s after Egypt was expelled for signing the Camp David Accords of 1978.

  The boldest experiment in unity was the United Arab Republic, which lasted only from 1958 to 1961. Only Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, and North Yemen considered that short-lived merger. Historical divisions, competing local nationalisms, and geographical sprawl were the major reasons Pan-Arabism failed.

  The movement carried famous names. Arab Nationalist leaders of the mid-20th century included Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco, and several Syrian figures including Michel Aflaq and Shukri al-Kuwatli. Later leaders included Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya and Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

  Since the 1980s, Pan-Arabism has mostly been abandoned as an ideology. It was replaced by Pan-Islamism on one hand and individual nationalisms on the other. Distinct national identities strengthened over roughly 60 years, and an upsurge in political Islam pushed pan-Islamic identity ahead of pan-Arab identity among some Arab Muslims. The Hezbollah, a militant Islamic party in Lebanon, was founded in 1982.

• 6. Wars Without End

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  The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 gave rise to the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the major unresolved geopolitical conflicts. Arab states fought a series of wars with Israel and its western allies between 1948 and 1973, including the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. An Egypt-Israel peace treaty was signed in 1979.

  The Iran-Iraq War ran from September 1980 to August 1988, making it the second longest conventional war of the 20th century. Iraq invaded Iran on the 22nd of September 1980 after a long history of border disputes and fears of Shia insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority. Iraq made only limited progress, and the Iranians regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982.

  Lebanon endured a multifaceted civil war from 1975 to 1990 that left an estimated 120,000 dead. Another million people, a quarter of the population, were wounded, and roughly 76,000 remain displaced inside Lebanon. The Western Sahara War pitted the Sahrawi Polisario Front against Morocco between 1975 and 1991, after Morocco organized the Green March of some 350,000 citizens escorted by around 20,000 troops in 1975. A cease-fire was finally reached in September 1991.

  Further conflicts run through the region's recent decades. The North Yemen Civil War was fought from 1962 to 1970 after Abdullah as-Sallal's coup dethroned Imam al-Badr. The Somali Civil War began in 1991, leading to an aborted UN peacekeeping attempt in the mid-1990s and the rise of Al-Shabaab. The invasion of Kuwait led to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq brought the collapse of the Baathist regime and the execution of Saddam Hussein.

• 7. Oil And The Arab Spring

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  The discovery of large petroleum deposits in the 1930s changed the economic and geopolitical situation dramatically. Before that, the British Empire was mostly interested in the Suez Canal as a route to British India. It is believed the Arab world holds approximately 46 percent of the world's total proven oil reserves and a quarter of the world's natural-gas reserves.

  Five Persian Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, rank among the top ten petroleum or gas exporters worldwide. In Africa, Algeria ranks 10th in the world for gas, alongside Libya. These resources have enabled rentier states, widened economic disparities between oil-rich and oil-poor countries, and triggered extensive labor immigration in the sparsely populated Gulf states and Libya.

  Growth followed the prices. Oil and gas prices tripled between 2001 and 2006, and steel production rose from 8.4 to 19 million tonnes between 2004 and 2005. Even so, 19 million tonnes represented only 1.7 percent of global steel production. Saudi Arabia remains the top Arab economy by total GDP and Asia's eleventh largest, while Qatar is described as the richest developing country in the world by GDP per capita.

  The popular protests across the Arab world from late 2010 onward targeted authoritarian leadership and political corruption while demanding more democratic rights. The two most violent and prolonged conflicts that followed were the Libyan Civil War and the Syrian Civil War. A new third force had been forming, a class of young, educated, secular citizens with access to Al Jazeera since 1996 and to the internet, who wished for reform in their countries' religious institutions.