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The Arab World
Twenty-two states bound by a language rather than a border
The Arab world is defined by language and by membership rather than by terrain: it is the 22 states of the Arab League, running some 8,000 kilometers from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to Oman on the Arabian Sea, and taking in Somalia, Djibouti, and the Comoros at the African edge. That is a political definition, and it shows. Arabic is official in every one of them, yet tens of millions of their citizens speak Tamazight, Kurdish, Somali, or Nubian at home and may not think of themselves as Arab at all, while Arabic-speaking communities in Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Chad fall outside the line. It is a useful category that nobody should mistake for an ethnic map.
Stretched across some 13.1 million square kilometers, the Arab world is the largest continuous arid zone on the planet, taking in the Sahara, the Arabian Desert, and the Syrian steppe. Almost all of its people live on the fringes: the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Gulf shore, and the highlands of Yemen and Morocco. Toubkal, in the Moroccan Atlas, is the high point at 4,167 meters. The region also holds the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Strait of Hormuz, three of the most closely watched waterways anywhere, and, beneath the Gulf, the deepest oil reserves on earth.
Some 475 million people share a written language that binds them, Modern Standard Arabic, and spoken dialects that often do not: a Moroccan and an Iraqi in conversation may fall back on the standard register, or on French or English, to be understood. Arabic spread with Islam from the seventh century, carrying a scholarly tradition that preserved and extended Greek philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. The modern Arab world is young, urban, and unevenly rich. Qatar has one of the highest incomes per head on earth and Yemen one of the lowest, and the gulf between the petro-states and the populous republics has widened since the uprisings of 2011 rearranged the region's politics.