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The Maghreb
Northwest Africa, the island between the sea and the sand
The Maghreb is the western wing of the Arab world, the stretch of northwest Africa that medieval Arab geographers called the island of the west, hemmed by the Mediterranean on one side, the Atlantic on another, and the Sahara on the third. Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia form its undisputed core. Libya and Mauritania are usually added, largely because the Arab Maghreb Union of 1989 counted them as members, but the fit is looser: Libya leans east toward Egypt and the Levant, while Mauritania leans south toward the Sahel. Western Sahara, claimed by Morocco and contested by the Polisario Front, complicates the map further. What binds the core is a Berber substrate under an Arab surface.
Geography does much of the argument's work here. The Atlas Mountains run some 2,500 kilometers from Morocco's Atlantic shore to the Tunisian coast, catching Atlantic rain and cupping a fertile northern strip of olive groves, cork oak, cedar, and grain. Behind them the land falls away into the Sahara, and almost everyone lives on the seaward side of that divide. Toubkal, at 4,167 meters, is the region's roof and the highest point in the whole Arab world. Rivers are short and seasonal, so the important water is underground, in the aquifers that feed the oases. The coast has always faced Europe, and the Strait of Gibraltar is a far shorter crossing than the desert behind.
About 110 million people live here, most speaking Arabic in a distinct Maghrebi dialect that Egyptians famously struggle to follow, and millions speaking Tamazight, the Berber tongues that predate the Arab conquests of the seventh century and are now official in Morocco and Algeria. Carthage, Roman Africa, the Almoravids and Almohads, the Ottomans, and then French and Italian rule have each left sediment. France's long occupation of Algeria and the bitter war of independence from 1954 to 1962 still shape politics on both shores, as does the migration that ties Maghrebi families to Paris, Marseille, and Brussels. Algerian and Libyan hydrocarbons, Moroccan phosphates, and tourism carry the region's economies.