The Arab world spans nineteen plurality-Arab states—or twenty-two
Usually defined as nineteen states where Arabs form at least a plurality—or, maximally, all twenty-two Arab League members including Comoros, Somalia, and Djibouti—the Arab world stretches mainly across West Asia and North Africa. World Bank figures for 2021 put inhabitants near 456 million with output around 2.85 trillion dollars.
The region runs from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, with the Mashriq in the east and the Maghreb in the west. Arabs began as a Central Semitic people spread across the Syrian Desert, the lower Levant and the north of Arabia, including groups such as the Nabataeans and Ghassanids. The early Muslim conquests carried them outward: Iraq fell in 633, the Levant between 636 and 640 and Egypt in 639, though a distinct Egyptian Arabic emerged only by the 16th century, and the Maghreb was Arabized gradually under the Fatimids.
Mongol armies ended the Abbasid Caliphate in the 13th century, and by 1570 the Ottomans ruled most Arab lands, though Morocco remained under its own dynasties. After the Ottoman collapse in World War I, Britain, France and Italy carved the region into mandates and protectorates. Independence came in a wave: Lebanon in 1943, Syria and Jordan in 1946, Libya in 1951, Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, Algeria in 1962 and the UAE in 1971. Ibn Saud unified Saudi Arabia by 1932, while Oman has governed itself, apart from brief Persian and Portuguese interludes, since the 8th century.
Founded in 1945, the Arab League pursued pan-Arab political union, and Egypt and Syria briefly merged as the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961. When Egypt was expelled for signing the Camp David Accords, the League's headquarters moved from Cairo to Tunis during the 1980s, and since then pan-Arabism has largely given way to pan-Islamism and separate national loyalties. By the League's own test, an Arab is an Arabic speaker resident in an Arab state who sympathises with Arab aspirations.
Language is looser than the map. Governments use Standard Arabic, but daily speech is Darija in the Maghreb and Aammiyya in the Mashriq, borrowing from Berber, French, Spanish and Italian. In the Comoros most people speak Comorian, with Arabic reserved for religion. Iran has around 1.5 million Arabic speakers, mostly in Khuzestan, and Chad and Eritrea sit in the League as observers.
Source: Arab world
