Asian Art

Arab world

The Arab world comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in West Asia and North Africa. While the majority of people in the Arab world are ethnically Arab, there are also significant populations of other ethnic groups such as Berbers, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians, among other groups. Arabic is used as the lingua franca throughout the Arab world. The Arab world is usually defined as the 19 states where Arabs form at least a plurality of the population. At its maximum defination it consists of the 22 members of the Arab League, an international organization, which on top of the 19 plurality Arab states also includes 3 non-Arab countries, namely the Comoros, Djibouti and Somalia. The region 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. The eastern part of the Arab world is known as the Mashriq ("east" in Arabic) and the western part as the Maghreb ("west" in Arabic). According to the World Bank, the Arab world has a total population of 456 million inhabitants and a gross domestic product of $2.85 trillion, as of 2021. The region is economically quite diverse, and includes some of the wealthiest as well as poorest populations in the world. In post-classical history, the Arab world was synonymous with the historic Arab empires and caliphates. Arab nationalism arose in the second half of the 19th century along with other nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire. The Arab League was formed in 1945 to represent the interests of Arab people and especially to pursue the political unification of the Arab countries, a project known as pan-Arabism.

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See also

• ▸Buddhism and Eastern religions
• ▸Greg Weight
• ▸Imari ware

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.