The Arab World
The Arab World stretches across more than 14 million square kilometers (8.6 million square miles) of North Africa and the part of North-East Africa and South-West Asia called the Middle East. The Asian part of the Arab world is called the Mashriq. The North African part of the Arab World to the west of Egypt and Sudan is known as the Maghreb.
Its total area is the size of the entire Spanish-speaking Western Hemisphere (14 million km²), larger than Europe (10.4 million km²), Canada (10 million km²), China (9.6 million km²), the United States (9.6 million km²), Brazil (8.7 million km²). Only Russia—at 17 million km², the largest country in the world—and Anglophone North America (eighteen million square kilometers) are larger geocultural units.
The term “Arab” often connotes the Middle East, but the larger (and more populous) part of the Arab World is North Africa. Its eight million square kilometers include the two largest countries of the African continent, Sudan (2.5 million km²) in the southeast of the region and Algeria (2.4 million km²) in the center, each about three-quarters the size of India, or about one-and-a-half times the size of Alaska, the largest state in the United States. The largest country in the Arab Middle East is Saudi Arabia (2 million km²).
At the other extreme, the smallest autonomous mainland Arab country in North Africa and the Middle East is Lebanon (10,452 km²), and the smallest island Arab country is Bahrain (665 km²).
Notably, every Arab country borders a sea or ocean, with the exception of the Arab region of northern Chad, which is completely landlocked. Iraq is actually nearly landlocked, as it has only a very narrow access to the Persian Gulf.
Historical boundaries
The political borders of the Arab World have wandered, leaving Arab minorities in non-Arab countries of the Sahel and the Horn of Africa as well as in the Middle Eastern countries of Turkey and Iran, and also leaving non-Arab minorities in Arab countries. However, the basic geography of sea, desert, and mountain provide the enduring natural boundaries for this region.
