Arabia

Arabia, Arabic Jazīrat Al-ʿArab (“Island of the Arabs”), peninsular region, together with offshore islands, located in the extreme southwestern corner of Asia. The Arabian Peninsula is bounded by the Red Sea on the west and southwest, the Gulf of Aden on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south and southeast, and the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf (also called the Arabian Gulf) on the east. Geographically the peninsula and the Syrian Desert merge in the north with no clear line of demarcation, but the northern boundaries of Saudi Arabia and of Kuwait are generally taken as marking the limit of Arabia there.

The peninsula’s total area is about 1,200,000 square miles (3,100,000 square kilometres). The length, bordering the Red Sea, is approximately 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometres) and the maximum breadth, from Yemen to Oman, 1,300 miles. The largest political division is Saudi Arabia; it is followed, in order of size, by Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. The island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, about 200 miles southeast of the mainland, has strong ethnographic links to Arabia; politically it is part of Yemen.

The geographic cohesiveness of the Arabian Peninsula is reflected in a shared interior of desert and a shared exterior of coast, ports, and relatively greater opportunities for agriculture. The fact that most of the peninsula is unfavourable for settled agriculture is of enormous significance. Competition for habitable land is keen, and efficient use of land and water is crucial to the welfare of each state. Social characteristics reinforce the geophysical factors that have created a somewhat similar environment throughout the peninsula: a homogeneity among the people is seen in a degree of similarity in language, religion, culture, and political experience.

The vast majority of Arabians are ethnic Arabs, and a large number are able to trace their ancestry back through many generations living in the same area. Nearly all speak Arabic, and differences in dialects, though substantial, do not bar mutual intelligibility. Since the Islamic expansion of the mid-7th century, most Arabians have been Muslim. Differences in sects are important locally, as in Bahrain and Yemen, but the historic commitment of the peninsula to the faith of its son, the Prophet Muhammad, has done more to unite than divide it.

Culture has found expression in forms that are the joint inheritance of all the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, and that inheritance is shared with Arab and Muslim societies beyond the region. Poetry, religious laws and precepts, and values associated with heroism permeated the culture of the past, but the innovations associated with Western culture reached the entire peninsula in the 20th century and have substantially influenced art, mores, and behaviour.

Most of the states of the peninsula share common political systems. Nearly all are or have been monarchies, based in large part on principles of religious legitimacy. In the 20th century, especially since World War II, they aimed at gradual change in political life while trying to achieve rapid economic and social advancement. Although the peninsula’s available natural resources are not distributed equally among its states—those in the south and southwest derive far less wealth from oil, for example—similar economic transformations have taken place, or are taking place, in all the societies. Urbanization, greater access to health care and education, secularization, and the settling of many nomads have changed the fabric of daily life throughout the area.

The various sections of the Arabian Peninsula have only seldom been united under one government. In the 16th century, for instance, the Ottoman Empire was able to conquer most of the coasts, but it could take neither the interior of the peninsula nor the southeast. In the 19th century Great Britain or the Ottomans controlled much of the peninsula, but the central interior almost continually remained independent under the Saudis.

Arabia, from the advent of Islam in the 7th century, maintained close ties with other parts of the Middle East through commercial, religious, social, military, and political interactions. In modern times the Arabian Peninsula’s growing importance to the rest of the world, resulting primarily from the petroleum discoveries of the 20th century, led to increased contacts with the West. The blending of Middle Eastern and external influences presents both opportunities and problems for the peoples and countries of the peninsula.

Despite the political disunity of the past and the considerable variety of national experiences in the present, the Arabian Peninsula continues to share an underlying unity of environment, society, culture, and faith.