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Major Geographic Qualities of North Africa & Southwest Asia 1. Ancient culture hearths and some of the world’s most durable civilizations: Ur, Babylon, Mesopotamia - Levant, Fertile CrescentEgypt’s Nile Valley, Shatt-al-Arab in Iraq, Iran (Persia), Israel2. Location of the founding of the world’s 3 great monotheistic religions:Judaism, Christianity, Islam3. Predominantly Islamic, but not exclusively. Adhered to by the majority from Morocco to Pakistan, and ultimately to Indonesia. Non-Muslims include the Jews of Israel, Lebanese Christians, Armenian Christians and the nominally secular Turks.4. The “Arab World,” although there are significant non-Arab countries. Arabs are people who speak Arabic, a Semitic language. Hebrew is a Semitic language too. Including Israel, which contains Palestinian Arabs, Iran (Farsi). (Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are NOT part of the Arab world).5. Widely dispersed population clusters, and in the case of some riverine settlements, linear distributions (Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Shatt-al-Arab).6. Arid to semi-arid throughout the entire realm. Only exceptions are on windward slopes of mountains, such as the Atlas Tell in the Maghreb, the Zagros Mountains of Iran, Turkey’s Anatolian Plateau, and southern Yemen.7. “Middle East,” is a British colonial term for the realm: where African, Arabia, and Asian regions meet. Also a realm over which empires have ebbed and flowed: Persian, Roman, Ottoman, British, Russian and many more.8. Discord and conflict have characterized the realm, with wars and territorial disputes. Political instability, assassination, and terrorism occur frequently. While much of this is ancient, there is also a detrimental colonial legacy of British and French occupation. There have been many recent wars: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991brought about the first Gulf War, then 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; Israeli/Palestinian ongoing conflict for territory 1948-present; The Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s; The Algerian crisis of 1998-9; the so-called Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh terrorism, an outgrowth of the U.S. invasion in 2003; and last, but not least, the ongoing Sunni/Shi’a conflict.9. The fall of the USSR and the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam and other beliefs have recently expanded the realm into the countries of Former Soviet Central Asia (FSU), now referred to as Central Asia.Huge oil reserves in the Persian Gulf, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, the Caucasus, the former Central Asian republics, and even Afghanistan, have brought tremendous wealth to the ruling classes (political and economic) in the realm. With some exceptions (Kuwait, the Saudi upper crust, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dabi) the standard of living is not high for the majority of the population. Oil has also brought the realm to world attention. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 grabbed US attention and has not let go.NORTH AFRICA (Module 2 includes the countries of the “Horn:” Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti)Muslim, Caucasian, Semitic(Arabic & Hebrew), and Berber (North Africa) language groups large European influence arid desert inland, Mediterranean coastal climates semi-arid tablelands Atlas mountains (an extension of the Alps) Nile Valley: one of the world’s oldest civilizations, more than 80 million people live within about 10 miles of the Nile and in its delta and the interior area of the Al Fayum. ................
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