50 Fun Facts About Arab World

Which desert, the largest hot one on Earth, has a name that comes from the Arabic word for 'desert'?

The Sahara covers about 9.2 million square kilometres, so saying 'Sahara Desert' really means 'desert desert'.

Which country, known in Arabic as Misr, has the largest population of any nation in the Arab world?

Egypt is home to more than 100 million people, and it bridges two continents because its Sinai Peninsula lies in Asia.

Which Dubai skyscraper became the tallest building in the world when it opened in 2010?

Burj Khalifa was called Burj Dubai until its opening day, when it was renamed after the president of the United Arab Emirates.

Which Gulf state, bordered on land only by Saudi Arabia, hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup?

Qatar was the first Arab country to host the tournament, which moved to November and December to escape the summer heat.

Which salt lake on Jordan's western border has shores that form the lowest land point on Earth?

The Dead Sea lies more than 430 metres below sea level and is nearly ten times as salty as the ocean, so bathers float with no effort.

Which eastern Mediterranean country shows a cedar tree at the centre of its red and white flag?

Lebanon has treated the cedar as a national symbol for centuries, and the flag's white band is often read as its snow-capped mountains.

Which single colour filled the entire flag of Libya from 1977 to 2011, with no emblem at all?

Green stood alone under Muammar Gaddafi, and for almost all of those years it was the world's only national flag of one colour with no design.

The digits 0 to 9 are known as Arabic numerals, but in which country was the system invented?

India is where mathematicians devised the system between the 1st and 4th centuries, and Europe named it after the Arab scholars who passed it on.

Which branch of mathematics is named from an Arabic term that first meant setting broken bones?

Algebra comes from 'al-jabr', a word the scholar al-Khwarizmi put in the title of his 9th-century book on solving equations.

Which rock-cut Nabataean capital in southern Jordan is listed among the New 7 Wonders of the World?

Petra is nicknamed the Rose City for the colour of its sandstone, and it stayed unknown to Europeans until a Swiss traveller reached it in 1812.

Which country, the largest in Africa by area, has a name from the Arabic for 'the islands'?

Algeria became Africa's largest country in 2011, when Sudan split in two, and its name recalls small islands that once lay off its capital.

Which Arab state, linked to Saudi Arabia by the King Fahd Causeway, has a name meaning 'two seas'?

Bahrain is an island nation, and nobody is sure which 'two seas' its name first meant: one idea is the salt water around it and the fresh springs beneath.

Which island nation off Mozambique is the only Arab League member wholly in the Southern Hemisphere?

The Comoros takes its name from an Arabic phrase meaning 'Islands of the Moon'.

Which country on the Horn of Africa contains Lake Assal, the lowest point on the African continent?

Djibouti's Lake Assal lies 155 metres below sea level, and the salt cut from its shores gave rise to ancient caravan routes.

Which country includes Socotra, an island of dragon blood trees lying nearer to Africa than Arabia?

Yemen's Socotra is so isolated that about a third of its plant life is found nowhere else on Earth.

Which Atlantic-coast country, with its capital at Nouakchott, holds the ringed Richat Structure?

Mauritania's Richat Structure, nicknamed the Eye of Africa, is a 40-kilometre dome worn down into concentric rings of rock.

In which country did the Arab Spring begin in 2010, after a street vendor's protest in Sidi Bouzid?

Tunisia's president of 23 years stepped down within a month, and the wave of protest then spread across the region.

Which Arab League member has the longest coastline on the African mainland?

Somalia is one of the few Arab League members that is not ethnically Arab, and its shoreline wraps around the tip of the Horn.

Which kingdom was the first Arab nation in a FIFA World Cup semi-final, finishing fourth in 2022?

Morocco was also the first African semi-finalist, and its run ended only with a 2–0 defeat by France.

Which landlocked country directly south of Libya has two official languages, Arabic and French?

Chad is home to more than 200 ethnic and linguistic groups, so Arabic and French serve as its two shared official tongues.

Which capital, called the 'city of a thousand minarets', hosts the Arab League's headquarters?

Cairo anchors the largest urban area in Africa and the Arab world, and has housed the League since 1945 apart from a spell in the 1980s.

Which city on the Tigris was founded in 762 as the circular capital of the Abbasid caliphs?

Baghdad was officially named the 'City of Peace' by its founder, and its House of Wisdom earned it a reputation as a centre of learning.

Which Arab capital, nicknamed the City of Jasmine, is often called the oldest capital in the world?

Damascus also holds the Umayyad Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the world and a site of continuous prayer since the rise of Islam.

Which city in western Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Muhammad, do Muslims face when they pray?

Mecca is closed to non-Muslims, and the hajj pilgrimage to it is a journey every able Muslim is asked to make once in a lifetime.

Which Saudi capital, set on the Najd plateau, is the largest city on the Arabian Peninsula?

Riyadh grew out of an 18th-century walled town, and most of the modern metropolis dates only from the 1950s onward.

At which capital city does the Blue Nile join the White Nile before the river flows north?

Khartoum's name, in one folk etymology, comes from an Arabic word for 'trunk', after the thin strip of land between the two rivers.

Which capital, first built on seven hills, was known as Philadelphia in Greek and Roman times?

Amman was renamed in the 3rd century BC by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who called the city after himself.

Which city, home to a Louvre museum opened in 2017, is the capital of the United Arab Emirates?

Abu Dhabi stands on a T-shaped island less than 250 metres from the mainland, and it is only the country's second-biggest city, behind Dubai.

Which Atlantic port city holds the Hassan II Mosque, whose 210-metre minaret rises beside the ocean?

Casablanca means 'white house', and the minaret of its great mosque is the second tallest in the world.

Which city's skyline is dominated by the golden Dome of the Rock, a shrine completed in the 690s?

Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock is the oldest surviving work of Islamic architecture, though its present gold plating dates only from the 20th century.

Which waterway did Ferdinand de Lesseps open in 1869, long before his Panama venture went bankrupt?

The Suez Canal joins the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, sparing ships the long voyage around Africa.

Which mountain range, crowned by the peak of Toubkal, runs for 2,500 km across northwest Africa?

The Atlas Mountains stand between the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts and the vast desert that lies to their south.

Which desert, known in English as the Empty Quarter, fills the south of the Arabian Peninsula?

The Rub' al Khali covers some 650,000 square kilometres, with reddish-orange dunes that rise as high as 250 metres.

Which name for the western Arab world comes from Arabic for 'the place where the sun sets'?

The Maghreb is the counterpart of the Mashriq, the eastern part of the Arab world, whose name simply means 'the east'.

What Arabic word do geographers use for a desert riverbed that holds water only after heavy rain?

A wadi is a lifeline for desert nomads, who follow the seasonal plants that sprout along it after the rains.

Which strait links the southern end of the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the open ocean beyond?

Bab al-Mandab translates from Arabic as 'Gate of Grief', and it ranks among the key chokepoints of world shipping.

Which river, formed where the Tigris and Euphrates meet in southern Iraq, runs to the Gulf?

The Shatt al-Arab once watered the largest forest of palm trees in the world, with some 17 million of them along its banks in the 1970s.

Which weapon lies beneath the Islamic creed, written in white, on the flag of Saudi Arabia?

The sword sits under the shahada, and because that sacred text is on it, the Saudi flag is never lowered to half-mast.

Which currency name is shared by Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq and Libya?

The dinar takes its name from the Roman denarius, and Kuwait's modern version is the world's highest-valued currency unit.

Which rulers, based in Istanbul, held most Arab lands from the 1500s until the First World War?

The Ottomans won the Levant and the Hejaz by defeating the Mamluk sultans in a war of 1516–17.

Which indigenous people of North Africa prefer the name Amazigh to the one outsiders gave them?

Berbers often find that name insulting, since it is related to the Arabic word for 'barbarian'.

Which traditional sailing vessel with settee or lateen sails carried Arab trade across the Red Sea?

Dhow is really an umbrella word: Europeans applied it to every boat of the region that carried similar sails, whatever local sailors called each type.

Which official European Union language descends from the Arabic once spoken in medieval Sicily?

Maltese is the only Semitic language officially written in the Latin script, a legacy of Arabic-speaking settlers who arrived from Sicily.

Which singer of monthly Thursday concerts drew some four million mourners to her 1975 funeral?

Umm Kulthum kept up those first-Thursday concerts for some forty years, and streets across the Arab world were said to empty as people hurried home to tune in.

Which author of 'Children of Gebelawi' was the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Naguib Mahfouz, honoured in 1988, first released many of his novels in serial form, among them 'Children of Gebelawi' itself.

Which 14th-century traveller from Tangier covered 117,000 km, far more than Marco Polo or Zheng He?

Ibn Battuta only dictated the story of his journeys near the end of his life, in the book commonly known as the Rihla.

Which Arabic name covered the Muslim-ruled lands of the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492?

Al-Andalus lives on in the name of Andalusia, the region of southern Spain, and first appears on coins minted in 716.

Which city holds al-Qarawiyyin, founded in the 850s and often called the world's oldest university?

Fez is said to owe the school to Fatima al-Fihri, credited by tradition with founding it as a mosque, and it only became a state university in 1963.

Which white antelope, gone from the wild by the 1970s, was later bred and freed in Oman and Jordan?

The Arabian oryx became, in 2011, the first animal ever moved from 'extinct in the wild' back to merely 'vulnerable' on the Red List.

Which bird, named for the sultan Saladin, serves as the coat of arms of both Iraq and Palestine?

The eagle became a badge of Arab nationalism after a 1952 revolution, which is why several republics adopted it.