- A variety of countries make up the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
- Widely spoken languages in the Middle East and North Africa include Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Berber, Kurdish, French, and English.
- The Middle East has been referred to as ‘the crossroads of the world’ because it connects the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
- The majority of Muslims do not live in the Middle East. More Muslims live in South Asia than in the Middle East and North Africa combined.
- The country with the world’s largest Muslim population is Indonesia, which is in South Asia, not the Middle East.
- Roughly 60% of the population in the Middle East is under 25 years old.
- The term “Arab” generally refers to people who speak Arabic as their first language.
- The majority of Arabs are Muslims, but the majority of Muslims are not Arabs.
- The words Islam and Muslim are derived from the Arabic word salam, which means peace.
- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three largest monotheistic and Abrahamic religions in the world, each of which originates in the Middle East.
- The Islamic calendar is based on lunar cycles, unlike the Gregorian and other calendars that are based on the Earth’s rotation around the sun.
- The Arabic language uses the same punctuation marks as English, but some of them are inverted or reversed.
- Arabic is the most commonly spoken language in the Middle East. It is the official language of more than 20 countries and is spoken by approximately 300 million people worldwide.
- Sunni Muslims make up roughly 85% – 90% of the global Muslim population and 60% of the population in the Middle East.
- The global population of Muslims is approximately 1.6 billion people, roughly 23% of the world’s population.
- The term “mocha” is derived from the city of Mocha in Yemen, where coffee production was commercialized by the year 1400.
- In 1997, three men from Yemen tried to sue NASA for trespassing on Mars, claiming they had inherited it from their ancestors 3,000 years ago.
- Arabic is the world’s 5th most widely spoken language after Chinese, Spanish, English, and Hindi.
- Some of the world’s oldest civilizations were connected with parts of today’s Middle East. These include the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian civilizations.
- Three of the seven wonders of the ancient world are in the Middle East: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
- Cairo, Egypt is the largest city in the Middle East with a population of roughly 16 million.
- The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is 2,717 feet tall and the second tallest building is the Royal Clock Tower Hotel in Mecca, which is 1,972 feet tall.
- The five pillars of Islam are prayer, a pilgrimage to Mecca, the profession of faith, fasting, and almsgiving.
- The Prophet Muhammed had four daughters and three sons. Each of these children died before Muhammad, except Fatimah.
- There are no permanent rivers in Saudi Arabia, but the country does have permanently or intermittently dry riverbeds, which are called wadis.
