6.1 Chapter 6 NORTH AFRICA AND SOUTHWEST ASIA

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chapter 6

NORTH AFRICA AND SOUTHWEST ASIA▶

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GEOGRAPHIC INSIGHTS

After you read this chapter, you will be able to discuss the following geographic insights as they relate to the five thematic concepts:

1.

Environment:

The population of this predominantly dry region is growing faster than is access to cultivable land and water for agriculture and other human uses. Many countries here are dependent on imported food, and because global food prices are unstable, the region often has food insecurity. Climate change could reduce food output both locally and globally and make water, already a scarce commodity, a source of conflict. New technologies offer solutions to water scarcity but are expensive and unsustainable.

2.

Globalization and Development:

The vast fossil fuel resources of a few countries in this region have transformed economic development and driven globalization. In these countries, economies have become powerfully linked to global flows of money, resources, and people. Politics have also become globalized, with Europe and the United States strongly influencing many governments.

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Power and Politics:

Despite the presence of elected bodies of government, authoritarian power structures prevail throughout North Africa and Southwest Asia. Beginning with the Arab Spring of 2010, waves of protests swept the region, resulting in the overthrow of several authoritarian governments. Within the region, official responses to the Arab Spring have included both repression and reform.

4.

Urbanization:

Two patterns of urbanization have emerged in the region, both tied to the global economy. In the oil-rich countries, the development of spectacular new luxury-oriented urban areas is based on global flows of money, credit, goods, and skilled people. In the oil-poor countries, cities are old and have little capacity to handle the masses of poor, rural migrants attracted by the promise of jobs. In these older, poorer cities, jobs are often scarce and many people live in overcrowded slums with few services.

5.

Population and Gender:

This region has the second-highest population growth rate in the world, after that of sub-Saharan Africa. Part of the reason for this is that women are generally poorly educated and tend not to work outside the home. Childbearing thus remains crucial to a woman’s status, a situation that encourages large families. The role and social standing of women in the region is one of the issues being addressed by current political movements.

The North Africa and Southwest Asia Region

The region of North Africa and Southwest Asia (shown in Figure 6.1 and Figure 6.2) contains 21 countries plus the occupied Palestinian Territories. Physically, the region is part of two continents: Africa and Eurasia. The North African countries of this region stretch from Western Sahara and Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean, through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt along the Mediterranean Sea, plus Sudan, which lies south of Egypt. Eurasia begins on the eastern side of the Red Sea with the Arabian Peninsula, which consists of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait (see Figure 6.1C); the countries of the eastern Mediterranean littoral (shoreline), including Jordan, Israel, the occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, and Syria; and Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. This region is often referred to as the Middle East, a term we do not use in this book because it arose during the colonial era and describes the region from a limited Euro-American geographic perspective. To someone in China or Japan, the region lies to the far west, and to someone in Russia, it lies to the south.

Figure 6.1: Regional map of North Africa and Southwest Asia.
Figure 6.2: Political map of North Africa and Southwest Asia.

The five thematic concepts in this book are explored as they arise in the discussion of regional issues; the interactions between two or more themes are often featured. Vignettes, like the one below about the changing role of women in this region, illustrate one or more of the themes as they are experienced in individual lives.

The Arab Spring, a movement that will likely continue evolving for decades, has been brought on by deep and structural problems. Large numbers of the poor, the uneducated, the educated unemployed, minorities, and women have been pushed further and further into poverty and powerlessness by political and economic systems that have privileged the wealthy and politically connected. Movements like the Arab Spring arise when enough people decide they can no longer tolerate these systems.

The issue of gender equity in the region of North Africa and Southwest Asia is controversial because many people are convinced that only Westerners (meaning people of European origin) raise this issue, and that they do so in order to belittle Muslim culture for having a set of values that places females in a special, and subservient, category. But Mona Eltahawy’s article and the response it has received across the region suggests that gender equity is becoming a central theme in the Arab Spring movement and that women are leading a profound transformation of this region.

What Makes North Africa and Southwest Asia a Region?

To most outsiders, North Africa and Southwest Asia is a region characterized by five qualities: It is the center of the religion of Islam; it holds a great deal of Earth’s petroleum resources; water is generally scarce here; Arab culture dominates most countries; and women are discriminated against more intensely than in most of the rest of the world. While these five features are all present, they alone provide a far too simplistic picture of the region.

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The vast majority of people practice Islam, a monotheistic religion that emerged between 601 and 632 c.e. Islam is a faith that is interpreted in many different ways. Most Muslims are moderate in their thinking and accept the validity of other beliefs, especially that of Christianity, because Mary and Jesus both play important roles in Islam. Only a vocal minority of Muslims is drawn to ultra-fundamentalist versions of Islam known as Islamism. The term Islamism refers to a Muslim religious activist movement that seeks to curb secular influences that are spreading as a result of globalization. Some Islamists characterize Western influence as corrupt and destructively self-serving, while others are more open to Western ideas. Stronger in some parts of the region than in others, Islamism has tended to gain popularity during economic recessions and to wane with economic booms.

Islam a monotheistic religion that emerged in the seventh century c.e. when, according to tradition, the archangel Gabriel revealed the tenets of the religion to the Prophet Muhammad

Islamism a grassroots religious revival in Islam that seeks political power to curb what are seen as dangerous secular influences; also seeks to replace secular governments and civil laws with governments and laws guided by Islamic principles

Fossil fuel reserves—made up of oil and natural gas formed over millions of years from the fossilized remains of dead plants and animals—are highly uneven in their distribution (see Figure 6.18) and are found mainly around the Persian Gulf. These fossil fuels are extracted and exported throughout the world at tremendous profit, but the profits are not equitably distributed to the people in the countries from which they are generated. For example, in the oil-rich Gulf states (see the discussion of wealth disparities), profits go primarily to the members of a few large, privileged families, and only modest amounts are spread to the rest of the citizens.

fossil fuel a source of energy formed from the remains of dead plants and animals

This region is generally arid but the degree of aridity and its impact on development varies widely. Newly revealed underground water resources may change development options.

Arab culture and language is widespread, but many people in the region are not Arab. The population of Turkey and Iran, the second and third most populous countries in the region, are of non-Arab ethnicities, as are many minority populations, such as the Kurds, Berbers, Christians, and Jews.

Finally, the role and status of women, a point of contention for many years, is in transition. The experiences of women vary widely from country to country. In Turkey, women have many more options for education and work than in Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Gender issues also vary between more rural and urban areas. Urban women tend to be more educated, outspoken, and active in commerce, public life, and government, while rural women tend to lead more secluded domestic lives with few educational opportunities. The movement toward greater gender equity is generally strongest in urban areas.

Terms in This Chapter

In this book, as mentioned earlier, we choose to not use the common term Middle East. The term Arab world is used only where it applies, since many people in the region are not of Arab ethnicity.

We use the term occupied Palestinian Territories (oPT) to refer to Gaza and the West Bank, those areas where Israel still exerts control despite treaty agreements; the word “occupied” is lowercase to show the supposed temporary quality of the occupation. The U.S. Department of State uses the term Palestinian Territories. The United Nations, upon recently agreeing to give the territory observer status, now refers to it as the State of Palestine.

occupied Palestinian Territories (oPT) Palestinian lands occupied by Israel since 1967

GLOBAL PATTERNS, LOCAL LIVES

Mona Eltahawy, a Muslim Egyptian-American journalist, was angry when she wrote an essay for Foreign Policy magazine entitled “Why Do They Hate Us?” in the spring of 2012. It is easy to see why. The Arab Spring—a political movement that washed across North Africa and into Egypt, beginning in 2010—held the promise of real change in her native land. For a time, the tens of thousands of largely peaceful male and female demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square shared a common purpose: the resignation of the authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak (Figure 6.3). He had remained in power for nearly 30 years, aided by a powerful and oppressive military, and supported by internal corruption and large foreign aid packages from the United States.

Figure 6.3: Women and the Arab Spring. An Egyptian woman holds up a widely circulated photo that shows riot police stripping and beating a woman during an Arab Spring protest in Cairo in 2011. Women have been very active in protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the region in recent years, and some groups, including parts of Egypt’s government, have felt threatened by this. Some female protestors have become a target for sexual assaults designed to make others perceive them as dangerous, “dirty,” or immoral.

For the many thousands of women—students and young professionals—who participated in the Cairo demonstrations, it was exhilarating to be welcomed by male compatriots, many of whom were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a large and amorphous organization of men opposed to the corrupt Mubarak regime and its affiliations with the West. The Muslim Brotherhood, however, is also known for its stance against liberalizing women’s rights. For a time, the common purpose of ousting Mubarak united everyone.

Eltahawy, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Egypt, and who has focused her career on social justice and women’s rights in Egypt, joined the throng of demonstrators. As the protests went on, not only did retaliation by the military and police toward male and female demonstrators become increasingly brutal, but antagonism toward women by the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators and even from young, more liberal male demonstrators grew, leading to random violence by men against women. Mubarak’s resignation in February 2011 left undetermined the way in which a new government would be established; so as the military asserted control, the demonstrations continued. One day in the fall of 2011, Eltahawy, who continued to report on the increasingly frustrated demonstrators in Tahrir Square, was arrested along with some others. While in custody, both her arms were broken in a beating, and she was sexually assaulted, as were many other women demonstrators.

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In her essay, which she wrote some months after her release, Eltahawy raged against repressive political authorities and against Muslim men as a whole, who she expected to be in solidarity with women demonstrators. Her hope that movement toward gender equity would be one of the end products of the Arab Spring was dashed by what she saw and experienced, so she lashed out with a diatribe against the many large and small ways in which she saw women being belittled—not by the Qur’an, but by religious social practice in Egypt and elsewhere (Figure 6.4). In so expressing her rage, Eltahawy seems to have invigorated a cross-regional discussion on gender equity that is attracting serious male and female participants. They are expressing a surprising level of agreement that the Arab Spring must include the human rights of women. [Source: Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera. For more detailed information, see Text Sources and Credits.]

Figure 6.4: Variations in women’s freedom to exercise their human rights in five categories. Each country was evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest degree of freedom and 5 being the highest. A variety of factors was assessed for each nation: actions taken and omitted; the legal system; the political environment; actual implementation of laws and policies; and the role that non-state individuals and institutions played in strengthening or weakening women’s rights and freedoms.
[Sources consulted: Sanja Kelly and Julia Breslin, eds., Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Freedom House); Freedom House reports on Israel and Turkey, at http://www.freedomhouse.org]

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THINGS TO REMEMBER

  • The Arab Spring, a broad-based but not centrally organized movement against corruption and toward more political freedom, has spread across the region since 2010.

  • Women are increasingly participating in political movements but continue to face difficulties in doing so.

  • Issues of gender equity are becoming central to the public dialogue.