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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.