The most religiously and ethnically divided
country is mountainous Lebanon, among whose
population of 3.7 million today no one group has
an overall majority. The Muslim population is
divided between Shia, Sunni and the Druze; the
Maronite Catholic Christians, who have their own
patriarch but accept the Pope as head of the
Church, are the largest single Christian group and,
together with other Christian communities, once
made up about half the total population. Today
the Muslims form the majority. So sensitive an
issue have precise population numbers been in the
Lebanon that no official census of the communities
has been taken for half a century. The breakdown
in 1957 of a power-sharing agreement between
Maronites and Sunni, the so-called National Pact,
plus interference by neighbours, as well as by the
militant Palestinian Liberation Organisation,
plunged the Lebanon into bloody civil war. At the
opening of the twenty-first century the main divi-
sions were between 1.5 million Shiite Arabs, 1.6
Sunni Arabs and 1.4 million Christians.
The population of the territory under
Jordanian control after the 1967 war with Israel
was about 3.8 million in 1987. In the West Bank,
assigned to Jordan (Transjordan) in 1949 after
the first Arab–Israeli War, there were a further
500,000 Arab Palestinians under Israeli control.
The relationship between Arab Jordanians and
Arab Palestinians who are seeking their own inde-
pendence has been a strained one. The Jordanians
are Sunni Muslims; in the West Bank there is a
minority of Christians. In 2004, the total popu-
lation of Israel is 7 million. In the occupied West
Bank and Gaza occupied since 1967 there are
more than 3 million Palestinians and over
200,000 Israeli settlers. In Israel itself there are
more than 1 million Arabs.
The Arabian peninsula’s most important state
is Saudi Arabia, unified by Ibn Saud and his
zealous followers, the Wahhabi, after the defeat
of his rival Hussain Sharif of Mecca in the 1920s,
and in 2002 having a population of about 23.5
million. Originally the poverty-stricken Bedouins
of Saudi Arabia and their tribal chiefs were of
political importance because they ruled over the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and so, with
British backing, could be set up as rival caliphs
appealing to the Muslims of the Ottoman and
Indian empires against the Caliph Sultan of
Turkey. This proved of some value to Britain in
the First World War but its sponsorship proved
insufficient to unite the Arabs. The tribes of the
Arabian peninsula were among the poorest in the
Middle East, and most of the peninsula, except
for the pilgrimage routes and the coastline, was
isolated from the rest of the world. Ibn Saud’s
new kingdom of Sunni Arabs was backward and
poor, his rule patriarchal. Patriarchal rule has con-
tinued to the present day, but the kingdom has
become one of the richest in the world as a result
of the post-war development of the huge oil dis-
coveries made in the 1930s. Before then, there
had been nothing to attract the British, who
maintained friendly relations and did not interfere
in Saudi Arabia’s internal affairs. Desperate for
revenue, Ibn Saud in 1933 granted concessions
for oil-prospecting to American oil companies
which were exploited after the war by the Arabian
American Oil Company (Aramco).
Similarly, the discovery and development of oil
wells along the Persian Gulf, in Kuwait and
Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (Trucial
States) and Oman, transformed those regions of
the Arabian peninsula into one of the wealthiest
in the world. In contrast, Yemen, with a popula-
tion estimated at 19 million in 2002, has few
valuable resources and is very poor. But a number
of companies are continuing exploration for
gas and oil and production is expanding. The
Yemenites belong to a branch of the Shia Muslims
- most Arabs are Sunni. Britain’s interests in the
Arabian peninsula, before the irruption of oil,
were mainly strategic. To safeguard commercial
routes and the oil supplies from Iraq and Iran,
Britain held on to Aden and maintained protec-
torate relationships with the tribal sheikhs along
the coastline of the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf.
Egypt is among the largest Middle Eastern
states but also one of the poorest. As elsewhere in
the region, the population has increased very
rapidly in the twentieth century and efforts to
modernise, and especially to improve the lot of
the peasants, can scarcely keep pace with the rate
of population growth from some 18 million in
1947 to an estimated 73 million fifty-seven years
later. The great majority of Egyptians are Sunni
Muslims, but there is a minority of Arab-speaking
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