SOUTHWEST ASIAN PEOPLE

inhabitants of Southwest Asia. For the purposes of this article, Southwest Asia is defined as the roughly triangular region extending from Anatolia (the Asian portion of Turkey) in the west to and including Iran in the east and Yemen, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, in the south. Other countries in the region are Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. This roster represents a relative constructthe southwestern corner of the Asian continent. Both geographically and culturally, the region defies such boundaries. The survival of a number of historical names for the general area and portions of it makes for further ambiguity. Mashriq, for instance, is an Arabic designation (meaning the East) for the land between the western border of Egypt and the western border of Iran, which differs from the region treated in this article by excluding Iran and Turkey and adding Egypt and The Sudan. Nearly synonymous with Mashriq but encompassing Iran and northeastern Africa is Middle East, which has largely supplanted Near East (i.e., closest to Europe) in modern usage. European traders applied the term Levant to the countries along the eastern Mediterranean shores, sometimes including Greece and Egypt; modern Syria and Lebanon are sometimes called the Levant States. The large Asian peninsula of Turkey retains in some discussions its ancient names Asia Minor and Anatolia. Situated at the juncture of Asia, Europe, and Africa, Southwest Asia presents a confluence of landforms spanning all three continents. It lies at the heart of the great band of deserts stretching from Morocco in western North Africa to China in East Asia. The chain of snowcapped mountains comprising the Alps of Europe at one end and the Himalayas of South Asia at the other crosses Turkey and forms a ring around the salt-desert plateau of Iran. And the so-called Fertile Crescent, an ancient agricultural belt extending northwestward from the Tigris and Euphrates basin (Mesopotamia) in Iraq and then southwestward along the Mediterranean coast, terminates in the Nile River valley of northeastern Africa. Just as these physical features link Southwest Asia with surrounding regions, so does its culture resist rigid demarcation. As was stated earlier, Southwest Asia was one of the chief cradles of civilization. Three monotheistic world religionsJudaism, Christianity, and Islamoriginated there. As a land bridge among continents, it has been traversed by numerous peoples, many of whom left small groups of settlers that retain distinctive cultural identities today. Perhaps the most conspicuous fact about the region has been its demographic heterogeneity; its population is a mosaic of peoples. Several overarching factors have nonetheless lent the area a regional identity that dates to ancient times, although each of these elements suggests its own regional boundaries. Islam, for instance, is the predominant religionand determining cultural forceof Southwest Asia, yet this influence ranges west to Morocco and east to Indonesia. In addition, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria contain large populations of non-Muslims. The Arabic language of Muhammad and the Qur'an unites much of the region, giving the so-called Arab peoples their common identity. But this designation extends west to the Moroccans, also, and fails to include the Turks and Iranians (although Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979 brought Arabic into official favour). Additional reading Surveys include George B. Cressey, Crossroads: Land and Life in Southwest Asia (1960); J.I. Clarke and W.B. Fisher (eds.), Populations of the Middle East and North Africa: A Geographical Approach (1972); John Gulick, The Middle East: An Anthropological Perspective (1976, reprinted 1983); Daniel G. Bates and Amal Rassam, Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East (1983); Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Nicholas S. Hopkins (eds.), Arab Society: Social Science Perspectives (1985); Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach, 2nd ed. (1989); Colbert C. Held and Mildred McDonald Held, Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics (1989); and Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (1991). The essays in Trevor Mostyn (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa (1988), are also useful. Richard Lawless (ed.), The Middle Eastern Village: Changing Economic and Social Relations (1987); and N.C. Grill, Urbanisation in the Arabian Peninsula (1984), study rural-to-urban migration. Gerard Chaliand (ed.), People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (1980), is a collection of essays. The adaptation of pastoral nomad society in Southwest Asia in general is examined by Shirley Kay, The Bedouin (1978); and in Israel in particular by Emanuel Marx and Avshalom Shmueli (eds.), The Changing Bedouin (1984). Israeli society as a whole is considered in Dov Friedlander and Calvin Goldscheider, The Population of Israel (1979). Jamshid A. Momeni (ed.), The Population of Iran (1977), covers all aspects of Iran's human resources before the Islamic revolution of the late 1970s; while the essays in Richard Tapper (ed.), The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (1983), assess more recent tribal, political, and social structures. Ailon Shiloh The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica