In its broadest meaning, the Middle East recovers a territorial whole which is stretched of Egypt and Turkey in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by including the Arabique peninsula. It includes the Middle East strictly speaking (Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt). The 268 million inhabitants of this space of 7.9 million square kilometers is distributed between 16 States, of a few hundreds of thousands (Bahrain, Qatar) with nearly 60 million inhabitants (Egypt, Iran, Turkey). This area seems a mosaic of nations, ethnos groups and confessions. Its tumultuous history is related to the claims of people victims of a succession of territorial cuttings, often carried out under the auspices of the adjacent nations and the Western great powers.
Inside this unit are distinguished a part turco-Iranian woman (Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey), the States of the fertile Crescent (Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), those of the Arabique peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Yemen) and, on the African continent, Egypt.