Maghreb

The Maghreb (/ˈmɑːɡrəb/; Arabic: ْاَلْمَغْرِب, romanized: al-Maghrib, lit. 'The place where the sun sets' [ælˈmaɣrɪb] ^ⓘ), also known as the Arab Maghreb (Arabic: اَلْمَغْرِبُ الْعَرَبِيُّ, romanized: al-Maghrib al-ʿArabi, lit. 'the Arab west') or the Greater Maghreb (Arabic: المغرب الكبير al-Maghrib al-Kabīr), and Northwest Africa, is the western part of the Arab world. The region comprises western and central North Africa, including Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Maghreb also includes the disputed territory of Western Sahara. As of 2018, the region had a population of over 100 million people.

The Maghreb is usually defined as encompassing much of the northern part of Africa, including a large portion of the Sahara Desert, but excluding Egypt and the Sudan, which are considered to be located in the Mashriq—the eastern part of the Arab world. The traditional definition of the Maghreb—which restricted its scope to the Atlas Mountains and the coastal plains of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya—was expanded in modern times to include Mauritania and the disputed territory of Western Sahara. During the era of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula (711–1492), the Maghreb's inhabitants—the Muslim Maghrebis—were known by Europeans as the "Moors". The Greeks referred to the region as the "Land of the Atlas", referring to its Atlas Mountains.

Before the establishment of modern nation states in the region during the 20th century, the Maghreb most commonly referred to a smaller area, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlas Mountains in the south. It often also included the territory of eastern Libya, but not modern Mauritania. As recently as the late 19th century, the term "Maghreb" was used to refer to the western Mediterranean region of coastal North Africa in general, and to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in particular.

The region comprising the Maghreb was somewhat unified as an independent political entity under the kingdom of Numidia. This period was followed by one of the Roman Empire's rule or influence. The Germanic Vandals invaded after that, followed by the equally brief re-establishment of a weak Roman rule by the Byzantine Empire. The Islamic caliphates came to power under the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate and the Fatimid Caliphate. The most enduring rule was that of the local Arab empires of the Aghlabids, Idrisids, Salihids, Sulaymanids, Umayyads of Cordoba, Hammudids, Nasrids, Saadians, Alawites and the Sennusids, as well as the Berber empires of the Ifranids, Almoravids, Almohads, Hammadids, Zirids, Marinids, Zayyanids, Hafsids and Wattasids, extending from the 8th to 13th centuries. The Ottoman Empire also controlled parts of the region for a period.

Centuries of Arab migrations to the Maghreb since the 7th century shifted the demographic scope of the Maghreb in favor of the Arabs. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region was ruled by European powers: France (Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia, and most of Morocco), Italy (Libya), and Spain (northern Morocco and Western Sahara). Italy was expelled from North Africa by the Allies in World War II. Decolonization of the region continued in the decades thereafter, with violent conflicts such as the Algerian War, the Ifni War, the Rif War, and the Western Sahara War.

Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia established the Arab Maghreb Union in 1989 to promote cooperation and economic integration in a common market. The union implicitly included Western Sahara under Morocco's membership. However, this progress was short-lived, and the union is now largely dormant. Tensions between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara re-emerged, reinforced by the unresolved border dispute between the two countries. These two conflicts have hindered progress on the union's joint goals.

The toponym maghrib (Arabic: مغرب) is an Arabic term that the first Muslim Arab settlers gave to the recently conquered area situated west of the Umayyad capital of Damascus in the 7th century AD. The term was used to refer to the region extending from Alexandria in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Etymologically, it means both "the western place/land" and "the place where the sun sets", in contrast to the Mashriq, the Fertile Crescent and eastern part of the Arab world. In Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm fī Ma'rifat al-Aqālīm (c. 985 AD), medieval Arab geographer Al-Maqdisi used the term Arab regions (Arabic: أَقَالِيمُ ٱلْعَرَبِ) to refer to the lands of Arabia, Iraq, Upper Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Maghreb. This constituted the earliest documented differentiation between the terms Maghreb and Gharb (Muslim lands west of the Abbasid capital, Baghdad). The former referred to the present-day Maghreb whereas the latter incorporated the Levant and Egypt in addition to the Maghreb.

Medieval Muslim historians and geographers divided the Maghreb region into three areas: al-Maghrib al-Adna (the near Maghrib; also known as Ifriqiya), which included the lands extending from Alexandria to Tarabulus (modern-day Tripoli) in the west; al-Maghrib al-Awsat (the middle Maghrib), which extended from Tripoli to Bijaya (Béjaïa); and al-Maghrib al-Aqsa (the far Maghrib), which extended from Tahart (Tiaret) to the Atlantic Ocean. Historians and geographers disagreed, however, over the definition of the eastern boundary. Some authors place it at the sea of Kulzum (the Red Sea) and thus include Egypt and Barqa (Cyrenaica) in the Maghreb. Ibn Khaldun does not accept this definition because, he says, the inhabitants of the Maghreb do not consider Egypt and Barqa as forming part of Maghrib. The latter commences only at the province of Tripoli and includes the districts of which the country of the Berbers was composed in former times. Later Maghribi writers repeated the definition of Ibn Khaldun, with a few variations in details.