Pre-Reading Notes

Hello and welcome to Chapter 7: North Africa and Southwest Asia! Whew, that’s a long title. But there isn’t really a better name for it, so we’ll go with it.

I’d like you to take a moment and imagine this region. What images come to mind? What physical features do you know about? What cultural features are you aware of?

Maybe this:

It’s the Sahara (which my son says with a British accent because we have the British version of Planet Earth.) But would you believe only around 25% of the surface of the Sahara is covered by sand? It actually looks more like this:

Most of my students also think of this region as a realm where Islam is dominant and might picture something like this:

And while this attire can be found in particular cultural landscapes, such as Afghanistan shown here, you can also find images like this, of a group of young women in Turkey:

So just as Sub-Saharan Africa was a region of contrasts, we find contrasting landscapes here as well, both in terms of physical geography and human geography.

The core focus of this chapter is religion. The Geography of Religion is the spatial study of religion and it’s actually one of my primary research areas, so I hope you enjoy reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it!

The learning objectives for Chapter 7, and questions you might consider, are:

• Identify the key geographic features of North Africa and Southwest Asia
  • What are the most important physical features found in this region?
  • What are some misconceptions related to the physical geography of this region and what is the reality?
  • How has the physical geography of this region shaped the human landscape?
• Describe the geography of the major religious groups found in North Africa and Southwest Asia
  • What are the major religions found here and what are their key beliefs?
• Explain how the history of North Africa and Southwest Asia impacted its cultural landscape
  • How did the spread of Islam impact this region?
  • How did colonization impact the political and cultural geography of North Africa and Southwest Asia?
  • What events have shaped this region most recently?
• Describe the current areas of religious conflict within North Africa and Southwest Asia
  • Why has there been historic religious conflicts in this region and why do they continue today?

Don’t forget to add your own review questions to this list as you read the chapter!

Now go read Chapter 7!

Notes After Reading

Hi there! Welcome back to the study notes for Chapter 7! By far, most of the questions I get from students on this chapter are on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so that’s what I’ll be focused on for our Part B notes. So, brush up on this section of the textbook if you need to review the basics and then we’ll continue on.

Okay, so why is this issue confusing? First, I think students sometimes mistakenly think that Israel and Palestine are two separate countries. They’re not. (Well, it depends on who you ask.) But essentially we have the sovereign state of Israel and within that we have the territory of Palestine, but Palestine is not its own sovereign state. Some people want it to be, and some other countries recognize it as sovereign, but it is not independent. The U.N. has designated it as a “non-member observer state.” (The only other non-member observer state as of 2021, if you were curious, was the Holy See, also known as Vatican City.)

That said, the issue of sovereignty is a bit more complicated because even though the entire territory is officially the state of Israel, there are areas within it that are controlled by the Palestinian National Authority. Israel has some control over the West Bank, which we’ll get into in a moment, but the Gaza Strip is entirely Palestinian controlled (though Israel has blockaded this territory since 2007.)

Follow me so far? Okay, the situation in Gaza is perhaps easier to understand, which you can see from the map. But while it’s easier to understand, it is also more dire and has been characterized by the United Nations as a humanitarian crisis. The blockade I just mentioned means that imports and exports into this area are severely restricted, which Israel argues is necessary to prevent terrorist activity, but for people living here, has made life difficult. Everything from construction projects to employment opportunities to the supply of medicines has been impacted.

In the West Bank, the situation is more complicated. Here, you have Israeli settlements near Palestinian-controlled areas, and a complicated system of checkpoints and barriers separating them. This is an image of the Hawara checkpoint, within a Palestinian city inside the West Bank:

So Palestinians have to make their way through these checkpoints and around barriers to cross into other parts of the West Bank, which not surprisingly limits development, employment opportunities, etc. As with the Gaza blockade, Israel says this is necessary to protect its citizens from terrorists.

Also in the West Bank, you have Israeli settlements like this, which is the Israeli settlement of Ariel, home to over 20,000 people:

Israelis, and Israel’s government, often argue that housing in Jerusalem is expensive, and so as Israel has grown in population, it’s been necessary to expand into these areas to provide affordable housing. Israel’s government also maintains that since the entire administered territory constitutes the sovereign state of Israel, they have a right to build in the West Bank.

Much of the international community, however, views these settlements as the illegal annexation and occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel. It is also important to understand that the building of settlements complicates a peace plan (which is why you sometimes hear about settlement building as a big sticking point in any peace agreements.) Why is that?

Think back a moment to how the state of Israel was founded and to the original partition plan. What if we just said, “Alright y’all. This is a bit of a mess. Let’s just start over and go back to the original plan”? Well, we could potentially do that in Gaza, but what do we do with the West Bank? How do you now switch it to be entirely Palestinian territory? In other words, what do you do about the Israelis now living there if you decide that area should now be the state of Palestine? (I mean, ideally people could just live together in peace, but that seems unlikely here at this point.)

So what now? This situation is complicated. And it is made more complicated by the deep religious and cultural differences we find here. I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but until this situation is resolved, I think we’ll continue to see violent clashes and conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Well, on that hopeful note, really well done on this chapter. Seriously, this is a region that students often know very little about and feel uncomfortable asking questions about, so excellent work!

Don’t forget to go back to the chapter questions and test yourself!