What's the most the Arab World could be united and what would it take?

Basically, how much of the Arab world could be realistically be united, without breaking apart too soon, and preferably not for the foreseeable future, and what would it take to reach that point?
 
I think any durable unification of the Arab world would be limited to Al Sham/The Levant, and maybe Iraq and parts of the Arabian peninsula as well.

Egypt is unlikely to stay a member of any larger Arab federation in the long term, Egyptians do speak Arabic, but there is a stronger and more distinct Egyptian national identity than in other Arabic speaking countries.

As a political movement, Arab nationalism was predominantly led by Levantine Christians who speak the Shammi dialect. An Arab state that comprises the territory of the Palestine, Transjordan, and Syrian League of Nations Mandates is geographically compact and culturally cohesive enough to work. A larger version of this state may be able to include Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States, although oil-rich countries like Kuwait would probably be reluctant to re-distribute their oil wealth with a larger country.

Yemen is too difficult to consolidate control over and doesn't have the natural resource wealth to make conquest profitable. Any Arab unifiers should stay clear of admitting Yemen if they want to avoid a separatist insurgency.
 
Scenario: The Rashidis win the Rashidi-Saudi War and establish a relatively liberal Arab state in Najd, which might eventually lead to a limited Arab unification, with a united Mashriq under a constitutional monarchy based in Ha'il.
 
Like jerseyguy wrote Egypt is too big and to be in a united arab entity.
If we go by culture and sub-languages, the most possible outcome would be the creation of four or five arab speaking countries.
-Arabia: Gulf nations and Yemen
-Levant: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine
-Egypt including Cyranaica
-Sudan
-Iraq
-Maghreb: from Mauretania to Libya
 
Yeah, but the Protestants and Catholics in Germany had pretty much stopped killing each other 200 years earlier. The Sunnis and Shiites are still killing each other today.
 
Yeah, but the Protestants and Catholics in Germany had pretty much stopped killing each other 200 years earlier. The Sunnis and Shiites are still killing each other today.
It wasn't like that at the beginning of the century though. The Sunnis and Shia got along fine under the Ottomans, under European rule, and got halfway through the Cold War before the sectarian nastiness started. In a way, what is going on now is a betrayal of Pan-Arabism as it was first conceived. The way I see it there were two way's Pan-Arabism could have gone, either celebrating the diversity of the Arab World or forcing homogeneity on minorities by their definition of what "Arab" meant. The latter won out in OTL, with predictable consequences for the minorities. The reason for that? Israel. Sorry. It has to take at least some the the blame.

The history modern Middle East begins with the creation of Israel. As a response to that, were have been decades of wars, revolutions, Arab Nationalists, and persecutions. Lots of Jews that had lived in the region now felt unsafe and emigrated. Something similar is now happening to the Arab Christians who are emigrating en-masse from the region to safer places. Lately it has become the Sunni-Shia split that has become the next victim to the vicious cycle of tribalism in the region.

It didn't have to happen like it did in OTL. Lets say you had an Arab State covering the Middle East excluding Egypt. Like was thought about after WW1. It's Arab but it's also cosmopolitan and diverse. Perhaps it is even a federation. There are many ways the Middle East turned out and many reasons it is the way it is today. The idea of it dividing itself into sectarian bits in every timeline after 1900 is naive.
 
Egypt is unlikely to stay a member of any larger Arab federation in the long term, Egyptians do speak Arabic, but there is a stronger and more distinct Egyptian national identity than in other Arabic speaking countries.
Egypt is the most populated Arab nation and was the center of Pan-Arabism. It's certainly going to be a member, the capital, and the most likely one to start the whole thing.
 
You could have Nasser co-op the Ba'ath party in Syria.You can retain Syria in United Arab Republic and rope in Iraq.You can get Sudan,Libya, and Algeria following the two 1969 coups with a similar modal of co-oping local pan-Arabist movement.
 
You’d likely have to start with the decision by the Allied Powers to divide up the Middle East between themselves a hundred years ago.
 
Any scenario where Arab nationalism does better than OTL seems like it would be a worse timeline to live in than OTL.
Enlightened, semi-constitutional monarchy has a way better track record in the Arab world than either Arab nationalist republics or absolute monarchies.

I'd much rather live in Jordan or Morocco than in Saudi Arabia, or the Arab republican movements with a tendency to end up like Qaddafi's Libya, Egyptian military rule, or the Baathist dystopias in Iraq and Syria.
 
Egypt is the most populated Arab nation and was the center of Pan-Arabism. It's certainly going to be a member, the capital, and the most likely one to start the whole thing.
The Egyptian people are Egyptian Arab Muslims, with equal emphasis on all three parts of that identity. Any movement that overemphasizes one part of Egyptian's identity relative to the others is going to fail in the long run.
In the '30s and '40s there was a movement called Pharaonism that attempted to build a non-Islamic, secular nationalist identity around pride in ancient Egypt. It attracted towering figures like the novelist Taha Hussein, but one of the reasons if failed to build a following was its distance to contemporary Egyptian society, and the fact that the pre-Islamic period is seen as an age of Jahiliyya, or ignorance.

Arab nationalists like Nasser make the same mistake but with a different overemphasis. The Camp David Accords demonstrated that Egyptian leaders care about the Egyptian people's interests first. Anwar Saddam wasn't going to put Egypt's Nile Delta core at risk or write off control of the Sinai for the foreseeable future for the sake of the Palestinian cause or Syria's claim to the Golan heights. Egypt's continued unwillingness to annex the Gaza strip is a clear demonstration that Egyptians and Palestinians are two related, but distinct peoples.
 
Arab nationalists like Nasser make the same mistake but with a different overemphasis. The Camp David Accords demonstrated that Egyptian leaders care about the Egyptian people's interests first. Anwar Saddam wasn't going to put Egypt's Nile Delta core at risk or write off control of the Sinai for the foreseeable future for the sake of the Palestinian cause or Syria's claim to the Golan heights. Egypt's continued unwillingness to annex the Gaza strip is a clear demonstration that Egyptians and Palestinians are two related, but distinct peoples.
How would this relative be in a scenario where Egypt is the center of Pan-Arab state also the existence and success of such a state would vindicate pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism . Not to mention the peace with Israel was and is still unpopular in Egypt.
 
Depends on the pod. If its 19th century, I think you could get the Fertile Crescent, Arabia and maybe Egypt. Not much else. If Oman takes its colonies with it when joining, then you could have Zanzibar, Comoros and the Swahili coast. Comoros and Zanzibar could be like how French Guyana is to France.
 

Kaze

Banned
Abbasid amd Umayyad lands - that is far as I can figure if all the Arab / Muslim world united. But I doubt it would last long - something would break them up - war, their own weight, infighting between sects, and other items like the United States.
 
Abbasid amd Umayyad lands - that is far as I can figure if all the Arab / Muslim world united. But I doubt it would last long - something would break them up - war, their own weight, infighting between sects, and other items like the United States.
Ummyyad Caliphate? You mean the one that conquered Al-Andalus and almost took Constantinople a couple times? Admittedly, that could work, though it would clearly be a pre-1900 PoD working on a more unified and centralized caliphate fixing its internal issues and holding on longer to create a sort of unified identity.

Post-1900, a united Fertile Crescent, possibly even taking the Arabian peninsula, though it would require the Sykes-Picot agreement to fail or not exist to begin with. Possibly a more exhausting WW1 that results in France and Britain being unable to extend their control over the Middle East effectively.
 
Post-1900, a united Fertile Crescent, possibly even taking the Arabian peninsula, though it would require the Sykes-Picot agreement to fail or not exist to begin with. Possibly a more exhausting WW1 that results in France and Britain being unable to extend their control over the Middle East effectively
Maybe Germany reaches Paris and generally causes more destruction in France? Idk about Britain?
 
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