Many of the Arab states have long individual histories. Egypt has its pharaonic past; Tunisia follows on Carthage; Morocco goes back at least to the Roman occupation of North Africa; Lebanon goes back to the Phoenicians; and Iraq has roots in Sumeria, Babylonia, and Assyria. Other states are recent creations with arbitrary boundaries resulting from the colonial period, such as the desert states of Mauritania, Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan. At the time, the Palestinian Authority is in a transitional phase, is almost, but not quite a state in the international legal sense.

Arabdom is neither eternal nor is it a creation of yesterday. It has been evolving over more than two millennia. It was only with the appearance of the new religion of Islam (A.D. 610) that the Arabs made an unprecedented unity, pride, and a sense of sacred mission. Within one century, the Arab Muslims managed to conquer all the leading empires of the time (Roman, Persian, and Byzantine) and to establish their own, extending from the borders of China in East Asia to the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe. Within this vast empire, an Arab-Islamic civilization flowered, incorporating the legacies and achievements of contemporary and previous cultures and civilization