Arabic -speaking countries

Most of the countries that use Arabic as their official language are in the Middle East. They are part of the Arab World. This is because the largest religion in the Middle East is Islam.

The language is very important in Islam, because Muslims believe that Allah (God) used it to talk to Muhammad through the Archangel Gabriel (Jibril), giving him the Quran in Arabic. Many Arabic speakers are Muslims, but not all are.

Arabic is also becoming a popular language to learn in the Western world, even though Arabic grammar is sometimes very hard to learn for native speakers of Indo-European languages. Many other languages have borrowed words from Arabic, because of its importance in history. Some English words that can be traced to Arabic are: sugar,^[4] cotton,^[5] magazine,^[6]algebra,^[7] ,alcohol^[8] and Emir.^[9][10][11]

Arabic is an official language of:

• Algeria
• Bahrain
• Comoros
• Chad
• Djibouti
• Egypt
• Eritrea
• Iraq
• Israel
• Jordan
• Kuwait
• Lebanon
• Libya
• Mauritania
• Morocco
• Oman
• Palestine
• Qatar
• Western Sahara
• Saudi Arabia
• Sudan
• Syria
• Tunisia
• United Arab Emirates
• Yemen

It is also a national language of:

• Mali
• Senega