Cultural Diversity
These are the three major monotheistic religions founded and still practiced in Southwest Asia.
What are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
This region in Southwest Asia has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years because of its abundance of rich soil and fresh water.
What is the Fertile Crescent?
This type of government concentrates power in one person. That power tends to be unlimited.
What is an authoritarian government?
This war resulted in Israeli control of Gaza and the West Bank.
What is the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 (Six Day War)?
This is the largest single ethnic group found in Southwest Asia.
What is Arab?
This is the most important natural resource for most of the countries of Southwest Asia.
What is oil?
This government type has been difficult to maintain in Southwest Asia, due in large part to ethnic and religious differences made worse by European colonization in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
What is democracy?
Competing claims to land, ethnic and religious differences, wars, terrorism, and popular uprisings have been barriers to peace in this country, created in the aftermath of World War II.
What is Israel?
This is one of the two most important things all Muslims have in common.
What is faith in the Qur'an OR what is faith in and practice of the Five Pillars?
Most oil-rich nations in Southwest Asia have this type of economy, the opposite of those nations without much oil.
What is a command economy?
Iran is one of the only countries in the world with this government type.
What is theocracy?
This authoritarian leader's removal from power led to an insurgency that fought against U.S. troops from 2003-2011.
Who was Saddam Hussein?
These are the nations in Southwest Asia that do not have an Arab ethnic majority.
What are Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Cyprus?
This is the concept that countries produce the goods and services that they are best at producing.
What is specialization?
These two countries in Southwest Asia are considered failed states.
What are Syria and Yemen?
This terrorist group took advantage of wars and instability to take over large parts of Iraq and Syria in the 2010s, creating a short-lived caliphate.
What is ISIS/IS/ISIL/Islamic State?
This is a major factor in increasing ethnic and religious diversity in Southwest Asia.
What is improving technology?
This technology has allowed people to move further into previously inhospitable areas by providing fresh water where there was none.
What is desalination?
(Any one is acceptable) What is Iraq, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon?
The conflicts in both Syria and Yemen began because of this movement that called for greater democracy in non-democratic nations of the Muslim world.
What is the Arab Spring?