Abstract
The whole Arab region is currently going through an unprecedented period of political and economic volatility. In such hard times, my aim is to contribute towards understanding the real needs and lives of the people of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, paving the way to development of outcome indicators for future use in planning and delivering interventions or services.
The chapter addresses the main historical periods of the region, mainly the pre-Islamic and the Islamic period, and the European colonial and post-colonial eras. It also gives a detailed description of the characteristics of the current population, and the region’s economic and political conditions. The analysis is complemented by reviewing a number of well-established international simple and composite indicators of quality of life and wellbeing. An agenda for action is proposed to help point out to major steps that should be followed by policy makers.
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Notes
- 1.
Interested readers can consult: http://www.muslimphilosophy.com.
- 2.
‘The travels of Ibn Jubayr’ volumes as reviewed by William Wright (1907) can be found in: http://ia700208.us.archive.org/17/items/travelsofibnjuba05ibnjuoft/travelsofibnjuba05ibnjuoft.pdf.
- 3.
The Mlikī (Arabic: مالكي) madhhab is one of the schools of Fiqh or religious law within Sunni Islam. It was founded by Malik bin Anas and it considers the rulings from ulema from Medina to be sunnah [1]. Its adherents reside mostly in North Africa, West Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, in parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman and many Middle Eastern countries, and parts of India [2]. The Maliki school of jurisprudence forms the official state legal codes of Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. (Wikipedia. (2013d). Maliki. Retrieved August 15, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maliki.)
- 4.
For a review of Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, see: Nacer, M. et al. (2009). Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine: 11th century rules for assessing the effects of drugs. JRSM, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 102(2): 78–80, accessed in July 1 2013 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2642865/
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the help received from many people while preparing this manuscript, mainly Dr Renima Sid Ahmed (Historian) of the University of Chlef, Algeria and Prof. Richard Estes of Pennsylvania University who brought my attention to many important international data sources.
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Tiliouine, H. (2015). Quality of Life and Wellbeing in North Africa – Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. In: Glatzer, W., Camfield, L., Møller, V., Rojas, M. (eds) Global Handbook of Quality of Life. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9178-6_22
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