ABSTRACT
The most salient feature of the new Arab social order is its stratification system. It is uncommon among social scientists to treat a group of “sovereign states” as one societal unit and, hence, deal with a stratification system encompassing them all. The bottom of the Arab stratification pyramid is broadly based, containing six countries: The two Yemens, Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania, and Somalia. Income distribution is a crucial indicator of stratification in any society, but it is by no means the only indicator. Literacy rate has been used as an indicator of the educational component of country status; with better and more reliable data a more refined indicator could be used. Nomadic tribes lived on the margin of this stratification system but often without completely submitting to central authority. In terms of income stratification, their percentage at the upper level is quite small, somewhat bigger at the middle, but quite broad and overrepresented at the bottom.
