From the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert in North Africa, to Mesopotamia and the Arabian Sea in West Asia, the 22 countries of the Arab world not only cover an area of 13 million square kilometers and a population of more than 400 million, but also present distinctive features in language, literature and art. To understand the diversity of Arab culture has more and more becoming a pressing task for university students who aspire to broaden their international horizons.This course is divided into sixteen topics, each focusing on an important Arab city, like Sana'a, Mecca, Dubai and Doha in the Arabian Peninsula, Damascus, Jerusalem and Baghdad in the Fertile Crescent, Cairo and Tunis of Africa, and Cordova and Granada in the Iberian Peninsula. For thousands of years, the Arab world has witnessed the convergence of people and ideas and manifested a superb level of architecture, literature and art in these Arab cities. Our course also reveals the enduring binary stress between the natural and the man-made, the Bedouins and city-dwellers, and seafaring and agricultural cultivation in the Arab world.