The Big Questions, part 1: Geography and Human Ecology

As mentioned in lecture, I much prefer to organize advanced courses around questions rather than topics, so here's a few to think about.
      The biggest question of the term: how did one of the world's largest ecological zones -- the Arid Zone, stretching across North Africa, Arabia, and into Central Asia -- become one of the world's largest cultural zones: the core regions of Islamic civilization? To begin to bring together parts of the answer if not a single answer on its own we might consider the following questions:
      --What are the distinctive features of the Arid Zone and how have human beings adapted to them? Can we compare the human ecology of the Arid Zone to that of the world's other major ecological zones?
      --How did interactions among pastoralists, peasants, and city people shape the economies, cultures, and politics of the region?
      --What role did did empires play in creating ever-larger cosmopolitan cultures?
      --How, under the aegis of Islam, did a cultural fusion take place that created for the first time a cosmopolitan high culture stretching across (and unifying) the entire region?