Warning: fairly shameless praise. Professor Haqqani — who I believe may be reading this blog — may want to cover his ears.

Today was the last day of Professor Haqqani's class for this semester; we've spent the past few classes with mostly just open discussion, since a lot of the heavy content was weighted more towards the early part of the course. So today we all handed in our papers, and spent most of the remaining time going around discussing them with everybody talking about what they'd wrote... I have to say I actually envy Professor Haqqani the grading task he has ahead of him, because I was really amazed at the diversity of topics covered by people in their papers. My paper is one example of someone going deeper on some of the issues we raised in class, but there are so many others that people could — and did — cover when given a topic as broad and as deep as Islam and South Asian politics.

In some classes, that kind of breadth would make it hard to find any grounding in the subject, but my personal experience in Professor Haqqani's class has been quite different. After having gotten sucked into Steve Coll's Ghost Wars this summer, I was keen to learn more about a region I had previously known very little about, and Prof. Haqqani helped me expand that interest in the early weeks of his class. Having given us a broader base of knowledge to start from, he then stepped back and let us take it further by focusing down in our papers. Having increased my knowledge of the Uyghurs from basically nothing to.. well, something maybe midway in between bare familiarity and the kind of deep scholarship present in my sources, the only thing I found myself wishing at the end is that I could read all the other topics my classmates had chosen to focus on, so that I could share in their research and collectively deepen the whole breadth of knowledge I had acquired during the lecture parts of the course.

In any case, I think it's been one of the best courses I've taken at BU to date, and am immensely glad I went for it when the opportunity to register came over the summer. (The class I had been planning on taking, History of War, was also quite good according to an ex-roomate who's taking it, but having literally finished Ghost Wars the day before recieving an e-mail indicating the presence of the new class, I knew this was an opportunity I shouldn't pass up.) I have another class with Prof. Haqqani next semester — Islamic Political Movements and U.S. Policy — which I have equally high hopes for; expect to hear about it in the future.