**this is my professor’s message to me:
Hussam,
You might read over the points made on this guide to writing research papers at Georgetown University:
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/kingch/How_to_Write_a_Research_Paper.htm
As I’ve urged you to do before, you need to do some reading first. Prior to learning something about the topic you can have no idea of what questions to ask ro how to focus your research and your paper.
As for as a research question, I think simply asking something like “what was the relationship between the yoga tradition of Patanjali and others and the Sufi traditions present in India?” You paper should first summarize the aspect of the Indian traditions of yoga that you will focus on, then discuss the presence of Islam in India and how the Sufi orders came into contact with yoga, and then look at the interaction between the two. How did the two traditions influence each other? Did the Sufis borrow yoga ideas? What the development of yoga influence by Sufi ideas and practices? You will have to see–this is the purpose of your research. You paper should report your findings.
The first step is to read the materials that I sent to get an idea of what there is to write about. As far as general information on the yoga tradtions of India, you should have plenty of information for our course for that. As for Islam in Indian, general articles from the Encyclopedia of Religion and the Encyclopedia of Hinduism on the library’s e-resources page should be adequate.
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However, the last part about general information about yoga tradition is not an obligation. So, you can just research where ever you want as long as it is a scholar source. For example, I searched in The Encyclopedia of Hinduism and found a lot of things but it confused me with what i have taken from the course. therefore, please do what you can. it is a paper i had to hand in last semester but i could not until now. So please try your best. you can change whatever you see fit more; the topic, number of references, etc.
