TLDR: It's a scoring class with interesting material, however you need to put in effort. So it is not difficult, but it is time consuming. I would recommend you to take this class and Prof Yarbrough is a great lecturer. Took this class partly online as it was in Winter 2022. The professor is great to listen to and the lectures and subject matter are generally interesting. This is an upper div but I took this class as a freshman and got an A.

Prof Yarbrough is a good teacher and interesting to listen to with a sense of humor. The class is about Islam and how it has interacted with other religions (or societies) in many different ways. Themes taught in the class include the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic empires, Islam and violence, Muslims in Europe now etc. He makes lectures very interesting and I liked the lectures a lot.

Most classes were structured like this: The professor will explain some basic concepts, dive deeply and analyze some examples like a case study, give a conclusion and then present like an original insight/takeaway from this. It was interesting and engaging.

Lectures were fun, the readings were not. There are a lot of readings and you will NEED to do the readings. Expect around 60-100 pages of reading a week. Most of the readings will be very dense, academic texts or really old historical texts and they will be dry and challenging. The readings are rigorous and will need effort.

60% of the total grade is more or less guaranteed if you do the very very bare minimum and you can easily score 80% with minimal effort, getting an A requires some effort but again it's not a difficult class.

One good thing is that all the readings (which reading is due for when) and the syllabus (which mentions the focus question for each week, details about your final paper etc) are given to you at the start of the class itself so you can plan accordingly and get ahead if you have some free time early on.

Grading:
10% Discussion section attendance
10% Discussion section participation
10% Weekly Focus Question Submission
10% Weekly Micro-Quiz
20% Midterm
20% Final Exam
20% Final Paper

More info:

1. Each week you submit a one page focus question response with each response worth 1% of your total grade. So there will be a focus question which will basically require you to answer it and use evidence from the readings to support your answer. However, this did not take much time because you do not really need to present a world class essay or anything. Just have complete sentences and cite the appropriate evidence from the readings (which after reading the focus question you can search the readings for key words and quickly find) and you will be fine. Honestly I wrote most of these before I even went through the readings and each week's response took under 20 mins to do so I was fine.

2. Micro-quiz: at the start of every Thursday's lecture, we will have a 10 minute 5 question micro-quiz with fill in the blanks, MCQ or T/F questions. Each micro-quiz is worth 1% of your grade. The quiz will be about the big picture ideas of the readings or basically be a multiple choice question about what is the thesis of the author of a certain reading. It is a pass/fail micro-quiz meaning you get full credit if you get 3/5 correct or more and you get 0 if you get 2/5 or below. Even if you barely skim the readings, this should be easy. I went through many of these without doing the readings and still passed the quiz because I used my common sense.

3. The mid-term and the final have half of the questions allocated to content from lectures and half to readings alone. So half of your questions will be exclusively from the readings. The questions are very straightforward and quite basic so if you did the readings you will be fine and won't have to sweat, but that said you need to do the readings. 60% of each exam is based on MCQ/ TF/ Fill Blanks questions and the remaining 40% was based on 2 essay questions (500 words each). That said, the 2 essays were chosen from an essay bank of 5 questions that was released like a week before so you can prepare for this easily. Our exams were open book so that was great too, though I do not know if they will be open book or online henceforth after Winter 2022.

4. The final paper basically requires you to do what the professor does in each lecture: analyze an interaction across a boundary and draw an original insight from that, and using the readings (separate readings assigned for the final paper) explain what happened, how this interaction played out and why it happened the way it did and not any other way. You will be given like 3-4 different choices and you can pick a topic. Again, the details of the final paper are released more than a month in advance so it is easy and nothing to stress about. My paper was like 6 pages so not a big deal.