Maybe it was the dream a year ago, or possibly the welcome he received in this department on his first visit. But upon taking his PhD in the interdisciplinary Human Sciences program from George Washington University in August, Waleed El-Ansary reckons he was meant to accept the appointment at USC, starting this semester.

Born in Cairo, at age two he and his mother accompanied his father on a Fulbright to Ohio State. At six, he and his younger brother were moved to Louisiana when his academic father took a position at Louisiana State. Then came a move to George Washington University, where El-Ansary was to earn a BA in Economics followed by an MA at the University of Maryland.

His dissertation examines competing views of man and nature in mainstream, "neoclassical" economic theory on the one hand, and Islamic economics on the other. The contemporary literature in Islamic economics, he finds, often adopts uncritically the key philosophical presuppositions of neoclassical theory, neglecting the view of man and nature in the Islamic intellectual heritage. As time permits he will ready the work for publication.

Following a story-book meeting and courtship, he married Eman in Cairo, dividing the honeymoon between an elegant hotel room overlooking the Nile and the Pyramids and then a fortifying umrah pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. They live with their five-year-old daughter, Noor, in East Columbia.

He is teaching the introductory course, RELG 110, together with "Introduction to Islam" (Fall) and "Sufism" (Spring). His first interest has become interfaith dialogue, and he acknowledges inspiration by his dissertation advisor, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who lectured at USC several years ago. At the San Francisco conference with the Dalai Lama in April he contributed a report on interfaith initiatives at al-Azhar University and by Shaykh 'Ali Juma'a, currently Grand Mufti of Egypt.