Valerie Hoffman, Associate Professor, Program for the Study of Religion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Research: Islamic Leadership and Lineage in the Indian Ocean Region: The Scholars and Saints of Oman and the Hadramawt
Host: Yemeni Center for Research and Studies, Sanaa, Yemen; and Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman
September 2000-June 2001
(Middle East, North Africa, South Asia Regional Research Program)

Photo by Bill Wiegand

Sometimes life takes some surprising twists and turns. Just ask Valerie Hoffman. An Arabic scholar who'd spent a year in Egypt studying the lives of women in Sufi orders, she published a book on the topic in 1995 that made her a sought-after expert. "People were always asking me to write about it and to speak about it," she says. "But I felt I was too young to start getting into a rut -- I wanted to do something quite different. Strangely enough, her new direction came through the study of the eastern African language of Swahili.

In 1998, she traveled to Zanzibar -- partly to improve her Swahili and partly to take a look at the Arabic manuscripts that -- she had a hunch -- were somewhere in the country. "After all," she explains, "the Omanis had ruled there for over a hundred years. How could there not be Arabic writings?" As it turned out, there was a treasure trove of them. But to understand them better, she realized that she needed to know more about the Ibadi Muslim culture of Oman and Yemen that had produced the writings. So in September 2000, she began her Fulbright fellowship in the Middle East, poring over Ibadi manuscripts and meeting with scholars, government ministers, and even Oman's senior religious leader, the Grand Mufti.

"They loved having an outsider who read their authors and understood their theology," Hoffman recalls. "I brought back enough information to generate three books and any number of articles." Although she's back to her teaching duties at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she's already written the first chapter of her new book, "Thirsting for the Waters of Nahrawan: The Mystic Warrior-Scholars of the Modern Ibadi Renaissance." She's also working on a translation of an Ibadi theology primer, and itching to get started on the other writing projects that grew from her Fulbright year. "It was tremendous," she says. "I loved the opportunity at this stage of my life to pursue a different angle that still connects to my focus when I first started out. It's a natural field for me.

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