Ajami A. Fouad

Background

Ajami was born on September 18, 1945, in Arnoun, a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon into a Shia Muslim family. His Shiite great-grandfather had come to Arnoun from Tabriz, Iran in the 1850s.

Education

Ajami arrived in the United States in the fall of 1963, just before he turned 18. He did some of his undergraduate work at Eastern Oregon College (now Eastern Oregon University) in La Grande, Oregon. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington, where he wrote his thesis on international relations and world government, and earned a Doctor of Philosophy.

Career

Fouad Ajami has made his name in the United States not only as a scholar and the director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, but also as contributor to widely read periodicals like U.S. News and World Report and Harper's. He is also known for his impressive public speaking skills and regular appearances on television news shows for CBS. But while Ajami’s eloquence seems to be universally admired, his political analyses, both in his role as Mideast expert on the evening news and in his writings, have sometimes met with controversy.

In 1973 Ajami joined the politics department of Princeton University. He made a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination. In 1980, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University named him director of Middle East studies. He joined the Hoover Institution in 2011. Ajami was an advisor to United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as well as a friend and colleague of Paul Wolfowitz.

Ajami was a frequent contributor on Middle Eastern issues and contemporary international history to The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, as well as other journals and periodicals. He was also a contributor and close friend to Anderson Cooper of CNN.He was also a frequent guest on Fox News Channel's "America's News Headquarters w/ Uma Pemmaraju." Ajami frequently appeared on PBS, CBS and CNN News. along with Fox News.

As the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, including, in 1982, the much-coveted MacArthur Foundation Award, Ajami’s academic credentials have never been questioned. More controversial has been the political bent of some of his writings and views, which have at times been called “anti-Arab.” The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has protested CBS’s extensive reliance on Ajami as its Mideast expert, in the face of many other able candidates.

Ajami’s first major book, "The Arab Predicament", relates the panic and sense of vulnerability that Israel’s 1967 victory created in the Arab world. Organized into three parts, the book renders, in part one, the conflicts among three prevalent Arab points of view — “the radical, the Ba’thist, and the fundamentalist,” according to a Choice reviewer; in part two, Ajami explores Egypt’s central role in the Middle East and the effects of the influx of oil money into the region; in part three, he covers the rise of religious fundamentalism. This book was well received by critics from Choice and Library Journal. Elizabeth R. Hayford of Library Journal admired Ajami’s ability to “place Islamic fundamentalism within the broad issues of relations between ruler and ruled.”

Ajami’s 1998 work "The Dream Palace of the Arabs", has generated considerably more critical heat than his previous works. Although a Publishers Weekly review was positive, taking the book at its word, so to speak, and appreciating it as a “cohesive and illuminating cultural history” for “even the most general reader”, reviews in journals with stronger political stances reflected those leanings strongly. Andrew Rubin’s review for the Nation stated early on that, as a Mideast expert on television, Ajami “echoes the kind of anti-Arabism that both Washington and the pro-Israel lobby have come to embrace.” Rubin showed some appreciation for Ajami’s thoughtful analysis of the period of literary modernism that was born in the Mideast from the early 1940s onward, but whose secular bent became non-viable after the religious revolutions that swept the region.

In June 2011, Ajami wrote an article for The New Republic arguing that the U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, writing that "the United States will have to be prepared for and accept the losses and adversity that are an integral part of staying on, rightly, in so tangled and difficult a setting." On June 13, 2011 he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the unrest in Syria that "The mask of the Assad regime finally falls..." On June 22, 2014, Ajami died from prostate cancer at a summer home in Maine, aged 68.

Achievements

• Ajami was a 1982 winner of a five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship in the arts and sciences. In 2006, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bush, and the Bradley Prize, and in 2011 he earned the Benjamin Franklin Award for public service, and the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Beirut 1988
  • The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 1982
  • Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent (The Great Unraveling: The Remaking of th) - Kindle edition by Fouad Ajami. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. 2014
  • The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq - Kindle edition by Fouad Ajami. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. 2006
  • In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance 2014
  • The Syrian Rebellion 2012
  • The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Canto original series) 1992
  • The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon 1987
  • Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey 1999

Politics

Ajami was an outspoken supporter of the Iraq War, the nobility of which, "can be no doubt."

Views

Ajami believes that states will remain the dominant factor influencing the global framework and interaction. He also argues that civilizational ties are only utilized by states and groups when it is in their best interest to do so and that modernity and secularism are here to stay, especially in places with considerable struggles to obtain them, and he cites the example of the Indian middle class. Ajami also believes that civilizations do not control states; rather, states control civilizations.

Quotations: "Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time."

"There should be no illusions about the sort of Arab landscape that America is destined to find if, or when, it embarks on a war against the Iraqi regime. There would be no "hearts and minds" to be won in the Arab world, no public diplomacy that would convince the overwhelming majority of Arabs that this war would be a just war. An American expedition in the wake of thwarted UN inspections would be seen by the vast majority of Arabs as an imperial reach into their world, a favor to Israel, or a way for the United States to secure control over Iraq's oil. No hearing would be given to the great foreign power."

"America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world – the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects."

Membership

Ajami was a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Board of Advisors of the journal Foreign Affairs. Ajami was a founding member of The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa and was Vice Chairman of its academic council. Ajami also sat on the editorial board of Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank. He was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the cochair of their Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

Interests

• Middle Eastern studies

• Artists

  Bernard Lewis, Joseph Conrad

Connections

Fouad A. Ajami was married to Michelle Fouad.

Spouse:

Michelle Fouad