Fouad Ajami

Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins.

Ajami was born on September 19, 1945, in a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon called Arnoun. His Shiite family, the Ajamis, had come to Arnoun from Iran in the 1850s. His name "Ajami," indicates that he is from Iran because the word "Ajam" is Arabic for Persian.

Ajami arrived in the United States in the fall of 1963, just before he turned 18. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington, where he wrote his dissertation on international relations and world government. In 1973 Ajami joined Princeton's political science department, making a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination.

In "The Fate of Nonalignment," an essay in the Winter 1980/81 issue of Foreign Affairs he outlines how the Third world has fared in a context of nonalignment in post Cold war politics. In 1980, the accepted the offer from Johns Hopkins of the position as director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University's international relations graduate program in Washington, D.C., the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

A year after arriving at SAIS, Ajami published his first book, "The Arab Predicament." It analyzed the intellectual and political crisis that swept the Arab world following its defeat by Israel in the 1967 war. Ajami became the recipient of the five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship in the arts and sciences in 1982.

He wrote three other full length books, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (1998), Beirut: City of Regrets (1988) and The Vanished Imam: Musa Al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (1986). Ajami is 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, and other journals and periodicals, as well. He frequently appears on PBS and CBS News.

One notable contribution he made in the September October 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs was a rebuttal to Samuel Huntington’s "The Clash of Civilizations?", which offered a strong antithesis in the dialogue about the state and future of international relations after the Cold War. Huntington presents a world divided at the highest level into 8 civilizations, and includes a number of countries which are “torn” between two. He argues that civilizational divides are far more fundamental than economic interests, ideology, and regimes and that the world is becoming a smaller place with increasingly close interactions. He claims that the pre-eminence of a so-called "kin-country" syndrome and will provide a civilizational rallying point that will replace political ideology and traditional "balance of power" considerations for relations between states and nations. As a result, Huntington predicts that the West will eventually stand against "the rest" and create a backlash against Western values which supposedly "differ fundamentally" from those prevalent in other civilizations.

In his article “The Summoning”, Ajami criticises Huntington for ignoring the empirical complexities and state interests which drive conflicts in and between civilizations. 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.

His critiques of Huntington had a resounding effect on the East – West dichotomy, offering an important alternative assessment of future relations.

In The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey, Ajami surveyed the intellectual landscape in the Arab world, plus Iran, in what was in some ways an autobiography as well as a sequel to "The Arab Predicament." Two of his more memorable lines in "Dream Palace" were original takes on two highly contentious subjects. On Middle Eastern politics, he wrote of "a world where triumph rarely comes with mercy or moderation." On Pan-Arabism, he described the ideology as "Sunni dominion dressed in secular garb."

Ajami’s is arguably the most politically influential Arab American intellectual of his generation. One of the reasons for this is because unlike many Arab American leaders and intellectuals, he is an unabashed patriot and supporter of the government, and generally avoids comment on the poisonous Arab-Israeli conflict. Another reason is that he writes in a very lyrical style and avoids the academic jargon and dated theories that many in his field still rely on. Condoleezza Rice has been known to summon him to the White House for advice, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a friend and former colleague at SAIS, has paid tribute to him in speeches on Iraq. Ajami has been an outspoken supporter of the push for democracy in Iraq, which has drawn some criticism from others in the Ivory Tower.

External links

• Johns Hopkins SAIS Page for Fouad Ajami
• Rude Arab Awakening, assessment of Ajami by Martin Kramer