Fouad Ajami life and biography

Fouad Ajami is a MacArthur Fellowship winning, Lebanese-born American university professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues.

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

In "The Fate of Nonalignment," an essay in the Winter 1980/81 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, Ajami outlines how the Third world has fared in a context of nonalignment in post Cold war politics. In 1980, he accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University to become director of Middle East Studies at their international relations graduate program in Washington, D.C.: the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He holds an endowed chair as the Majid Khadduri professor.

A year after arriving at SAIS, Ajami published his first book, The Arab Predicament, which analyzed what Ajami described as an intellectual and political crisis that swept the Arab world following its defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

Subsequently, Ajami has written several other 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).

In The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey, Ajami surveyed the intellectual landscape in the Arab world and Iran, in what was in some ways an autobiography as well as a sequel to "The Arab Predicament." 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 most recent book: The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, The Arabs and The Iraqis in Iraq (2006), is about the American invasion of Iraq.

Author of books:

The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (1981)
The Vanished Imam: Musa Al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (1986)
Beirut: City of Regrets (1988)
The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey (1998)
The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (2006)

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