Fouad Ajami is a Majid Khadduri Professor and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at John Hopkins University . His Areas of Expertise consists of the Middle East; the Persian Gulf; Iran; Iraq; OPEC; international relations; Islamic religion and culture and law.
Fouad al-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.
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.
"The Fate of Nonalignment," a brilliant 1980/81 essay in Foreign Affairs in which 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 SAIS, a Washington-based graduate program.
A year after arriving at SAIS, Ajami published his first and still best book, The Arab Predicament. An anatomy of 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.
On top of his many notable publications, which include: the Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (1998); Beirut: City of Regrets (1988); The Vanished Imam: Musa Al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (1986); The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (1981; revised edition in 1992); 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 is now a regular guest on CBS News.
One notable scholarly 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 sites 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.
Ajami’s political expertise helped him arguably become the most politically influential Arab intellectual of his generation in the United States. Condoleezza Rice often summons him to the White House for advice, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a friend and former colleague, has paid tribute to him in several recent speeches on Iraq. Indeed, Ajami has been a fairly outspoken supporter of the elections and the push for democracy in Iraq, and has for that received some criticism for helping to sell America's wars in the region.
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Last updated: 08-27-2005 04:39:34
