Fouad A. Ajami (Arabic: فؤاد عجمي, romanized: Fuʾād ʿAjamī; September 18, 1945 – June 22, 2014) was a Lebanese-born American professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Ajami was an outspoken supporter of the Bush Doctrine and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he believed to have been a "noble war" and a "gift" to the people of Iraq.
Ajami was born in Arnoun, a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon into a Shia Muslim family. His Shia great-grandfather had immigrated to Arnoun from Tabriz, Iran in the 1850s. In Arabic, the word "Ajam" means "non-Arab" or "non-Arabic-speaker"; specifically in this context, it means "Persian" or "Persian-speaker." 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 State 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 PhD.
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, CNN and Fox News.
Nephew's link to killing of cleric
On 16 February 1984 two agents of the Israeli Shin Bet, acting on orders from Meir Dagan and working as members of the terrorist Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (a front organization for the Israel Defense Forces) killed Lebanese Shia imam and militant Ragheb Harb. Hussein Abbas, one of the assassins, was a nephew of Ajami, and after the assassination he fled to America where he lived in the home of his uncle.
In "The Fate of Nonalignment," an essay in the Winter 1980/81 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, Ajami outlined how in his opinion 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 book The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, The Arabs and The Iraqis in Iraq (2006), is about the American invasion of Iraq.
Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia (2020), was published posthumously, by the Hoover Institute.
View of Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"
One notable contribution Ajami made in the September October 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs was a rebuttal to Samuel Huntington’s "The Clash of Civilizations?", regarding the state and future of international relations after the Cold War. According to Judith Miller, Ajami continued to argue that militant Islamism of the type represented by Al Qaeda had peaked and was fading into insignificance.
Huntington presents a world divided at the highest level into eight civilizations, and includes a number of countries that are "torn" between two civilizations, arguing that these 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 further claims that the pre-eminence of a so-called "kin-country" syndrome will provide a civilizational rallying point that will replace political ideology and traditional "balance of power" considerations for relations between states and nations, resulting in a division between the West and "the rest" creating a backlash against Western values (which supposedly "differ fundamentally" from those prevalent in other civilizations).