Fouad Ajami

Biography: 

Fouad Ajami passed away on June 22, 2014.  He was the Herbert and Jane Dwight Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the cochair of the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. From 1980 to 2011 he was director of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Arab Predicament, The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. His most recent publication is In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance (Hoover Institution Press, 2014). His writings also include some four hundred essays on Arab and Islamic politics, US foreign policy, and contemporary international history. Ajami has received numerous awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Award for public service (2011), the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism (2011), the Bradley Prize (2006), the National Humanities Medal (2006), and the MacArthur Fellows Award (1982). His research has charted the road to 9/11, the Iraq war, and the US presence in the Arab-Islamic world.

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Recent Commentary

Analysis and Commentary

America and the Solitude of the Syrians

by Fouad Ajamivia Wall Street Journal
Friday, January 6, 2012

Deep down, the Obama administration seems to believe that Assad's tyranny is preferable to the opposition...

What Obama Left Behind in Iraq

by Fouad Ajamivia Advancing a Free Society
Sunday, December 18, 2011

'The tide of war is receding, and the soul of Baghdad remains, the soul of Iraq remains," Vice President Joe Biden said at Camp Victory, by the Baghdad airport, earlier this month, in the countdown to the official end of the Iraq war. In truth, the receding tide Mr.

Analysis and Commentary

Beware of Greeks Bearing Debt

by Fouad Ajamivia Newsweek
Monday, December 12, 2011

Greece lives with the sense that it is exempt from the demands of political and economic discipline...

In the News

Beware of Greeks Bearing Debt

by Fouad Ajamivia Defining Ideas (Hoover Institution)
Friday, December 2, 2011

Europe is paying for the pride of Greece—and for the legacy of the Classical Age...

Beware of Greeks Bearing Debt

by Fouad Ajamivia Advancing a Free Society
Friday, December 2, 2011

“We are on a difficult course, on a new Odyssey for Greece,” former Prime Minister George Papandreou once observed of his country’s economic malady.

Egypt and the Fruits of the Pharaohs

by Fouad Ajamivia Advancing a Free Society
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Egyptian history plays tricks with its interpreters. This ancient society is known for the stability given it by the Nile, a well-mannered and orderly river, and by a pharaonic culture where the rulers were deities. But this timeless image is largely false.

Analysis and Commentary

Egypt and the Fruits of the Pharaohs

by Fouad Ajamivia Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

What we are witnessing is not the consequence of democracy but rather a half-century of authoritarianism...

Why Are We Still Backing Hamid Karzai?

by Fouad Ajamivia Advancing a Free Society
Monday, November 21, 2011

“The lion doesn’t like it if a foreigner intrudes into his house. The lion doesn’t like it if a stranger enters his house.

Analysis and Commentary

Why Are We Still Backing Hamid Karzai?

by Fouad Ajamivia New Republic
Saturday, November 19, 2011

He offers us the most peculiar of gifts—the right to stay on indefinitely, shore up his regime, and pour our scarce treasure for his family and retainers. That Afghan lion doesn’t make its own kills...

Analysis and Commentary

Gadhafi and the Swindle of Dictatorship

by Fouad Ajamivia Wall Street Journal
Friday, October 21, 2011

We needn't dispatch our forces to all lands of trouble, but our burden of celebrating liberty on foreign shores endures...

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