Ajami, Middle East scholar, dies

He didn’t see regimes changing, talked up invasion of Iraq

Correction: Fouad Ajami, a commentator on Middle East affairs who died last week, was taunted as a boy by Sunni Muslim children, according to a profile in The Nation. A New York Times obituary, which ran in editions on June 24, misstated the source of the statement about the taunting. The obituary also referred incorrectly to Ajami’s move to the United States in 1963. He moved by himself, not with his family.

Fouad Ajami, an academic, author and broadcast commentator on Middle East affairs who helped rally support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- partly by personally advising top policymakers -- died Sunday. He was 68.

The cause was cancer, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Ajami was a senior fellow, said in a statement.

An Arab, Ajami despaired of autocratic Arab governments finding their own way to democracy, and believed that the United States must confront what he called a "culture of terrorism" after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

He likened the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to Hitler.

Ajami strove to put Arab history into a larger perspective. He often referred to Muslim rage over losing power to the West in 1683, when a Turkish siege of Vienna failed.

He said this memory had led to Arab self-pity and self-delusion as they blamed the rest of the world for their troubles. Terrorism, he said, was one result.

It was a view that had been propounded by Bernard Lewis, the Middle East historian at Princeton and public intellectual, who also urged the United States to invade Iraq and advised President George W. Bush.

Most Americans became familiar with Ajami's views on CBS News, CNN, and the PBS programs Charlie Rose and NewsHour.

He wrote more than 400 articles for magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, as well as a half-dozen books on the Middle East, some of which included his own experiences as a Shiite Muslim in majority Sunni societies.

Condoleezza Rice summoned him to the Bush White House when she was national security adviser, and he advised Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense.

In a speech in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney invoked Ajami as predicting that Iraqis would greet liberation by the U.S. military with joy.

In the years after the Iraqi invasion, Ajami continued to support the action as stabilizing.

But he said this month that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had squandered an opportunity to unify the country after American intervention and become a dictator.

More recently, he favored more aggressive policies toward Iran and Syria. Ajami's harshest criticism was leveled at Arab autocrats, who, by definition, lacked popular support. But his use of words like "tribal," "atavistic" and "clannish" to describe Arab peoples rankled some.

So did his belief that Western nations should intervene in the region to correct wrongs. Edward Said, the Palestinian cultural critic who died in 2003, accused him of having "unmistakably racist prescriptions."

Others praised him for balance. Daniel Pipes, a scholar who specializes in the Middle East, said in Commentary magazine in 2006 that Ajami had avoided "the common Arab fixation on the perfidy of Israel."

Fouad Ajami was born Sept. 19, 1945, at the foot of a castle built by Crusaders in Arnoun, a dusty village in southern Lebanon. His family came from Iran (the name Ajami means "Persian" in Arabic) and were prosperous tobacco farmers. When he was 4, the family moved to Beirut.

As a boy he was taunted by Sunni Muslim children for being Shiite and short, he wrote in The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey (1998), an examination of Arab intellectuals of the last two generations. As a teenager, he was enthusiastic about Arab nationalism, a cause he would later criticize.

He also fell in love with American culture, particularly Hollywood movies, and especially Westerns. In 1963, a day or two before his 18th birthday, his family moved to the United States.

He attended Eastern Oregon College (now University), then earned a doctorate at the University of Washington after writing a thesis on international relations and world government. He next taught political science at Princeton.

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's first book, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (1981), explored the panic and sense of vulnerability in the Arab world after Israel's victory in the 1967 war. His next book, The Vanishing Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (1986), profiled an Iranian cleric who helped transform Lebanese Shia from "a despised minority" to effective successful political actors. For the 1988 book Beirut: City of Regrets, Ajami provided a long introduction and some text to accompany a photographic essay by Eli Reed.

The Dream Palace of the Arabs told of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to renew their homelands' culture through the forces of modernism and secularism. The Christian Science Monitor called it "a cleareyed look at the lost hopes of the Arabs."

Partly because of that tone, some condemned the book as too negative. The scholar Andrew N. Rubin, writing in The Nation, said it "echoes the kind of anti-Arabism that both Washington and the pro-Israeli lobby have come to embrace."

Ajami received many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 and a National Humanities Medal in 2006.

He is survived by his wife, Michelle.

A Section on 06/24/2014

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