Farid El Khazen

Just over a year ago Fouad Ajami passed away. On this sad anniversary he merits a belated word of appreciation. Ajami was my teacher in the 1980s at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., where I had enrolled for my Master’s Degree, and later my doctorate. Arriving from Cornell University, where I had joined the doctoral program in economics, I was a newcomer to the business-like setting at SAIS, as well as to its Middle East Studies program. Ajami had recently joined SAIS, after years of teaching at Princeton University. He replaced Majid Khadduri, the longtime professor of Arab and Islamic studies, who was still teaching a course in the run-up to his retirement.

I went to see Ajami to inquire about courses in Middle East politics. I introduced myself and hinted at our “shared” Lebanese background, but received a rather unfriendly reply. He recommended that I take Khadduri’s course, not his own.

I ran into Ajami a few times in the SAIS lobby. We engaged in brief chats and went our separate ways. One time, as we shared the elevator to the library, Ajami inquired about my work. I told him of my belated interest in international relations and the Middle East and mentioned I had written a paper on the subject. He seemed interested. I gave him a copy, which he read, then conveyed his appreciation of it to me a week later.

That was our academic “coup de foudre.” I then took several courses with Ajami, especially after joining the doctoral program and he became my dissertation adviser. We engaged in lengthy discussions about the Middle East, but least of all on my dissertation. Ajami had little patience for academic guidance.

Instead, he was then deeply taken up by research for a book he was writing on Imam Musa al-Sadr. This was his journey back to his Lebanese Shiite roots, after a break of three decades. The interviews he conducted for “The Vanished Imam” with Sadr’s close associates, notably former Lebanese Parliament Speaker Hussein al-Husseini, left a mark on him. Here was a welcome diversion from the “Arab Predicament,” his groundbreaking book on Arab politics after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Following this brief Lebanon interlude, Ajami drifted back to international politics and literature, his first love. After I graduated from SAIS, Ajami regarded my hasty return to Lebanon, then still ravaged by war, as “foolish,” and he expressed this to common friends. I think he was right.

Fouad Ajami enjoyed debate and thrived on controversial issues, just as he liked to shock audiences in the classroom and outside. In hearings before U.S. congressional committees, Ajami did not hesitate to characterize the Shiites as suicidal and the Sunnis as homicidal. He was a media star, gifted for sound bites. Few were like him in so masterfully speaking the way that they wrote. Writing was his passion, teaching was his profession. Ajami wrote English prose with an Oriental touch. Much of his writing mirrored his personality and unique style. He was a writer by talent, an acute observer by instinct and a scholar by training.

However, I always felt in Ajami a deep sense of insecurity and restlessness behind the attitude of calm and indifference that he communicated. He was a “realist” and a dreamer, a self-made man who had come a long way. The son of Lebanese emigrants to West Africa, Ajami went to high school in Lebanon and traveled to the United States to attend university. He identified with American culture and society openly and bluntly, to the chagrin of his detractors, who attacked him as someone who had “betrayed” the Arab cause. On occasion Ajami may have gone too far, but so too did his critics, who engaged in systematic character assassination of him. This was in line with the practice of zero-sum Arab politics, albeit on American soil.

Ajami was independent minded, feeling no obligation to garner sympathy. The academic feuds of those days reflected the divide between American intellectuals of Arab origin. The Iraq war in 2003 put Ajami back on stage, and here again was an occasion for a bitter clash between him and the rest, as he got close to American decision-makers, especially during the George W. Bush presidency. Ajami was out to tear down another dream palace of the Arabs, to borrow from the title of his 1998 book, in which he reflected on the frustrated dreams of an entire Arab generation – his own generation.

In the last few years I had lost contact with Ajami and was not aware that he was ill. He moved to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution though he still resided in New York City, where he always felt most at home. A few years earlier he had declined an offer to teach at Harvard, partly because he enjoyed the freedom of living in New York and commuting to Washington.

I will always remember Ajami’s courage, honesty, great intellect, and sincerity as a mentor and friend with admiration. He is in the same league as outstanding Western-educated Lebanese scholars and intellectuals such as Philip Hitti, Albert Hourani, and Charles Malek. I was fortunate our paths crossed.

The fond memories I have of Fouad Ajami, the poet of international relations, as George Liska, another great mind at SAIS, described his writing style and scholarship, will never fade. May his soul rest in peace.