(September 19, 1945 – June 22, 2014)
Born in southern Lebanon and raised in Beirut, Fouad Ajami authored Beirut: City of Regrets, The Vanished Imam, The Arab Predicament, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq.
Professor Ajami joined Stanford University’s Hoover Institution as a senior fellow in 2011.
He published widely with some 400 essays, reviews, and columns of opinion, which appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times Magazine. He was a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs magazine and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Professor Ajami was the recipient of the five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship which he was awarded in 1982. In 2006, he was granted the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement.
In November 2006, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the President of the United States and the National Endowment of the Humanities. The Humanities medal citation noted: Fouad Ajami is known “for his scholarship, which has revealed common threads of hope across lines of geography, religion, and history. With an unclouded eye and a poet’s gift for words, he has broadened and enriched Americans’ understanding of the yearnings, dreams, and predicaments of the people of the Middle East.”
Professor Ajami was founding vice chairman of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. He passed away on June 22, 2014.