Fouad Ajami was born in 1945 in Arnoun, Lebanon. He was the Herbert and Jane Dwight Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the cochair of its Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. From 1980 to 2011 he was professor and director of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He authored several books: The Arab Predicament, The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, The Syrian Rebellion (Hoover Institution Press, 2012), and, most recently, a monograph, The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent (Hoover Institution Press, 2014). He was a widely published essayist whose writings, reviews, and columns of opinion appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Policy, The New York Times Magazine, and other forums in the United States and abroad.
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. In June 2011, he was awarded The Eric Breindel Prize for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. In November 2011, he received the seventh annual Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award from the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His writings charted the road to 9/11, the Iraq war, and the US presence in the Arab-Islamic world. Fouad Ajami died on June 22, 2014.