Fouad Ajami (1945–2014) was a Lebanese-born American scholar and writer. He taught first at Princeton University and then, for thirty years, was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He wrote and spoke extensively on Middle Eastern issues over the course of nearly forty years. He was the Herbert and Jane Dwight Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the cochair of its Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He wrote numerous books, including The Arab Predicament, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, The Syrian Rebellion, In This Arab Time, and a monograph, The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent. His writings also include more than four hundred essays on Arab and Islamic politics, U.S. foreign policy, and contemporary international history. Ajami received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellows Award (1982) and the National Humanities Medal. His writings charted the road to 9/11, the Iraq War, and the U.S. presence in the Arab-Islamic world.