In a year replete with devastating news, the June 22 death of Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami hit especially hard. For decades, Fouad, a man of genius I was honored to call a friend, was an invaluable mentor in matters involving the Arab world and its often-lethal discontents. It was a cauldron of self-destructive passions he knew well, this Lebanese Shiite who came to the United States because he found here a model of the civility and tolerance he wished for his people.
Fouad Ajami described the pathologies of the Arab world with singular clarity and literary grace. His was not the carping of the exile who despises what he has left; it was the sharp, penetrating, and ultimately compassionate (because true) critique of one who mourned the catastrophic condition of contemporary Arab civilization, the hijacking of Arab politics by self-serving dictators, virulent anti-Semites, and Islamist fanatics, and the untold lives warped or lost in consequence. That deep, moral passion about the corruptions of Arab culture was never more eloquently expressed than in the column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, a month after 9/11
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