A Year After His Death, Fouad Ajami's Detractors Look Worse than Ever

A Year After His Death, Fouad Ajami’s Detractors Look Worse than Ever

Fouad Ajami

Lebanese-born Middle East studies scholar Fouad Ajami died one year ago today. At the time of his death, his lemming-like detractors attacked him, viciously at times, for his refusal to ape their cultural relativism and biased scholarship. Today at FrontPage Magazine, CW director Winfield Myers critiques the critics and finds them boorish and intellectually parochial:

“He came with conceptions, but he made a voyage of discovery. And so he caught truths, deeper and more durable truths about himself and about us all.” (The Traveler’s Luck)

So wrote Fouad Ajami, who died one year ago today, about Joseph Conrad, whose talents for capturing the clash between East and West he judged superior to V.S. Naipaul’s. He might have been writing about his own gift for interpreting the Middle East from his adopted American home. The truths he caught were gained (like Conrad’s) through an immigrant’s eyes—eyes trained not just on his adopted country, but on the land of his birth.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

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Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.