Ajami's Method
by Russell A. Berman via The Caravan
Aspects of Fouad Ajami’s method are inimitable, or nearly so, inseparable from the distinctive personality of this one remarkable thinker. His reflections on the politics of the Middle East always depended on his empathetic understanding of the cultures, the complex histories, the literary achievements, and the ever-present currents of faith. Add to this his specifically Lebanese perspective, indisputably rooted in the region but also always with an eye to the sea, to the West, and to a very different political-cultural world.

The Saudi Evolution
​Reuel Marc Gerecht 

Introduction To Crosswinds: The Way Of Saudi Arabia
by Cole Bunzel via The Caravan
The publication of Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia has been a long time coming. Fouad Ajami’s intimate portrait of Saudi society and politics, drawing on his visits to the kingdom in the 1990s and early 2000s, was finished in 2010. The manuscript was submitted to Hoover Institution Press that year, and in the coming months it would be edited and typeset.

HOOVER WEBSITE

HOOVER PUBLICATIONS ON AJAMI

WINEP’s Dennis Ross: Bandar speaks out: the changing landscape in the Mideast

Walter Russell Mead writes: Many Arab leaders fear that Turkey will use the brotherhood’s networks to build support for Ankara’s regional ambitions. Iran can only call on the minority Shiites for religious support, but Turkey can attract supporters from the Sunni majority. Ironically, the current Arab nightmare is that the next U.S. administration won’t support Israel enough. Regional leaders fear that Team Biden would ignore Israeli as well as Arab objections, embracing Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, despite Mr. Erdogan’s ambitions, and dropping sanctions against Iran as part of a return to the 2015 nuclear deal. – Wall Street Journal

Ken Pollack reviews David H. Rundell’s “Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads” and Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck’s “Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power.” He concludes that while the Saudis may be problematic allies, the US is often the most difficult ally of all. Read the review here.

In a Dispatch op-ed, Danielle Pletka argues that while a rekindling of the Democratic love affair with Tehran promises rough seas ahead in the Middle East, the larger problem may be that both a Trump second term or a Biden administration will likely wash their hands of the region, feeling that the mission as they defined it has been accomplished. Learn more here.

 In a National Interest op-ed, Michael Rubin notes that the threat of the embassy closure does not only fulfill the aims of Iran and the militias but also weakens Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi at a critical time. Pompeo’s threat, bluff or not, has reverberated across Baghdad. Continue here.

Martin Kramer on the Middle East

• It takes two to make history

Bringing the Middle East Back Home
​The American Orientalist Class attempts to paint a fantasy Middle Eastern landscape on the American canvas
 Tony Badran 

https://www.amazon.com/Syrian-Rebellion-Ajami-Fouad-Hardcover/dp/B01181X44I/ref=sr1fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531709123&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=found+ajami+syrian+rebellion

IS children, the lost generation
The misallocation of resources, social stigma and de facto administrative discrimination uphold obstacles to the reintegration of children in Iraq born under or recruited by the Islamic State.

The world, in all its tangled webs, will be read into the Boston bombing suspects.

For some, the Tsarnaev brothers are Chechen avengers, young men seared by the long war in Russia’s “southern backyard.” For Vladimir Putin and his regime, this deed of terror in an American city is, doubtless, a vindication of the iron fist with which the Russians fought their long war against Chechnya, proof of the malignancy of the Islamist menace.

Foes of immigration can be expected to offer the Tsarnaev brothers as evidence that a nation that throws its gates wide open courts this kind of calamity. One way or the other, the matter of Islamist radicalism hovers over this episode.

There are other testimonies that speak to the puzzlement of our time, to the difficulty of drawing hard lines between cultures in conflict.

A classmate who knew Dzhokar, the younger of the two brothers, from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School described him as a cool guy, a regular American kid on the wrestling team. Another classmate, Ty Barros, describes a boy who liked sports and listened to rap music and hung out with other kids in the neighborhood. Dzhokar never discussed religion and politics, this acquaintance adds. Pamela Rolon, a residential adviser in the dorm where Dzhokar lived, at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said that the young man “studied hard and spoke English beautifully.”

Baseball Caps
The world outwits us, furrows run across it: We look for fixed identities and whole, intact worlds, and we find instead the shaking up of continents, the intermingling of peoples and ways.
For me, the earliest evidence of the foreign birth of the bombers was not their features, as we saw them in the grainy early footage, but the baseball caps -- one turned backward -- and the backpacks. This was Americanism as the two assailants understood it -- easily available, the kind that could slip across boundaries, evade detection. American urban culture fashioned the look, but it is now the property of one and all.

We know the pattern. These assailants live on the seam between countries and cultures.

Think of Faisal Shahzad, the young Pakistani who, three years ago, sought to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. He had driven his car from his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He had worked for Elizabeth Arden, and completed that all-American degree, the MBA. Neighbors recall him jogging in the evening near his home. The U.S. was his home and wasn’t; Pakistan, the land of his birth, was no longer home. It could no longer answer his needs.

He came to militant Islam after personal failure and disappointment. For him, the faith had become a weapon. He found it online, on the World Wide Web -- that mix of modern technique and belligerent enmities.

Of all that has been said and written about this breed of “nowhere men” who have risen to war against the very messy world that forged them, the most poignant was said about the Lebanese-born terrorist, Ziad Jarrah, who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11: He never missed a party in Beirut and never missed a prayer in Hamburg.
​
Jarrah had been the quintessential party boy in Lebanon, hip and trendy; he and his sisters were strangers to traditional Islam. The pampered boy of an affluent family was unhinged by a radical reading of the faith that he found in the storefront mosques in Hamburg. Modernity failed and unsettled Jarrah.

Making Sense Of The Syrian Civil War
mentioning Fouad Ajami, Hoover Institution via The New York Times 
After a chemical attack in Syria on Saturday that killed dozens and is suspected to have been launched by the Assad government, President Trump is warning that the United States may strike back. These books will get you up to speed on the seven-year war and highlight those most affected: the country’s people.

In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance by Fouad Ajami. With @samueltadros, Hudson Institute.
"In this collection of bold and wide-ranging essays, Fouad Ajami offers his views on the Middle East, commenting on the state of affairs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and more. He brings into focus the current struggles of the region through detailed historical standpoints and a highly personal perspective. The author discusses such landmark past events as the Algerian civil war, the state of the Arab world shortly after 9/11, and the pan-Arab awakening that began in 2011, as well as current events such as the Syrian rebellion and the repercussions of its brutal response from Bashar al-Assad. In addition, he sheds new light on some of the significant players in the Arab world, past and present, from Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate of the Arabs, to Ziad Jarrah—the terrorist who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11."
https://www.amazon.com/This-Arab-Time-Pursuit-Deliverance/dp/0817914943/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470005828&sr=1-4

In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance by Fouad Ajami. With @SamuelTadros, Hudson Institute.
"In this collection of bold and wide-ranging essays, Fouad Ajami offers his views on the Middle East, commenting on the state of affairs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and more. He brings into focus the current struggles of the region through detailed historical standpoints and a highly personal perspective. The author discusses such landmark past events as the Algerian civil war, the state of the Arab world shortly after 9/11, and the pan-Arab awakening that began in 2011, as well as current events such as the Syrian rebellion and the repercussions of its brutal response from Bashar al-Assad. In addition, he sheds new light on some of the significant players in the Arab world, past and present, from Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate of the Arabs, to Ziad Jarrah—the terrorist who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11."