The Native Informant (Page 2)

Seeking to understand the causes of Ajami's transformation, I spoke to more than two dozen of his friends and acquaintances over the past several months. (Ajami did not return my phone calls or e-mails.) These men and women depicted a man at once ambitious and insecure, torn between his irascible intellectual independence and his even stronger desire to belong to something larger than himself. On the one hand, he is an intellectual dandy who, as Sayres Rudy, a former student, puts it, "doesn't like groups and thinks people who join them are mediocre." On the other, as a Shiite among Sunnis, and as an émigré in America, he has always felt the outsider's anxiety to please, and has adjusted his convictions to fit his surroundings. As a young man eager to assimilate into the urbane Sunni world of Muslim Beirut, he embraced pan-Arabism. Received with open arms by the American Jewish establishment in New York and Washington, he became an ardent Zionist. An informal adviser to both Bush administrations, he is now a cheerleader for the American empire.

The man from Arnoun appears to be living the American dream. He has a prestigious job and the ear of the President. Yet the price of power has been higher in his case than in Kissinger's. Kissinger, after all, is a figure of renown among the self-appointed leaders of "the people from whom he stems" and a frequent speaker at Jewish charity galas, whereas Ajami is a man almost entirely deserted by his people, a pariah at what should be his hour of triumph. In Arnoun, a family friend told me, "Fouad is a black sheep because of his staunch support for the Israelis." Although he frequently travels to Tel Aviv and the Persian Gulf, he almost never goes to Lebanon. In becoming an American, he has become, as he himself has confessed, "a stranger in the Arab world."

Up From Lebanon

This is an immigrant's tale.

It begins in Arnoun, a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon where Fouad al-Ajami was born on September 19, 1945. A prosperous tobacco-growing Shiite family, the Ajamis had come to Arnoun from Iran in the 1850s. (Their name, Arabic for "Persian," gave away their origins.)

When Ajami was 4, he moved with his family to Beirut, settling in the largely Armenian northeastern quarter, a neighborhood thick with orange orchards, pine trees and strawberry fields. As members of the rural Shiite minority, the country's "hewers of wood and drawers of water," the Ajamis stood apart from the city's dominant groups, the Sunni Muslims and the Maronite Christians. "We were strangers to Beirut," he has written. "We wanted to pass undetected in the modern world of Beirut, to partake of its ways." For the young "Shia assimilé," as he has described himself, "anything Persian, anything Shia, was anathema.... speaking Persianized Arabic was a threat to something unresolved in my identity." He tried desperately, but with little success, to pass among his Sunni peers. In the predominantly Sunni schools he attended, "Fouad was taunted for being a Shiite, and for being short," one friend told me. "That left him with a lasting sense of bitterness toward the Sunnis."

In the 1950s, Arab nationalism appeared to hold out the promise of transcending the schisms between Sunnis and Shiites, and the confessional divisions separating Muslims and Christians. Like his classmates, Ajami fell under the spell of Arab nationalism's charismatic spokesman, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the same time, he was falling under the spell of American culture, which offered relief from the "ancestral prohibitions and phobias" of his "cramped land." Watching John Wayne films, he "picked up American slang and a romance for the distant power casting its shadow across us." On July 15, 1958, the day after the bloody overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy by nationalist army officers, Ajami's two loves had their first of many clashes, when President Eisenhower sent the US Marines to Beirut to contain the spread of radical Arab nationalism. In their initial confrontation, Ajami chose Egypt's leader, defying his parents and hopping on a Damascus-bound bus for one of Nasser's mass rallies.

Ajami arrived in the United States in the fall of 1963, just before he turned 18. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington, where he wrote his dissertation on international relations and world government. At the University of Washington, Ajami gravitated toward progressive Arab circles. Like his Arab peers, he was shaken by the humiliating defeat of the Arab countries in the 1967 war with Israel, and he was heartened by the emergence of the PLO. While steering clear of radicalism, he often expressed horror at Israel's brutal reprisal attacks against southern Lebanese villages in response to PLO raids.

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