In 1973 Ajami joined Princeton's political science department, commuting to work from his apartment in New York. He made a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination. One friend remembers him as "a fairly typical advocate of Third World positions." Yet he was also acutely aware of the failings of Third World states, which he unsparingly diagnosed in "The Fate of Nonalignment," a brilliant 1980/81 essay in Foreign Affairs. In 1980, when Johns Hopkins offered him a position as director of Middle East Studies at SAIS, a Washington-based graduate program, he took it.

A year after arriving at SAIS, Ajami published his first and still best book, The Arab Predicament. An anatomy of the intellectual and political crisis that swept the Arab world following its defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, it is one of the most probing and subtle books ever written in English on the region. Ranging gracefully across political theory, literature and poetry, Ajami draws an elegant, often moving portrait of Arab intellectuals in their anguished efforts to put together a world that had come apart at the seams. The book did not offer a bold or original argument; like Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers, it provided an interpretive survey--respectful even when critical--of other people's ideas. It was the book of a man who had grown disillusioned with Nasser, whose millenarian dream of restoring the "Arab nation" had run up against the hard fact that the "divisions of the Arab world were real, not contrived points on a map or a colonial trick." But pan-Arabism was not the only temptation to which the intellectuals had succumbed. There was radical socialism, and the Guevarist fantasies of the Palestinian revolution. There was Islamic fundamentalism, with its romance of authenticity and its embittered rejection of the West. And then there was the search for Western patronage, the way of Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, who forgot his own world and ended up being devoured by it.

Ajami's ambivalent chapter on Sadat makes for especially fascinating reading today. He praised Sadat for breaking with Nasserism and making peace with Israel, and perhaps saw something of himself in the "self-defined peasant from the dusty small village" who had "traveled far beyond the bounds of his world." But he also saw in Sadat's story the tragic parable of a man who had become more comfortable with Western admirers than with his own people. When Sadat spoke nostalgically of his village--as Ajami now speaks of Arnoun--he was pandering to the West. Arabs, a people of the cities, would not be "taken in by the myth of the village." Sadat's "American connection," Ajami suggested, gave him "a sense of psychological mobility," lifting some of the burdens imposed by his cramped world. And as his dependence on his American patrons deepened, "he became indifferent to the sensibilities of his own world."

Sadat was one example of the trap of seeking the West's approval, and losing touch with one's roots; V.S. Naipaul was another. Naipaul, Ajami suggested in an incisive 1981 New York Times review of Among the Believers, exemplified the "dilemma of a gifted author led by his obsessive feelings regarding the people he is writing about to a difficult intellectual and moral bind." Third World exiles like Naipaul, Ajami wrote, "have a tendency to...look at their own countries and similar ones with a critical eye," yet "these same men usually approach the civilization of the West with awe and leave it unexamined." Ajami preferred the humane, nonjudgmental work of Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapucinski: "His eye for human folly is as sharp as V.S. Naipaul. His sympathy and sorrow, however, are far deeper."

The Arab Predicament was infused with sympathy and sorrow, but these qualities were ignored by the book's Arab critics in the West, who--displaying the ideological rigidity that is an unfortunate hallmark of exile politics--accused him of papering over the injustices of imperialism and "blaming the victim." To an extent, this was a fair criticism. Ajami paid little attention to imperialism, and even less to Israel's provocative role in the region. What is more, his argument that "the wounds that mattered were self-inflicted" endeared him to those who wanted to distract attention from Palestine. Doors flew open. On the recommendation of Bernard Lewis, the distinguished British Orientalist at Princeton and a strong supporter of Israel, Ajami became the first Arab to win the MacArthur "genius" prize in 1982, and in 1983 he became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The New Republic began to publish lengthy essays by Ajami, models of the form that offer a tantalizing glimpse of the career he might have had in a less polarized intellectual climate. Pro-Israel intellectual circles groomed him as a rival to Edward Said, holding up his book as a corrective to Orientalism, Said's classic study of how the West imagined the East in the age of empire.

In fact, Ajami shared some of Said's anger about the Middle East. The Israelis, he wrote in an eloquent New York Times op-ed after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, "came with a great delusion: that if you could pound men and women hard enough, if you could bring them to their knees, you could make peace with them." He urged the United States to withdraw from Lebanon in 1984, and he advised it to open talks with the Iranian government. Throughout the 1980s, Ajami maintained a critical attitude toward America's interventions in the Middle East, stressing the limits of America's ability to influence or shape a "tormented world" it scarcely understood. "Our arguments dovetailed," says Said. "There was an unspoken assumption that we shared the same kind of politics."

But just below the surface there were profound differences of opinion. Hisham Milhem, a Lebanese journalist who knows both men well, explained their differences to me by contrasting their views on Joseph Conrad. "Edward and Fouad are both crazy about Conrad, but they see in him very different things. Edward sees the critic of empire, especially in Heart of Darkness. Fouad, on the other hand, admires the Polish exile in Western Europe who made a conscious break with the old country."

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