JHU SAIS Professor Fouad Ajami Publishes New Book on Iraq

Washington, D.C.- 07/12/2006 - Fouad Ajami, the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), has recently published The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. Free Press released the book on 07/10.

In the years after the Iraq war began, Ajami, one of the world's foremost authorities on Middle Eastern politics, has made many trips to that country and met Iraqis of all ethnicities, religions, politics and regions. In his new book, The Foreigner's Gift, Ajami provides the reader with a portrait of the whole Iraq-the Iraq that is not on the evening news, and one that it is necessary to understand in order to know what the future might hold for all of us.

There is more to Iraq than roadside bombings, and Ajami shows us the normally unseen Iraq through his interviews with Baathist insurgents, reclusive Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, American soldiers, Kurdish politicians, Iraqi policemen, ordinary citizens voting for the first time in their lives and Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi. In Iraq's endless variety, he sees the possibility for a harmonious, diverse, fluid society, or for an acrimonious, war-torn place stunted by power struggles.

Ajami also argues that it would have been better had Iraqis brought about their own liberty and demolished Saddam Hussein's prisons and statues on their own, had the United States entered into their path in Iraq with a better understanding of the region, and had Iraqis not been too proud to admit that they needed a foreigner's gift. But this gift of liberty granted them by an American-led war is what Iraqis now have to work with, if they are to make a new history that would go beyond the sorrow and the violence of Iraq's recent past.

Ajami also serves as a consultant to CBS News on Middle Eastern affairs, a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report and a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic. A recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and the Bradley Prize, he is the author of The Dream Palace of the Arabs and The Arab Predicament.

SAIS is one of the country's leading graduate schools devoted to the study of international relations. Located along Embassy Row in Washington's Dupont Circle area, the school enrolls more than 450 full-time graduate students and mid-career professionals and has trained more than 13,000 alumni in all aspects of international affairs.