The Dream Palace of the Arabs, Fouad Ajami
The Dream Palace of the Arabs, Fouad Ajami
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The Dream Palace of the Arabs
A Generation's Odyssey

Author: Fouad Ajami

Narrator: Qarie Marshall

Unabridged: 12 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/15/2020

Synopsis

From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.

About Fouad Ajami

Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. A MacArthur Fellowship recipient, he is the author of several books on Middle Eastern politics and culture, including The Arab Predicament and The Vanished Iman, and he serves as a contributing editor for The New Republic and U.S. News and World Report as well as on the editorial board of Foreign Affairs. Born and raised in Lebanon, he lives in New York City.

About Qarie Marshall

Qarie Marshall has narrated over thirty series for the Discovery Channel and the BBC. He has also been a guest voice on Comedy Central's Drawn Together and has recorded BBC radio plays, the in-flight programming for Virgin Atlantic Airlines, over eighty video games for the PlayStation and Xbox, and numerous audiobooks. In 2007, he was made an Associate Artist of The Purple Rose Theatre.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tyler on November 17, 2008

Written before September 11, Ajami's ever-relevant book asks why modern Arab society thinks so differently from others. This wasn't always so: Today's Arab society is the repudiation of a bygone liberalization among Arab thinkers, an opening up that faded after about 1967. But why did liberal trends......more

Goodreads review by P on April 20, 2011

Ajami is the rock star Middle East Studies scholar at an exceptionally wonderful graduate school, and I wanted to read his stuff. For those of us who watch current events in the Arab World, and say, "Where did all this secular leftism come from?" this book chronicles where it came from. Ajami compel......more

Goodreads review by Jason on January 25, 2024

The Middle East is planet Earth’s permanent snafu. While the troubles there didn’t start in the 20th century, it is clear that the Arabic lands since World War II have been a continuation of their turbulent past and a sad precursor for where they are heading in the future. Fouad Ajami takes a look a......more

Goodreads review by Murtaza on July 04, 2014

This book is Ajami's exploration of Arab intellectual currents in the 20th century, from nationalism to Islamism; touching on topics such as relations with Israel and the rise and fall of the Saddam Hussein's Iraq. While I've long been skeptical of Ajami's politics his work shows him to be an intelle......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on August 23, 2016

Kind of an odd book, but rewarding in significant ways. I read this because Ajami was very influential in America's thinking about the Middle East in the 1990's and early 2000's and has been a figure of controversy ever since. The book itself is both a history and critique of Arab nationalist intell......more

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