IF DEMOCRATIZATION WAS EASY IT WOULDN'T HAVE TAKEN THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO GET THERE:

What set Ajami apart from his peers, I think, was not just his command of the subject, which was unparalleled, but his frankness. Born in a southern Lebanese village to a Shiite family, Ajami left home for the U.S. as a young man and never returned. His origins set him up to know the region as only a native could; his self-imposed exile gave him the distance to see the place as a local could not. He did not apologize for pointing out the pathologies that bedevil the Arab world or for the role of the United States, whose influence over the course of Arab life he thought was exaggerated. Unlike so many other commentators on the Middle East, Ajami went right to the thing itself.

For Ajami, the recent history of the Middle East is about the demise of Arab nationalism and secular politics, which dominated the region in the 1950s, and the rise of authoritarian governments and fundamentalist Islam. None of these projects was able to provide better lives for the vast majority of the people they purported to serve. Schools produced graduates who were literate but disinclined to critical inquiry. Governments so stifled personal initiative and creativity that, by 1995, the Arab world's quarter-billion people exported less than Finland's five million. Meanwhile, the dictators plundered their countries with boundless depravity: Ajami estimates that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the former ruler of Tunisia, and his wife, controlled a third of the country's economy.

The result, on the eve of the uprisings that spread across the Arab world, was a failed civilization, which no amount of anti-Zionism or anti-Americanism, pumped up by cynical despots, could obscure. "The solitude of the Arabs in the contemporary order of nations, their exceptionalism if you will, had become a moral embarrassment to the Arabs themselves. It was as though they had left history and become spectators to their own destiny,'' Ajami writes in "The Arab Awakening, 2011," the book's first, and strongest, essay. "It was a bleak landscape: terrible rulers, sullen populations, and a terrorist fringe that hurled itself in frustration at an order bereft of any legitimacy."

Ajami regards the anti-Americanism that animates so much of the Arab world's political discourse as a diversion from its real problems. Even when he writes about the invasion of Iraq, a war so fraught with error and disaster, he essentially gives the Americans a pass. "The terrible errors of this war can never smother its honor,'' he says. While this might be difficult for some readers to swallow, Ajami reminds us that, for Iraqis, the war was about more than just the strategies and miscalculations of the United States. It was a chance to shape their own futures. "It is not nightfall that has descended on Iraq,'' he writes, "but a savage and uncertain dawn." 

Follow @brothersjudd