Fouad Ajami, who has written for TNR for nearly 25 years, was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bush last week. It is an award any president would--and should--have made. If the American people at all better understand the subtleties of the Arab and Muslim worlds, it is largely because his mind has made its mark on our minds. First of all, and this is not unimportant, Ajami writes with a felicity and strength rare even to our most graceful writers. The sheer poetry and music of his prose are life enhancing. No one else but Joseph Conrad, who, like Ajami, was an immigrant to the English language and who is Ajami's literary conscience, can take from intricate psychological realities in the public sphere their very essence and put them before the reader both truthfully and straightforwardly. His writings in this magazine are as central to our inheritance and character as the writings of Edmund Wilson, a different sort of writer, were in his day. Ajami's writings ranged from broad history to intimate portraits, the culture of the literate Arab world and the thuggish Arab world, the face to the past and the aversion of the future. Yes, read these splendid essays of Ajami's, and I think you will marvel at their texture, their elegance, their coherence. These are only ten of the pieces he wrote for us. There are more. He also wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and U.S. News & World Report. I think his New Republic writings are his best in the essay style. But, then, I would. His legacy is otherwise also captured by his stunningly argued books: The Arab Predicament, The Vanished Imam, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and The Foreigner's Gift. This is his scholarly testament up to now, and it will help you grasp what happened during the last decades: No reader of the Ajami corpus could claim to be surprised either by the metaphorical suicidal politics of the Arabs or by the literally suicidal politics of the Arabs. Ajami is an American patriot, a prototypical American immigrant patriot. He knows why everyone wants to come to this country and why a few want to leave, and, I think, from his point of view (and mine), why don't they? He is a teacher in America, in a great university, for one. But also in the remaining television venues that still allow some room for thinking that does not comfort or assure.