Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami dies at age 68

Fouad Ajami, a prolific writer who became one of the world's most prominent Middle East historians, died on Sunday aged 68, Stanford University said.Ajami, a Shi'ite Muslim who was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the United States in 1963, died after battling cancer, said the university's Hoover Institution, where he was a senior fellow.The author of some 400 essays on Arab and Islamic politics, US foreign policy and contemporary international history, Ajami was credited with research that charted the road to the September 11, 2001 attacks on US targets, the Iraq war and the US presence in the Arab-Islamic world, the statement said.