Reading Fouad Ajami’s posthumous memoir, When Magic Failed, was like reading my own life story. Both Ajami and I hail from Shia families who moved from a homogeneous countryside to cosmopolitan Beirut. My journey to Beirut took a bit longer—my father hailed from Iraq, and we fled the repression of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in the 1980s to my mother’s country, Lebanon.