2017/ 2018
“Modernizing” Ibn Khaldun: ʿAli al-Wardi and the Sociology of the Iraqi Peasant
This project examines the writings of Iraq’s foremost sociologist, ʿAli al-Wardi (1913-1995 CE), whose multi-volume work, Lamahat Ijtimaʿiyya min Tarikh al-ʿIraq al-Hadith (Sociological Glimpses from the Modern History of Iraq) embarked on a sociological analysis of what al-Wardi termed the “personality of the Iraqi individual” (Shakhsiyat al-Fard al-ʿIraqi). Al-Wardi’s methodology combined Arab intellectual history, particularly the work of the classical philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 CE), with modern sociological theory to depict Iraq’s rapidly transforming 20th-century social landscape, particularly its rural inhabitants. Like Ibn Khaldun, Al-Wardi theorized the relationship between urban culture and that of Bedouin tribesmen, but adapted aspects of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas to theorize the appearance of new peasant classes. My project argues that al-Wardi’s work emerges from a modern tradition of positivist sociological inquiry that, when applied in the colonial context, claimed to produce a dispassionate portrayal of social reality. Al-Wardi’s theorizations of Bedouin and peasant cultures would lend itself to explanations of the irrevocable distance—psychological, cultural, and material—between the city and the country, a distance that was a barrier to the establishment of a unified national culture, and thus a distance that had to be bridged through government policy. In the context of an expanding central government authority, such a state of affairs had a particularly pernicious impact on the peasantry, who were being integrated into the governmentality of the colonial state.
2009/ 2010
Modernism Before Modernity: Literature and Urban Form in Iraq
During the academic year 2009/ 2010 as a EUME Fellow in Berlin he will expand upon his dissertation project by examining the ways that radical aesthetic forms are linked to the expansion of liberal notions of citizenship in the Arab world.