Ali Al-Wardi and the Dialectical Approach

The book of the Iraqi researcher Hussein al-Hindawi, " Ali al-Wardi and the dialectical approach ", issued recently by Abjad Publishing and Distribution, reopens the pink file from an entry that goes beyond restoring his biography or re-presenting his most famous theses, towards questioning the methodological basis on which his intellectual project was based, and its consistency with the dialectical approach that is supposed to constitute one of his main tributaries.The importance of this attempt lies in the fact that it does not deal with Al-Wardi as one of the names of the Iraqi intellectual heritage that should be celebrated or restored, but rather as a knowledge project that can be examined and criticized, including questioning the theoretical tools that he used, and the limits that his approach clashed with in interpreting Iraqi society.Ali Al-Wardi was born in 1913 in Baghdad, and died in 1995, after a research career that made him one of the most prominent founders of sociology in Iraq. His fame began to expand since the 1940s, especially after his return from the United States, where he received his doctorate from the University of Texas in 1950, with a dissertation dealing with Ibn Khaldun and his influence on social thought.Al-Wardi's fame was not separate from the nature of the topics he chose to work on; he tended to dismantle social axioms, question the relationship between declared values and actual practices, and read Iraqi society through its historical and cultural contradictions, rather than just presenting an ideal image of it.His lecture in Baghdad in 1950, in which he addressed the duality of the Iraqi personality, was a milestone in the formation of his controversial intellectual image. He saw that the Iraqi personality is affected by an ongoing conflict between two systems of values: the values of nomadism and its nervousness and social traditions, and the values of civilization and its imposition of stability, organization and different social relations.At the core of this approach, it was not intended to make a moral judgment about Iraqis as much as it was an attempt to explain the contradiction between what an individual says and what they do, and between the ideals they adopt and the behavior they practice in their daily lives. However, this thesis, with its broad generalizations, opened the door to non-stop discussions about its validity to explain a diverse society with multiple experiences and components.The most prominent ideas of Al-Wardi are divided into three interrelated concepts: the conflict of nomadism and civilization, dual personality, and social entanglement. The latter concept refers to the imbalance that arises when the manifestations of material and technical life progress faster than the development of ideas, values and social institutions, widening the gap between apparent modernization and deep cultural transformation.Through these concepts, Al-Wardi tried to provide a social explanation for the contradictions that govern Iraqi life, considering that society does not move in a straight line towards modernity, but rather is formed through conflicts, tensions and overlaps between different patterns of life and thinking.