Hanna Batatu Lecture Series

The following English text is a shortened translation that I will send you afterwards. Once you receive the arabic text, please shorten it to match the content of the English text. Hanna John Batatu (1926-2000) was an internationally renowned scholar and a highly regarded authority on the contemporary Arab world, specifically the histories of Iraq and Syria. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948. The Nakba and the plight of Palestine and its people had a visceral impact on his life. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and earned a prestigious award for undergraduates. He won a scholarship to study political science at Harvard where he met and studied with Professors Barrington Moore Junior and Herbert Marcuse and was heavily influenced by their Marxist methodology. Like his mentor Marcuse, Batatu would later define and introduce himself to his students as an independent Marxist. From the 1950s till his passing in 2000, Professor Batatu dedicated his writing and career to studying, teaching and writing about the history of the modern Middle East. In his writings, Hanna Batatu set the highest standards for historians and researchers and effectively established a scholarly basis for the study, analysis and historical documentation of societal development in contemporary Iraq and Syria. His methodology is grounded in political sociology and considers in detail social factors in the development of state and society, with particular emphasis on the social composition of political movements. His work on Iraq has widely been considered the pre-eminent study of modern Iraqi history and one of the best works on the Middle East to be published in the second half of the 20th century. It paved the way for any study that followed concerning modern Iraq and its political and socio-economic history.

Titled “Society and History in Iraq between Hanna Batatu and Ali al-Wardi”, the second lecture in the Hanna Batatu Lecture Series was given by Lebanese-American historian, Dina Rizk Khoury. Khoury is Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Khoury’s lecture focuses on the writings of Hanna Batatu and Ali al-Wardi and the implications of their distinct methodologies to our understanding of the history and politics and present-day Iraq. The Palestinian political scientist and the Iraqi sociologist utilized radically different approaches and reached divergent conclusions about the nature of Iraq’s modern national project.

Drawing on Marxist class analysis, Hanna Batatu traced the development of Iraqi society from a pre-modern one based on tribal and communal loyalties, to a modern class society in which allegiances to class and to political parties co-existed and sometimes replaced older more traditional allegiances. By contrast Ali al-Wardi drew on the sociological thinking of Ibn Khaldun as well as on the work of American social psychologists. He understood the history of Iraq, not as a linear progression from pre-modern forms of social organization to modern ones, but as a continuous struggle between hadara and badawa, between the cultures of urban settled life and the primordial allegiances to tribe and sect.

Writing in the late 1970s at the height of Ba’thist power, Hanna Batatu’s history of the Iraqi Communist Party and its liquidation by the Ba’th, exhibited a faith in the ability of popular mobilization to forge a change in society. Ali al-Wardi had no such faith. He saw the politics of the 1920 rebellion, claimed by nationalist historiography as the birth of modern Iraqi nationhood, as mired in allegiances to sect and tribe. Al-Wardi’s ethnographic approach led him to assert that the cultural personality of Iraqis was incapable of assimilating modern forms of sociability.

Looking at Batatu’s and al-Wardi’s histories of modern Iraq in 2016, one would tend to find much in al-Wardi that helps in our understanding of present day Iraq. Beginning in the 1990s, al-Wardi’s works have been republished and widely circulated. This revival of al-Wardi speaks to a wider questioning of the Arab world of the project of modernity and the post-colonial regimes that have ruled since the 1950s. Batatu’s class analysis and his relative optimism in the project of modernity appear incongruous with the present realities of Iraq. However, we give up a great deal of insight into the modern history of Iraq if we only see its social history through the lens of al-Wardi’s work.  Not the least of what we give up is the accomplishments, however problematic, of the modernization project in Iraq and the prospect of speaking of an Iraqi future outside the confines of sect and tribe.