Foulath Hadid

Foulath Hadid was an Iraqi writer and scholar who specialised in Arab affairs and democracy. He was born in Baghdad in 1937 to a prominent family of political and intellectual leaders. His father, Mohammed Hadid, was a cabinet minister and a founding member of the Iraqi National Democratic Party. His sister, Zaha Hadid, was a world-renowned architect. He studied at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, and then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read law. He later studied business at Harvard and became a chartered accountant. He worked as a partner in several international firms and had a successful career in finance. He met his wife, Lalla Kenza Alaoui, a member of the Moroccan royal family, while working in Washington, DC. They had two children, Tala, a painter and film-maker, and Nik, a businessman. Hadid was also a passionate sportsman and a regular visitor to Wimbledon. He retired in 2000 and devoted himself to writing and research. He became a senior associate member and an honorary fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he edited and published his father's memoirs, Mudhakkarati, in 2006. The book was hailed as one of the most important Arab political memoirs of recent years. He also wrote Iraq's Democratic Moment, a history of Iraq's democracy movement in the 1940s and 1950s, which was published posthumously in 2012. He received an advance copy at his hospital bed. He was a strong advocate of Arab democracy and human rights, and condemned imperialism, hegemony, and dictatorship. He believed that the Arab people would one day achieve their aspirations for freedom and dignity. He died in 2012 after a short illness and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, England. He was awarded the Gertrude Bell Memorial Gold Medal by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq in 2009. He is remembered as one of the most influential Iraqi writers and scholars of the 20th century and a pioneer of Arab studies in the UK.