Dr. Mohammed Al-Sudairi (The University of Hong Kong)

The talk focuses on the life and thought of Hadi al-‘Alawi (1932-1998), an unorthodox yet still well-known Iraqi intellectual who gained considerable acclaim since the 1960s as a subversive scholar of the Arab classical tradition. For much of his life, al-‘Alawi was engaged with the creative integration of this tradition with Marxism with the aim of bringing about an egalitarian and humanistic socio-political order in the Arab world. Over the course of his intellectual journey, China increasingly occupied an important place in his worldview, a function of his extended stays there as a foreign expert in 1977-1982 and 1991-1994. The talk introduces al-‘Alawi’s eclectic and rich ideas – sadly unknown in Anglophone scholarship – on the indigenization of Marxism, the communalism of Chinese and Islamic civilizations, spiritual atheism, the creation of non-Western alternatives for modernity, and the successes and failures of the Chinese Revolution.