Mohammed Hadid

Mohammed Hadid (January 1, 1907 – August 3, 1999) was an Iraqi economist, cabinet minister and democracy advocate.

Mohammed Hadid was born into a rich Mosulite family at the beginning of the 20th century. He was born and raised in Nazareth, in Palestine. There he met and married Wajeeha Sabonji, with whom he had three children; Haithem, the writer and accountant Foulath and the noted architect Zaha Hadid.

Hadid attended the London School of Economics between 1928 and 1931, and achieved a degree in Economics. It was there that he is said to have been influenced by the ideas of Professor Harold Laski, a "widely known socialist and agnostic". He was also influenced by the works of Sidney Webb, Hugh Dalton, John Maynard Keynes and other economists and socialists whose Fabian ideas held the promise for a new social order to be constructed in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1931, Hadid returned to Baghdad and joined the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. More importantly, he became a founding member of the politically progressive Ahali group which embraced the ideals of Britain's Labour Party and attracted other leading personalities such as Abd al-Fattah Ibrahim, Jafar Abu-t-Timman, Kamel Chadirchi and Hikmat Sulayman.

In 1936, the Ahali group was involved in a coup d'état that was led by army general Bakr Sidqi. When Sidqi sought dictatorial power at the expense of the group's plans for public welfare and reform, the group resigned en bloc in 1937. In 1946, Hadid became Vice-President of the National Democratic Party. The party, essentially the social democratic wing of the Ahali group, championed agrarian reform, workers' rights and state control of Iraq's nascent oil industry.

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