Wadie Elias Jwaideh (1 July 1916 – 9 March 2001)[1][2][3] was an Iraqi American professor of history known for his work on the Kurds.
Jwaideh was born in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, into an Arabic-speaking Christian family that later moved to Baghdad. In 1942 he received a Licentiate in Law from the University of Baghdad and in 1960 a Ph.D. from Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. During this time, he also held a lecturer position in Arabic at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating he joined the faculty of Indiana University as a history professor, where he founded the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature. He retired in 1985 and moved to San Diego where he was an adjunct professor of history at the University of California, San Diego until 1990.[4] An annual lecture is given in his honor at Indiana University.[4]
His book “The Kurdish National Movement” was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2006. The book was published in book form by Syracuse University Press 46 years after was published as a Ph.D. thesis; the thesis had long been known to and cited by scholars.[5]
Jwaideh understood the Kurdish socio-political system as operating at a tribal (aşiret) level before the twentieth century. According to Jwaideh, individual Kurdish leaders who attained political power did so within wider Muslim political structures, not within the Kurdish community.[6][7] In Jwaideh's view, Kurdish identity is fundamentally tribal and more secular than religious.[7][6] While acknowledging the "classic" status of Jwaideh's Kurdish National Movement, M. Hakan Yavuz asserts that Jwasdeh's characterization of Kurdish identity as being predominantly secular is fundamentally different from Kemalist secularism.[8]