In an effort to situate Ali al-Wardi's larger body of scholarship, this article places him within his Iraqi and international intellectual milieu, highlighting the role of his book Preachers of the Sultan for its grounding of his later works, while at the same time asserting the seriousness with which he took the scholar's role as an activist to bring knowledge to the public by which to better inform the grounding for, and exercise of, democratic politics. In particular, it highlights the

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... cal grounding al-Wardi captured through his explication of the Iraqi 'split personality' (izdiwajiyyah) as well as the unique role preachers play in dividing the social community through the justification of political power and promotion of sectarianism. Ali al-Wardi's unique inquiry of Iraq and its peoples, as well as his efforts to craft and promote the learned capacities of his countrymen as an activist public intellectual feature his contributions within the constellation of Iraq's intellectual firmament. Although this prominence diminished in recent decades, due to both political opposition from the Ba'thist regime as well as the caprice of western scholarly fashion, al-Wardi's corpus resonates today as much as it did at the 1950s' zenith of his public renown. Al-Wardi's impact across a wide spectrum of engagement, traversing multiple academic disciplines in addition to informing cultural production beyond the walls of the academy, KeYWords democracy sectarianism split personality critical theory