Edward Said

Edward Wadie Said
Born	Edward Wadie Said 1 November 1935 Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine
Died	25 September 2003 (aged 67) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Post-colonialism, Post-modernism
Notable ideas	Occidentalism, Orientalism, The Other

Edward Wadie Said (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd]; Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a literary theoretician, and a public intellectual who was a founding figure of the critical-theory field of Post-colonialism. He was born a Palestinian Arab in the Jerusalem city of Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), and was an American citizen through his father. Said was an advocate for the political and the human rights of the Palestinian people, whom the journalist Robert Fisk described as their most powerful voice.

As a cultural critic, academic, and writer, Said is best known for the book Orientalism (1978), an analysis of the culturally inaccurate representations that are the bases of Orientalism (a term he coined) — the Western study of Eastern cultures; how The West perceives and represents The East. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of the work inherently political, servile to power, and therefore intellectually suspect. Orientalism is based upon Said’s intimate knowledge of colonial literature, such as the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and the post-structuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci, and Theodor Adorno; and the literary theories of R. P. Blackmur and Raymond Williams, and other philosophers. Orientalism, and his other thematically related works, proved analytically influential in the fields of the humanities, especially in literary theory and in literary criticism.

Moreover, Orientalism proved especially influential upon the field of Middle Eastern studies, wherein it transformed the academic discourse of the field’s practitioners, of how they examine, describe, and define the cultures of the Middle East. As a critic, he vigorously discussed and debated the cultural subjects comprised by Orientalism, especially as applied to and in the fields of history and area studies; nonetheless, some mainstream academics disagreed with Said’s Orientalism thesis, especially the Anglo–American Orientalist Bernard Lewis.

As a public intellectual, Said discussed contemporary politics and culture, literature and music in books, lectures, and articles. Drawing from his family experiences, as Palestinian Christians in the Middle East, at the time of the establishment of Israel (1948), Said argued for the establishment of a Palestinian state, for equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel — including the right of return — and for increased U.S. political pressure upon Israel to recognize, grant, and respect said rights; moreover, in that vein, the public intellectual Edward Said also criticized the political and cultural politics of the Arab and Muslim régimes who acted against the interests of their peoples.

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being a Renaissance Man, Said was an accomplished pianist, and a music journalist; and, with Barenboim, he co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations about music. An intellectually active man until the last months of his life, he died of leukæmia in late 2003.

Early life

Edward Said was born on 1 November 1935, to Hilda Said, and her husband, the businessman Wadir Said, in the Jerusalem city of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–48). Edward’s father, Wadir Said, was a Palestinian man who soldiered in the U.S. Army component of the Allied Expeditionary Force (1917–19), commanded by General John J. Pershing, in the First World War (1914–18); the war-time military service of Said père granted U.S. citizenship to him and to his family. After the war, in 1919, Wadir Said, moved to Cairo and established a stationery business, in partnership with a cousin. Like her husband, Hilda Said was an Arab Christian, born in Nazareth, a small town in Palestine. Although his parents practiced the Jerusalemite variety of Greek Orthodox Christianity, Edward was agnostic. The other child of the Saids, the daughter Rosemarie Said Zahlan (1937–2006), became an historian and a writer.

The 1922 frontiers of Mandatory Palestine in (1920–48).

At school

Said described his childhood as lived "between worlds", the worlds of Cairo and Jerusalem, until he was twelve. In 1947, he attended the Anglican St. George’s School in Jerusalem, about which experience he said:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like "Said", connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired Prince of Wales [Edward VIII] in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity, at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.

In the late 1940s, the latter school days of Said included attendance at the Egyptian branch of Victoria College (VC), where one classmate was Omar Sharif whom he remembered as a sadistic and physically abusive Head Boy; other classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, and Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Saudi Arabian boys whose academic careers progressed to their becoming ministers, prime ministers, and leading businessmen of and in their respective countries. In that colonial time, the VC school educated select Arab and Levantine lads to become the Anglicized ruling-class, who, in due course, were to rule their respective countries, upon British decolonization. Victoria College was the last school Edward Said attended before being sent to the U.S.:

Edward and his sister Rosemarie (1940)

The moment one became a student at VC, one was given the student handbook, a series of regulations governing every aspect of school life — the kind of uniform we were to wear, what equipment was needed for sports, the dates of school holidays, bus schedules, and so on. But the school’s first rule, emblazoned on the opening page of the handbook, read: “English is the language of the school; students caught speaking any other language will be punished.” Yet, there were no native speakers of English among the students. Whereas the masters were all British, we were a motley crew of Arabs of various kinds, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks, each of whom had a native language that the school had explicitly outlawed. Yet all, or nearly all, of us spoke Arabic — many spoke Arabic and French — and so we were able to take refuge in a common language, in defiance of what we perceived as an unjust colonial stricture.

Said proved a troublesome student, and was expelled from Victoria College in 1951, and ended up in Northfield Mount Hermon School, in Massachusetts, a socially élite, college-prep boarding-school where he endured a miserable year of feeling out of place. Nonetheless, he excelled academically and achieved the rank of either first (valedectorian) or second (salutatarian) in a class of one hundred sixty students. In retrospect, Said said that having been sent away to a place so far from the Middle East was a parental decision much influenced by "the prospects of deracinated people, like us, being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible". He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University (1957), and then a Master of Arts degree (1960) and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1964), in English Literature, from Harvard University.

Career

In 1963, Said joined Columbia University as a member of the faculties of the department of English and of the department of Comparative Literature, where he taught and worked until 2003 (be became professor there in 1991); in the course of that tenure, Barack Obama was one of his pupils at Columbia College. In 1974, he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard College; in 1975–76 he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, at Stanford University; in 1977, he was the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and subsequently was the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities; and, in 1979, he was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

Said served as president of the Modern Language Association; as editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; on the executive board of International PEN; in the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in the Royal Society of Literature; in the Council of Foreign Relations; and he was a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Criticism

The 19th century novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) is the subject of Edward W. Said’s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966).

Literary criticism

The first book that Edward Said published, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), was an expansion of the dissertation he presented to earn his doctor of philosophy degree; wherein the nature and the degree of how the autobiographic background of the writer is part of the fictional narrative, and thus contributes to the psychologic and narrative realism of the story. In Edward Said: Criticism and Society (2010), Abdirahman Hussein said that the novella Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad, was the book that proved “foundational to Said’s entire career and project”. Afterwards, Said redacted ideas gleaned from the works of the 17th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico, and other intellectuals, in the book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), about the theoretical bases of literary criticism. Said’s further bibliographic production featured books such as The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and On Late Style (2006).

Like his post-modern intellectual mentors, the post-structuralist philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Said was fascinated by how the people of the Western world perceive the peoples of and the things from a different culture, and by the effects of society, politics, and power upon literature; thus is Edward W. Said a founding intellectual of post-colonial criticism. Although the critique of Orientalism is his especially important cultural contribution, it was the critical interpretations of the works of Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, and other writers, that were the influential scholarship that established his intellectual reputation.

Orientalism

Said is most famous for the description and analyses of Orientalism as the source of the inaccurate cultural representations that are the foundation of Western thought towards the Middle East, of how The West perceives and represents The East. The thesis of Orientalism (1978) proposes the existence of a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture”, which derives from Western culture’s long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East, in particular. That such perceptions, and the consequent cultural representations, have served, and continue to serve, as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperialist ambitions of the European powers and of the U.S. Likewise, Said also criticized and denounced the political and the cultural malpractices of the régimes of the ruling Arab élites who have internalized the false, romanticized representations of Arabic culture that were conceived and established by Anglo–American Orientalists:

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

The cover of Said's Orientalism contained a detail from the 19th-century Orientalist painting The Snake Charmer, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904).

In Orientalism, Said argued that much Western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism meant for European self-affirmation, rather than for objective intellectual enquiry and academic study of Eastern cultures. Hence, Orientalism functioned as a method of practical, cultural discrimination applied as a means of imperialist domination — i.e. the Western Orientalist knows more about the Orient than do the Orientals. As such, Orientalism has exerted much intellectual influence upon the academic fields of literary theory and cultural studies, human geography and history, and Oriental studies. Parting from the philosophic works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and the works of the early critics of Orientalism — such as Abdul Latif Tibawi (“English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism”, 1964), Anouar Abdel-Malek (L’orientalisme en crise | Orientalism in Crisis, 1963), Maxime Rodinson (Bilan des études mohammadiennes | Assessment of Mohammedan Studies, 1963), and Richard William Southern (Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, 1978) — that The Orient as studied from The West, and the consequent perceptions of and about The East (purveyed as Orientalism) are intellectually suspect, and cannot be accepted at their face value, as faithful, true, and accurate representations of Oriental peoples and things. That the history of European colonial rule, and of the consequent political domination of the civilizations of the East, distorts the writing of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalists; thus was the term “Orientalism” rendered into a pejorative word:

I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact — and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.

The romanticized Orient: The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511)

Moreover, Orientalism concluded that Western writing about the Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak, and feminised “Other”, an existential condition greatly contrasted with the rational, strong, and masculine West, which is a binary relation derived from the European psychological need to create a “difference” of cultural inequality, between The West and The East; that cultural difference is attributed to immutable cultural “essences” inherent to Oriental peoples and things. In 1978, in addition to the intellectual, cultural, and commercial successes of the book Orientalism, the thesis of cultural misrepresentation was validated by the historical resonance of the Yom Kippur war (6–25 October 1973), and of the 1973 Oil Embargo crises of reduced petroleum-production, with which the Middle East and the OPEC countries made themselves politically known to The Western World, as peoples, and not just as exotic Others.

Intellectual criticism

Academic and philosophic

Orientalism (1978) provoked much theoretic criticism of the work and its thesis, and personal controversy about Edward Said, the author and the man. In “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism” (1993), Ernest Gellner said that Said’s contentions that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years were unsupportable, because the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) had remained a great politico–military threat to Europe until the late 17th century. In “Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Said” (2005), Mark Proudman reported that Said said that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the late 19th century, when, in fact, the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire also were active imperial actors in that geopolitical theatre. In Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (1996) Christopher Alan Bayly said that, at the height of European imperialism, European power in the Orient was not absolute, and much depended upon local collaborators, who often subverted the imperial strategies of the European powers with whom they collaborated against their own peoples. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Robert Irwin said that Palestine and Egypt were poor historical examples of Orientalism, because they were under European control (imperial and hegemonic) only for short periods in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century. Conversely, that Said devoted less attention to the more apt examples of the British Raj (1858–1947) in India, and to Russia’s Asian dominions — because he (Said) sought to score political points against Western misbehaviour in the Middle East.

The criticism by Orientalists such as Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya, addressed what the historian Nikki Keddie said were “some unfortunate consequences” of Orientalism upon the perception and the status of their scholarship.

In Approaches to the History of the Middle East, the historian Keddie said that, as critical theory, Said’s work on Orientalism had:

unfortunate consequences . . . I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East [studies] field to adopt the word “Orientalism” as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the “wrong” position on the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged “too conservative”. It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So, “Orientalism”, for many people, is a word that substitutes for thought, and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant, at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.

File:Lewis-pre.jpg

About Orientalism, the professors Bernard Lewis (above) and Edward Said disagreed.

Moreover, the Anglo–American Orientalist Bernard Lewis was a nemesis especially at odds with the thesis of Orientalism, wherein Said identified Lewis as:

. . . a perfect exemplification [of an] Establishment Orientalist [whose work] purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, very close to being propaganda against his subject material. For sheer heedless anti-intellectualism, unrestrained or unencumbered by the slightest trace of critical self-consciousness, no one, in my experience, has achieved the sublime confidence of Bernard Lewis, whose almost purely political exploits require more time to mention than they are worth. In a series of articles, and one particularly weak book — The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) — Lewis has been busy responding to my argument, insisting that the Western quest for knowledge about other societies is unique, that it is motivated by pure curiosity, and that, in contrast, Muslims neither were able nor interested in getting knowledge about Europe, as if knowledge about Europe were the only acceptable criterion for true knowledge.

Lewis’s arguments are presented as emanating exclusively from the scholar’s apolitical impartiality, whereas, at the same time, he has become an authority drawn on for anti–Islamic, anti–Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades, all of them underwritten by a zealotry, covered with a veneer of urbanity, that has very little in common with the “science” and learning Lewis purports to be upholding.

In the event, Bernard Lewis replied to Said’s characterizations, of his (Lewis’s) works as political propaganda, and of him (Lewis) as an anti-intellectual, with essays critical of the Said, the academic man, and his works; Lewis later was joined in rejoinder of Said by the academics Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt who said that Orientalism (1978) is a flawed account of Western scholarship about “The Orient”.

In the article “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy” (2008), Robert Irwin said that the serious flaw in Orientalism (1978) was Said’s not having distinguished among the different types of Orientalist writers, especially because such writers possessed different cultural perspectives towards the peoples and places of the Orient — writers such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who never travelled to the East); the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (who toured Egypt); the French geographer Joseph-Ernest Renan (whose work is racist in perspective); and the British Orientalist, translator, and lexicographer Edward William Lane, who was a fluent speaker of the Arabic tongue. In Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (2007), Ibn Warraq said that the varied origins and cultural attitudes of European Orientalists over-rode factual and historical considerations, which Said ignored in order to construct a stereotype of Europeans befitting his thesis about the nature of Orientalism. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, Robert Irwin said that Said ignored the domination of 19th-century Oriental studies by German and Hungarian Orientalists, scholars from countries without imperial colonies in the Orient.

In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (1988), O.P. Kejariwal said that Edward Said created a monolithic Occidentalism to oppose the monolithic Orientalism of Western discourse, by having failed to distinguish among the paradigms of Romanticism and the secular, intellectual traditions of the Age of Enlightenment. That he ignored the wide range and fundamental differences of opinion among Western scholars about the nature of Oriental peoples and things; that he failed to acknowledge that Orientalists, such as the philologist William Jones, who sought to establish cultural kinship rather than cultural difference between The East and The West; and that such scholars often made discoveries that later provided the foundations of anti-colonial nationalism.

Generally, such critics of Edward Said argued that he, and his academic followers, failed to critically distinguish among the varieties of Orientalism that are presented and applied in the Western mass communications media, and in Western popular culture — such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) — and Western academic studies of Oriental languages and literatures, histories and cultures.

In the article “Who is Afraid of Edward Said?” (1999), Biswamoy Pati said that by establishing ethnicity and cultural background as the tests of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Edward Said drew attention to the question of his own ethnic and cultural identities as a Palestinian man and as a colonial Subaltern from the British Middle East. In the article “Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire”, D.A. Washbrook said that Said was disqualified from writing about the Orient because of his Anglophone rearing, schooling, and education at an élite British school in Cairo; because he had lived most of his adult life in the U.S.; and because Said was a distinguished university professor who argued that: “any and all representations . . . are embedded, first, in the language, and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer . . . [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides ‘The Truth’, which is, itself, a representation”. That excessive cultural relativism had trapped the academic Said, and his post-colonial theorist followers, in a “web of solipsism”, which limits him and them to speak only of cultural “representations”, whilst simultaneously allowing them to deny the existence of any objective truth about the Orient.

In the event, some consequences of being a politically-militant, public intellectual occurred in 1985: the Jewish Defense League (JDL) traduced Said’s public statements about the state and nature of Arab–Israeli relations, and officially stated that Said was a Nazi, because of his anti–Zionism, which the JDL misrepresented as anti–Semitism; an arsonist set afire his office at Columbia University; and continual, attempted intimidations, personal and familial, with “innumerable death threats”.

Personal criticism

Justus Reid Weiner, an American lawyer, and resident scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think-tank, claimed that Said had been dishonest about his childhood biography. In the Commentary magazine article “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said” (1999), Weiner impugned Said’s intellectual honesty and personal integrity — to wit, Said lied when he said: “I was born in Jerusalem, and spent most of my formative years there; and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.” Despite having acknowledged that Edward Said was born in Jerusalem (Palestine), Weiner reported that Edward Said’s birth certificate lists a Cairo (Egypt) residential address for the Said family; that the boy Edward did not live his formative, boyhood years in Jerusalem with his family, but in Cairo; and that the boy Edward had not been a full-time student at the St. George’s School, in Jerusalem, because the school’s register of students contained no record of his matriculation to the school.

In the event, Said’s integrity was defended by three journalists and an historian, who said that the claims of Justus Weiner were false. In the Counterpunch newsletter article “Commentary ‘Scholar’ Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said” (1999), Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair reported that Weiner had deliberately falsified the biographic record in order to attack Said. In evidence, the reporters presented an interview of Haig Boyadjian, who said that he had explicitly told Justus Weiner about having been a classmate of Edward Said at the St. George’s School, in Jerusalem, which fact Weiner omitted from his biographic reportage about Edward Said.

In The Nation magazine article “The ‘Commentary’ School of Falsification” (1999), Christopher Hitchens described Weiner’s article as a work of “extraordinary spite and mendacity”; and reported that schoolmates and instructors confirmed that Edward Said had been a student at the St. George Academy; they quoted Said, from 1992, that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo.

In The New York Review of Books, the historian Amos Elon described the article “Exile’s Return”, by Justus Weiner, as a “diatribe”, and accused him of waging a “personal smear campaign” against Edward Said, and that Weiner had failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–48, when the Arab League declared the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Said family moved from the Talbiya neighbourhood of Jerusalem, and returned to Cairo:

[Edward Said] and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains, that shortly afterward, the [Said] family’s property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Said and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government’s refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth.

In retort, Justus Weiner accused the historian Elon of intellectual dishonesty, and accused the reporter Hitchens of having made himself “a poster boy for Palestine”. To Hitchens’s criticism, that Weiner had impugned Said’s integrity, based solely upon biographical details, without interviewing the man, Weiner replied that three years of research into the boyhood of Edward W. Said had made it unnecessary to interview the man about his childhood in British Palestine, and about his school days in the Middle East:

The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, “You’re a liar, you’re a fraud”.

About such biographic controversy, Edward Said said that the publishers of the politically conservative Commentary magazine had attacked him in three, long articles, the third written by Justus Weiner; and that, as a biographic article, about his childhood and student days, its credibility was “undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact”.

Influence

Edward Said was a personally charismatic public intellectual who was (perhaps) hyperbolically praised as an “intellectual superstar”, because his range of enquiry comprehended literary theory and comparative literature, history and political commentary, cultural criticism and music criticism, and other fields. Since its publication in the late 20th century, the book Orientalism (1978) proved to be an intellectual document central to the field of post-colonial studies, because its thesis remains historically factual, true, and accurate for the pertinent periods studied, and especially regarding the cultural representations of “Orientals” and “The Orient” presented in the mass communications media of the West. Nonetheless, Said’s supporters acknowledged that concerning the German Orientalist scholarship, the scope of Orientalism is limited; yet, in the magazine article “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985), Said said that no-one opponent provided a substantive rationale for claiming that the dearth of discussion about German Orientalism necessarily limits the scholarly value and practical application of the book’s thesis. Moreover, in the Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, Said presented follow-up refutations of the criticisms that Bernard Lewis registered against the first edition (1978) of the book.

Moreover, his critics and supporters acknowledge the transformative influence of Orientalism upon scholarship in the humanities — the former say that is an intellectually limiting influence upon scholars, whilst the latter say that it is an intellectually liberating influence upon scholars. Post-colonial studies, of which Said was an intellectual founder, and a scholarly reference, is a fertile and thriving field of intellectual enquiry that helps explain the post-colonial world, its peoples, and their discontents. Hence the continued investigational validity and analytical efficacy of the critical propositions presented in Orientalism (1978), especially in the field of Middle Eastern studies.

The scholarship of Said remains critically pertinent to and intellectually relevant in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies, notably upon scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash (“Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography”, 1990), Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001), and Ronald Inden (Imagining India, 1990); upon scholars studying Cambodia, such as Simon Springer (“Culture of Violence or Violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and Imagining the ‘Savage Other’ in Post-transitional Cambodia”, 2009); and upon literary theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha (Nation and Narration, 1990), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987), and Hamid Dabashi (Iran: A People Interrupted, 2007).

Elswewhere, in and about Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić–Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms (1992), based upon and derived from the ideas of the historian Larry Wolff (Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, 1994) and upon the ideas that Said presented in Orientalism (1978). In turn, the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans, 1997) presented her ethnologic concept of Nesting Balkanisms (Ethnologia Balkanica,1997), which is theoretically related to and derived from Milica Bakić–Hayden’s concept of Nesting Orientalisms.

Politics

Pro–Palestinian activism

Said became politically active in 1967, to counter the stereotyped misrepresentations with which the U.S. news media explained the Arab–Israeli wars; reportage divorced from the historical realities of the Middle East, in general, and Palestine and Israel, in particular. His "The Arab Portrayed" (1968) was an essay wherein he described the images of the Arab, as presented and manipulated in journalism and some types of scholarship, which are meant to evade the specific discussion of the historical and cultural realities of the peoples who are the Middle East. Since then, he participated in political and diplomatic efforts for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). In 1988, he was a proponent of the two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (1948), and voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1993, Said quit his membership of the PNC to protest the politics that lead to the signing of the Oslo Accords, because he thought the accord terms unacceptable, and because they had been rejected by the Madrid Conference of 1991. Especially troublesome to Said was his belief that Yasir Arafat had betrayed the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to return to their houses and properties in the Green Line territories of pre–1967 Israel; and that Arafat ignored the growing political threat of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories established since the conquest of Palestine in 1967. By 1995, in response to Said's political criticisms, the Palestinian Authority banned the sale of Said’s books; however, relations improved when Said publicly praised Yasir Arafat for rejecting Prime Minister Ehud Barak's minimal offers at the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David (2000) in the U.S.

In the essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" (1979), Edward Said argued in favour of the political legitimacy and philosophical authenticity of the Zionist claims and right to a Jewish homeland; and for the inherent right of national self-determination of the Palestinian people. Said’s books on the matters of Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), and The End of the Peace Process (2000). In 1998, for the BBC, Said made In Search of Palestine (1998), a documentary film about Palestine past and Palestine present, wherein Said returned to the country from which he had emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Accompanied by his son Wadie, Said revisited his boyhood haunts, and confronted the Israeli injustices (social and cultural) meted out to ordinary Palestinians in the contemporary West Bank. Despite the social and cultural prestige that BBC cinema products usually enjoyed, In Search of Palestine was not broadcast by the television companies of the U.S.

In 2003, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, Mustafa Barghouti, and Edward Said established the third-party political organization Al-Mubadara (the Palestinian National Initiative), headed by Barghouti, to be a reformist and democratic alternative to the usual two-party politics of Palestine, as an alternative to the respectively extremist politics of the social-democratic Fatah and the Islamist Hamas.

Stone-throwing incident

On 3 July 2000, while travelling as a tourist in the Middle East with his son, Said was photographed throwing a stone across the Blue Line Lebanese–Israeli border. In the U.S., that image elicited much conservative political criticism that Said’s action demonstrated an inherent, personal sympathy with terrorism, thus the Commentary magazine journalist Edward Alexander labelled Said as the "Professor of Terror". According to Said, there was not much to the incident: "Mr. Said said he was having a stone-throwing contest with his son and called it a 'symbolic gesture of joy' at the end of Israel's occupation of Lebanon...It was a pebble; there was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away. However, the As-Safir newspaper reported that a local Lebanese resident said that Said was less than ten metres (ca. 30 ft.) from the IDF soldiers manning the two-storey guardhouse when he aimed and threw the stone over the border fence; the stone struck the barbed wire atop the border fence. Despite the political fracas among right-wing Columbia University students and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith International (Sons of the Covenant), the University Provost defended Said's action as an academic's freedom of expression: "To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no-one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Said".

Nevertheless, Said endured repercussions, such as the cancellation of an invitation to give a lecture to the Freud Society, in Austria, in February 2001. The President of the Freud Society justified withdrawing the invitation from Said by explaining that “the political situation in the Middle East, and its consequences” had rendered an accusation of anti–Semitism a very serious matter, and that any such accusation “has become more dangerous” in the politics of Austria; the Freud Society thus cancelled their invitation to Said in order to “to avoid an internal clash” of opinions, about him, that might ideologically divide the Freud Society.

Criticism of U.S. foreign politics

In the revised edition of Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1997), Said criticized the Orientalist bias of the Western news media’s reportage about the Middle East and Islam, especially the tendency towards editorializing “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.” He criticized the military involvement of the U.S. in the Kosovo War (1998–99) as an imperialist action and described the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act as the political license that predisposed the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003. He claimed that the continual support of Israel by successive U.S. presidential governments, as actions meant to perpetuate regional political instability in the Middle East. In the event, despite being sick with leukæmia, the public intellectual Edward Said continued his criticism of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in mid-2003; and, in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper, in the article “Resources of Hope” (2 April 2003), Said said that the U.S. war against Iraq was a politically ill-conceived military enterprise:

My strong opinion, though I don’t have any proof, in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East, and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike, and install régimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is, to say the least, out of date and widely speculative.

In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of the 283-page political dossier that the FBI had compiled on Edward Said, which indicated that he had been spied upon since 1971, four years since he had become a public intellectual active in the politics to the U.S.

Music

The harmonious Middle East: the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Said was an accomplished pianist. He worked as the music critic for The Nation magazine, and wrote four books about music: Musical Elaborations (1991), Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002, with Daniel Barenboim), On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006), and Music at the Limits (2007). In the latter book he spoke of finding musical reflections of his literary and historical ideas in bold compositions and strong performances.

In 1999, Said and Daniel Barenboim founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is composed of young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. They also established The Barenboim–Said Foundation in Seville, to develop education-through-music projects. Besides managing the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim–Said Foundation assists with the administration of the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine Project, and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project, in Seville. Composer Mohammed Fairouz acknowledged the influence of Edward Said upon his works: compositionally, the First Symphony thematically alludes to the essay "Homage to a Belly-Dancer" (1990); and a piano sonata titled Reflections on Exile(1984), which thematically refers to the emotions inherent to the eponymous subject.

Awards

Besides honors, memberships, and postings to prestigious organizations world-wide, Edward Said was awarded some twenty honorary university degrees in the course of his professional life as an academic, critic, and Man of Letters. Among the honors bestowed to him was the Bowdoin Prize by Harvard University. He twice received the Lionel Trilling Book Award; the first occasion was the inaugural bestowing of said literary award in 1976, for Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974). He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and was awarded the inaugural Spinoza Lens Prize. In 2001, Said was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais Prize. The autobiography Out of Place (1999) was bestowed three awards, the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature.

Death and legacy

On 25 September 2003, after enduring a twelve-year sickness with chronic lymphocytic leukæmia, Said died aged 67 in New York City. He was survived by his wife, Mariam, his son, Wadie, and his daughter, Najla, an actress, playwright, and a founder of Nibras, the Arab–American theatre troupe.

Eulogies included Alexander Cockburn, "A Mighty and Passionate Heart"; Seamus Deane, "A Late Style of Humanism"; Christopher Hitchens, "A Valediction for Edward Said"; Tony Judt, "The Rootless Cosmopolitan";, Michael Wood, "On Edward Said"; and Tariq Ali, "Remembering Edward Said (1925–2003)". In November 2004, in Palestine, Birzeit University renamed their music school the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.

A Palestinian National Initiative-sponsored poster, In memoriam Edward Wadie Said, on the Israeli West Bank wall.

Tributes

Verso Books published Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said (2008), edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür; the essayists include Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi, and Elias Khoury, . Routledge published Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (2010), by Harold Aram Veeser, a critical biography. The University of California Press published Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations (2010), edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, and featuring contributions about Said’s intellectual legacy by Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Ghada Karmi, Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, among others.

Academic establishments such as Columbia University, the University of Warwick, Princeton University, the University of Adelaide, the American University of Cairo, and the Palestine Center have instituted annual series of lectures about the subjects, topics, and themes that Edward Said discussed in his works; notable among the speakers have been Daniel Barenboim, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Cornel West.

Bibliography

Main article: Edward Said bibliography

See also

• West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
• Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988)
• List of Columbia University people
• Palestinian Christians
• Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis

Endnotes

Further reading

• Valerie Kennedy Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
• Conor McCarthy The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Andrew N. Rubin, editor, Humanism, Freedom, and the Critic: Edward W. Said and After. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.

External links

• The Edward Said Archive
• "Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights." Lecture given at UC Berkeley. Part 1, Part 2.
• "Barenboim and Said: 'Parallels and Paradoxes". Interview with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday (2002-12-28, National Public Radio).
• Democracy Now! interview with Edward Said (2001-3-14)
• Edward Said at ZMagazine.org
• Edward Said at The Electronic Intifada
• Edward Said at IMDb
• Review of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays and Edward Said: The Last Interview, in Other Voices, vol. 3, no. 1.
• Works by Edward Said at Open Library
• Edward Wadie Said at the International Institute of Social Studies
• Booknotes interview with Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, June 17, 2001.