Registered: Jul 2001
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Posts: 11769

Financial Times

Obituary: Edward W. Said
By Edward Mortimer
Published: September 25 2003 20:58 | Last Updated: September 25 2003 20:58


Edward W. Said, who died on Thursday aged 67, was one of the late 20th century's most influential thinkers about the relations between culture and politics and also the best known spokesman for the Palestinians in the court of western public opinion.

These two roles were closely related, and each drew strength from the other.

Said's embattled politics gave added force and drama to his scholarly arguments, while his academic eminence won him a wider hearing for his political views.

At a deeper level, both activities derived from a burning anger at the unwillingness of the western establishment to give a serious hearing - or often any hearing at all - to the Palestinian grievance. Politically, Said sought to break through this wall of condescension with a stream of articles, speeches, interviews and television appearances.

Intellectually, he gradually broadened his analysis, presenting the Palestinian case as an extreme instance of western ideological treatment, first of Arabs in general (The Arab Portrayed, 1968), then of Muslims (Orientalism, 1978), and later of the non-western world as a whole (Culture and Imperialism, 1993).

It was the second of these works, Orientalism, that established his reputation by bringing together his two personae - professor of English literature at Columbia and member of the Palestine National Council. It caught the imagination of students all over the world with its thesis that western academic learning about Islam and the Muslim peoples was not detached and scientific, as it liked to present itself, but one of the instruments the west used to impose its domination.

Later books, The Question of Palestine (1979), and Covering Islam (1981), plus Culture and Imperialism produced a formidable array of opponents and created major controversy.

In 1999 Said was accused in the rightwing American press of having fabricated the story of his childhood in Jerusalem "so as to invent himself as an embodiment of the Palestinian cause". By chance these attacks coincided with the appearance of his memoir of his early life, Out of Place, which he wrote during his long and painful struggle against leukaemia.

Although born in Jerusalem in 1935 of Palestinian parents, he grew up mainly in Cairo where his father had a successful stationery business - and the tribulations of his childhood were more personal than political. His father, an American citizen, had fought in the first world war before returning to his native Palestine. Wadie Said - or Bill as he liked to be called - sent his son to expatriate British schools where the teachers showed no interest in Arabic culture. Indeed, speaking the language was a punishable offence.

Not surprisingly, Said felt himself a misfit. The theme of his memoir is that he never felt fully at home anywhere and as a result was driven throughout his life by a restless insecurity which he felt was typical of the Palestinian condition. This gave him, he believed, an empathy with other "exiled writers out of place", including Joseph Conrad - the subject of his first book.

Aged 15, Said was removed from Victoria College, the "British Eton in Egypt", and sent to a New England preparatory school followed by Princeton and Harvard. In this clubby atmosphere he made common cause with fellow outsiders, many of whom were children of European Jewish immigrants. For a time his specifically Arab or Palestinian identity was almost suppressed.

After toying with a musical career - he was a pianist of near professional standard - he eventually made his name as an English literature specialist. By his own account what began his transformation into a Palestinian nationalist was the Israeli victory of 1967 and the unquestioning triumphalism with which America greeted it.

At times Said seemed to be asserting that the quest for knowledge about other cultures was in itself malign or hypocritical or both. Thus his work could be taken as a condemnation of the entire canon of classical anthropology, or as an apology for cultural relativism - the notion that all beliefs are equally valid and that there is no such thing as objective truth. This brought him into conflict with such distinguished anthropologists as Ernest Gellner, for whom reason transcended culture and relativism was the ultimate trahison des clercs.

Yet critiques of Said's work should be distinguished from the sustained vilification to which he was subjected by political opponents, both before and after he came out against the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

His anti-Zionism, however vehement, was never tinged with anti-Semitism. So perhaps it was fitting that after 1993, despairing of a meaningful Palestinian state alongside Israel, he reverted to the earlier vision of a single, democratic Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be fellow citizens with equal rights.

He is survived by his Lebanese-born wife Mariam and by their son and daughter.

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: NYC
Posts: 3598

Isn't "palestinian intellectual" an oxymoron?


disclaimer: i'm joking. The sad thing is, people won't care about this guy dying because he and his towelhead friends killed teh WTC!

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: NYC
Posts: 11769

I read a lot of his writings in college. Good stuff.

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Registered: Apr 2003
Location: . o O
Posts: 6367

I care.

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