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Edward Wadie Said (November 1, 1935 – September 24, 2003; ) was a well-known Palestinian-American literary theorist, critic, and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist. He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is regarded as a founding figure in post-colonial theory.

Life

Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine). His father was a wealthy Christian Palestinian businessman and an American citizen, while his mother was born in Nazareth of Christian Lebanese and Palestinian descent . The historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan was his sister. According to Said's autobiography, he lived between Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12 and, in 1947, he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem. According to Said, his extended family became refugees in 1948 during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War because the family home was in the affluent quarter of Talbiya in the western part of Jerusalem that was annexed by Israel. In 1998, Said wrote: "I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt." May 7, 1998.

At age 14, Said entered Victoria College in Cairo, and then Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, the United States. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as a professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, in 1977, and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992, Said attained the rank of University Professor, which is Columbia's most prestigious academic position. He also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities. He spoke Arabic, English and French fluently and was literate in Spanish, German, Italian and Latin.

Said was bestowed numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice received Columbia's Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. His memoir Out of Place won the 1999 New Yorker Prize for non-fiction. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society.*

Said's writing regularly appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. He gave interviews alongside good friend, fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky regarding U.S. foreign policy for various independent radio programs.

Said also contributed music criticism to The Nation for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim.

In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under surveillance starting in 1971. Most of his records are marked as related to "IS Middle East" ("IS" = Israel) and significant portions remain "Classified Secrets" .

Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York after a decade-long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia.

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor.

Controversy over Said's early life

In 1999, Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, conducted a study in which he asserted that Edward Said's family did not permanently reside in Talbiya and did not live there during the final months of the British mandate, and thus they could not be considered refugees. Said's parents never owned a house in Jerusalem, says Weiner, the house in Talbiya belonged to Edward Said's aunt and Edward Said's family visited Jerusalem only occasionally. "On his Said's birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address." According to Weiner, Said grew up in Cairo and attended Gezira Preparatory School there and probably never attended the St. George's Academy in Jerusalem except during his family's brief stays in that city. Weiner argues that Said's name does not appear on the school registry and that David Eben-Ezra, whom Said mentioned as his classmate, has no recollections of him Sep 1999.. Weiner's article originally appeared in Commentary magazine; an abridged version was published in The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Telegraph.

Said was defended by several respondents, including Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, who wrote that schoolmates and teachers of Said had confirmed Said's stay at St. George's School in Jerusalem. Hitchens also quoted Said as having written already in 1992 actually in 1989 that he had spent a large part of his youth in Cairo . Said himself responded to Weiner in an article titled "Defamation, Zionist-style" published in Al-Ahram Weekly. In the article, Said argues that "the family house was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership". Further, Edward Said says that school records ended in 1946, while he attended St. George only in 1947, so his name could not possibly be on the registry Sep 1999. . Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian who said he had been Said's classmate at St. George's Sep 1999. . In an interview in 2000, Said said: "I was born in Jerusalem, my family is a Jerusalem family. We left Palestine in 1947. We left before most others. It was a fortuitous thing. ... I never said I was a refugee, but the rest of my family was. My entire extended family was driven out ..." .

Orientalism

Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism," which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture" 17(5), Jan 1999. . He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

The Argument

Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory and cultural studies, and to a lesser extent on those of History and Orientalism. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (acknowledging the influence of the latter, but not the former Edward W. Said Orientalism (Penguin) 1995 p3 ), and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A.L. Tibawi A.L. Tibawi “English-speaking Orientalists: a critique of their approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism” Islamic Quarterly Vol.8 (1964) pp25-45 (whose influence also went unacknowledged), Said argued that all Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term which he transformed into a pejorative epithet). He argues that their claims to objective knowledge of the Orient are simply claims to power.

“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.” Orientalism p11

Said’s contention was that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long, that in Orientalist writings a very considerable bias exists in even the most outwardly objective of texts, a bias which most Western scholars would not even be able to recognise, because it is part of their cultural make-up too. His contention was that the West has not only conquered the East politically, but that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its myriad modern identities from a perspective which takes Europe as the norm from which the ‘exotic’ ‘inscrutable’ Orient deviates. Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient invariably depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised ‘Other’, contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West. Western writings are about creating ‘difference’ between West and East, a difference which is attributed to the existence of certain immutable ‘essences’ in the Oriental make-up. In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia. Having thus stated his central thesis, the remainder of Orientalism consists mainly of examples from Western texts designed to illustrate it.

Reception

Said’s book attracted both adulation and criticism from the very outset. Historians and anthropologists such as Ernest Gellner Ernest Gellner “The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism” Times Literary Supplement 19th February 1993 pp3-4 (A review of Said's Culture and Imperialism) pointed out that his contention that the West had dominated the East for over 2,000 years (since the composition of Aeschylus’s The Persians) was simply unsupportable. Until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe. Furthermore Said had chosen to concentrate largely on the Middle East, Palestine and Egypt, where his own roots lay, and these were areas that only came under European control in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, and for a relatively short period. He devoted much less attention to the British Raj in India, by far the lengthiest and most successful example of European hegemony in the Orient, and entirely ignored Russia’s dominions in Asia. Critics have argued that this was because Said was more interested in making polemical points about the Middle East Robert Irwin For Lust of knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies (London: Allen Lane) 2006 pp159-60, 281-2 . Others pointed out that even at the height of the Imperial Era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators and local forms of knowledge, which were frequently subversive of Imperial aims C.A. Bayly Empire and Information (Delhi: Cambridge University Press) 1999 pp25, 143, 282. The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm also expressed reservations about Said's polemicism and his tendency to essentialize the West Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” Khamsin Vol.8 (1981)p6 .

Criticism from Orientalists

The fiercest criticism of his views, however, has come from academic Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis Bernard Lewis “The Question of Orientalism” in Islam and the West (London) 1993 pp. 99–118 , Albert Hourani, Kanan Makiya, Nikki Keddie and Robert Graham Irwin Robert Irwin For Lust of Knowing. The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane) 2006 , who feel that their profession has been unfairly maligned. Bernard Lewis was among the scholars whose work Said questioned in Orientalism and subsequent works. The two authors came to frequently exchange polemics, starting in the pages of the New York Review of Books following the publication of Orientalism. Lewis's article "The Question of Orientalism" was followed in the next issue by "Orientalism: an exchange." Other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr *, Aijaz Ahmad In Theory: Classes, Natures, Literatures (London) 1992 and William Montgomery Watt also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.

Said's academic critics argued that Said made no attempt to distinguish between the writings of poets such as Goethe (who never even travelled in the East), novelists such as Flaubert (who undertook a brief sojourn in Egypt), discredited mavericks such as Ernest Renan, and serious scholars such as Edward William Lane who were fluent in Arabic and produced work of considerable value: their common European origins and attitudes, according to Said, overrode such considerations Said Orientalism pp. 87–88, 336; Ibn Warraq Debunking Edward Said . Furthermore, Irwin (amongst others) has pointed out that Said had entirely ignored the fact that Oriental studies in the 19th century were dominated by Germans and Hungarians, from countries which, inconveniently for Said's purposes, did not possess an Eastern Empire Irwin For Lust of Knowing pp. 8, 150–166 . Said is further accused of creating a monolithic ‘Occidentalism’ to oppose to the ‘Orientalism’ of Western discourse: he failed to make a distinction between Romanticism and Enlightenment thinking, he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion amongst western scholars of the Orient; he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as Sir William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than in creating ‘difference’, and had frequently made discoveries which would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism O.P. Kejariwal The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the discovery of India’s past (Delhi: Oxford University Press) 1988 ppix-xi, 221-233. More generally, Said and his followers have been criticised for making no distinction between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (expressed in distasteful representations of the Orient in films such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and the work of Western scholars, which ends up being tarred with the same brush Said Orientalism Afterword to the 1995 edition p. 347; Irwin For Lust of knowing pp. 3–8 * .

Finally, Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian, and as a "Subaltern". Given his prominent position at the heart of the American Academy (he was at one time President of the Modern Language Association), his largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, and the fact that he spent his entire adult life in the United States, if one accepts Said's own arguments that

any and all representations… are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer… are interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth’, which is itself a representation.” Orientalism p. 272

This could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Thus, Said's critics argue, their excessive relativism with regard to knowledge means that Said and his followers end up trapped in a “web of solipsism” D.A. Washbrook “Orients and Occidents. Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire” The Oxford History of the British Empire Vol. V Historiography p. 607, unable to talk of anything but 'representations', and denying the existence of any objective truth.

Supporters and influence

Said’s supporters argue that these criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film *. They point out that Said himself had acknowledged the limitations of his study in failing to address German scholarship Said Orientalism pp18-19 , and that in the 'Afterword' to the 1995 edition of his book he had convincingly (to them) refuted his critics such as Lewis Said Orientalism 'Afterword' pp329-54 . Apart from his continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies, his work has had particular influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash Gyan Prakash “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian historiography” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. XXXII No.2 (1990) pp383-408 , Nicholas Dirks Nicholas Dirks Castes of Mind (Princeton) 2001 , Ronald Inden Ronald Inden Imagining India (Oxford University Press) 1990 and on literary theorists such as Homi Bhabha Homi K. Bhaba Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.) 1990 and Gayatri Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York) 1987 .

His critics and supporters alike acknowledge the profound, transformative influence which Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the Humanities - the former, however, allege that it has been almost wholly baleful, the latter that it was liberating.

Pro Palestinian activism

"Above all we must, as Mandela never tired of saying about his struggle, be aware that Palestine is one of the great moral causes of our time. Therefore, we need to treat it as such. It's not a matter of trade, or bartering negotiations, or making a career. It is a just cause which should allow Palestinians to capture the high moral ground and keep it. " (Edward Said in Al-Ahram weekly) *

Writing in 1980, Said also criticized what he saw as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:

"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" .

As a Palestinian activist, Said campaigned first for a creation of an independent Palestinian state, and then later for a single Jewish-Arab state. From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional struggles. He supported the two-state solution and voted for it in Algiers in 1988. He quit the PNC over the decision by Yasser Arafat and the PLO to support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, a decision he considered disastrous to the interests of Palestinian refugees living in Arab League member states who supported the American-led coalition. Thereafter, Said became critical of the role of Arafat in the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, feeling that the Oslo terms were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 70's. In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. He came to prefer and support the binational solution--the creation of one state in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and pre-1967 Israel, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights over a two state solution with a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

"I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial" .
His relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad that PA leaders banned the sale of his books in August 1995, but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.

In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both the established Palestinian Authority and to Islamist militant groups such as Hamas.

Said's books on the issue of Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and The End Of The Peace Process (2000).

Publications

  • Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
  • Beginnings: Intention and Method(1975)
  • Orientalism (1978)
  • The Question of Palestine (1979)
  • Orientalisme (1980)
  • Literature and Society (editor) (1980)
  • Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981)
  • The World, the Text and the Critic (1983)
  • After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) photographs by Jean Mohr
  • Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988) and co-editor with Christopher Hitchens
  • Yeats and Decolonization (1988)
  • Musical Elaborations (1991)
  • Culture and Imperialism (1993)
  • The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
  • Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994)
  • The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward W. Said (1994) with David Barsamian
  • Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996)
  • Entre guerre at paix (1997)
  • Acts of Aggression: Policing "Rogue States" (with Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark)(1999)
  • Out of Place (1999) (a memoir)
  • Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884-1891 (Editor) (1999)
  • The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000)
  • Reflections on Exile (2000)
  • The Edward Said Reader (2000)
  • Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (2001)
  • CIA et Jihad, 1950-2001: Contre l'URSS, une désastreuse alliance (2002), with John K. Cooley
  • Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (2003) by David Barsamian
  • From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (Collection of Essays) (2003)
  • Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2005)
  • On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (will be published posthumously April 2006)
  • Criticism in Society (year of publication unknown)
  • Edward Said: A Critical Reader (year of publication unknown)
  • ''Freud and the Non-European (year of publication unknown)
  • Jewish Religion, Jewish History (Introduction) (year of publication unknown)
  • Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (year of publication unknown)
  • Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with Daniel Barenboim) (year of publication unknown)

References

External links

1935 births | 2003 deaths | Cancer deaths | Humanists | Islamic politics and Islamic world studies | Literary critics | Palestinian writers | Arab Americans | Palestinian-Americans | Political writers | Post-colonial theory | American Middle Eastern studies

إدوارد سعيد | Edward Said | Edward Said | Edward Said | Edward Said | Edward Saïd | אדוארד סעיד | エドワード・サイード | Edward Said | Саид, Эдвард Вади | Edward Said | 爱德华·萨义德 | Edward Said

 

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