A Tribute to Edward Said

With the recent passing away of Edward Said the world has lost a great scholar and humanist and an eloquent supporter of the dispossessed and disenfranchised Palestinians.

Edward Said (pronounced Saa-EED) had an unusual background. He was born to Christian Palestinian parents in Jerusalem in 1935. He spent part of his childhood in Palestine and in the United States. In 1947 when the British divided the city of Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves, his father, a prosperous businessman, took the family to Cairo where he studied at some of the elite schools in that city.

At age sixteen he returned to the United States and after his under-graduate studies at Princeton went to Columbia for graduate studies. He spent the rest of his academic life at the institution holding prestigious chairs in Humanities and English literature and was subsequently named a university professor, the highest academic rank at the university. He was a polymath in the true sense of the word. In Arabic one would have called him by the all-encompassing title of hakim.

With clarity and understanding he wrote about the intertwined disciplines of literature, culture and politics. His 1978 book ‘Orientalism’ made him famous but also brought him, along with accolades, some very harsh and at times unjustified criticism. In that book, Mr. Said had argued that over the years western academics and writers had viewed the East, the Islamic and Arab world to be specific, in a prejudicial way. He called those Western writers, beginning from the time of the Enlightenment, as ‘racist, imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric’, and this, in his view, eased the way to colonize and dominate the East. They variably portrayed the East in stereotypical terms as sensual, corrupt, vicious, lazy, tyrannical and backward. Once the cultural power to define others was exercised, the political power to dominate followed.

In ‘Culture and Imperialism’, his 1993 book, he further argued that most British writers of the 19th and 20th century, while not overtly political in their views, created literature that sanctified Colonial rule rather than questioning its morality or validity. He considered Jane Austen, E. M. Foster, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling and the likes to be in that mold. One could easily add Winston Churchill to that list also. As a staunch royalist and imperialist he had written some awfully nasty stuff about the Indians.

The unintended consequence of Mr. Said’s probing scholarship was that many people in the East seized his words to add another layer of grievances against the West. Mr. Said was also a harsh critic of the totalitarian Arab regimes in the East. ‘It is the role of the Arab intellectual,’ he wrote, ‘to articulate and defend the principles of liberation and democracy at all costs’. Alas such intellectuals have been in rather short supply in that part of the world.

He was an unabashed supporter of the Palestinian cause and while he was not restrained to heap his disdain on the ineptitude and corruption of Palestinian leadership, he continued to lend his pen and his passionate and eloquent voice for the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. As a member of the Palestinian National Council (parliament) since 1977, he helped write a new constitution in 1988 for the future Palestinian State.

His disagreement with the Palestinian leadership came to surface after the ill-fated Oslo Accords that according to him agreed to a moth-eaten truncated state and too little control over it. In later years and suffering from leukemia he abandoned his dream of a separate state for his people and argued for a single democratic state where Arabs and Jews could peacefully coexist.

He was critical of the American role in the Middle East and as the Economist recently wrote in his obituary, Mr. Said understood (American) sympathy towards Israel and the sea of old guilt that lies beneath it. Edward Said understood and recognized the horrific suffering of the Jewish people and the unspeakable pain of the Holocaust. But he also demanded that Israel recognize its own culpability for the plight of the Palestinian people.

His criticism of America and Israel had its expected consequences. He suffered insults and character assassination at the hands of Israeli sympathizers in the academe and on the outside. To that he wryly observed that to be a victim of a victim does presen

He was a class act.