Edward Said


Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Educated in the Western canon at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.
As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism, a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said's model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.
As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, due to his public criticism of Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has "to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual" man and woman.
In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville. This initiative brings together, every summer, a group of young classical musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories and Arab countries to study, perform and to promote mutual reflection and understanding. Barenboim and Said jointly received the 2002 Prince of Asturias Awards for their work in "improving understanding between nations".
Besides being an academic, Said was also an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, a compilation of their conversations and public discussions about music held at New York's Carnegie Hall.
The Barenboim–Said Academy, a joint project Said also developed with Barenboim, was created Berlin. The academy was planned as a site for young music students from the Arab world and Israel to study music and humanities in Berlin. It opened its doors on 8 December 2016.
Said died of leukemia on 24 September 2003.

Life and career

Early life

Edward Wadie Said was born on 1 November 1935, to Hilda Said and Wadie Said, a businessman in Jerusalem, then part of British-governed Mandatory Palestine. Wadie Said was a Palestinian man who soldiered in the U.S. Army component of the American Expeditionary Forces, commanded by General John J. Pershing, in the First World War. Afterwards, that war-time military service earned American citizenship to Said père and his family. Edward's mother Hilda Said was Lebanese and raised in Nazareth, Ottoman Empire.
In 1919, in partnership with a cousin, Wadie Said established a stationery business in Cairo. Like her husband, Hilda Said was an Arab Christian, and the Said family practiced Protestant Christianity. He and his sister Rosemarie Saïd Zahlan both pursued an academic careers. Said is said to have become an agnostic in his later years.

Education

Said lived his boyhood between the worlds of Cairo and Jerusalem; in 1947, he attended St. George's School, Jerusalem, a British school of stern Anglican Christian cast. About being there, Said said:
By the late 1940s, Edward's schooling included the Egyptian branch of Victoria College, Alexandria, where classmates included Hussein of Jordan, and the Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Saudi Arabian boys whose academic careers would progress to their becoming ministers, prime ministers, and leading businessmen in their respective countries.
In that colonial time and place, the function of a British colonial school such as VC was to educate selections of young men from the Arab and Levantine ruling classes, to become the Anglicized post-colonial administrators who would rule their countries, upon British decolonization. About Victoria College, Said said:
In 1951, Victoria College expelled Said, who had proved a troublesome boy, despite being a student of great intelligence and much academic achievement; he then attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts, a socially élite, college-prep boarding-school where he lived a difficult year of social alienation. Nonetheless, he excelled academically, and achieved the rank of either first or second in a class of one hundred sixty students.
In retrospect, being sent far from the Middle East he viewed as a parental decision much influenced by "the prospects of deracinated people, like us the Palestinians, being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible." The realities of peripatetic life—of interwoven cultures, of feeling out of place, and of homesickness—so affected the schoolboy Edward that themes of dissonance feature in the work and worldview of the academic Said. At school's end, he had become Edward W. Said—a polyglot intellectual. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1957 after completing a senior thesis titled "The Moral Vision: André Gide and Graham Greene." He later received Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in English Literature from Harvard University.

Career

In 1963, Said joined Columbia University as a member of the English and Comparative Literature faculties, where he taught and worked until 2003. In 1974, he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard; during the 1975–76 period, he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, at Stanford University. In 1977, he became 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 was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.
Said also worked as a visiting professor at Yale University, and lectured at more than 200 other universities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. In 1992, Said was promoted to "Professor", the highest-ranking academic job at Columbia University. Editorially, Prof. Edward 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, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, the Council of Foreign Relations, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1993, Said presented the BBC's annual Reith Lectures, a six-lecture series titled Representation of the Intellectual, wherein he examined the role of the public intellectual in contemporary society, which the BBC published in 2011.

Literary production

Said's first published book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, was an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he presented to earn the PhD degree. Moreover, in Edward Saïd: Criticism and Society, Abdirahman Hussein said that Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness was "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, about the theoretical bases of literary criticism. Said's later works include The World, the Text, and the Critic, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization, Culture and Imperialism, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and On Late Style.

''Orientalism''

Said became an established cultural critic with the book Orientalism a critique of Orientalism as the source of the false cultural representations with which the Western world perceives the Middle East—the narratives of how The West sees The East. The thesis of Orientalism proposes the existence of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture", which originates from Western culture's long tradition of false, romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East, in particular. That such cultural representations have served, and continue to serve, as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperial ambitions of the European powers and of the U.S. Likewise, Said denounced the political and the cultural malpractices of the régimes of the ruling Arab élites who have internalized the false and romanticized representations of Arabic culture that were created by Anglo–American Orientalists.
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Orientalism proposed that much Western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism, meant for the self-affirmation of European identity, rather than objective academic study; thus, the academic field of Oriental studies functioned as a practical method of cultural discrimination and imperialist domination—that is to say, the Western Orientalist knows more about the Orient than do the Orientals.
That the cultural representations of the Eastern world that Orientalism purveys are intellectually suspect, and cannot be accepted as faithful, true, and accurate representations of the peoples and things of the Orient; that the history of European colonial rule and political domination of Asian civilizations, distorts the writing of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Orientalist.
That since Antiquity, Western Art has misrepresented the Orient with stereotypes; in the tragedy The Persians, by Aeschylus, the Greek protagonist falls, because he misperceived the true nature of The Orient. That the European political domination of Asia has biased even the most outwardly objective Western texts about The Orient, to a degree unrecognized by the Western scholars who appropriated for themselves the production of cultural knowledge—the academic work of studying, exploring, and interpreting the languages, histories, and peoples of Asia; therefore, Orientalist scholarship implies that the colonial subaltern were incapable of thinking, acting, or speaking for themselves, thus are incapable of writing their own national histories. In such imperial circumstances, the Orientalist scholars of the West wrote the history of the Orient—and so constructed the modern, cultural identities of Asia—from the perspective that the West is the cultural standard to emulate, the norm from which the "exotic and inscrutable" Orientals deviate.
The thesis of Orientalism concluded that the West's knowledge of the Orient depicts the cultures of the Eastern world as an irrational, weak, and feminized non–European Other, which is the opposite of the West's representations of Western cultures as a rational, strong, and masculine polity. That such an artificial binary-relation originates from the European psychological need to create a "difference" of inequality, between the West and the East, which inequality originates from the immutable cultural essences innate to the peoples of the Oriental world.

Criticism of ''Orientalism''

Orientalism provoked much professional and personal criticism for Said among academics. Traditional Orientalists, such as Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya, suffered negative consequences, because Orientalism affected public perception of their intellectual integrity and the quality of their Orientalist scholarship. The historian Keddie said that Said's critical work about the field of Orientalism had caused, in their academic disciplines:
In Orientalism, Said described Bernard Lewis, the Anglo–American Orientalist, as "a perfect exemplification Establishment Orientalist purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, very close to being propaganda against his subject material."
Lewis responded with a harsh critique of Orientalism accusing Said of politicizing the scientific study of the Middle East ; neglecting to critique the scholarly findings of the Orientalists; and giving "free rein" to his biases.
Said retorted that in The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Lewis responded to his thesis with the claim that the Western quest for knowledge about other societies was unique in its display of disinterested curiosity, which Muslims did not reciprocate towards Europe. Lewis was saying that "knowledge about Europe the only acceptable criterion for true knowledge." The appearance of academic impartiality was part of Lewis's role as an academic authority for zealous "anti–Islamic, anti–Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades." Moreover, in the Afterword to the 1995 edition of the book, Said replied to Lewis's criticisms of the first edition of Orientalism.

Influence of ''Orientalism''

In the academy, Orientalism became a foundational text of the field of Post-colonial studies, for what the British intellectual Terry Eagleton said is the book's "central truth... that demeaning images of the East, and imperialist incursions into its terrain, have historically gone hand in hand."
Said's friends and foes acknowledged the transformative influence of Orientalism upon scholarship in the humanities; critics said that the thesis is an intellectually limiting influence upon scholars, whilst supporters said that the thesis is intellectually liberating. The fields of post-colonial and cultural studies attempt to explain the "post-colonial world, its peoples, and their discontents", for which the techniques of investigation and efficacy in Orientalism, proved especially applicable in Middle Eastern studies.
As such, the investigation and analysis Said applied in Orientalism proved especially practical in literary criticism and cultural studies, such as the post-colonial histories of India by Gyan Prakash, Nicholas Dirks and Ronald Inden, modern Cambodia by Simon Springer, and the literary theories of Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hamid Dabashi.
In Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić–Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms, derived from the ideas of the historian Larry Wolff and Said's ideas in Orientalism. The Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova presented the ethnologic concept of Nesting Balkanisms, which is derived from Milica Bakić–Hayden's concept of Nesting Orientalisms.
In The Impact of "Biblical Orientalism" in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine, the historian Lorenzo Kamel, presented the concept of "Biblical Orientalism" with an historical analysis of the simplifications of the complex, local Palestinian reality, which occurred from the 1830s until the early 20th century. Kamel said that the selective usage and simplification of religion, in approaching the place known as "The Holy Land", created a view that, as a place, the Holy Land has no human history other than as the place where Bible stories occurred, rather than as Palestine, a country inhabited by many peoples.
The post-colonial discourse presented in Orientalism, also influenced post-colonial theology and post-colonial biblical criticism, by which method the analytical reader approaches a scripture from the perspective of a colonial reader. See: The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-colonialism in Palestine–Israel. Another book in this area is Postcolonial Theory, by Leela Gandhi, explains Post-colonialism to how it can be applied to the wider philosophical and intellectual context of history.

Politics

In 1967, consequent to the Six-Day War the academic Edward Said became a public intellectual when he acted politically 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. To address, explain, and correct such Orientalism, Said published "The Arab Portrayed", a descriptive essay about images of "the Arab" that are meant to evade specific discussion of the historical and cultural realities of the peoples who are the Middle East, featured in journalism and some types of scholarship.
In the essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims", Said argued in favour of the political legitimacy and philosophic 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 about Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession, and The End of the Peace Process.

Palestinian National Council

From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council. In 1988, he was a proponent of the two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a meeting of the PNC in Algiers. In 1993, Said quit his membership to the Palestinian National Council, to protest the internal politics that led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, which he thought had unacceptable terms, and because the terms had been rejected by the Madrid Conference of 1991.
Said disliked the Oslo Accords for not producing an independent State of Palestine, and because they were politically inferior to a plan that Yasir Arafat had rejected—a plan Said had presented to Arafat on behalf of the U.S. government in the late 1970s. Especially troublesome to Said was his belief that Yasir Arafat had betrayed the right of return of the Palestinian refugees 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 that had been established since the conquest of Palestine in 1967.
In 1995, in response to Said's political criticisms, the Palestinian Authority banned the sale of Said's books; however, the PA lifted the book-ban when Said publicly praised Yasir Arafat for rejecting Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offers at the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David in the U.S.
In the mid-1990s, Said wrote the Foreword to the history book , by Israel Shahak, about Jewish fundamentalism, which presents the cultural proposition that Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians is rooted in a Judaic requirement for Jews to commit crimes, including murder, against Gentiles. In his Foreword, Said said that Jewish History, Jewish Religion is "nothing less than a concise history of classic and modern Judaism, insofar as these are relevant to the understanding of modern Israel"; and praised the historian Shahak for describing contemporary Israel as a nation subsumed in a "Judeo–Nazi" cultural ambiance that allowed the dehumanization of the Palestinian Other:
In 1998, Said made In Search of Palestine, a BBC documentary film about Palestine past and present. In the company of his son, Wadie, Said revisited the places of his boyhood, and confronted injustices meted out to ordinary Palestinians in the contemporary West Bank. Despite the social and cultural prestige usual to BBC cinema products in the U.S., the documentary was never broadcast by any American television company. In 1999, the American monthly Commentary cited ledgers kept at the Land Registry Office in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period as background for his boyhood recollections.

In Palestine

On 3 July 2000, whilst touring the Middle East with his son, Wadie, Edward Said was photographed throwing a stone across the Blue Line Lebanese–Israel border, which image elicited much political criticism about his action demonstrating an inherent, personal sympathy with terrorism; and, in Commentary magazine, the journalist Edward Alexander labelled Said as "The Professor of Terror", for aggression against Israel. Said explained the stone-throwing as a two-fold action, personal and political; a man-to-man contest-of-skill, between a father and his son, and an Arab Man's gesture of joy at the end of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon : "It was a pebble; there was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away."
Despite having denied that he aimed the stone at an Israeli guardhouse, the Beirut newspaper As-Safir reported that a Lebanese local resident reported that Prof. Said was at less than ten metres distance from the Israeli Defense Force soldiers manning the two-storey guardhouse, when Said aimed and threw the stone over the border fence; the stone's projectile path was thwarted when it struck the barbed wire atop the border fence. Nonetheless, in the U.S., despite a political fracas by right-wing students at Columbia University and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith International, the university provost published a five-page letter defending Prof. 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 Saïd."
Nevertheless, Said endured political 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 by explaining to Said 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; thus, the Freud Society cancelled their invitation to Said in order to "avoid an internal clash" of opinions, about him, that might ideologically divide the Freud Society. In Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Saïd, Said likened his political situation to the situation that Noam Chomsky has perdured as a public intellectual:
"It's very similar to his. He's a well-known, great linguist. He's been celebrated and honored for that, but he's also vilified as an anti–Semite and as a Hitler worshiper. ... For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti–Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. We don't want anybody's history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. On the other hand, there's a great difference, between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people."

Criticism of U.S. foreign policy

In the revised edition of Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Said criticized the Orientalist bias of the Western news media's reportage about the Middle East and Islam, especially the tendency to editorialize "speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies." He criticized the American military involvement in the Kosovo War as an imperial action; and described the Iraq Liberation Act, promulgated during the Clinton Administration, as the political license that predisposed the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, which was authorised with the Iraq Resolution ; and 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 leukemia, as a public intellectual, Said continued criticising the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in mid-2003; and, in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper, in the article "Resources of Hope", Said said that the U.S. war against Iraq was a politically ill-conceived military enterprise:

Under surveillance

In 2003, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, Mustafa Barghouti, and Said established Al-Mubadara, headed by Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a third-party reformist, democratic party meant to be an alternative to the usual two-party politics of Palestine. As a political party, the ideology of Al-Mubadara is specifically an alternative to the extremist politics of the social-democratic Fatah and the Islamist Hamas. Said's founding of the group, as well as his other international political activities concerning Palestine, were noticed by the U.S. government; in 2006, the anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of the 283-page political dossier that the FBI had compiled on Said, begun in 1971, four years into his career as a public intellectual active in U.S. politics.

Music

Besides having been a public intellectual, Edward Said was an accomplished pianist, worked as the music critic for The Nation magazine, and wrote four books about music: Musical Elaborations ; Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, with Daniel Barenboim as co-author; On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain ; and Music at the Limits in which final book he spoke of finding musical reflections of his literary and historical ideas in bold compositions and strong performances.
Elsewhere in the musical world, the composer Mohammed Fairouz acknowledged the deep influence of Edward Said upon his works; compositionally, Fairouz's First Symphony thematically alludes to the essay "Homage to a Belly-Dancer", about Tahia Carioca, the Egyptian terpsichorean, actress, and political militant; and a piano sonata titled Reflections on Exile, which thematically refers to the emotions inherent to being an exile.
In 1999, Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim co-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.

Honors and awards

Besides honors, memberships, and postings to prestigious organizations worldwide, 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 were:
On 24 September 2003, after enduring a twelve-year sickness with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Edward W. Said died, at 67 years of age, in New York City. He was survived by his wife, Mariam C. Said, his son, Wadie Said, and his daughter, Najla Said. The eulogists included Alexander Cockburn ; Seamus Deane ; Christopher Hitchens ; Tony Judt ; Michael Wood ; and Tariq Ali. In November 2004, in Palestine, Birzeit University renamed their music school the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.
The tributes to Edward Said include books and schools; such as Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said features essays by Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi, and Elias Khoury; Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism, by Harold Aram Veeser, a critical biography; and Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations, essays by Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappé, Ella Shohat, Ghada Karmi, Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim; and the Barenboim–Said Academy was established in 2012.

Citations