Edward Said

Edward Said

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Edward Wadie Said
Full name	Edward Saïd
Born	November 1, 1935(1935-11-01) Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
Died	September 25, 2003 (aged 67) New York City, New York, United States
School/tradition	Postcolonialism, Postmodernism
Notable ideas	Orientalism "The Other"
Influenced by Derrida, Vico, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Gramsci, Adorno, Conrad, Blackmur, Williams, Foucault, Chomsky.
Influenced Hamid Dabashi, Homi K. Bhabha, John Esposito, Gayatri Spivak, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Fisk, Mahmood Mamdani, Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, Nigel Gibson, Derek Gregory.

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Edward Wadie Saïd (pronounced /edward wædiːʕ sæʕiːd/ Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد‎, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, and an advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism.^[1] Robert Fisk described him as the Palestinians' "most powerful political voice."^[2]

Early life

Edward Said and sister, Rosemarie 1940

Said was born in Jerusalem^[3] (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father, a US citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins, was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I. He moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His mother was born in Nazareth, also of Protestant^[4] Christian Palestinian descent.^[5] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.

Due to his family's Christian background and his upbringing in predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern countries, Said once referred to himself as a "Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture":

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales 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.^[6]

According to his autobiographical memoir, Out of Place,^[6] Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12. He attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem. As the Arab League states declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. In a London Review of Books article Said gave a more detailed account of his upbringing.

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. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schools designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to go to the United States was Victoria College in Alexandria, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading businessmen, as well as such glamorous figures as Michel Shalhoub, head prefect of the school and chief tormentor when I was a relatively junior boy, whom everyone has seen on screen as Omar Sharif.^[6]

In 1951, Said was expelled from Victoria College for being a "troublemaker",^[6] and was consequently sent by his parents to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place".^[6] Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily 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'.^[6] Despite this dissonance, Said did well at the Massachusetts boarding school often 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.^[6]

Fluent in English, French, and Arabic,^[7] Said earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude (1957) from Princeton University and a Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) from Harvard University.

Career

In 1963, Said joined the faculty of Columbia University, and served as a professor in the departments of English and Comparative Literature until his death in 2003.^[8] In 1974 he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, in 1975-6 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford, and in 1977, Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1979, Said was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.^[9] Professor Said also taught at Yale University.^[10] In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's highest academic position.

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 fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky regarding US foreign policy for various independent radio programs.

Said also served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly,^[11] and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the executive board of PEN, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, the Council of Foreign Relations,^[12] and the American Philosophical Society. Said was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world,^[13] as well as of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize, the Lionel Trilling Award (twice), the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award,^[14] among others.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim

For many years, Said, who was also an accomplished musician and pianist,^[15] wrote a music criticism column for The Nation.

In 1999, he jointly founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. The award-winning youth orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries, and has performed internationally, including within both Israel and Palestine.

The Barenboim-Said Foundation, based in Seville and financed by the Junta de Andalucía (Regional Government of Andalusia), which Said and Barenboim had worked together to establish, was officially constituted in 2004. The purpose of the Foundation is to develop several "education through music" projects. In addition to managing the orchestra, the Barenboim-Said Foundation assists with other projects such as the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine project and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project in Seville.^[16]

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 claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."^[17] 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 the US' colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In 1980, Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:

Main argument

Said asserts that much western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study,^[19] a form of racism, and a tool of imperialist domination.^[20] Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,^[21] Anouar Abdel-Malek,^[22] Maxime Rodinson,^[23] and Richard William Southern,^[24] Said argued that 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 that he transformed into a pejorative):

Said argued that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years, since the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus. Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that even most Western scholars could not recognize. His contention was not only that the West has conquered the East politically but also 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 modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.

Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to 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. After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

Criticism

Orientalism and other works by Said have sparked a wide variety of controversy and criticism.^[25] Ernest Gellner argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe.^[26] Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian Empires intervened.^[27] Others argued 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, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims.^[28] Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.^[29]

Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism has come from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis,^[30] and Kanan Makiya address what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's Orientalism on the perception and status of their scholarship.^{[note 1]} Bernard Lewis in particular was often at odds with Said following the publication of Orientalism, in which Said singled out 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".^[31] Lewis answered with several essays in response, and was joined by other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.^[32]

Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic. According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations in Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans.^[33] Irwin writes that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.^[34]

Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic ‘Occidentalism’ to oppose to the ‘Orientalism’ of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment; that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.^[35] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).^[36]

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 Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his 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 … [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation" ^[37] could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism",^[38] unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.

One critic, Justus Weiner, wrote an article which claimed that Said fabricated parts of his early life story. Weiner asserted that Said's formative years were spent in Egypt, where his family's prosperous business was located, and that Said "probably" did not attend St. George's Academy in Jerusalem as he had said, except briefly. Weiner contended that his assertions cast doubt on Said's qualification to contribute to the debate over the dispossession of Arabs before Israel's founding in 1948.^[39]

Three journalists and one historian wrote that Weiner's claims are false. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian, who reported telling Weiner that he had been Said's classmate, a fact Weiner omitted mentioning.^[40] In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, and quoted Said stating, in 1992, that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo.^[41][42] Amos Elon, biographer of the founders of Israel, wrote in The New York Review of Books that Weiner failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–48, 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 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."^[43] In reply, Weiner accused Elon of dishonesty,^[43] and Hitchens of making himself "into a poster boy for Palestine."^[44]

Said observed that the publishers of Commentary had attacked him in three long articles and that Weiner's was the third in the series.^[45][46] Both Said and Weiner reported that Weiner did not contact Said regarding the article. Said commented that the article about his early life was "undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact."^[47]

Supporters and influence

Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.^[48] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship ^[49] and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics, such as Lewis.^[50] Orientalism is regarded as central to the postcolonial movement, encouraging scholars "from non-western countries...to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with 'narratives of oppression,' creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western 'other.'"^[51]

Said's continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash,^[52] Nicholas Dirks,^[53] and Ronald Inden,^[54] and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha^[55] and Gayatri Spivak.^[56] His work continues to be widely discussed in academic seminars, disciplinary conferences, and scholarship.^[57]

Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting, his supporters praise his influence as liberating.^[58] Postcolonial theory, of which Said is regarded as a founder and a figure of continual relevance,^[1] continues to attract interest and is a thriving field in the humanities.^[59] Orientalism continues to profoundly inform the field of Middle Eastern studies.^[57] He was a prominent public intellectual in the United States, praised widely as an "intellectual superstar," engaging in music criticism, public lectures, media punditry, contemporary politics, and musical performance.^[51] His breadth of influence is regarded as "genuinely global," resting on his unique and innovative blend of cultural criticism, politics, and literary theory.^[57]

Criticism of US foreign policy

In a 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.”^[60]

Said opposed many US foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East. During an April 2003 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said argued that the Iraq war was ill-conceived:

Pro-Palestinian activism

Throughout his adult life, Said involved himself in the struggle on behalf of the rights of Palestinians. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council.^[62]

Said was an early proponent of a two-state solution and, in 1988, voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord 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 Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 1970s. 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. Said's 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 Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.

In an article entitled Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, he argued that both the Zionist claim to a land - and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland - and Palestinian rights of self-determination held legitimacy and authenticity. 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).

Edward Said throwing a stone across the Lebanon-Israel border.

A photograph taken on July 3, 2000, of Said in South Lebanon lobbing a rock across the Lebanon-Israel border drew criticism from some political and media commentators, some of whom decried the act as "terrorist sympathizing."^[64]. Said explained the act as 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."^[65] Although he denied aiming the rock at anyone, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir asserted that Said had been less than 30 feet (9.1 m) from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower when he aimed the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed-wire.^[66]

While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia University faculty members, some students, and from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Columbia provost issued a five-page letter defending Said's act on the grounds of 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."^[67]

Said noted that there were repercussions, however, giving for an example when, in February of 2001, the Freud Society of Vienna cancelled an invitation for him to give a lecture.^[68] The president cited as the Society's reason "the political situation in the Middle East and its consequences," going on to explain that anti-Semitism "has become more dangerous" in Austrian politics and that the Society had decided on the cancellation "to avoid an internal clash."^[69]

In Culture and Resistance (2003), Said likened his situation to that of Noam Chomsky: "It's very similar to him. 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 a Hitler worshiper." Said went on to explain:

"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."^[70]

In 2003, 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 Fatah and Hamas.

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 FBI surveillance as early as 1971. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.^[71]

Death and tributes

An al-Mubadara memorial poster of Edward Said on the Israeli West Bank wall.

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.^[72] He was survived by his wife, Mariam (Cortas); a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.^[73]

Subsequently, several prominent writers published elegies for Said, including Alexander Cockburn^[74], Christopher Hitchens,^[75] Tony Judt,^[76] and Tariq Ali.^[77]

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Said's honor.^[78]

Since October of 2005, the University of Adelaide has presented the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, an annual lecture event. The lecturers are described by the university as "high profile intellectuals who transcend the gap of academia and public discourse." The lecturers so far have been: Robert Fisk (2005), Tanya Reinhart (2006), Ghada Karmi (2007), Sara Roy (2008), and Saree Makdisi (2009).^[79]

In 2008, Verso Books published Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, a book of essays by 15 authors, including Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi and Elias Khoury. The book was edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür.

Bibliography

Lectures and interviews

• 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 focusing on the stone toss. (2001-3-14)
• Google Books excerpts from Edward Said talks about his new book Out of Place and Exile interview with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday (1999-11-06, National Public Radio)
• Google Books excerpts from The Connection interview with Christopher Lydon (2000-04-07, WBUR 90.9 FM, Boston)

See also

• The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, named in his honor
• Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis
• Daniel Barenboim

Further reading

• Andrew N. Rubin, ed., Humanism, Freedom, and the Critic: Edward W. Said and After. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.

Notes

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edward Said

• The Edward Said Archive A collection of links to articles written by or about Said.
• A cache of articles by Said at ZMagazine.org
• Edward Said index at The Electronic Intifada.
• Edward Said at the Internet Movie Database
• Review of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays and Edward Said: The Last Interview, in Other Voices, vol. 3, no. 1.
• Debunking Edward Said criticism of Orientalism by Ibn Warraq
• "Edward Said's Documented Deceptions" by pro-Israel group CAMERA
• Edward W. Said, intellectual by Bruce Bawer, The Hudson Review, Winter 2002