By Miri -
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Edward and his sister Rosemarie, 1940 |
It has been ten years
since the passing of Edward Said. He was a cultural critic, an
academic, a writer, an intellectual, a musician and probably one of
the most powerful voices of the Palestinian cause.
Said was born in Jerusalem
in 1935 to a prosperous Palestinian Christian family. He attended
school in Jerusalem, Cairo and Massachusetts and obtained his
academic degrees in Princeton and Harvard University. He spent most
of his academic career as a professor of Comparative Literature at
Columbia University, but also taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
Said was married to Mariam
Said, and was the father of a daughter, Najla and a son Wadie.
As a Palestinian with US
citizenship, who would never shy away from criticising either side,
Said felt most of his life “out of place”, which also became the title of
his memoir. Yet, as his colleague Joseph Massad writes, Said created
an intellectual world with “a new language, a new syntax, a new
vocabulary to which those of us who, like him, felt out of place in a
terrifyingly unjust world, could belong”.
Said the Intellectual
Said had a very clear
vision of the tasks and responsibilities of an intellectual. To him,
criticism constituted the very basis for thinking and he saw the
intellectual as someone who had to always “speak truth to power”.
"I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for"
In an age dominated by so
many political deities, be it communism, imperialism, or even
nationalism, Said envisioned himself as a political atheist, who
hated all systems “whether on our side or theirs with equal
distaste”. This position should however not be confused with one of
neutrality, but rather as the insistence on taking a critical stance
towards all political religions
.
Said's
Orientalism
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The cover of Orientalism, "The Snake Charmer" by Jean-Léon Gérome |
During his lifetime, Said
wrote and published numerous books and articles, many of which were
very influential, yet his most important work remains Orientalism,
which was first published in 1978.
Said had always been
interested in the way that the West perceived and represented the
non-West. As a Palestinian Arab he became particularly interested in
the Western conceptualisation of the so called Orient. He therefore
took it on himself to thoroughly study the Western discipline of
Orientalism, and the representations of the Orient in Western
culture.
The “Orient”, he claims, is nothing but a Western
projection, which serves as an implicit justification for its
colonial and imperialist ambitions. At the same time the West used
the representations of the Orient as irrational, weak and feminine,
in order to invent itself as its antithesis, and thus as rational,
strong and with supposedly masculine qualities.
Until today Orientalism
engenders a lot of discomfort and even hostility towards Said, yet
its impact on a number of academic disciplines, such as anthropology,
comparative literature, cultural and postcolonial studies, the latter of which
Said is unequivocally one of the intellectual founding figures,
cannot be underestimated.
More than an analysis, Orientalism became
a method which served to show how in different ways the European self
came to be engineered as the universal self, against which all others
should be measured.
While until the publication of Orientalism,
Western scholarship was mainly concerned with studying the
non-Western other, Said's work to some extent managed to shift this
perspective and allowed for the study not of blackness but of
whiteness, not of femininity but of masculinity, not of homosexuality
but of heterosexuality.
The importance of
Orientalism could not be diminished by the passing of time, mainly
because the conditions of its production unfortunately remain
unchanged. More than 30 years after its first publication, wars are
still waged and legitimised by invoking the image of a "civilised"
democratic West struggling to enlighten the uncivilised Orient.
Said and Palestine
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Poster of Said at the Separation Barrier |
For quite a while his life
in exile disconnected Said from Palestine, yet the Arab defeat
against Israeli troops, and the subsequent occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza in 1967 reportedly reconnected him with his former
self. Said thereafter became a central figure to the struggle of
making the Palestinian narrative known
abroad.
In 1977 he was elected to
the Palestine National Council (PNC) as an independent member and he
was also among the first advocates of the two-state solution, which
entailed an implicit recognition of Israel's right to exist
. Yet
also when it came to Palestinian politics, Said remained loyal to his
conviction of the centrality of criticism, even when it concerned his
own community. Protesting the politics which led to the Oslo Accords,
he resigned from the PNC in 1991. Oslo, he rightly predicted, would
turn Palestine into a Bantustan and the PLO into a police authority
subcontracted to the Israeli occupation.
Due to his harsh criticism
of the Palestinian leadership, Arafat censored and banned the
writings of "the best-known and most distinguished Palestinian
exile", which probably only served to emphasise the importance
of Said's work.

During the later years of
his life, Said became a supporter of a secular democratic state for
both Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
During the later years of his life he increasingly dedicated himself to music. Yet also in this realm, the fight for a more just future remained a central theme and together with his friend, the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Palestinian, Arab and Israeli musicians.
After fighting against leukaemia for 12 years, Said passed away in New York on September 25th, 2003. It almost seems as if, now than ever, we are in need of his critical voice, yet fortunately, through his work, he equipped us with many tools to form our own critical opinions in order to continue his legacy and speak truth to power.
Comments
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Hi, you've put his date of death as September 25th, 2013, I think you meant 2003 :-). Great piece.
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