[Fwd: Re: [A-List] Edward Said]

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [A-List] Edward Said
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:10:41 -0400
From: Henry C.K. Liu <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
References: <002501c3842c$f5186530$8d5094c3@xxxxxxxxx>

Excerpt from
The Abduction of Modernity
by
Henry C.K. Liu

Edward Said of Columbia University, one of the pioneers of post-colonial
studies, has written extensively on the subject of cultural imperialism.
His work highlights the misconceived assumptions about cultures and
societies and is influenced by Michel Foucault's concepts of discourse
and power. Foucault views the intellectual's role as no longer to place
himself somewhat ahead and to the side in order to express the stifled
truth of the collectivity. Rather, it is to struggle against the forms
of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere
of knowledge, truth, consciousness, and discourse. In this sense theory
does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice.
But it is local and regional and not totalizing. This is a struggle
against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where
it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to awaken consciousness
that we struggle but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity
conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their
illumination. Colonialism, the political theory governing imperialism,
is based on a belief that the mores of the colonizer are superior to
those of the colonized on the basis on power. This colonial mentality
explains why former colonies such as Hong Kong cling to the myth of the
superiority of their colonial culture.

According to Said, the Orient signifies a system of representations
framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western
learning, Western consciousness, and Western Empire. The Orient exists
for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West.
Orientalism refers to the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and
cultures, generally by Westerners. It is a mirror image of what are
inferior and alien ("Other") to the West. Although this term had been
abandoned as archaic by the late 20th century, Said argues that the term
should be redefined to apply to any current study of such societies to
correct current accounts of the Middle East, India, China, and elsewhere
that reflects long-held Western biases. The discourse and visual imagery
of Orientalism are laced with notions of power and superiority,
formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of
the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies.

Critical theorists regard Orientalism as part of an effort to justify
colonialism through the concept of the "white man's burden", and to
wield the sword of modernity against allegedly "backward" civilizations.
A critical theory is an account of morality that is sensitive to the
historically contingent nature of the culture that spawned it: by
adopting a hypothetical stance toward their own traditions and on this
basis grasping their own cultural relativity, participants in the
formation of a critical theory take a questioning stance toward their
own practices while nonetheless avoiding the paralysis of moral
relativism. The current coercive application of the Western concept of
democracy, rule of law, individual freedom and market fundamentalism as
universal truth is a legitimate target of critical theory.

Promoters of this Western version of modernity see its birth in the West
through a radical transformation of its past. The West of the Middle
Ages, built around a world view of Christian Scholasticism, was a
society of religious philosophy, feudal law, and an agricultural
economy. Out of this past, the Renaissance and Enlightenment produced a
substantially new mentality of science, individualism, industrial
capitalism and imperialism. The cultural foundation of this new
mentality is that reason, not revelation, is the instrument of knowledge
and arbiter of truth; that science, not religion, leads to truth about
nature and life; that the pursuit of happiness in this life, not the
quest for spiritual fulfillment, or suffering in preparation for the
next, is the cardinal purpose of existence; that reason can and should
be used to increase human control through economic and technological
progress; that the individual person is an end in him/herself with the
capacity to direct his/her own life, not a communal member of society
with a prescribed social role; that individuals should be encouraged to
indulge in inalienable rights to freedom of thought, speech, and action;
that religious belief should be a private affair rather than a
collective awareness, that intolerance is a social disease, and that
church and state should be kept separate.

As the West grows stronger, tolerance of other cultures and of those
within the West itself who refuse to participate is viewed increasingly
as a sign of weakness. Domination takes on sophisticated, less visible
forms. National sovereignty is pushed aside in the name of replacing
command economies with markets, warfare with trade, and rule by king or
commissar with token democracy. To resist neo-imperialism is to resist
modernity. This view justifies the new empire of the sole superpower,
self-proclaimed inheritor of Western civilization.

Yet this view of modernity misreads history. Thomas Aquinas (1225-71)
benefited intellectually from his exposure to translations of works of
Aristotle from Greek into Latin by Arab scholars to whose world view he
became much indebted. He also profited intellectually from the rise of
universities in Europe during 12th and 13th centuries, notably the
University of Bologna (1088), known for its studies in law, the
University of Padua (founded by dissidents from Bologna), the University
of Paris, and Oxford University, all founded as centers of learning in
theology, not science. In this new intellectual milieu in Europe,
Aquinas applied Aristotelian syllogism as interpreted by Arab minds to
medieval mysticism of revelation. His Summa Theologica (1267-73) was a
systematic exposition of theology on rational philosophical principles
worked out by the ancient Greeks as modified by Arab precision and
algebra, which pioneered the use of variables in problem-solving in logic.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/EG11Ad01.html



New York Times
Edward Said, Leading Advocate of Palestinians, Dies at 67
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

dward Said, a polymath scholar and literary critic at Columbia
University who was the most prominent advocate in the United States of
the cause of Palestinian independence, died in New York City today. He
was 67.

The cause of death was leukemia, which Mr. Said had been battling for
several years.

Mr. Said, who was born in Jerusalem during the British mandate in
Palestine and emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager,
spent a long and productive career as a professor of comparative
literature at Columbia and was the author of several widely discussed books.

He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic
and English, but, as he once put it, "a man who lived two quite separate
lives," one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce
critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent
of the Palestinian cause.

Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Mr. Said was an Episcopalian
married to a Quaker. He was also an excellent pianist who for several
years was the music critic for The Nation.

From 1977 to 1991, he was as an unaffiliated member of the Palestine
National Conference, a parliament-in-exile. Most of the conference's
members belong to one or another of the main Palestinian organizations,
most importantly the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir
Arafat, but some were members of smaller organizations believed
responsible for terrorist operations against Israelis and Americans,
such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

"The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim," Mr. Said told
Dinitia Smith in New York magazine in 1989, making the kind of statement
that put him at the center of the roiling debate about the Middle East.

"They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and
terrorism is understandable," he said. " But what the Israelis do, in
killing Palestinians on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the
horrific and unjust dispossession of the Palestinian people."

He added: "'I totally repudiate terrorism in all its forms. Not just
Palestinian terrorism I'm also against Israeli terrorism, the bombing of
refugee camps."

Mr. Said was a widely recognized figure in New York, a frequent
participant in debates on the Middle East, and an outspoken advocate of
a Palestinian homeland. For many years he was an ardent supporter of Mr.
Arafat, whom he called "the leader of a genuinely national and popular
movement, with a clearly legitimate goal of self-determination for his
people."

But Mr. Said became a bitter critic of Mr. Arafat after the 1993 Oslo
accords between Israel and the P.L.O., believing that the agreement gave
the Palestinians too little territory and too little control over it.

In the years after Oslo, he argued that separate Palestinian and Jewish
states would always be unworkable and, while he recognized that emotions
on both sides were against it, he advocated a single binational state as
the best ultimate solution.

"I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land
that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way,
with equal rights for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New
York Times. "There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two
communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular
fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such."

Among the criticisms leveled against Mr. Said by Jews and others was his
failure to condemn specific acts of terrorism by Palestinian groups,
including some that served alongside him on the Palestine National Council.

One such person, for example, was Abu Abbas, a member of the P.L.O.
executive committee who is believed responsible for the hijacking of the
Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of a wheelchair-bound
American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

In his interview with New York, Mr. Said called Abu Abbas "a
degenerate," but he then argued that important Israeli leaders, like
former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, had been
terrorists responsible for the killing of women and children.

Among the political views of Mr. Said that were cited by his defenders
was his unambiguous condemnation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran
for his call on his followers to assassinate the writer Salman Rushdie.

Mr. Said, while opposing the American-led Persian Gulf War in 1991,
called the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein "an appalling and dreadful
despot," and he made similar statements at times about the Syrian
president Hafez al-Assad. But Mr. Said was throughout his long career
far more critical of the West and of Israel and their attitudes and
practices in the Arab world than he was of the Arabs or their leaders.

While Israel and its supporters saw the crux of the Middle East conflict
as the Arabs' unwillingness to accept the existence of Israel and the
constant Arabic threat to Israeli security, Mr. Said saw matters in
terms of Zionist atrocity and Palestinian victimhood.

"In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property
destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism
has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have
done to Zionists," he wrote in "The Question of Palestine" (1979).

Mr. Said's best-known and most influential book was "Orientalism,"
published in 1978, which was an amalgamation of his scholarly position
and his political views. In it, Mr. Said laid out a vision of history in
which cultural power the power to define others is inextricably linked
with the political power to dominate. The theory he outlined in
"Orientalism" was that the Western view of the East as sensual and
corrupt, vicious, lazy, tyrannical and backward, exemplified this power.

"The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of
power, of domination of varying degrees of a complex hegemony," Mr. Said
wrote in Orientalism." The idea, which seemed to be anchored in Mr.
Said's own sense of belonging to a dispossessed people, was that the
West invented the East as a way of reinforcing the power of colonialism
over the colonized. Influenced by French thinkers like Franz Fanon,
Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss, Mr. Said was one of the first
scholars to introduce such notions of culture and power into the
American academy.

In one of his later books, "Culture and Imperialism," Mr. Said argued
that 19th-century and 20th-century British novelists even so apparently
nonpolitical a writer as Jane Austen provided a cultural legitimization
for colonialism.

Mr. Said maintained that writers like E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad and
Rudyard Kipling engaged in a "novelistic process, whose main purpose is
not to raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy
attention, but to keep the empire more or less in place."

Mr. Said's entire life's work drew on his experiences in both East and West.

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his
childhood in a well-to-do neighborhood of thick-walled stone houses that
is now one of the main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a
prosperous businessman who had lived in the United States, took the
family to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into
Jewish and Arab halves.

The 12-year-old Edward went to the American School in Cairo, then to
Victoria College, an elite institution where among his classmates were
the future King Hussein of Jordan and the actor Omar Sharif.

In 1951 his parents sent him to the Mount Hermon School in
Massachusetts. He went on to Princeton University and then to graduate
school at Harvard, where he got his Ph.D. in English literature in 1964.
The year before that, Mr. Said became an assistant instructor in the
English Department of Columbia, moving up to full professor in 1970.

In 1977 he was appointed to an endowed chair, becoming the Parr
Professor of English and Comparative Literature and later the Old
Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, a position he held
until he was named a university professor, the highest academic position
at Columbia.

Mr. Said's first book was "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of
Autobiography," in which he began to explore some of the themes that led
to his theories about culture and imperialism.

His second book, "Beginnings," was an examination of literary
inspiration, the way a writer lives out what Mr. Said called the "new
and the customary."

The book, praised by Richard Kuczkowski in The Library Journal as "an
ingenious exploration of the meaning of modernism," won Columbia's
Lionel Trilling Award in 1976. His next book was "Orientalism" with its
theory that the Orient and especially the Arab world have been created
by the Western imagination, as a series of demeaning, reductive stereotypes.

John Leonard, reviewing the book in The New York Times praised the book
as "not merely persuasive, but conclusive."

"Orientalism" established Mr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in
American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger
faculty and graduate students on the left for whom "Orientalism" was a
kind of intellectual credo, the founding document of the field that came
to be called post-colonial studies.

Central to Mr. Said's argument was the notion that there was in essence
no objective, neutral scholarship on Asia and especially on the Arab
world. The very Western study of the East, in his view, was bound up in
the systematic prejudices about the non-Western world that turned it
into a set of clichés. Since the Enlightenment, Mr. Said wrote, "Every
European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an
imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."

This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the Middle
East who acknowledged that there was much in the book that was true but
who rejected many of its assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic, and
over-simplistic.

"It is a pity that it is so pretentiously written, so drenched in
jargon, for there is much in this book that is superb as well as
intellectually exciting," wrote the British historian J. H. Plumb in The
New York Times Book Review. But Mr. Plumb and others contended that Mr.
Said made no effort to actually examine the real, historical relations
between West and East, or to sort out what was true "in the Western
representation" of the East from what was false and caricatural.

They argued that Mr. Said's assumption was that the Orientalists simply
invented the East to satisfy the requirements of cultural superiority
and Western imperialism and he ignored the vast body of scholarship that
grappled with the East on its own terms.

"The tragedy of Mr. Said's `Orientalism', '` wrote Bernard Lewis, a
leading scholar of the Middle East who is criticized in Mr. Said's book,
"is that it takes a genuine problem of real importance and reduces it to
the level of political polemic and personal abuse."

During his years at Columbia, Mr. Said also came to play a more active
role as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, becoming a member of the
Palestine National Council in 1977 and helping, in 1988, to draft a new
Palestinian constitution.

Though seen by most American supporters of Israel as a radical, many
Palestinians identified him as a moderate, a figure who reportedly urged
Mr. Arafat to help break the Middle East impasse by acknowledging
Israel's right to exist. In interviews, he identified himself as a kind
of perpetual outsider, a man influenced by two cultures, the Arabic and
the American, but belonging fully to neither.

"I've never felt that I belonged exclusively to one country, nor have I
been able to identify `patriotically' with any other than losing
causes," Mr. Said wrote in The Nation in 1991. As Mr. Said became more
prominent, defending Palestinians in written statements and in
interviews, as victims of Israeli brutality, he came under attack from
supporters of Israel who accused him of supporting terrorism. He was at
one point reportedly put on a "hit list" by the Jewish Defense League.

It was in its way an acknowledgement of Mr. Said's importance that an
Israeli scholar, Justus Reid Weiner, spent some three years researching
his early life in order to show that Mr. Said had falsified his
biography. In an article in Commentary magazine in 1999, Mr. Weiner
argued that Mr. Said had cultivated a moving personal story of a
Palestinian childhood brought to an abrupt and tragic end by the
creation of Israel in 1947, when, in fact, according to Mr. Weiner, Mr.
Said's childhood home was Cairo.

Interviewed by a reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Said replied that
he had never denied that he had grown up in Cairo as well as Jerusalem.
"I don't think it's that important in any case," Mr. Said said. "I never
have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I've represented
the case of my people, which is something quite different."

Another, earlier article in Commentary, entitled "Professor of Terror,"
elicited a spirited response, with both Jews and non-Jews coming to Mr.
Said's defense. "To portray Said as a devotee of terrorist politics is a
gross distortion of his life's work as a scholar and militant," wrote
Richard A. Falk, a political scientist at Princeton.

In 1991, Mr. Said, who learned during a routine visit to his doctor that
he had leukemia, quietly stepped down from the Palestine National
Council. But when Israel and the P.L.O. signed a peace agreement in
1994, Mr. Said spoke out angrily against the leadership of Mr. Arafat,
not only, in his view, for giving away too much to Israel but also for
the corruption and tyrannical nature of his rule.

"He's sold his people into enslavement," Mr. Said said of Mr. Arafat in
1994. Speaking of the P.L.O., he said, "They're a leadership without
credibility and without moral authority, and I don't know any
Palestinian today who considers the P.L.O. in its current form anything
but an organization of losers and has-beens."

In his last years, Mr. Said's literary production became more and more
political. In 1979 he published "The Question of Palestine" and two
years after that, "Covering Islam" in which he tried to show how
Westerners depicted Arabs as "synonymous with trouble rootless,
mindless, gratuitous trouble."

Mr. Said's last book was "The Politics of Dispossession," which extended
his criticism of Western attitudes toward the Palestinians but also
portrayed the Palestinian leadership as profligate and corrupt.

Reviewing that book in The New York Times, David Shipler wrote: "Reading
Mr. Said is like being yelled at for hours on end, and it takes a good
and willing ear to appreciate his calmer passages of insight, to hear
the essential melodies that run beneath the discordant onslaughts."

Mr. Said's first marriage, to Maire Jaanus, ended in divorce. He is
survived by his wife, Mariam Cortas, a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.


Michael Keaney wrote:

> Edward Said
>
> Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian cause in
> America
>
> Malise Ruthven
> Friday September 26, 2003
> The Guardian
>
> Edward Said, who has died aged 67, was one of the leading literary critics
> of the last quarter of the 20th century. As professor of English and
> comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, he was widely
> regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in
> America. Above all, he was the most articulate and visible advocate of the
> Palestinian cause in the United States, where it earned him many enemies.
>
> The broadness of Said's approach to literature and his other great love,
> classical music, eludes easy categorisation. His most influential book,
> Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to change the direction of
> several disciplines by exposing an unholy alliance between the enlightenment
> and colonialism. As a humanist with a thoroughly secular outlook, his
> critique on the great tradition of the western enlightenment seemed to many
> to be self-contradictory, deploying a humanistic discourse to attack the
> high cultural traditions of humanism, giving comfort to fundamentalists who
> regarded any criticism of their tradition or texts as off-limits, while
> calling into question the integrity of critical research into culturally
> sensitive areas such as Islam.
>
> Whatever its flaws, however, Orientalism appeared at an opportune time,
> enabling upwardly mobile academics from non-western countries (many of whom
> came from families who had benefited from colonialism) 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".
>
> Said's influence, however, was far from being confined to the worlds of
> academic and scholarly discourse. An intellectual superstar in America, he
> distinguished himself as an opera critic, pianist, television celebrity,
> politician, media expert, popular essayist and public lecturer.
>
> Latterly, he was one of the most trenchant critics of the Oslo peace process
> and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat. He was dubbed "professor of
> terror" by the rightwing American magazine Commentary; in 1999, when he was
> struggling against leukaemia, the same magazine accused him of falsifying
> his status as a Palestinian refugee to enhance his advocacy of the
> Palestinian cause, and of falsely claiming to have been at school in
> Jerusalem before completing his education in the United States.
>
> The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles in New York was
> predictable, given his trenchant attacks on Israeli violations of the human
> rights of Palestinians and his outspoken condemnations of US policies in the
> Middle East. From the other side of the conflict, however, he encountered
> opposition from Palestinians who accused him of sacrificing Palestinian
> rights by making unwarranted concessions to Zionism.
>
> As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared to concede that Jews
> had historic claims to Palestine, he said: "I don't deny their claims, but
> their claim always entails Palestinian dispossession." More than any other
> Palestinian writer, he qualified his anti-colonial critique of Israel,
> explaining its complex entanglements and the problematic character of its
> origins in the persecution of European Jews, and the overwhelming impact of
> the Zionist idea on the European conscience.
>
> Said recognised that Israel's exemption from the normal criteria by which
> nations are measured owed everything to the Holocaust. But while recognising
> its unique significance, he did not see why its legacy of trauma and horror
> should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who were
> "absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity",
> of their rights.
>
> "The question to be asked," he wrote in the Politics Of Dispossession
> (1994), "is how long can the history of anti-semitism and the Holocaust be
> used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for
> its behaviour towards the Palestinians, arguments and sanctions that were
> used against other repressive governments, such as South Africa? How long
> are we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza... are directly
> connected to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of
> the victims of Nazism?"
>
> He insisted that the task of Israel's critics was not to reproduce for
> Palestine a mirror-image of a Zionist ideology of diaspora and return, but
> rather to elaborate a secular vision of democracy as applicable to both
> Arabs and Jews. Elected to the Palestine national council (PNC) in 1977, as
> an independent intellectual Said avoided taking part in the factional
> struggles, while using his authority to make strategic interventions.
> Rejecting the policy of armed struggle as impermissible - because of the
> legacy of the Holocaust and the special conditions of the Jewish people - he
> was an early advocate of the two-state solution, implicitly recognising
> Israel's right to exist. The policy was adopted at the PNC meeting in
> Algiers in 1988.
>
> In adapting the English version of the Arabic draft text, Said used his
> influence to rephrase the Arabic; although his modifications were
> insufficient to satisfy the Reagan administration, which ended by dictating
> the crucial words that appeared in Arafat's speech to a special session of
> the UN general assembly (convened in Geneva because the US state department
> refused to grant Arafat a visa to attend the UN in New York), there can be
> little doubt that Said's tireless representations in the American media,
> explaining that the declaration amounted to a "historic compromise" on the
> part of the Palestinians towards the Jewish state, opened the way for the
> US-PLO dialogue that would lead to the Madrid conference and the Oslo peace
> process.
>
> As the peace process gained momentum, however, Said adopted an increasingly
> critical stance and, in 1991, resigned from the PNC. The Oslo declaration,
> he argued, was weighted unfairly towards Israel; the scenario, previsioning
> an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho in advance of the other
> territories and agreement on the final status of Jerusalem, amounted to "an
> instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles".
>
> To the end, he remained a thorn in the side of the Palestinian authority.
> The best-known and most distinguished Palestinian exile became the subject
> of censorship by the representatives of his own people, one of the
> standard-bearers of the liberal conscience in the increasingly illiberal
> climate of intolerance and corruption surrounding President Arafat and his
> regime.
>
> Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian family. His father
> Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the US before the first world war. He
> volunteered for service in France and returned to the Middle East as a
> respectable Protestant businessman - with American citizenship - before
> making an arranged marriage to the daughter of a Baptist minister from
> Nazareth.
>
> In Out Of Place (1999), the memoir of his childhood and youth, Said
> described his father, who called himself William to emphasise his adopted
> American identity, as overbearing and uncommunicative. His Victorian
> strictness instilled in Said "a deep sense of generalised fear", which he
> spent most of his life trying to overcome. To his father, Said owed the
> drivenness that brought him his remarkable achievements. "I have no concept
> of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative
> achievement," he wrote. "Every day for me is like the beginning of a new
> term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain
> tomorrow before it."
>
> Wadie Said revealed little about himself or the source of his money, but
> certainly Edward and his sisters never wanted for anything, travelling with
> battalions of servants, summering (after 1947) in the cultivated comfort of
> Dhour el Shweir in Lebanon, enjoying sumptuous dinners on transatlantic
> liners. Said described his mother, whom he evidently adored, as brilliant
> and man- ipulative, neurotically difficult to please, giving always the
> impression that "she had judged you and found you wanting" - yet instilling
> in him a love of literature and music.
>
> Said's first name, improbably inspired by the Prince of Wales, was the
> creation of his parents, whom he would come to see as "self-creations" out
> of an eclectic blend of elements and aspirations: American lore culled from
> magazines and his father's memories, missionary influence, incomplete and
> hence eccentric schooling, British colonial attitudes. Arabic was forbidden
> at home, except when speaking to servants; even the waiters at Groppis, the
> fashionable Cairo cafe, were addressed in bad French.
>
> According to Said, his un-Arab Christian name induced a split in his
> adolescent sense of identity, between "Edward", his outer self, and the
> "loose, irresponsible, fantasy-ridden metamorphoses of my private inner
> life". Bright but rebellious, he described himself as having been a leading
> troublemaker at Cairo's Victoria College, the British-style public school
> whose snooty captain Michael Shalhoub would later achieve celebrity as Omar
> Sharif.
>
> Sent at his father's insistence to Mount Hermon, a private school in
> Massachusetts, he blossomed academically, but lacked the right attitude to
> be acknowledged as an outstanding student. He responded positively to the
> American approach to essay-writing, which he found more imaginative and
> stimulating than the buttoned-up British approach in Cairo.
>
> The contrast between his burgeoning academic distinction and the absence of
> formal recognition clearly marked him deeply. He would claim that it was
> this experience, as much as the work of his more widely acknowledged
> intellectual mentors, including RP Blackmur, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor
> Adorno, Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault, that influenced his anti-
> authoritarian outlook.
>
> Said's engagement with Palestine drew on deep emo tional roots, particularly
> his affection for his Jerusalem aunt Nabiha, his father's sister, who, after
> 1948, devoted her life to working with Palestinian refugees in Cairo,
> although she never discussed the political aspects of the dispute in Said's
> presence. Until his 30s, Edward was too preoccupied with his studies,
> progressing smoothly through Princeton and Harvard graduate school,
> developing his critical methodologies and indulging his passion for music,
> especially the piano, at which he achieved an almost professional level of
> competence, to take much interest in the politics of his homeland.
>
> It was the trauma of the Arab defeat in 1967, which unleashed a second wave
> of refugees (many of them already refugees from the 1948 exodus), that
> shocked him out of what he would come to see as his earlier complacency,
> reconnecting him with his former self.
>
> Said's writings on English literature, such as Culture And Imperialism
> (1993), and western classical music drew heavily on his sense of being an
> outsider. Like Joseph Conrad, the subject of his PhD thesis and first
> published book, he retained an "extraordinarily persistent residual sense of
> his own exilic marginality", which enabled him to deploy a kind of double-
> vision in his readings of the English novel, discerning the invisible
> colonial plantations that guarantee the domestic tranquillity of Mansfield
> Park, or finding in Conrad's self-consciously circular narrative forms the
> sense of the potentiality of the challenges to western hegemony that would
> erupt during the post-colonial era.
>
> Where African writers such as Chinhua Achebe dismissed Conrad as a racist,
> suggesting that, whatever his gifts as a writer, his political attitudes
> must make him despicable to any African, Said saw such reasoning as
> amounting to spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic amputation. Contrary to
> the assumption sometimes made about him, he did not consider that the hidden
> political agendas and attitudes of cultural supremacy that he regarded as
> informing the canons of western culture from Dante to Flaubert necessarily
> diminished their artistic integrity or cultural power.
>
> His achievement may have been to enhance artistic comprehension by drawing
> attention to unstated political dimensions in the knowledge that art must
> always escape enlistment for partisan ends. In a brilliant essay on Die
> Meistersinger that grapples with Wagner's anti-semitism, he quoted, with
> approval, Pierre Boulez's remark that "Wagner's music, by its very
> existence, refuses to bear the ideological message that it is intended to
> convey."
>
> A similar statement could be made about Said's work as a critic. The
> anti-colonial perspective that animates his work does not issue in
> ideological consistency. Rather, it challenges conventional assumptions
> about art, music and literature, opening up new avenues of inquiry and
> questioning the criteria by which knowledge is organised and husbanded. Like
> his hero, Theodor Adorno, Said was "the quintessential intellectual, hating
> all systems, whether on our side or theirs, with equal distaste".
>
> Versatile and subtle, he was better at elucidating distinctions than
> formulating systems. A Christian humanist with a healthy respect for Islam,
> he was a member of the academic elite; yet he inveighed against academic
> professionalism, venturing into territories well outside his area of
> speciality, insisting always that the true intellectual's role must be that
> of the amateur, because it is only the amateur who is moved neither by the
> rewards nor the requirements of a career, and who is therefore capable of a
> disinterested engagement with ideas and values.
>
> The unusual complexity of his background - privileged yet marginal, wealthy
> yet powerless - allowed him to empathise with dispossessed people,
> especially the victims of Zionism and its western supporters, while enjoying
> in the fullest measure the cultural riches of New York, a city that rang
> louder than any other with Jewish achievement and success.
>
> In his final years, Said's health grew ever more fragile, and, though
> passionately concerned with the unfolding Palestinian disaster in the wake
> of 9/11 and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he took a conscious
> decision to withdraw from political controversy and channel his energies
> into music. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he founded with the Israeli
> citizen Daniel Barenboim in 1999 grew out of the friendship he forged with
> the musician who shares his belief that art - and, in particular, the music
> of Wagner - transcends political ideology. With Said's assistance, Barenboim
> gave master classes for Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank,
> infuriating the Israeli right.
>
> The orchestra received a tumultuous reception at the BBC Proms last month.
> It may prove a fitting legacy for an intellectual whose work illuminated our
> crisis-ridden world by embracing its contradictions and celebrating its
> complexities.
>
> In 1970, he married Mariam Cortas, by whom he had a son and a daughter.
>
> · Edward Wadie Said, writer and academic, born November 1 1935; died
> September 25 2003