The situation in the Middle East seems like it’s going from bad to worse, and it’s seemed that way for a long time. Maybe public intellectuals like Edward Said could help — but unfortunately Said, who was born November 1, 1935, passed away in 2003.
Said was a Palestinian-American academic, critic, and activist. He was born in Jerusalem, and was a US citizen from birth because his father was from the US. He relocated to Egypt after the 1948 Palestine war, then went to the US to attend Princeton and Harvard. He earned a BA in English from Princeton, and MA and PhD degrees in literature from Harvard. In 1963 he became a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, where he spent his whole career.
But he was also a well-known public figure, and lectured at hundreds of universities around the world. He was originally an advocate for a Palestinian state, but in 1999 changed his stance and argued for a single Israeli-Palestinian state. Although he was a full professor at Columbia, he also served as a visiting professor at Yale, the president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly, and a member of numerous other academic organizations. He presented the annual Reith Lectures for the BBC in 1993; his topic was the role of the public intellectual in modern society.
One of Said’s main interests was what he called the cultural archive, the repository of knowledge in the everyday interactions of people in a society. The term was coined by social anthropologist Wendy James, and Said became it’s foremost popularizer in his book Culture and Imperialism. He emphasized that the growth of Western imperialism depended on disrupting cultural archives in the societies the West attempted to absorb. He also pointed out that his own discipline, comparative literature, can be directly linked to the idea of empire.
Said’s first celebrated work was Orientalism, published in 1978, which explored the Western use of false, romanticized ideas about Asia and the Middle East, and how that exposed the existence of “a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture.” Orientalism was so respected and persuasive that Orientalist scholars found that it affected public perception of “their intellectual integrity and the quality of their scholarship.” The book remains a foundational text in the field of post-colonial studies.
Said became an activist as a consequence of the 1967 Six-Day War when he harshly criticized the US news media’s depictions of the conflict. He published The Arab Portrayed the next year, in which he pointed out that the images of people in the Middle East typically used in the West “are meant to evade specific discussion of the historical and cultural realities of the peoples represented in the Middle East.” Some of his other writings on the subject include Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims, The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession, and The End of the Peace Process.
The political climate of the Middle East has been fraught for so long that when Said toured the area with his son in 2000, and tossed a stone across the Lebanese-Israel border, the symbolic act ignited a firestorm of commentary. His toss was described as “aggression against Israel” and a demonstration of “personal sympathy with terrorism.”
Said was an accomplished musician, too, wrote several books about music, was the music critic for the magazine The Nation, and co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is still operated by the Barenboin-Said Foundation in New York.
He was awarded dozens of honorary degrees, several book awards, and academic awards including the Bowdoin Prize, the Spinoza Lens Prize, the Sultan Owais Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. After he died of leukemia at 67, the Edward Said Chair was endowed at Columbia, Birzeit University renamed their music school the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, and the Barenboim-Said Academy (a music school) was established in Berlin.
