Edward Wadie Said (; Arabic: إدوارد
وديع سعيد‎ [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd],
Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25
September 2003) 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 (1978), 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, because he publicly criticized
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, which comprises young Israeli,
Palestinian, and Arab musicians.
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 (2002),
a compilation of their conversations about
music.
Said died of leukemia on 25 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 (1920–48).
Wadie Said was a Palestinian man who soldiered
in the U.S. Army component of the American
Expeditionary Forces (1917–19), commanded
by General John J. Pershing, in the First
World War (1914–18).
Afterwards, that war-time military service
earned American citizenship to Said père
and his family.
Edward's mother, Hilda Said was born 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, although the Said family practiced the
Jerusalemite variety of Greek Orthodox Christianity,
Edward was agnostic.
Moreover, his sister Rosemarie Saïd Zahlan
(1937–2006) also pursued an academic career.
=== 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:
With an unexceptionally Arab family name like
"Saïd", connected to an improbably British
first name (my mother much admired Edward
VIII 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.
To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language,
and English, my school language, were inextricably
mixed: I have never known which was my first
language, and have felt fully at home in neither,
although I dream in both.
Every time I speak an English sentence, I
find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice
versa.
By the late 1940s, Edward's schooling included
the Egyptian branch of Victoria College, Alexandria
(VC), where classmates included (King) 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, Edward said:
The moment one became a student at Victoria
College, one was given the student handbook,
a series of regulations governing every aspect
of school life—the kind of uniform we were
to wear, what equipment was needed for sports,
the dates of school holidays, bus schedules,
and so on.
But the school's first rule, emblazoned on
the opening page of the handbook, read: "English
is the language of the school; students caught
speaking any other language will be punished."
Yet, there were no native speakers of English
among the students.
Whereas the masters were all British, we were
a motley crew of Arabs of various kinds, Armenians,
Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks, each of
whom had a native language that the school
had explicitly outlawed.
Yet all, or nearly all, of us spoke Arabic—many
spoke Arabic and French—and so we were able
to take refuge in a common language, in defiance
of what we perceived as an unjust colonial
structure.
In 1951, Victoria College expelled Edward,
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, the student Edward excelled,
and achieved the rank of either first (valedictorian)
or second (salutatorian) in a class of one
hundred sixty students.In retrospect, being
sent far from the Middle East (Egypt) 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 (fluent in English,
French, and Arabic) who had earned a Bachelor
of Arts (1957) degree at Princeton University,
and Master of Arts (1960) and Doctor of Philosophy
(1964) 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 other universities.
Said lectured at more than 200 universities
in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
In 1992, Said was promoted to "Professor",
the highest-rank 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; was 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 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 (1966), was
an expansion of the doctoral dissertation
he presented to earn the PhD degree.
Moreover, in Edward Saïd: Criticism and Society
(2010), Abdirahman Hussein said that Conrad's
novella Heart of Darkness (1899) 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
(1974), about the theoretical bases of literary
criticism.
Said's later works include The World, the
Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism,
Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization
(1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations
of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures
(1994), Humanism and Democratic Criticism
(2004), and On Late Style (2006).
=== Orientalism ===
Said became an established cultural critic
with the book Orientalism (1978) a critique
(description and analyses) 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.
So far as the United States seems to be concerned,
it is only a slight overstatement to say that
Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as
either oil suppliers or potential terrorists.
Very little of the detail, the human density,
the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered
the awareness of even those people whose profession
it is to report the Arab world.
What we have, instead, is a series of crude,
essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world,
presented in such a way as to make that world
vulnerable to military aggression.
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.
I doubt if it is controversial, for example,
to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt,
in the later nineteenth century, took an interest
in those countries, which was never far from
their status, in his mind, as British colonies.
To say this may seem quite different from
saying that all academic knowledge about India
and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed
with, violated by, the gross political fact—and
yet that is what I am saying in this study
of Orientalism.
That since Antiquity, Western Art has misrepresented
the Orient with stereotypes; in the tragedy
The Persians (472 BCE), 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 (the colonised people) 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:
Some unfortunate consequences ... I think
that there has been a tendency in the Middle
East [studies] field to adopt the word Orientalism
as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring
to people who take the "wrong" position on
the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who
are judged "too conservative."
It has nothing to do with whether they are
good or not good in their disciplines.
So, Orientalism, for many people, is a word
that substitutes for thought, and enables
people to dismiss certain scholars and their
works.
I think that is too bad.
It may not have been what Edward Saïd meant,
at all, but the term has become a kind of
slogan.
In Orientalism, Said described Bernard Lewis,
the Anglo–American Orientalist, 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."Lewis
responded with a harsh critique of Orientalism
accusing Said of politicizing the scientific
study of the Middle East (and Arabic studies
in particular); 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 (1982),
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
[was] 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 (1978).
=== 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 (Iran: A People Interrupted,
2007).
In Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić–Hayden
developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms
(1992), derived from the ideas of the historian
Larry Wolff (Inventing Eastern Europe: The
Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment,
1994) and Said's ideas in Orientalism (1978).
The Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (Imagining
the Balkans, 1997) presented the ethnologic
concept of Nesting Balkanisms (Ethnologia
Balkanica, 1997), 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
(2014), 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
(2007).
Another book in this area is Postcolonial
Theory (1998), 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 (5–10
June 1967) the academic Edward Said became
a public intellectual when he acted politically
to counter the stereotyped misrepresentations
(factual, historical, cultural) 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" (1968),
a descriptive essay about images of "the Arab"
that are meant to evade specific discussion
of the historical and cultural realities of
the peoples (Jews, Christians, Muslims) who
are the Middle East, featured in journalism
(print, photograph, television) and some types
of scholarship (specialist journals).In the
essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of its
Victims" (1979), 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 (1979), The Politics
of Dispossession (1994), and The End of the
Peace Process (2000).
=== Palestinian National Council ===
From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent
member of the Palestinian National Council
(PNC).
In 1988, he was a proponent of the two-state
solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
(1948), 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 (Declaration of Principles on Interim
Self-Government Arrangements, 1993), 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 (PA) 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 (2000) in the U.S.In the mid-1990s,
Said wrote the Foreword to the history book
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight
of Three Thousand Years (1994), by Israel
Shahak, about Jewish fundamentalism, which
presents the cultural proposition that Israel's
mistreatment of the Palestinians is rooted
in a Judaic requirement (of permission) for
Jews to commit crimes, including murder, against
Gentiles (non-Jews).
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 all my works, I remained fundamentally
critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism.
. . . My view of Palestine . . . remains the
same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations
about the insouciant nativism, and militant
militarism of the nationalist consensus; I
suggested, instead, a critical look at the
Arab environment, Palestinian history, and
the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion
that only a negotiated settlement, between
the two communities of suffering, Arab and
Jewish, would provide respite from the unending
war.
In 1998, Said made In Search of Palestine
(1998), 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 (1985–2000):
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 (The Ambassador) reported that a
Lebanese local resident reported that Prof.
Said was at less than ten metres (ca. 30 ft.)
distance from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)
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 (Sons of the
Covenant), 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 (2003), 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 (1997), 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 (1998–99) as an imperial
action; and described the Iraq Liberation
Act (1998), 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
(2 October 2002); 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" (2 April
2003), Said said that the U.S. war against
Iraq was a politically ill-conceived military
enterprise:
My strong opinion, though I don't have any
proof, in the classical sense of the word,
is that they want to change the entire Middle
East, and the Arab world, perhaps terminate
some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist
groups they dislike, and install régimes
friendly to the United States.
I think this is a dream that has very little
basis in reality.
The knowledge they have of the Middle East,
to judge from the people who advise them,
is, to say the least, out of date and widely
speculative.
. . .
I don't think the planning for the post–Saddam,
post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated,
and there's very little of it.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman
and U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas
Feith testified in Congress, about a month
ago, and seemed to have no figures, and no
ideas [about] what structures they were going
to deploy; they had no idea about the use
of [the Iraqi] institutions that exist, although
they want to de–Ba'thise the higher echelons,
and keep the rest.
The same is true about their views of the
[Iraqi] army.
They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition
that they've been spending many millions of
dollars on; and, to the best of my ability
to judge, they are going to improvise; of
course, the model is Afghanistan.
I think they hope that the U.N. will come
in and do something, but, given the recent
French and Russian positions, I doubt that
that will happen with such simplicity.
=== Under surveillance ===
In 2003, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak,
Mustafa Barghouti, and Said established Al-Mubadara
(The Palestinian National Initiative), 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 (Islamic Resistance Movement).
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 (1991); Parallels and Paradoxes:
Explorations in Music and Society (2002),
with Daniel Barenboim as co-author; On Late
Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
(2006); and Music at the Limits (2007) in
which final tome 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" (1990),
about Tahia Carioca, the Egyptian terpsichorean,
actress, and political militant; and a piano
sonata titled Reflections on Exile (1984),
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 was the Bowdoin
Prize by Harvard University.
He twice received the Lionel Trilling Book
Award; the first occasion was the inaugural
bestowing of said literary award in 1976,
for Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974).
He also received the Wellek Prize of the American
Comparative Literature Association, and was
awarded the inaugural Spinoza Lens Prize.
In 2001, Said was awarded the Lannan Literary
Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2002,
he received the Prince of Asturias Award for
Concord.
He was the first U.S. citizen to receive the
Sultan Owais Prize (for Cultural & Scientific
Achievements, 1996–1997).
The autobiography Out of Place (1999) was
bestowed three awards, the 1999 New Yorker
Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf
Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton
Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature.
== Death and legacy ==
On 25 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
("A Mighty and Passionate Heart"); Seamus
Deane ("A Late Style of Humanism"); Christopher
Hitchens ("A Valediction for Edward Said");
Tony Judt ("The Rootless Cosmopolitan"); Michael
Wood ("On Edward Said"); and Tariq Ali ("Remembering
Edward Said, 1935–2003").
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 (2008) features essays by
Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi, and Elias
Khoury; Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism
(2010), by Harold Aram Veeser, a critical
biography; and Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation
and Representations (2010), essays by Joseph
Massad, Ilan Pappé, Ella Shohat, Ghada Karmi,
Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
and Daniel Barenboim; and the Barenboim–Said
Academy (Berlin) was established in 2012.
== See also ==
Edward Said bibliography
List of Columbia University people
Projects working for peace among Arabs and
Israelis
Z Communications
Orientalism
== References ==
=== Citations ===
=== Sources ===
Barsamian, David (2003).
Culture and Resistance: Conversations with
Edward W. Said.
Pluto.
ISBN 9780745320175.
Cornwell, John (2010).
Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint.
Continuum International.
ISBN 9781441150844.
Joachim Gentz (2009).
"Orientalism/Occidentalism".
Keywords re-oriented.
interKULTUR, European-Chinese intercultural
studies, Volume IV.
Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
pp. 41–.
ISBN 978-3-940344-86-1.
Retrieved 18 November 2011.
Ghazoul, Ferial Jabouri, ed. (2007).
Edward Said and Critical Decolonization.
American University in Cairo Press.
ISBN 978-977-416-087-5.
Retrieved 19 November 2011.
Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was one of the
most influential intellectuals in the twentieth
century.
Gray, Richard T.; Gross, Ruth V.; Goebel,
Rolf J.; et al., eds. (2005).
A Franz Kafka encyclopedia.
Greenwood.
ISBN 978-0-313-30375-3.
Retrieved 18 November 2011.
Iskander, Adel; Rustom, Hakem (2010).
Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and
Representation.
University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-24546-4.
McCarthy, Conor (2010).
The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said.
Cambridge UP.
ISBN 9781139491402.
Said, Edward W. (1979).
Orientalism.
Knopf Doubleday.
ISBN 9780394740676.
Said, Edward W. (1996).
Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine
in the Middle East Peace Process.
Vintage Books.
ISBN 9780679767251.
Singh, Amritjit; Johnson, Bruce G., eds. (2004).
Interviews with Edward W. Said.
UP of Mississippi.
ISBN 9781578063666.
Turner, Bryan S; Rojek, Chris (2001).
Society and Culture: Scarcity and Solidarity.
SAGE.
ISBN 9780761970491.
Zamir, Shamoon (2005).
"Said, Edward W.".
In Jones, Lindsay.
Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition.
12.
Macmillan.
pp. 8031–32.
== Further reading ==
Pannian, Prasad (2016-01-20).
Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity.
New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN 9781137548641.
Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity
at Google Books.
Valerie Kennedy Edward Said: A Critical Introduction.
Key Contemporary Thinkers.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Conor McCarthy The Cambridge Introduction
to Edward Said.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Andrew N. Rubin, editor, Humanism, Freedom,
and the Critic: Edward W. Said and After.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
2005.
== External links ==
The Edward Said Archive
Edward Said on IMDb
Review of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
and Edward Said: The Last Interview, in Other
Voices, vol. 3, no.
1.
Works by Edward Said at Open Library
Appearances on C-SPAN
