PROFILE
EDWARD W. SAID - ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT
INTELLECTUALS OF
THE 21ST CENTURY
By Habeeb Salloum
Edward W. Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and a much sought after lecturer, has been called the Arab world's most prominent overseas thinker/scholar. Renowned for his groundbreaking research in the field of comparative literature and his shrewd political commentaries, he is, today, one of the most prominent intellectuals in the United States. Few of the world’s renowned academics are able to draw rock concerts’ crowds like Edward Said and, amazingly, after the lectures, like the rock stars, he is often mobbed.
Above all, Edward Said has made his mark as a Middle East analyst and a relentless critic of the Israeli policy of domination, as well the foremost North American spokesman and advocate of the Palestinian and Arab causes. A man with many dimensions, he is considered to be one of the world's most famous English professors and, like only a very few of his colleagues, he has been able to combine an arduous intellectual life with a political stance.
And these are not all his attributes. Edward Said, besides writing extensively on music, is also a classical music and cultural critic, a scholar of opera, as well as a pianist. In1998, he participated in a new production of Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ for which he wrote a new English text.
The most famous Palestinian in the West, he is proud of his people and their history. When the Oslo Accords were signed, he was, amid all the euphoria, a lonely voice of dissent. He denounced the agreements, calling them ‘instruments of Palestinian surrender’ and ‘a Palestinian Versailles’. These were prophetic words which in less than a decade were to come true.
Edward Said was born in 1935 to a prosperous Palestinian Christian family in Jerusalem, who were US citizens. As a result of the 1947 partition of Palestine, his family were dispossessed and became refugees, moving to Cairo, Egypt. There, he attended St. George's, an American school, then later moved to Victoria College - an English colonial school. Everything about him at this stage of his life was Western. He carried an American passport, went to westernized Lebanon for holidays, and watched Hollywood films about Africa - enthralled with those about Tarzan.
At the age of 16, his parents sent him for schooling in the U.S.A. - a country where he has lived ever since. As a young man, he learned to speak several languages and was interested in reading novels and listening to classical music. After his high school education, he obtained his B.A. from Princeton, and his Ph.D. from Harvard where he won the Bowdoin Prize, the best scholarly dissertation written by a student, for his essay relating to a critical study of Joseph Conrad, the famous Polish/American writer.
In 1963, he was
appointed as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, New York, where he later was promoted to Professor.
In the ensuing years he served as a visiting professor at Harvard,
Yale, John Hopkins and Toronto Universities.
Professor Edward Said has lectured at more than 200 universities and colleges in North America, Africa, Asia and Europe. He serves on the editorial board of 20 learned publications, and is the general editor at Harvard University Press of a book series named ‘Convergences’. His writings, some of which have been translated into 26 languages, includes many books which cover an extraordinary range of subjects.
From among these are: Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1980), Literature and Society (1980), The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), After the Last Sky (1986), Blaming the Victims (1988), Musical Elaborations (1991), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994), The Pen and the Sword (1994), Representations of the Intellectual (1994), The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination (1994), Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995), Out of Place (1999), Reflections on Exile (2000), End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000), Power, Politics, and Culture (2002), and his latest book Not Quite Right: A Memoir, Reflections on Exile - a monumental collection of essays spanning his 35-year career at Columbia University.
Of these works, his most famous book is Orientalism in which he examines the development of ideas and images about the Arab world in Western European cultures. In it, he writes of how the West has stereotyped and degraded the Arab world over the centuries. To balance this bias, he calls for the promotion of Third World literature as a major cultural force within the Western world.
The book has been embraced by various cultures and intellectual societies in innumerable lands across the globe. With Orientalism, Said transformed the way people looked at Islam, Arabs, and the Middle East. This work, along with his later book, Culture and Imperialism, have been important studies of how artistic creation and cultural prejudices converge and this has made him a much sought after lecturer in the intellectual world.
In addition to writing a music column for The Nation and a column for the Arabic newspapers al-Hayat in London and Al-Ahram, Egypt, he has published a good number of articles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman and London Observer. Also, his works appear regularly in the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique and he is a contributor to numerous other newspapers in France, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Spain, the Arab World, Pakistan, India and Japan.
The Arab-Israeli war, in 1967, stirred him to political activism after he saw that the West had a distorted view of the Middle East and Islamic world. His own identity as a Palestinian now became evident and he began to get involved with his cultural origin, which, like many other Arabs educated in western schools, he had suppressed as a child. Affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause in North America seemed to spur him on. Soon, he became the chief spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the United States.
At the same time, he became intensely involved in literary scholarship and Palestinian rights, and between 1977 and 1991, served as a member of the Palestine National Council. However, after the Oslo accords he became highly critical of the PLO and resigned from the council. Through the years, he became a harsh critic of the state of Israel and, in the last decade, of Arafat himself.
In the U.S.A., he has paid a price for his high profile on the Palestinian issue. Many of his colleagues in universities have slandered him as ‘the professor of terror’ and officials of The Jewish Defense League have labeled him a Fascist. His office at Columbia was set on fire, and he, along with his family, have received countless death threats.
"Palestine," he once wrote, "is a thankless cause. You get nothing back but opprobrium, abuse, and ostracism. How many friends avoid the subject? How many colleagues want nothing of Palestine's controversy? How many liberals have time for Bosnia and Somalia and South Africa and Nicaragua and human and civil rights everywhere on Earth, but not for Palestine and Palestinians?"
For some years, Said has been battling leukemia, but at the same time, continues to forge full steam ahead with his literary effort and, in the world of politics, attacking or supporting controversial world issues. As he continues to battle illness and age, he is striving to merge conflicting areas of his experience such as: musical and literary, private and public, First and Third World, and, the most controversial of all, Zionist and Arab. Often to Arabs, he talks about the Holocaust and to Jewish groups about the dispossession and de-humanization of the Palestinians.
All through his life, he has been hostile to practiced religion. Regardless that Edward Said's family was Anglican, and that he had a very religious upbringing, he is a convinced secularist. As a youth, he had fondness for the King James version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and he believes that the Qur’an is a wonderful book, but as religious scriptures, they mean nothing to him. The first Arab to defend Salman Rushdie, Edward Said is a self-proclaimed secular intellectual. He distrusts and loathes all forms of religious politics such as Zionism, Islamic fundamentalism or the Western fundamentalism of the Christian Right.
As befitting his stature, Edward Said is a member of countless organizations and societies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former member of the Executive Board of the New York Council of the Humanities. In addition, he is an Honorary Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge; a member of the PEN Executive; the Board president of the Modern Language Association; and from 1980-1983, he was chairman of the board of directors of the Institute of Arab Studies.
In addition, Said has been awarded a myriad of prizes and honors. From among these are: honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Birzeit University and the University of Michigan; and the Rene Wellek Award given by the American Comparative Literature Association in 1984-1985. In March 1998, he was granted the Sultan Owais Prize, the top literary prize of the Arab world, for general cultural achievement; and in 1999 he received doctorates from the American University in Cairo and the National University of Ireland. In the same year, he was awarded the first Spinoza Prize given in the Netherlands and the California based News Circle Magazine’s Advisory Board selected him as the ‘Arab-American of the Year 2000' for his scholarly and political contributions to society.
Having survived a life-threatening disease of the blood for more than a decade, Edward Said is still going strong. His political activism and his enormous on-going contributions to humanities, as well as his wide-ranging intellectual life continue unabated. He still arouses passionate feelings, pro and con, among his readers.
He appeals to a large constituency of devotees throughout the world who regard him as a paragon of intellectuals. They appreciate the high seriousness and the perspicuous aspect of his intelligence, both evident in his books. Yet, somehow, in his spare time, this Renaissance-like intellectual has time to relax by playing the piano or writing about music and the opera.
Habeeb Salloum is a Canadian freelance writer and author who has traveled extensively to many parts of the world and has written comprehensively about the countries and their cuisines.
His email is: habeeb.salloum@sympatico.ca.
