Edward said famous works

Born November 1, 1935

Jerusalem, Palestine

Died September 25, 2003

New York, New York

Political, social, and arts critic and commentator; contributor to Palestine's Declaration of Statehood (1988)

"Palestine is a thankless cause…. 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 the Palestinians?"

E dward Said was the most visible supporter in the United States for Palestinian people. He helped author the English-language version of the Palestine Declaration of Statehood in 1988, through which the Palestine Liberation Organization sought to establish a nation of Palestinian people. They had been without a country since 1947, living in lands occupied first by Jordan and Egypt, and then after 1967 by Israel. In 1991, however, Said resigned from his position on the Palestine National Committee because he was dissatisfied with the Palestine leadership and negotiations over statehood. By that time, Said had long distinguished himself as a literary and opera critic, television commentator, and popular public lecturer. His editorials on the Middle East appeared in major newspapers worldwide. He was also an accomplished pianist and formed the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Israeli Daniel Barenboim (1942–) in 1999. They shared a belief that art is limitless in its potential, unlike political ideologies.

Out of place

Edward W. Said (pronounced sah-EED) was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, on November 1, 1935, to Wadie and Hilda Musa Said. Said's father had immigrated to the United States before World War I (1914–18). After serving with U.S. forces in France during the war, Wadie Said returned to Jerusalem. He was a wealthy businessman in writing supplies and thought of himself as a Westerner (someone from Europe or the United States; he held American citizenship). He preferred to be called William (an Americanized version of Wadie) and named his son Edward after England's prince of Wales (1894–1972). Said's mother was the daughter of a Baptist minister from Nazareth. The marriage of Said's parents was arranged (a marriage contract negotiated by parties other than both the bride and the groom).

The Said family spoke English at home, using Arabic only when speaking to servants. The mix of Western influences in a Middle Eastern environment left Said with a divided sense of identity as he grew up, as he noted in his autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). He always felt that he was an outsider, as the title of his autobiography implies.

Said grew up primarily in Cairo, Egypt, where his father's business was located. The family owned property in Jerusalem, in the region that since ancient times had been called Palestine, but they were permanently exiled from Palestine after the Arab-Israeli War (1947–49). The war was fought after the United Nations (UN) divided land in the Middle East that had been occupied by Great Britain after World War I and had been called Palestine. The UN wanted to provide for two nations, Israel and Palestine (see box). The surrounding Arab nations refused to recognize the Jewish state of Israel, and a war was fought in which the Jewish people were successful. Thousands of Palestinians became refugees, or people without a homeland, following that war.

Said was educated at a private school in Cairo. In 1951, he immigrated to the United States and finished his high-school education at Mount Hermon, a private school in Massachusetts. Said graduated from Princeton University in 1957 and then went on to Harvard University. While attaining his master's degree (1960) and his doctorate in philosophy (Ph.D., 1964) from Harvard, he worked as a tutor in history and literature. He became a professor of literature at Columbia University in 1963 and continued there for over thirty years while also serving as a visiting professor at several American universities.

Political awakening

Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), set the tone for his work as a critic of literature. Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born in Poland but spent much of his early life at sea, working on sailing ships and in the British Merchant Navy. He later wrote fictional works set in places he had traveled, such as Africa and the Far East. In his book on Conrad, Said argued that the author, like other Western writers, projected political dimensions in his work that represented the viewpoint of colonialists, or nations that exert control over a foreign land and impose laws and customs on the people—in effect, "civilizing" them according to standards set by the colonialists. That dimension, noted Said, should be considered when reading all Western literature.

During his twenties, Said concentrated on graduate school, teaching, literary criticism, and music; he was also an excellent pianist and became a critic on opera. His political interests were stirred after he turned thirty by the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, which Israel won and resulted in many more Palestinians losing their property. After the war in the late 1940s, Palestinians lived in lands on the west bank of the Jordan River, under the authority of Jordan, and on the Gaza strip (a strip of land between Israel and Egypt), under the authority of Egypt. After the war of 1967, those two areas fell under the control of Israel. Said began following events and became involved in the Palestinians' attempt to form a nation. Meanwhile, Said was married in 1970 to Mariam Cortas. They would have two children, Wadie and Najla. Said continue to write literary criticism while his political involvement deepened.

Joins the Palestinian cause

Said was elected to the Palestine National Council (PNC) in 1977. This group provided advice to Yasir Arafat (1929–), leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in his effort to win international recognition for a Palestinian

state. Unlike some members of the council who supported armed conflict with Israel, Said advocated the two-state solution (see box). Said favored recognition of Israel; Arab states and most Arab people did not at that time. After much bloodshed in the Middle East and much debate among Palestinian leaders, the policy was adopted at a PNC meeting in Algiers, Algeria, in 1988. Said drafted the English version of the Palestinian declaration of statehood. Meanwhile, he represented the Palestinian view in articles in American magazines and as a commentator on television news programs.

Recognition of Israel's right to exist opened the way for the United States to work with the PLO and Israel in such talks as the Madrid Conference in Spain and the Oslo Peace Process in Norway. As the peace process gained momentum, however, Said adopted an increasingly critical stance. In 1991, he resigned from the PNC, believing the Oslo declaration was more favorable to Israel. Said had come under increasingly negative criticism by Israeli supporters in the United States, and now he was criticized by Palestinian supporters as well. He became the subject of censorship by Palestinian authorities. His advocacy of Palestinian rights did not prevent him from criticizing Palestinian policies and leadership.

"Said made lots of enemies," noted an obituary that appeared in Newsweek magazine upon Said's death in 2003. "His searing critiques of American Middle East policy made him a bogeyman for many in the pro-Israel camp: There were demands that he be reprimanded by Columbia [University] after he threw a stone at Israel from across the Lebanese border. And yet his condemnations of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian regime and Arab intellectuals' 'creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness' led some Arabs to denounce him as a traitor."

Palestine in Recent History

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition, or divide, an area of the Middle East, known historically as Palestine and which had been under the control of Great Britain since World War I, into two states, one Jewish, and one Arab. Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states rejected the partition. The Jewish population accepted it, and on May 14, 1948, they declared independence and formed the state of Israel. Armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria invaded Israel. Large numbers of Palestinian Arabs fled during the fighting, and others were expelled from their homes. The Jewish forces prevailed, and the state of Israel was established.

The territories that were to form an Arab state in Palestine were occupied by Jordan (the West Bank) and Egypt (the Gaza Strip) from 1948 to 1967, when Israel entered those areas, defended them in the Six Day War, and occupied them afterward. Palestinians have struggled to assert their independence since then. The word "Palestine" describes a geographical area and the proposed state of the Palestinian people.

Exposes stereotypes

During the period from 1978 to 1991 when Said was a member of the PNC, he wrote several more books, including two that examine European and American representations of the peoples and societies of the Middle East. Orientalism (1978) argues that scholars, journalists, and creative writers stereotype Middle Eastern cultures as unchanging and violent. These negative depictions, Said continued, come to inform popular attitudes and then public policy toward the region and are used to justify Western economic and political domination of the Middle East. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981) points to ways Western media perpetuate stereotypes, or present the same images, often unflattering, over and over again, of Muslims and ignores the diversity of Islamic beliefs. "With Orientalism," wrote Habeeb Salloum, "Said transformed the way people looked at Islam, the Arabs, and the Middle East. This work, and his later book, Culture and Imperialism (1993), were important studies of how artistic creation and cultural prejudices converge [come together] and made him a much-sought-after lecturer in the intellectual world."

Said discussed the plight of Palestinians and the momentum building toward the declaration of statehood in 1988 in such works as The Question of Palestine (1979) and After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986). In these works, Said traced the history of the Palestinians and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and argues that Palestinian efforts to obtain statehood have been made to appear unjustifiable by some Israeli supporters.

During the 1990s, Said continued to be outspoken, attacking what he saw as Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians and condemning U.S. policies in the Middle East in articles and on national television news programs. He also continued writing a music column for The Nation magazine and a column for the Arabic newspapers al-Hayat in London and Al-Ahram in Egypt. His articles appeared in U.S. periodicals as well as in newspapers in France, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Spain, Pakistan, India, and Japan.

Health declines

Said was diagnosed with leukemia, a form of cancer, in the early 1990s. As his health grew fragile near the end of the decade, he began focusing his energy on music. He founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, an

Israeli citizen, in 1999. With Said's assistance (Said was an accomplished pianist), Barenboim gave master classes for Palestinian students in the West Bank, which was occupied by Israel. The orchestra made a triumphant tour of Europe.

Said also wrote his autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). Looking back on his youth, Said wrote, "A constant property links young Edward with the adult Said: the notion of out of placeness, of exile, as changeless, permanent features of his personality that existed before he could have known what the future had in store for him." Said's final works included The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000), his reflections on why negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians failed in the 1990s; Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), a collection of Said's writings on politics and literature; and Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (2001), a collection of interviews and panel discussions involving Said from the years 1976 to 2000.

"Power, Politics, and Culture covers a wide range of topics, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the peace process, the Gulf War, Middle East politics, literary criticism, cultural theory, opera, and travel drawn from a variety of publications, both in the United States and abroad," noted Habeeb Salloum in Contemporary Review. Upon Said's death in 2003, Salloum said, "His political activism and his enormous on-going contributions to humanities, as well as his wide-ranging intellectual life for many years aroused passionate feelings, pro and con, among his readers." Salloum added, "He appealed to a large constituency of devotees throughout the world who regarded him as a paragon [model of excellence] of intellectuals."

—Roger Matuz

For More Information

Books

Marrouchi, Mustapha. Edward Said at the Limits. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Said, Edward W. The Edward Said Reader. Edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Said, Edward W. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Periodicals

"Edward Said: Appreciation of Writer, Teacher, Music Critic and Contributor to The Nation; Critic of Western Imperialism and Champion of Palestinian Liberation" (obituary). The Nation (October 20, 2003): p. 4.

Salloum, Habeeb. "Edward Said: The Palestinian Intellectual Champion." Contemporary Review (November 2003): pp. 271–74.

"A Scholar and Exile: Edward Said" (obituary). Newsweek International (October 6, 2003): p. 60.

Web Sites

The Edward Said Archive.http://www.edwardsaid.org/modules/news/ (accessed on March 24, 2004).

Ruthven, Malise. "Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America" (obituary). The Guardian (September 26, 2003). http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1049931,00.html (accessed on March 24, 2004).