[x] Close ad

EDWARD SAID

Edward Wadie Said (November 1, 1935 – September 24, 2003; Arabic: إدوارد سعيد‎) was a well-known Palestinian-American literary theorist, critic, and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist. He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is regarded as a founding figure in post-colonial theory.[1]

Contents

Life

Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine). His father was a wealthy Christian Palestinian businessman and an American citizen, while his mother was born in Nazareth of Christian Lebanese and Palestinian descent.[2] The historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan was his sister. According to Said's autobiography, he lived between Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12 and, in 1947, he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem. According to Said, his extended family became refugees in 1948 during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War because the family home was in the affluent quarter of Talbiya in the western part of Jerusalem that was annexed by Israel. In 1998, Said wrote: "I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt."[3]

At age 14, Said entered Victoria College in Cairo, and then Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, the United States. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as a professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, in 1977, and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992, Said attained the rank of University Professor, which is Columbia's most prestigious academic position. He also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities. He spoke Arabic, English and French fluently. In 1999 Said became president of the Modern Language Association.

Said was bestowed numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice received Columbia's Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. His memoir Out of Place won the 1999 New Yorker Prize for non-fiction. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society.[1]

Said's writing regularly appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. He gave interviews alongside his good friend, fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky regarding U.S. foreign policy for various independent radio programs.

Said also contributed music criticism to The Nation for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim.

In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under surveillance starting in 1971. Most of his records are marked as related to "IS Middle East" ("IS" = Israel) and significant portions remain "Classified Secrets."[4]

Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York after a decade-long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia.

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor.[5]

Controversy over Said's early life

In 1999, Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, conducted a study in which he asserted that Edward Said's family did not permanently reside in Talbiya and did not live there during the final months of the British mandate, and thus they could not be considered refugees. Said's parents never owned a house in Jerusalem, says Weiner, the house in Talbiya belonged to Edward Said's aunt and Edward Said's family visited Jerusalem only occasionally. "On his [Edward Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address." According to Weiner, Said grew up in Cairo and attended Gezira Preparatory School there and probably never attended the St. George's Academy in Jerusalem except during his family's brief stays in that city. Weiner argues that Said's name does not appear on the school registry and that David Eben-Ezra, whom Said mentioned as his classmate, has no recollections of him.[6]

Said was defended by several respondents, including Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, who wrote that schoolmates and teachers of Said had confirmed Said's stay at St. George's School in Jerusalem. Hitchens also quoted Said as having written already in 1992 [but actually in 1989] that he had spent a large part of his youth in Cairo.[7] Said himself responded to Weiner in an article entitled "Defamation, Zionist-style" published in Al-Ahram Weekly. In the article, Said argues that "the family house was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership". Further, Edward Said says that school records ended in 1946, while he attended St. George only in 1947, so his name could not possibly be on the registry.[8] Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian who said he had been Said's classmate at St. George's.[9] In an interview in 2000, Said said: "I was born in Jerusalem, my family is a Jerusalem family. We left Palestine in 1947. We left before most others. It was a fortuitous thing. ... I never said I was a refugee, but the rest of my family was. My entire extended family was driven out. . . ."[10]

Orientalism

Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism," which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."[11] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

The Argument

Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory and cultural studies, and to a lesser extent on those of History and Oriental Studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (acknowledging the influence of the latter, but not the former[12]), and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi[13], Anouar Malek-Abdel[14], Maxime Rodinson[15], and Richard William Southern[16] (whose influence also went unacknowledged), Said argued that all Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term which he transformed into a pejorative epithet). He argues that their claims to objective knowledge of the Orient are simply claims to power:

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. (Said, Orientalism 11)

Said’s contention was that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long, that in Orientalist writings a very considerable bias exists in even the most outwardly objective of texts, a bias which most Western scholars would not even be able to recognise, because it is part of their cultural make-up too. His contention was that the West has not only conquered the East politically, but that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its myriad modern identities from a perspective which takes Europe as the norm from which the "exotic," "inscrutable" Orient deviates. Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient invariably depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West. Western writings are about creating "difference" between West and East, a difference which is attributed to the existence of certain immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up. In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia. Having thus stated his central thesis, the remainder of Orientalism consists mainly of examples from Western texts designed to illustrate it.

Reception

Said’s book attracted both adulation and criticism from the very outset. Historians and anthropologists such as Ernest Gellner[17] argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for over 2,000 years (since the composition of Aeschylus’s The Persians) was simply unsupportable. Until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe. Furthermore, Said had chosen to concentrate largely on the Middle East, Palestine and Egypt, where his own roots lay, and these were areas that came under European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Said devoted much less attention to the British Raj in India, by far the lengthiest and most successful example of European hegemony in the Orient, and entirely ignored Russia’s dominions in Asia, some critics have argued, because Said was more interested in making polemical points about the Middle East.[18] Others pointed out that even at the height of the Imperial Era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators and local forms of knowledge, which were frequently subversive of Imperial aims.[19] The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm also expressed reservations about Said's polemicism and his tendency to essentialize the West.[20]

Criticism from Orientalists

The fiercest criticism of his views, however, has come from academic Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis[21], Albert Hourani, Kanan Makiya, Nikki Keddie and Robert Graham Irwin [22], who feel that their profession has been unfairly maligned. Bernard Lewis was among the scholars whose work Said questioned in Orientalism and subsequent works. The two authors came to frequently exchange polemics, starting in the pages of the New York Review of Books following the publication of Orientalism. Lewis's article "The Question of Orientalism" was followed in the next issue by "Orientalism: An Exchange." Other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr [2], Aijaz Ahmad (In Theory: Classes, Natures, Literatures [London, 1992]), and William Montgomery Watt also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.[23]

Said's academic critics argued that Said made no attempt to distinguish between the writings of poets such as Goethe (who never even travelled in the East), novelists such as Flaubert (who undertook a brief sojourn in Egypt), discredited mavericks such as Ernest Renan, and serious scholars such as Edward William Lane who were fluent in Arabic and produced work of considerable value: their common European origins and attitudes, according to Said, overrode such considerations.[24] Irwin (among others) points out that Said entirely ignored the fact that Oriental studies in the 19th century were dominated by Germans and Hungarians, from countries which, inconveniently for Said's purposes, did not possess an Eastern Empire.[25] Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic ‘Occidentalism’ to oppose to the ‘Orientalism’ of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion amongst western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge the greater concerns of many Orientalists (such as Sir William Jones) with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and had frequently made discoveries which would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.[26] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (when they descry distorted representations of the Orient in films such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and discussions of phenomena pertaining to the Orient in the work of Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).[27]

Finally, Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian, and as a "Subaltern." Ironically, by dint of Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, his spending his entire adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own arguments that "any and all representations… are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer . . . [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation" (Orientalism 272) could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. These critics argue that what they regard as the excessive relativism of Said and his followers would seem to trap them in a "web of solipsism"[28], unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.

Supporters and influence

Said’s supporters argue that these criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.[29] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship (Orientalism 18-19) and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics such as Lewis (329-54). Apart from his continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies, his work has also particularly influenced various scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash[30], Nicholas Dirks[31], Ronald Inden[32], and on literary theorists such as Homi Bhabha[33] and Gayatri Spivak.[34]

Both critics and supporters of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence which his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the Humanities; but the former regret its influence as mostly deplorable, whereas the latter praise its influence as mostly liberating.[citation needed]

Pro Palestinian activism

"Above all we must, as Mandela never tired of saying about his struggle, be aware that Palestine is one of the great moral causes of our time. Therefore, we need to treat it as such. It's not a matter of trade, or bartering negotiations, or making a career. It is a just cause which should allow Palestinians to capture the high moral ground and keep it" (Edward Said, as qtd. in Al-Ahram weekly).

In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:

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.[35]

As a Palestinian activist, Said campaigned first for a creation of an independent Palestinian state, and then later for a single Jewish-Arab state. From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional struggles.[36] He supported the two-state solution and voted for it in Algiers in 1988. He quit the PNC over the decision by Yasser Arafat and the PLO to support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, a decision he considered disastrous to the interests of Palestinian refugees living in Arab League member states who supported the American-led coalition. Thereafter, Said became critical of the role of Arafat in the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, feeling that the Oslo terms were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 70's. In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. He came to prefer and support the binational solution—the creation of one state in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and pre-1967 Israel, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights over a two state solution with a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

"I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial."[37]

His relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad that PA leaders banned the sale of his books in August 1995, but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.

On July 3, 2000, Said was videotaped lobbing a symbolic rock towards an Israeli watchtower on the Israeli-Lebanese border. "One stone tossed into an empty space scarcely warrants a second thought," he later said, responding to criticism that he had aimed the rock at people less than 30 feet away.[38] In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both the established Palestinian Authority and to Islamist militant groups such as Hamas.

Said's books on the issue of Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and The End Of The Peace Process (2000).

Publications

  • Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
  • Beginnings: Intention and Method(1975)
  • Orientalism (1978)
  • The Question of Palestine (1979)
  • Orientalisme (1980)
  • Literature and Society (editor) (1980)
  • Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981)
  • The World, the Text and the Critic (1983)
  • After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) [with photographs by Jean Mohr]
  • Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988) [contributor and co-editor with Christopher Hitchens]
  • Yeats and Decolonization (1988)
  • Musical Elaborations (1991)
  • Culture and Imperialism (1993)
  • The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
  • Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994)
  • The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward W. Said (1994) [Conversations with David Barsamian]
  • Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996)
  • Entre guerre at paix (1997)
  • Acts of Aggression: Policing "Rogue States" (with Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark)(1999)
  • Out of Place (1999) (a memoir)
  • Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884-1891 (Editor) (1999)
  • The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000)
  • Reflections on Exile (2000)
  • The Edward Said Reader (2000)
  • Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (2001)
  • CIA et Jihad, 1950-2001: Contre l'URSS, une désastreuse alliance (2002), with John K. Cooley
  • Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (2003) [Interviews by David Barsamian]
  • From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (Collection of Essays) (2003)
  • Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2005)
  • On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (will be published posthumously April 2006)
  • Criticism in Society (year of publication unknown)
  • Edward Said: A Critical Reader (year of publication unknown)
  • Freud and the Non-European (year of publication unknown)
  • Jewish Religion, Jewish History (Introduction) (year of publication unknown)
  • Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (year of publication unknown)
  • Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with Daniel Barenboim) (year of publication unknown)

References

  1. ^ Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York & London: Routledge, 1990). ISBN 0415053722.
  2. ^ Amritjit Singh, Interviews With Edward W. Said (Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2004) 19 & 219. ISBN 1578063663.
  3. ^ Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books March 1, 2006, accessed May 7, 1998.
  4. ^ David Price, "How the FBI Spied on Edward Said," CounterPunch, January 13, 2006, accessed January 15, 2006.
  5. ^ See Birzeit U.
  6. ^ Justus Reid Weiner, "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," Commentary, Sept. 1999, re-posted on FreeRepublic ("A Conservative News Forum"), April 15, 2001, accessed February 9, 2006; abridged versions and extracts or excerpts of Weiner's article were also published elsewhere, incl. in both The Daily Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal; see, e.g., Justus Reid Weiner, "The False Prophet of Palestine" The Wall Street Journal August 26, 1999.
  7. ^ Michael Sprinkler, ed. Edward Said: A Critical Reader. London: Blackwell, 1993. ISBN 155786229X.
  8. ^ Edward Said (September 1999). Defamation, Zionist-style. Al-Ahram Weekly. Retrieved on 2006-02-10.
  9. ^ Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, "Commentary: 'Scholar' Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said," CounterPunch September 1999, accessed [February 10], 2006.
  10. ^ Amritjit Singh, Interviews with Edward W. Said (Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2004) 19 & 219. ISBN 1578063663.
  11. ^ Keith Windschuttle, "Edward Said's "Orientalism revisited," The New Criterion January 17, 1999, accessed January 19, [1999].
  12. ^ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1995) 3.
  13. ^ A. L. Tibawi, "English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism," Islamic Quarterly 8 (1964): 25-45
  14. ^ Anouar Malek-Abdel, "L’orientalisme en crise," Diogène 44 (1963): 109-41
  15. ^ "Bilan des études mohammadiennes," Revue Historique 465.1 (1963)
  16. ^ Richard William Southern, Western views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1978; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962).
  17. ^ Ernest Gellner, "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism," rev. of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, Times Literary Supplement February 19, 1993: 3-4.
  18. ^ Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006) 159-60, 281-2.
  19. ^ C.A. Bayly Empire and Information (Delhi, India: Cambridge UP, 1999) 25, 143, 282.
  20. ^ Sadik Jalal al-ʿAzm "Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse," Khamsin 8 (1981): 6ff.
  21. ^ Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," in Islam and the West (London 1993) 99–118.
  22. ^ Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2003; London: Allen Lane, 2006).
  23. ^ See online posting of chapter by Martin Kramer, "Said’s Splash", from Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Policy Papers, No. 58 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). ISBN 0944029493.
  24. ^ Said, Orientalism 87–88, 336; Ibn Warraq, Debunking Edward Said.
  25. ^ Irwin, For Lust of Knowing 8, 150–166.
  26. ^ O.P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1988) ix-xi, 221-233.
  27. ^ Said, "Afterword" to the 1995 ed. of Orientalism 347, as cited by Irwin, For Lust of Knowing 3–8; cf. "Temple of Doom," The Film Journal no. 12.
  28. ^ D.A. Washbrook, "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire," in Historiography, vol. 5 of The Oxford History of the British Empire 607.
  29. ^ See Terry Eagleton, Rev. of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, by Robert Irwin (London: Penguin, 2003). ISBN 0713994150. New Statesman Bookshop November 1, 2003.
  30. ^ Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32.2 (1990): 383-408.
  31. ^ Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).
  32. ^ Ronald Inden, Imagining India (New York: Oxford UP, 1990).
  33. ^ Homi K. Bhaba, Nation and Narration (New York and London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990).
  34. ^ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987).
  35. ^ Edward W. Said, "Islam Through Western Eyes," The Nation, April 26, 1980, first posted online January 1, 1998, accessed December 5, 2005.
  36. ^ Malise Ruthven, "Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America," 2003, The Guardian, accessed March 1, 2006.
  37. ^ Edward Said, "Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders," CounterPunch, August 4, 2003, accessed December 12, 2005.
  38. ^ Sunnie Kim, "Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon," Columbia Daily Spectator July 19, 2000, News.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: