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Edward Said

1935–2003 · 68 years

The exile who taught the West to read its own scholarship

Portrait of Edward Said — Barenboim-Said Akademie gGmbH — CC0 via Wikimedia Commons

The American citizenship came from a war his father fought. Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on November 1, 1935, into a Palestinian Christian family, and held a US passport from birth because Wadie Said had served with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. The childhood ran between Jerusalem and his father's stationery business in Cairo. Said attended St George's School in Jerusalem, left as the 1947 war closed in, and enrolled at Victoria College in Cairo, which expelled him in 1951 for bad behavior despite high marks. His parents sent him to Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts, as far from the Middle East as possible. Princeton followed in 1957, a Harvard doctorate in 1964, and a Columbia post in 1963 that he held until he died.

Orientalism, in 1978, argued that Western scholarship on the East had never been neutral knowledge. It was bound up with imperial power, producing a fixed and inferior Orient that made the governing of the place look natural. The book became a founding text of postcolonial studies and rearranged reading in literary criticism, anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. Said wrote The Question of Palestine in 1979 and Culture and Imperialism in 1993, sat on the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991, broke with Yasser Arafat over the Oslo Accords, and by 1999 was arguing for a single binational state.

The rebuttals came from inside the field and they were not slight. Bernard Lewis, whom Orientalism had named as an exemplary Establishment Orientalist, wrote in 1982 that Said had politicized a scholarly discipline, declined to engage its findings, and given free rein to his biases. Robert Irwin and Keith Windschuttle argued that he misread and cherry-picked his sources and flattened a varied body of work, and others held that the book licensed a politicized humanities. Pressure ran the other way too. Said's Columbia office was set on fire and he lived for years with death threats. In 1999 Commentary printed Justus Reid Weiner's charge that he had invented a Jerusalem childhood. Said called it defamation and answered it in the memoir Out of Place.

A photograph taken in July 2000 showed him throwing a stone across the Lebanese border, and demands for his dismissal followed. Columbia reviewed the incident and took no action against him. What he was building at the same time was an orchestra. In 1999 he and the conductor Daniel Barenboim founded the West-Eastern Divan, which seats young Israeli, Palestinian and Arab musicians in the same rehearsals, and the two endowed a foundation in Seville. Said died in New York on September 25, 2003, after 12 years with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and was buried in Lebanon. Columbia endowed a chair in his name, Birzeit University renamed its conservatory for him in 2004, and the Barenboim-Said Academy opened in Berlin in 2012.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Edward Said's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Beginnings: Intention and Method book
Won the first Lionel Trilling Book Award 1974
Orientalism book
The founding text of postcolonial studies, and the most attacked 1978
The Question of Palestine book
The case for Palestinian self-determination, written for American readers 1979
Covering Islam book
On how the Western press reports the Middle East 1981
Culture and Imperialism book
Empire read through the novels of the imperial powers 1993
Out of Place: A Memoir book
Written under a leukemia diagnosis, and an answer to his critics 1999

Life in brief

with age at each point

November 1, 1935 aged 0 Born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family His father's wartime service with the American Expeditionary Forces made him a US citizen from birth.
1951 aged ~16 Expelled from Victoria College in Cairo High marks, bad behavior. His parents sent him to boarding school in Massachusetts.
1957 aged ~22 Graduates from Princeton His senior thesis paired the novelists Gide and Greene. A Harvard doctorate followed in 1964.
1963 aged ~28 Joins the Columbia faculty in English and comparative literature He taught there for the next 40 years.
1978 aged ~43 Publishes Orientalism The argument that Western knowledge of the East was produced inside imperial power.
1993 aged ~58 Resigns from the Palestinian National Council over the Oslo Accords He had sat on it since 1977 and held that the terms abandoned the refugees.
1999 aged ~64 Publishes Out of Place Justus Reid Weiner had argued in Commentary that Said grew up in Cairo, not Jerusalem, and was never dispossessed. Said called it defamation.
July 3, 2000 aged 64 Photographed throwing a stone across the Lebanese border Columbia reviewed the incident and took no action against him.
September 25, 2003 aged 67 Dies in New York of chronic lymphocytic leukemia Diagnosed 12 years earlier. He was buried in Lebanon.