There have been few more significant intellectuals in the 20th century than Edward Said, who died in Paris on 25 September.
His was a life lived in exile—a Palestinian Christian who was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Cairo, but who spent most of his adult life in America. Indeed in his biography, Out of Place, he spoke poignantly of always packing large amounts of luggage, even for an overnight stay, because of an ingrained fear that he was again going into exile and would never return home. It was this awareness of exile, his identity as a Palestinian and an outsider, that most strongly characterised his prolific output as a writer and activist.
First employed by Colombia University in New York in 1963, he rapidly rose through the ranks to become University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, a position which he held until his death. Said was also an accomplished musician, an erudite and internationally respected music critic and a man widely published in the fields of literature, international politics, philology and psychiatry. And all of this from a man who battled against leukaemia for the last decade of his life.
The work that thrust him onto the international stage was his 1978 book Orientalism. This was a true revolution of ideas, a paradigmatic shift in the way we see the world beyond our own borders. The central pillar of his book was a refusal to accept that our understanding of other cultures could ever be objective. Elegantly taken to its conclusion, Said’s argument revealed the way Western knowledge of other cultures served as a weapon in the armoury of empire—how knowledge in the service of power reduced entire cultures and religions to essences and legitimate targets of violence.
In his follow-up book, Covering Islam, Said brought the full force of this argument to bear upon US foreign policy and media coverage of events in the Islamic world. In a statement as relevant today as when it was published in 1981, he wrote: ‘What we have is a limited series of crude, essentialised caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as, among other things, to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.’
Said’s identity as a Palestinian gave his statements a forceful personal edge. It also exposed him to fierce criticism. His Israeli critics frequently pointed to Said’s former membership of the PLO’s Palestine National Council, all the while