Edward Said

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Edward Said
Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Edward Saïd
Birth November 1, 1935(1935-11-01)
Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
Death September 25, 2003 (aged 67)
New York City,
New York,
United States
School/tradition Postcolonialism, Postmodernism
Notable ideas Orientalism
"The Other"

Edward Wadie Saïd MRSL (Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد‎, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic and political activist, particularly as an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism.[1] During his lifetime he was referred to as Palestine's "most powerful political voice".[2]

Contents

[edit] Life

Edward Said and sister in Palestine 1940

Said was born in Jerusalem[3] (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father was a US citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins who had moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His father was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I, while his mother was born in Nazareth, also of Protestant[4] Christian Palestinian descent.[5] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.

Said once referred to himself as a "Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture":

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.[6]

According to his autobiographical memoir, Out of Place,[6] Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12. He attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem. As the Arab League states declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. In a London Review of Books article Said gave a more detailed account of his upbringing.

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. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schools designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to go to the United States was Victoria College in Alexandria, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading businessmen, as well as such glamorous figures as Michel Shalhoub, head prefect of the school and chief tormentor when I was a relatively junior boy, whom everyone has seen on screen as Omar Sharif.[6]

In 1951, Said was expelled from Victoria College for being a "troublemaker",[6] and was consequently sent by his parents to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place".[6] Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'.[6] Despite this dissonance, Said did well at the Massachusetts boarding school often 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.[6]

Said earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude (1957) from Princeton University and a Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as Professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. In 1977, Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's most prestigious academic position. Professor Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale University. He was fluent in English, French, and Arabic.[7] In 1999, after his earlier election to second vice president and following its succession policy, Said served as president of the Modern Language Association.

Said was bestowed with 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. In 1999, he won the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award for ethics.[8] His autobiographical 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.[9]

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 US foreign policy for various independent radio programs.

Said also wrote a music criticism column for The Nation magazine for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim. The orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries.

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.[10]

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor.[11]

[edit] Orientalism

Main article: Orientalism (book)

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 claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."[12] 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 the US' colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

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.

 ”

[edit] Main argument

Said asserts that much western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study,[14] a form of racism, and a tool of imperialist domination.[15] Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,[16] Anouar Abdel-Malek,[17] Maxime Rodinson,[18] and Richard William Southern,[19] Said argued that 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 that he transformed into a pejorative):

“ 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. ”

—Orientalism 11

Said argued that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years, since the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus. Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that even most Western scholars could not recognize. His contention was not only that the West has conquered the East politically but also 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 modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.

Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to 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. After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

[edit] Criticism

Orientalism and other works by Said have sparked a wide variety of controversy and criticism.[20] Ernest Gellner argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe.[21] Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian Empires intervened.[22] Others argued 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, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims.[23] Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.[24]

Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism has come from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya address what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's Orientalism on the perception and status of their scholarship.[25] Bernard Lewis in particular was often at odds with Said following the publication of Orientalism, in which Said singled out Lewis as a "perfect exemplification" of an "Establishment Orientalist" whose work "purports to be objective liberal scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material".[26] Lewis answered with several essays in response, and was joined by other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.[27]

Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic. According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations in Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans.[28] Irwin says that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.[29] 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 among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.[30] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).[31]

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". Given Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his 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. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism",[32] unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.

[edit] Conflict with Bernard Lewis

Orientalism included much criticism of historian Bernard Lewis, which Lewis in turn answered. Said contended that Lewis treats Islam as a monolithic entity without the nuance of its plurality, internal dynamics, and historical complexities, and accused him of "demagogy and downright ignorance."[33] Said quoted Lewis' assertion that "the Western doctrine of the right to resist bad government is alien to Islamic thought". Lewis continued,

In the Arabic-speaking countries a different word was used for [revolution] thawra. The root th-w-r in classical Arabic meant to rise up (e.g. of a camel), to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage, to rebel.

Said suggests that this particular passage is "full of condescension and bad faith", that the example of a camel is selected deliberately to debase Arab revolutionary ambitions: "[I]t is this kind of essentialized description that is natural for students and policymakers of the Middle East." Lewis' writings, according to Said, are often "polemical, not scholarly"; Said asserts that Lewis has striven to depict Islam as "an anti-Semitic ideology, not merely a religion".[34]

[Lewis] goes on to proclaim that Islam is an irrational herd or mass phenomenon, ruling Muslims by passions, instincts, and unreflecting hatreds. The whole point of this exposition is to frighten his audience, to make it never yield an inch to Islam. According to Lewis, Islam does not develop, and neither do Muslims; they merely are, and they are to be watched, on account of that pure essence of theirs (according to Lewis), which happens to include a long-standing hatred of Christians and Jews. Lewis everywhere refrains himself from making such inflammatory statements flat out; he always takes care to say that of course the Muslims are not anti-Semitic the way the Nazis were, but their religion can too easily accommodate itself to anti-Semitism and has done so. Similarly with regard to Islam and racism, slavery, and other more or less "Western" evils. The core of Lewis's ideology about Islam is that it never changes, and his whole mission is now to inform conservative segments of the Jewish reading public, and anyone else who cares to listen, that any political, historical, and scholarly account of Muslims must begin and end with the fact that Muslims are Muslims.[34]

Rejecting the view that western scholarship was biased against the Middle East, Lewis responded that Orientalism developed as a facet of European humanism, independently of the past European imperial expansion.[35] He noted the French and English pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet not in an organized way, but long before they had any control or hope of control in the Middle East; and that much of Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of imperialism. "What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?"[36]

[edit] Supporters and influence

Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.[37] 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).

Said's continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash,[38] Nicholas Dirks,[39] and Ronald Inden,[40] and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha[41] and Gayatri Spivak.[42]

Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting, his supporters praise his influence as liberating.[43]

[edit] Criticism of US foreign policy

In a 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.”[44]

Said opposed many US foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East. During an April 2003 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said argued that the Iraq war was ill-conceived:

“ My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative....

I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. [US Undersecretary of State Marc] Grossman and [US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest.

The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.[45]

 ”

[edit] Pro-Palestinian activism

An al-Mubadara memorial poster of Edward Said on the Israeli West Bank wall.
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As a pro-Palestinian activist, Said campaigned for a creation of an independent Palestinian state. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional struggles.[46] He supported the two-state solution and voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers in 1988. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord 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 Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 1970s. 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. Said's 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 Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.

Edward Said throwing a stone across the Lebanon-Israel border.

On July 3, 2000, Said was photographed lobbing a rock across the Lebanon-Israel border. Although he denied aiming the rock at Israeli soldiers, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir asserted that he had positioned himself less than 30 feet (9.1 m) from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower before throwing the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed-wire. Said later said, "One stone tossed into an empty space scarcely warrants a second thought", labeling the stone-throwing as "a symbolic gesture of joy".[47]

While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia faculty members and students and from the Anti-Defamation League, the provost issued a statement defending Said's act on the grounds of freedom of expression, a position echoed by his supporters on campus.[48]

In 2002, Said suggested, "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."[49] Later that year, 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 Fatah and Hamas.

In August 2003, in an article published online in Counterpunch, Said summarizes his position on the contemporary rights of Palestinians vis-à-vis the historical experience of the Jewish people:

“ 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.[50] ”

Said was an early proponent of a two-state solution, and, in an important academic article entitled Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, he argued that both the Zionist claim to a land - and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland - and Palestinian rights of self-determination held legitimacy and authenticity. 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).

“ [I]n all my works I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism.... My view of Palestine ... remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested instead a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war.[51] ”

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 FBI surveillance as early as 1971. He and his family were aware that any support towards the Palestinian cause would provoke such investigations. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.[52]

[edit] Claims about Said's early life
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In 1999, Justus Weiner, a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published an article in Commentary, arguing that Said's family did not permanently reside in Talbiya or live there during the final months of the British mandate, and therefore that they could not be considered refugees. According to Weiner, it was only Said's aunt who owned a house in Talbiya, while Said's family visited Jerusalem only occasionally. "On [Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate," Weiner states, "his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo," leaving blank the space for a local address. Weiner suggests Said grew up in Cairo, at the affluent Zamalek neighborhood, and probably never attended St. George's Academy in Jerusalem except during brief stays in that city. Weiner argues that Said's name is not on the school registry and that David Eben-Ezra, whom Said mentioned as a classmate, has no recollections of him. Weiner points out that Said has no recollection of basic facts regarding the house, such as the presence of the Consulate of Yugoslavia or that the philosopher Martin Buber rented his aunt's apartment and was evicted by her. [53] [54] including:

Less than a month after Weiner's article appeared, Alexander Cockburn replied, in The Nation magazine on September 27, 1999, to the personal attack on Said. In an article titled "Israel's Torture Ban". Cockburn wrote:

At the Israeli Justice Department the official in charge of matters affecting Palestinians, and thus a man well trained as an apologist for Israeli security forces, was an American emigre called Justus Reid Weiner. Weiner, now a "scholar in residence" at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, financed by Michael Milken and his family, is the author of a grotesque attack on Edward Said in the latest issue of Commentary. (University of Illinois Professor Frank) Boyle remembers telling Weiner that Jewish-American professors such as John Fried and Richard Falk were among those raising this question of Nuremberg accountability. "I shall never forget Weiner's response,' Boil recalls. "He said, 'There are large numbers of self-hating Jews living in America. That's why I moved to Israel.' At that point I realized I was wasting my time talking to a fanatical anti-Arab racist, so I terminated the conversation."

Following Weiner's widely publicized{citation} article, several respondents disputed Weiner's claims. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair chastised Weiner for his "deliberately falsified" report, noting that a classmate of Edward Said's during his childhood had been interviewed by Weiner, but that Weiner had omitted any mention of the interview in order to maintain his implication that there was no evidence of Edward Said having attended school in Jerusalem.[55] In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens writes that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, and quotes Said stating as early as 1992 that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo.[56]

In a 1711-word article, Edward Said himself underscored errors and false statements in the biographical article Weiner wrote about Said. Though Weiner claimed to have spent three years researching the article, Said pointed out that Weiner had never once contacted him to confirm facts. Said's article, published in Counterpunch, began with these words:

Given the approach of the final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians it seems worthwhile to record here the lengths to which the Israeli right-wing (Jabotinsky and Netanhayu's Revisionists) will go to further its claims on all of Palestine against those of the country's native Palestinian inhabitants who were dispossessed as an entire nation in 1948. To this very end, an article has appeared in the September issue of Commentary, a small conservative Jewish monthly, which attacks my life and story as a Palestinian by pretending to show that I am neither really Palestinian, nor ever lived in Palestine, nor that my family was evicted from Palestine in 1948. It should be remarked that this is the third such attack on me by Commentary in twenty years: the first being an enormously long critique in 1981 of my book The Question of Palestine, the second a reckless article in l988 or l989 entitled "The Professor of Terror," the third being this one, written by one Justus Weiner, an American Israeli who works for an obscure Israeli self-proclaimed "neoconservative" research center in Jerusalem. Before that he was paid by the Israeli Ministry of Justice to defend against Amnesty International. Weiner's argument is buttressed by his boast that he spent three years on his study of my life, spoke to 85 witnesses, travelled to several continents, and found many inconsistencies in what he says is "my story," which he distorts more or less at will. It seems astonishing that he obtained funding for this project, although he tactfully doesn't say why, how much, and from whom, given that it was from Michael Milken (the junk bond felon and his foundation). The first problem is that during his three years of assiduous research Weiner never once contacted or in any way spoke to me, an extraordinary omission by a man who pretends that he is both a scholar and a journalist but actually uses the methods of neither one nor the other. He says he spoke to my assistant once: that is a straight-out lie. Another problem is that he misappropriated and falsifies a galley of my memoir, Out of Place, completed in September 1998, and to appear from Knopf next month. (Extracts from it will appear shortly in the New York Review of Books, The Observer, Harper's and Granta.) There, I scrupulously record the facts of my early life spent between Jerusalem, Cairo and Dhour el Shweir (Lebanon), making clear that being the member of a privileged class I was spared the worst ravages of the nakba. I have never claimed to have been made a refugee, but rather that my extended family, all of it -- uncles, cousins, aunts, grandparents -- in fact was. By the spring of 1948 not a single relative of mine was left in Palestine, ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces. Commentary 's Weiner does not mention that, allowing himself the preposterous claim that my memoir (for which I signed a contract in 1989, submitted several chapters in 1994, and completed in 1998) was written to refute an article by him that did not appear until late August 1999. To make matters worse, Weiner's strenuous display of scholarly rigor is undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact. ... Edward Said's reply to Weiner published in Counterpunch

In an article entitled "Defamation, Zionist-style," Said responded that "the family house was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership," and that his name could not be on the school's registry, which was terminated a year before his attendance.[57] Said charged that the "Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques", criticizing the Jerusalem Center for having "hired an obscure Israeli-American lawyer to 'research' the first ten years of my life and 'prove' that even though I was born in Jerusalem I was never really there".[58] Said later added, "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."[59]

[edit] Works

Publications
Year Book Notes Publisher
1966 Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography Harvard University Press. Republished by Columbia University Press in 2007, ISBN 0-231-14004-5
1973 The Arabs Today: Alternatives for Tomorrow Essays presented at the fourth annual convention of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Boston, 1971. Edited by Said and Fuad Suleiman. Forum Associates (Columbus, Ohio)
1975 Beginnings: Intention and Method Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-00580-2. Reprinted by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1978, ISBN 0-801-82085-5. New edition published by Columbia University Press in 1985, ISBN 0-231-05937-X
1978 Orientalism Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-394-42814-5. Republished by Vintage Books in 1979, ISBN 0-394-74067-X. 25th Anniversary Edition published by Penguin Classics in 2003, with 1995 afterword, ISBN 0-141-18742-5
1979 The Question of Palestine Times Books, ISBN 0-812-90832-5. Republished by Vintage Books in 1980, ISBN 0-394-74527-2. Republished, with a new introduction and epilogue, by Vintage Books in 1992, ISBN 0-679-73988-2
1980 Literature and Society Edited, with preface, by Said Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 0-801-82294-7
The Middle East: What Chances For Peace? Edited by François Sauzey. Contributions by Joseph J. Sisco, Shlomo Avineri, Said, Saburo Okita, Udo Steinbach, William Scranton, Abdel Hamid Abdel-Ghani and H.R.H. Prince Saud al-Faisal Issue number 24 of the Trialogue series. Published by the Trilateral Commission OCLC 271040449 [1]
1981 Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-394-50923-4, ISBN 0-394-74808-5 (paperback). Revised edition published by Vintage Books in 1997, ISBN 0-679-75890-9
1983 The World, the Text, and the Critic Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-96186-2
1986 After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives With photographs by Jean Mohr. Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-394-54413-7, ISBN 0-394-74469-1 (paperback). Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-13683-4. Republished by Columbia University Press in 1999, ISBN 0-231-11449-4 (paperback)
1987 Criticism in Society Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller. Compiled by Imre Salusinszky. Taylor & Francis, ISBN 0416922708
1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question Edited by Said and Christopher Hitchens Verso Books, ISBN 0-860-91175-6, ISBN 0-860-91887-4 (paperback)
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization Field Day (Derry), ISBN 0-946-75516-7
1989 Kim by Rudyard Kipling Edited with an introduction and notes by Said Penguin Books, ISBN 0-140-18352-3
1990 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature Reprint of Said's "Yeats and decolonization" with essays by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and an introduction by Seamus Deane University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-816-61862-3, ISBN 0-816-61863-1 (paperback)
1991 Musical Elaborations Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-07318-6
1993 Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabartî's Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation, 1798 translated by Smuel Moreh Includes "The scope of orientalism" by Said M. Wiener Publishers (Princeton, New Jersey), ISBN 1-558-76069-5, ISBN 1-558-76070-9 (paperback)
Culture and Imperialism Knopf, distributed by Random House, ISBN 0-394-58738-3. Republished by Vintage Books in 1994, ISBN 0-679-75054-1
Edward Said: A Critical Reader Edited by Michael Sprinker Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 1-557-86229-X
1994 The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian Common Courage Press (Monroe, Maine), ISBN 1-567-51031-0, ISBN 1-567-51030-2 (paperback)
The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-679-43057-1
Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-679-43586-7
1995 Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process Preface by Christopher Hitchens Vintage Books, ISBN 0-679-76725-8
1999 Acts of Aggression: Policing Rogue States Collection by Noam Chomsky, Said and Ramsey Clark Seven Stories Press and Turnaround Publisher Services (London), ISBN 1-583-22005-4
Out of Place: A Memoir Knopf, ISBN 0-394-58739-1
Complete Stories, 1884-1891 by Henry James Edited by Said Library of America, ISBN 1-883-01164-7
2000 Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land Essays by Said and Sheena Wagstaff Tate Gallery Publishing (London), ISBN 1-854-37326-9
The Edward Said Reader Edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin Vintage Books, ISBN 0-375-70936-3
The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-375-40930-0. Republished by Vintage Books in 2001, ISBN 0-375-72574-1
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-00302-0
2001 Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said Edited and with an introduction by Gauri Viswanathan Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-375-42107-6
2002 Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society By Daniel Barenboim and Said. Edited, with a preface, by Ara Guzelimian. Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-375-42106-8. Republished by Vintage Books in 2004, ISBN 1-400-07515-7
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Israël Shahak Foreword to the second printing by Said Pluto Press, ISBN 0-745-30818-X
CIA et Jihad, 1950-2001: contre l'URSS, une désastreuse alliance

by John K. Cooley

 Preface by Said Autrement (Paris), ISBN 2-746-70188-X
2003 Culture and Resistance: Conversations With Edward W. Said Interviews with Said by David Barsamian South End Press, ISBN 0-896-08671-2, ISBN 0-896-08670-4 (paperback)
Freud and the Non-European With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a response by Jacqueline Rose. Verso Books, ISBN 1-859-84500-2
2004 From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map Foreword by Tony Judt, afterword by Wadie E. Said. Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-375-42287-0
Humanism and Democratic Criticism Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-12264-0
Interviews With Edward W. Said Edited by Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson. University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1-578-06365-5, ISBN 1-578-06366-3 (paperback)
2005 Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation Edited by Homi Bhabha and W.J.T. Mitchell University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-53201-1, ISBN 0-226-53203-8 (paperback)
2006 Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said Edited by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi Lexington Books, ISBN 0-739-10988-5, ISBN 0-739-10988-X
On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain Foreword by Mariam C. Said, introduction by Michael Wood Pantheon Books, ISBN 0-375-42105-X
2008 Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said Edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür. Verso Books, ISBN 1-844-67245-X, ISBN 1-844-67246-8 (paperback)

[edit] Interviews

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York & London: Routledge, 1990). ISBN 0-415-05372-2.
  2. ^ Robert Fisk, "Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony," The Independent, 30-12-08, accessed 9-1-08, Link
  3. ^ Hughes, Robert (1993-06-21). "Envoy to Two Cultures". Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978727,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-10-21. 
  4. ^ Joe Sacco (2001). Palestine. Fantagraphics. 
  5. ^ Amritjit Singh, Interviews With Edward W. Said (Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2004) 19 & 219. ISBN 1-57806-366-3.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g 'Between Worlds' Edward Said, London Review of Books May 07 1998, accessed May 2008
  7. ^ Edward Said, Out of Place, pg. 82-83, Vintage Books, 1999.
  8. ^ http://www.spinozalens.nl/pages/laureaten_en.htm
  9. ^ Vintage
  10. ^ See Columbia News mourns passing of Edward Said.
  11. ^ See Birzeit U.
  12. ^ Keith Windschuttle, "Edward Said's "Orientalism revisited," The New Criterion January 17, 1999, accessed January 19, [1999].
  13. ^ Edward W. Said, "Islam Through Western Eyes," The Nation April 26, 1980, first posted online January 1, 1998, accessed December 5, 2005.
  14. ^ Said, Edward, Orientalism (Vintage Books: New York, 1979). ISBN 978-0394740676. Pg 12
  15. ^ Keith Windschuttle, "Edward Said's "Orientalism revisited," The New Criterion January 17, 1999, accessed January 19, 1999.
  16. ^ A. L. Tibawi, "English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism", Islamic Quarterly 8 (1964): 25-45
  17. ^ Anouar Abdel-Malek, "L’orientalisme en crise", Diogène 44 (1963): 109-41
  18. ^ "Bilan des études mohammadiennes", Revue Historique 465.1 (1963)
  19. ^ Richard William Southern, Western views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1978; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962).
  20. ^ review of Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge
  21. ^ 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.
  22. ^ Mark F. Proudman, "Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Said," Journal of the Historical Society, 5[4] December 2005, 560
  23. ^ C.A. Bayly Empire and Information (Delhi, India: Cambridge UP, 1999) 25, 143, 282.
  24. ^ Robert Irwin For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006) 159-60, 281-2.
  25. ^ Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism", in Islam and the West (London 1993) 99–118; Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2003; London: Allen Lane, 2006.
  26. ^ Orientalism, p315
  27. ^ Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Natures, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); Malcolm Kerr, rev. of Orientalism, by Edward Said, International Jour. of Middle Eastern Studies 12 (Dec. 1980): 544-47; and Martin Kramer, "Said’s Splash", Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Policy Papers 58 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). ISBN 0-944029-49-3. Kramer observes in "Said's Splash" that "Fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie (whose work Said had praised in Covering Islam) allowed that the book was 'important and in many ways positive.' But she also thought it had had 'unfortunate consequences'"; in an interview published in Approaches to the History of the Middle East, ed. Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (London: Ithaca Press, 1994) 144-45, as cited & qtd. by Kramer, Keddie says:

    "I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too "conservative". It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So "orientalism" for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan."

  28. ^ Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism / Ibn Warraq (2007) ISBN 1591024846
  29. ^ Irwin, For Lust of Knowing 8, 150–166.
  30. ^ O.P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1988) ix-xi, 221-233.
  31. ^ Said, "Afterword" to the 1995 ed. of Orientalism 347, as cited by Irwin, For Lust of Knowing 3–8; cf. Kaizaad Navroze Kotwal, "Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as Virtual Reality: The Orientalist and Colonial Legacies of Gunga Din," The Film Journal no. 12 (April 2005).
  32. ^ 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.
  33. ^ Said, Edward."The Clash of Ignorance," The Nation October 22, 2001, accessed April 26, 2007.
  34. ^ a b Orientalism. p317-8
  35. ^ Kramer, Martin (1999). "Bernard Lewis". Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Vol. 1. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. pp. 719–720. http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/BernardLewis.htm. Retrieved on 2006-05-23. 
  36. ^ Lewis, Bernard, Islam and the West, Oxford University Press, 1993, p.126
  37. ^ See Terry Eagleton, Rev. of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, by Robert Irwin (London: Penguin, 2003). ISBN 0-7139-9415-0. New Statesman Bookshop November 1, 2003.
  38. ^ 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.
  39. ^ Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).
  40. ^ Ronald Inden, Imagining India (New York: Oxford UP, 1990).
  41. ^ Homi K. Bhaba, Nation and Narration (New York & London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990).
  42. ^ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987).
  43. ^ Andrew N. Rubin, "Techniques of Trouble: Edward Said and the Dialectics of Cultural Philology," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102.4 (2003): 862-876.
  44. ^ Review of Dangerous Knowledge by Robert Irwin
  45. ^ Said, Edward."Resources of hope ," Al-Ahram Weekly April 2, 2003, accessed April 26, [2007].
  46. ^ Malise Ruthven, "Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America," The Guardian September 26, 2003, accessed March 1, 2006.
  47. ^ Sunnie Kim (July 19, 2000). "Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon". Columbia Daily Spectator. http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/33458. Retrieved on 2007-05-30. 
  48. ^ Karen W. Arenson (October 19, 2000). "Columbia Debates a Professor's 'Gesture'". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/19/nyregion/19COLU.html?ex=1176523200&en=ea585e33b37df5f2&ei=5070. 
  49. ^ Rpt. in Edward Said, "Thinking Ahead", Media Monitors April 1, 2002, accessed August 26, 2006.
  50. ^ Edward Said, "Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders," CounterPunch August 4, 2003, accessed December 12, 2005.
  51. ^ Edward Said, "Orientalism, an Afterward." Raritan 14:3 (Winter 1995).
  52. ^ David Price, "How the FBI Spied on Edward Said," CounterPunch January 13, 2006, accessed January 15, 2006.
  53. ^ Justus Reid Weiner, "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," Commentary; 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.
  54. ^ "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said", COMMENTARY Magazine (September 1999)
  55. ^ Qtd. in "Commentary: 'Scholar' Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said," Counterpunch September 1, 1999, accessed February 10, 2006.
  56. ^ Rpt. in Michael Sprinkler, ed. Edward Said: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1993). ISBN 1-55786-229-X. Some say it was acknowledged as early as 1989
  57. ^ Edward Said, "Defamation, Zionist-style," Al-Ahram Weekly August 26 - Sept. 1 1999, accessed February 10, 2006.
  58. ^ Edward Said, "Freud, Zionism, and Vienna" Al-Ahram Weekly March 15-21 2001, accessed October 31, 2006.
  59. ^ Amritjit Singh, Interviews with Edward W. Said (Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2004) 19 & 219. ISBN 1-57806-366-3.

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