Edward Said

Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003) was a Palestinian and American academic, literary critic, and political activist. As a professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of post-colonial studies. As a cultural critic, Said is best known for his book Orientalism (1978), a foundational text which critiques the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. His model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle Eastern studies.

Born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, in 1935, Said was a United States citizen by way of his father, who had served in the United States Army during World War I. After the 1948 Palestine war, he relocated the family to Egypt, where they had previously lived, and then to the United States. Said enrolled at the secondary school Victoria College while in Egypt and Northfield Mount Hermon School after arriving in the United States. He graduated from Princeton University in 1957 and received a doctorate in English literature from Harvard University in 1964. His principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor W. Adorno.

In 1963, Said joined Columbia University as a member of the English and Comparative Literature faculties, where he taught and worked until 2003. He lectured at more than 200 other universities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

As a public intellectual, Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council supporting a two-state solution that incorporated the Palestinian right of return, before resigning in 1993 due to his criticism of the Oslo Accords. He advocated for the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure political and humanitarian equality in the Israeli-occupied territories, where Palestinians have witnessed the increased expansion of Israeli settlements. However, in 1999, he argued that sustainable peace was only possible with one Israeli–Palestinian state. He defined his oppositional relation with the Israeli status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has "to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual".

Said was born on 1 November 1935 into a family of Palestinian Christians in the city of Jerusalem, at the time under the British Mandate for Palestine. His parents were born in the Ottoman Empire: his mother Hilda Said (née Musa) was half Palestinian and half Lebanese, and was raised in the city of Nazareth; and his father Wadie "William" Said was a Jerusalem-based Palestinian businessman. Both Hilda and Wadie were Arab Christians, adhering to Protestantism. During World War I, Wadie served in the American Expeditionary Forces, subsequently earning United States citizenship for himself and his immediate family.

In 1919, Wadie and his cousin established a stationery business in Cairo, Egypt.

Although he was raised Protestant, Said became an agnostic in his later years.

Said's childhood was split between Jerusalem and Cairo: he was enrolled in Jerusalem's St. George's School, a British boys' school run by the local Anglican Diocese, but stopped going to his classes when growing intercommunal violence between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews made it too dangerous for him to continue attending, prompting his family to leave Jerusalem at the onset of the 1947–1949 Palestine War. By the late 1940s, Said was in Cairo, enrolled at the Cairo branch of Victoria College. However, he was expelled in 1951 for troublesome behaviour, though his academic performance was high. Having relocated to the United States, Said attended Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts—a socially elite, college-prep boarding school where he struggled with social alienation for a year. Nonetheless, he continued to excel academically and achieved the rank of either first (valedictorian) or second (salutatorian) out of a class of 160 students.

In retrospect, he viewed being sent far from the Middle East as a parental decision much influenced by "the prospects of deracinated people, like us the Palestinians, being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible." The realities of peripatetic life—of interwoven cultures, of feeling out of place, and of homesickness—so affected the schoolboy Edward that themes of dissonance feature in the work and worldview of the academic Said. At school's end, he had become Edward W. Said, and was fluent in English, French, and Arabic. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1957 after completing a senior thesis titled "The Moral Vision: André Gide and Graham Greene." He later received Master of Arts (1960) and Doctor of Philosophy (1964) degrees in English literature from Harvard University.

Said's first published book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), was an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he presented to earn the PhD degree. Abdirahman Hussein said in Edward Saïd: Criticism and Society (2010), that Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) was "foundational to Said's entire career and project". In Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), Said analyzed the theoretical bases of literary criticism by drawing on the insights of Vico, Valéry, Nietzsche, de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Husserl, and Foucault. Said's later works included

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983),

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988),

Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994),

Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and

In 1967, consequent to the Six-Day War, Said became a public intellectual when he acted politically to counter misrepresentations (factual, historical, cultural) with which American news media explained the Arab–Israeli conflict; alleged reportage divorced from the historical realities of the Middle East, and from Israel and the Palestinian territories. To address, explain, and correct perceived orientalism, Said published The Arab Portrayed (1968), a descriptive essay about images of "the Arab" that are meant to evade specific discussion of the historical and cultural realities of the peoples represented in the Middle East, featured in journalism (print, photograph, television) and some types of scholarship (specialist journals).

In the essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims" (1979), Said argued in favor of the political legitimacy and philosophical authenticity of the claims and right to a Jewish homeland, while also asserting the simultaneously inherent right of national self-determination for the Palestinian people. He also characterized Israel's founding as it happened, the displacement of the Palestinian Arabs that accompanied it, and the subjugation of the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories as a manifestation of Western-style imperialism. His books on this topic include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

During a lecture conference at the University of Washington in 2003, Said affirmed that Israeli Jews had grounds for a territorial claim to Palestine (or the Land of Israel), but maintained that it was not "the only claim or the main claim" vis-à-vis all of the other ethnic groups (including Jews and Arabs) who have inhabited the region throughout human history:

Halleran: "Professor Said, do the Zionists have any historical claim to the lands of Israel?"Said: "Of course! But I would not say that the Jewish claim, or the Zionist claim, is the only claim or the main claim; I say that it is a claim among many others. Certainly, the Arabs have a much greater claim because they have had a longer history of inhabitance—of actual residence in Palestine—than the Jews did. If you look at the history of Palestine, there's been some quite interesting work done by biblical archaeologists... you'll see that the period of actual Israelite—as it was called in the Old Testament—dominance in Palestine amounts to about 200 to 250 years. But there were Moabites, there were Jebusites, there were Canaanites, there were Philistines, there were many other people in Palestine at the time and before and after. And to isolate one of them and say, 'That's the real owner of the land,' I mean, that is—that is fundamentalism. Because the only way you can back it up is say, 'Well, God gave it to us.' [...] So, I think the people who have a history of residence in Palestine for a certain amount of time—including Jews, yes, and, of course, the Arabs—have a claim. But... this is very important: I don't think any claim [...] nobody has a claim that overrides all the others and entitles that person with that so-called claim to drive people out!"

Said's argument against the Religious Zionism traditionally espoused by Jewish fundamentalists (i.e., citing God to project the Jewish/Israeli claim as superior to the Arab/Palestinian claim) asserted that such justifications were inherently irrational because they would, among other factors, enable Christians and Muslims of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds to lay superseding territorial claims to Palestine on the basis of their faith.

Besides having been a public intellectual, Edward Said was an accomplished pianist, worked as the music critic for The Nation magazine, and wrote four books about music: Musical Elaborations (1991); Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), with Daniel Barenboim as co-author; On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006); and Music at the Limits (2007) in which final book he spoke of finding musical reflections of his literary and historical ideas in bold compositions and strong performances.

Elsewhere in the musical world, the composer Mohammed Fairouz acknowledged the deep influence of Edward Said upon his works; compositionally, Fairouz's First Symphony thematically alludes to the essay "Homage to a Belly-Dancer" (1990), about Tahia Carioca, the Egyptian dancer, actress, and political militant; and a piano sonata, titled Reflections on Exile (1984), which thematically refers to the emotions inherent to being an exile.

In 1999, Said and Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. They also established The Barenboim–Said Foundation in Seville, to develop education-through-music projects. Besides managing the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim–Said Foundation assists with the administration of the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine Project, and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project, in Seville.

Besides honors, memberships, and postings to prestigious organizations worldwide, Edward Said was awarded some twenty honorary university degrees in the course of his professional life as an academic, critic, and Man of Letters. Among the honors bestowed to him were:

He twice received the Lionel Trilling Book Award; the first occasion was the inaugural bestowing of said literary award in 1976, for Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974). He also received the

Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association

Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001

Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in 2002 (shared with Daniel Barenboim).

Said died at the age of 67 in New York City on 24 September 2003, after a 12-year struggle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He was survived by his wife, Mariam C. Said, his son, Wadie Said, and his daughter, Najla Said. The eulogists included Alexander Cockburn ("A Mighty and Passionate Heart"); Seamus Deane ("A Late Style of Humanism"); Christopher Hitchens ("A Valediction for Edward Said"); Tony Judt ("The Rootless Cosmopolitan"); Michael Wood ("On Edward Said"); and Tariq Ali ("Remembering Edward Said, 1935–2003"). Said is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Broumana, Jabal Lubnan, Lebanon. His headstone indicates he died on 25 September 2003.

The tributes to Said include books and schools. The books include Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said (2008) that features essays by Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi, and Elias Khoury; Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (2010), by Harold Aram Veeser, a critical biography; and Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations (2010), with essays by Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappé, Ella Shohat, Ghada Karmi, Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim.

In 2002, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nayhan, the founder and president of the United Arab Emirates, and others endowed the Edward Said Chair at Columbia University; it was filled by Rashid Khalidi from 2003 until his retirement in 2024.

In November 2004, in Palestine, Birzeit University renamed their music school the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.

The Barenboim–Said Academy (Berlin) was established in 2012.