Said had always been in exile from mainstream culture. Born in 1935 to a prosperous Christian family in Jerusalem, he spent most of his childhood in Egypt and Lebanon, followed by the United States, where he attended boarding school and Princeton University. In Cairo, the young Arab was steeped in Shakespeare and Beethoven. Later, living and teaching in the United States for four decades, he became an outspoken critic of America’s media, government and foreign policy–an Ivy League professor speaking on behalf of Gaza’s dispossessed. His criticism–whether on literature, politics or music–insisted on culture as a gloriously complex, dynamic, muddled affair.
But his central themes were the politics of culture and the culture of politics. His most famous work, “Orientalism,” argued that Western scholarship on the East was shaped by imperialism. Western images of the Arab and the Muslim, he wrote, were largely fictional characters created by Western polemics.
Said made lots of enemies. As an elected member of the Palestine National Council in 1977, he shocked Palestinian nationalists by acknowledging Israel’s right to exist, and advocating the two-state solution. He became a harsh critic of the Oslo declaration, which he called “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” He resigned from the PNC in 1991. His searing critiques of American Middle East policy made him a bogeyman for many in the pro-Israel camp: There were demands that he be reprimanded by Columbia after he threw a stone at Israel from across the Lebanese border. And yet his condemnations of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian regime and Arab intellectuals’ “creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness” led some Arabs to denounce him as a traitor.
In the last months of his life, Said’s writing stayed angry and engaged. He penned blistering attacks on Ariel Sharon and on the Bush administration. The aftermath of the Iraqi war, he felt, was a calamity. A few months ago he made a plaintive plea for a vigorous debate about the pseudosimplicity of the war on terror. “I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, definitions and culture uncontested,” he wrote. Said left almost nothing uncontested, or unsaid. That, and his battles against fundamentalism of all stripes, will be his legacy.
