Edward Said, an Irreplaceable Treasure

Hussein Ibish

            With the passing of Edward Said, the United States, the Arab world and the human family have lost a rare public intellectual who was both a groundbreaking scholar and a champion of decency and humanity. Said was first and foremost a teacher, who worked not only in the classroom and campus, but who also taught entire peoples on several continents and in several languages how to think about each other and themselves. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, past President of the Modern Language  Association and one of the most influential literary critics of his generation.

            Certainly, no one did more than Said to teach the Western public, especially in the United States, about the reality and experience of the Palestinians. He theorized the Palestinian predicament in “The Question of Palestine,” humanized it in “After the Last Sky,” and personalized it in his moving memoir “Out of Place.” In the 1970s and ‘80s, when the word “Palestinian” conjured no images in the West other than hooded thugs, Edward Said — brilliant, urbane, polished and eloquent — came forward as living proof that the stereotype of the Palestinian terrorist was as crude a prejudice as any other. His seminal work, “Orientalism,” is widely credited with inaugurating the Postcolonial Studies movement in the humanities. His collections of essays, “The World, the Text, the Critic,” and “Reflections on Exile” are among the most influential in contemporary literary scholarship.

            In his columns in the largest Arabic language daily Al-Hayat and in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, as well as in countless lectures and speeches, Said devoted himself to explaining aspects of Western culture, especially the American political sensibility, to Arab audiences. Although he was thoroughly immersed in both Western and Arab culture, Said often remarked that he felt completely at home in neither. From this de-centered perspective, he attempted to serve as a bridge between increasingly alienated Arab and American societies.

            His consistent bravery, especially in defending the Palestinian cause at a time and place of maximum unpopularity, won Said many bitter and vitriolic opponents. Some cast him as a “professor of terror,” or denied that he was a Palestinian at all, while others bombed his office at Columbia University. 

            Through it all, Said remained committed to reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians based on mutual respect and recognition. He was one of the first prominent Palestinians to embrace the notion of a two-state solution, arguing in the 1970s for the recognition of Israel. More recently, he came to believe that the only viable solution was a single state for both Israelis and Palestinians that could transform rivals into partners and allow each to express their national identity without excluding or oppressing the other.

            His critics often accused him, quite falsely, of being “anti-American,” because of his staunch opposition to many aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Such critics fail to acknowledge not only that such dissent is in the highest tradition of American civil and intellectual life, but that Said was equally merciless in his judgments of Arab governments.

            His scathing attacks on leaders such as Yasser Arafat, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, to name only three but not entirely at random, were informed by an intellectual ethic that demanded speaking truth to power and telling people what they needed to hear, whether they liked it or not.  Perhaps more than any other contemporary scholar, Said presented his students, colleagues and the public with a powerful understanding of mission and purpose of the engaged intellectual.

            Perhaps Edward Said’s most important achievement as a public scholar was his championing of secularism as a critical, political and philosophical orientation. He taught several generations of literary critics a form of “secular criticism,” by which he meant, in effect, cultivating the ability to read texts with a full appreciation of how other cultural and historical narratives inform, inflect and intersect with one’s own.  He called this deeply influential critical methodology reading “contrapuntally” or “against the grain.” His 1993 lectures, published as “Representations of the Intellectual,” explained in detail his vision of the public intellectual as a fiercely independent spirit who confronted both the smugly powerful and the complacent public with difficult truths. Edward Said’s life-work was an exercise in this ethos, forever challenging friend and foe alike.

            Said, a multi-talented renaissance man, was also Music Editor for the Nation magazine in the 1990s, and an accomplished pianist. He was a  champion of political secularism, as opposed to religious or ethnic chauvinism, which he rightly viewed as a sine qua non for coexistence with respect and equality in a heterogeneous world made up of heterogeneous societies.

            Underlining the literary and political secularism Said promoted was a philosophical understanding of secularism adopted mainly from Giambattista Vico — the notion that human history is shaped by a genealogy of human choices. This version of secular history rejects divine intervention or teleology, the primacy of economic forces whether the “hidden hand” of the market or the inevitable victory of the proletariat, biology as destiny, and any other form of determinism, in favor of the self-conscious agency of collective and individual human actors.

            As religious fanaticism deepens around the globe and turns mass-murderous, globalization increasingly subjects every villager on the planet to the whims of transnational and transhistorical economic forces, and biotechnology and genetic engineering prepares to alter our very conception of what constitutes the human. Edward Said’s empowering but generous secular vision seems all the more precious a contribution. It is, perhaps, for explicating the genuinely redemptive and liberatory spirit of secularism that we owe the greatest debt of thanks to the late, great teacher. He is an irreplaceable treasure, and we shall miss him beyond measure.

The above image of the late Professor Edward Said throwing a stone symbolically in the direction of the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon was taken shortly after the retreat of Israel’s military from Lebanon in May 2000, after 22 years of brutal occupation. It was widely mischaracterized by apologists for Israel as Said “throwing stones at Israeli soldiers,” a misrepresentation which was typical of so many distortions directed against the life and work of this great scholar and activist. (photo by AP Photos)

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