Palestinian Scholar Edward W. Said Dies ULA ILNYTZKY Associated Press NEW YORK - Columbia University literary scholar Edward W. Said, the nation"s foremost Arab intellectual and advocate for the Palestinian cause, has died after a bout with leukemia. He was 67. Said, who died at a New York hospital late Wednesday, was a leading member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years, stepping down in 1991. He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause and a variety of other subjects, including English literature - his academic specialty - as well as music and culture. Said (pronounced sye-EED) was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of British-ruled Palestine, but spent most of his adult life in the United States. On the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was consistently critical of Israel"s policies toward the Palestinians. Two years ago, he said that Israel"s "efforts toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs" had actually strengthened Palestinian determination. "Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel"s concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective," Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Cairo. After the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Said criticized Yasser Arafat for making what he regarded as a bad deal for the Palestinians. He said Arafat and the Palestinian Authority had become "willing collaborators with the (Israeli) military occupation, a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians." In 2000, during a visit to the Middle East, Said stirred a controversy on campus by throwing a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom. Ghazi Aridi, Lebanon"s minister of culture, called Said"s death a great loss for Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Said was "an educated man and an intellectual capable of presenting Arab and Palestinian positions in a rational, scientific and flexible manner," Aridi said. Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, who first met Said in the 1960s, said he "was a man of intellect and courage who remained unwavering in his commitment to the Palestinian cause for justice and freedom and never ever allowed himself to be intimidated or silenced." "We need intellectuals like Edward Said, especially at this stage we are going through," said Turki al-Hamad, a prominent Saudi intellectual and writer. "We Arabs are not rich in such kind of intellectual thinking. He leaves a huge gap in our intellectual life." After studying in Cairo in his youth, Said moved to the United States, where he received a bachelor"s degree from Princeton University in 1957 and a master"s and Ph.D. from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964. Most of his academic career was spent as a professor at Columbia in New York, but he also was a visiting professor at such leading institutions as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Columbia President Lee Bollinger called Said "a man of enormous intellectual distinction. He was devoted to, and intimately engaged with works of art, especially the novel and the poem. He was a humanist who believed that such study is essential to a good and meaningful life." His books include "The Question of Palestine" in 1979 and "After the Last Sky" in 1986. His first book was a dissertation on Joseph Conrad, the early 20th century novelist on Western imperialism. In 2002, Said, together with pianist Daniel Barenboim, was named the winner of Spain"s Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for his effort toward bringing peace to the Middle East. Said and Barenboim had run summer workshops for young musicians from Israel and Arab countries. Funeral arrangements were incomplete. ----------- THE TIMES Edward Said Historian of literature and empire who became a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause       For Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York, literature and politics were inseparable.  He was famous in the academic world for his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, both of which argued that Western identity depended on its self-created superiority over its empire; and he was America’s most prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause. Edward Wadie Said was born into a Christian family in west Jerusalem in 1935, and was educated at the city’s St George’s Cathedral School and at Victoria College, Cairo. In 1951 Said was expelled for making trouble and sent to a Protestant school in America; when he returned to Jerusalem in 1992 it was his first visit for 40 years. He was an undergraduate at Princeton, took a doctorate at Harvard and then switched to Columbia, where he became assistant professor in 1967;  the Six Day War made that year a “political watershed” for him. In the following three decades at Columbia — he was also a visiting professor at Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins — Said helped to found the  discipline of postcolonial studies, insisting that in order to understand Western culture, its links with imperialism must be taken into account. This thesis was at the heart of Orientalism (1978), which considered the  intertwining of literature and empire. He argued that orientalist works  produced since 1800 had been part of a system of intellectual colonialism that had perpetuated itself. Said’s interests were broad — he loved opera and playing the piano, and was at one time a decent tennis player — and they were usually political. In Musical Elaborations (1991) he said that even music expressed power relations. “All we need to do,” he said, “is look at the whole field of classical music as a model of dominance in maintaining the structure of the status quo.” Music also entered into Said’s follow-up to Orientalism, entitled Culture and Imperialism (1993), which argued again that masterpieces by writers and artists such as Conrad, Verdi and Jane Austen reproduced Western control over its empire. He claimed, for example, that in Mansfield Park, Austen “sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half dozen passing references to Antigua” and that the novel was a vehicle with a hidden imperialist theme. The Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, Ernest Gellner, said that of the four assumptions in Culture and Imperialism, three were “probably false” but that Said’s “heart is in the right place”; Said replied that “Gellner shows no acquaintance whatever with  Islamic texts”. Another reviewer, Noel Malcolm, said: “It’s as if Neil Kinnock had started giving lectures on Chomsky.” There were also intellectual debates with the historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, who questioned the connection that Said made between colonial power and knowledge, arguing that his thesis suffered from concentrating  on orientalists from England and France. Said was also a prominent critic of the idea that after the Cold War came a “clash of civilisations” between East and West, arguing that cultures cannot be labelled as monolithic. In 1991 Said was told that he had leukaemia, and when he started chemotherapy he wrote Out of Place (1999), his memoir of youth. It was alleged in a New York magazine that he had fabricated a childhood in Jerusalem so as to invent himself as a Palestinian refugee, and he was denounced as a liar. Said insisted that he had been born in Jerusalem and had gone to school there, and that he had never described himself personally as a refugee. His family definitively fled Palestine for Egypt in 1947 and Said maintained that it was his rootlessness that led to his intellect: when he gave the Reith lectures in 1993, he said that exiles possess a “double perspective” and that “from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal, idea of how to think”. He also linked the worlds of literature and politics when he said that critical reading was important in any democratic society, arguing that “critical reading furnishes the engaged mind with an alertness to the lazy rhetoric that has so often covered up abuses of power”. Throughout his life Said was critical of American foreign policy, and felt that the Gulf War was part of a wider cultural conflict being waged  by America on the Arab world. He said that the peace process had created apartheid “bantustans”, and in The End of the Peace Process (2000), he asked why the Palestinian struggle was not seen in the same light as that against apartheid. He used the South African example to argue that a peace in the Middle East requires a basic acceptance from both sides of the idea of coexistence in a single state. Said wrote widely on this subject, most notably in The Question of Palestine (1979)  and After the Last Sky (1986). From 1977 until 1991 he was a member of the Palestinian National Council, a parliament in exile, and in 1988 he translated the Palestinian Declaration of Independence into English. But he and Yassir Arafat later fell out. Said felt that Arafat had become a “Pé tain figure who had . . . kept himself in power by conceding virtually everything significant about our basic political and human rights” and that the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO were a “ Palestinian Versailles”. Arafat banned a collection of Said’s essays which argued that the peace agreement was effectively a capitulation to Israel, and one of his entourage referred to Said as an orientalist.   Said also caused controversy in America when his criticism of the mistreatment of Palestinians turned into action in 2000. There was uproar in the American media when he threw a stone at an Israeli guardhouse on the border with Lebanon, though he said it was a “ symbolic gesture of joy” at Israel’s ending its occupation of Lebanon.  Columbia did not punish him, arguing that he was protected under the principle of academic freedom. He wrote after visits to the Middle East that Israel’s “xenophobia toward the Arabs” had made Palestinian determination even stronger. He blamed the events of September 11, 2001, on America’s support for Israel and continued to argue against the portrayal of the Arab world in  the American media. Earlier this year Said, who had once hoped to become a professional musician, and the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim published a book of  dialogues, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society.  Four years previously the pair had formed the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together young musicians from Arab countries and  Israel; it performed at the Proms this year, though ill-health prevented Said from attending. In 1962 Said married Maire Jaanus, who also became a professor at Columbia University. The marriage was dissolved in 1967 and in 1970 he married Mariam Cortas. They had a son and a daughter.   Edward Said, professor of English and comparative literature, was born on November 1, 1935. He died on September 24, 2003, aged 67. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Edward Said Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian cause  in America Malise Ruthven Friday September 26, 2003 The Guardian Edward Said, who has died aged 67, was one of the leading literary critics of the last quarter of the 20th century. As professor of English  and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, he was widely regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the most articulate and visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the United States, where it earned him many enemies. The broadness of Said"s approach to literature and his other great love,  classical music, eludes easy categorisation. His most influential book,  Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to change the direction of  several disciplines by exposing an unholy alliance between the enlightenment and colonialism. As a humanist with a thoroughly secular outlook, his critique on the great tradition of the western enlightenment seemed to many to be self-contradictory, deploying a humanistic discourse to attack the high cultural traditions of humanism,  giving comfort to fundamentalists who regarded any criticism of their tradition or texts as off-limits, while calling into question the integrity of critical research into culturally sensitive areas such as Islam. Whatever its flaws, however, Orientalism appeared at an opportune time,  enabling upwardly mobile academics from non-western countries (many of whom came from families who had benefited from colonialism) to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with "narratives of oppression", creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western "other". Said"s influence, however, was far from being confined to the worlds of academic and scholarly discourse. An intellectual superstar in America, he distinguished himself as an opera critic, pianist, television celebrity, politician, media expert, popular essayist and public lecturer. Latterly, he was one of the most trenchant critics of the Oslo peace process and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat. He was dubbed "professor of terror" by the rightwing American magazine Commentary; in 1999, when he was struggling against leukaemia, the same magazine accused him of falsifying his status as a Palestinian refugee to enhance  his advocacy of the Palestinian cause, and of falsely claiming to have been at school in Jerusalem before completing his education in the United States. The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles in New York was predictable, given his trenchant attacks on Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians and his outspoken condemnations of US policies in the Middle East. From the other side of the conflict, however, he encountered opposition from Palestinians who accused him of sacrificing Palestinian rights by making unwarranted concessions to Zionism. As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared to concede that Jews had historic claims to Palestine, he said: "I don"t deny their claims, but their claim always entails Palestinian dispossession." More than any other Palestinian writer, he qualified his anti-colonial critique of Israel, explaining its complex entanglements and the problematic character of its origins in the persecution of European Jews, and the overwhelming impact of the Zionist idea on the European conscience. Said recognised that Israel"s exemption from the normal criteria by which nations are measured owed everything to the Holocaust. But while recognising its unique significance, he did not see why its legacy of trauma and horror should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who were "absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity", of their rights. "The question to be asked," he wrote in the Politics Of Dispossession (1994), "is how long can the history of anti-semitism and the Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for its behaviour towards the Palestinians, arguments and sanctions that were used against other repressive governments, such as South Africa? How long are we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza... are directly connected to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of the victims of Nazism?" He insisted that the task of Israel"s critics was not to reproduce for Palestine a mirror-image of a Zionist ideology of diaspora and return, but rather to elaborate a secular vision of democracy as applicable to both Arabs and Jews. Elected to the Palestine national council (PNC) in 1977, as an independent intellectual Said avoided taking part in the factional struggles, while using his authority to make strategic interventions. Rejecting the policy of armed struggle as impermissible -  because of the legacy of the Holocaust and the special conditions of the Jewish people - he was an early advocate of the two-state solution,  implicitly recognising Israel"s right to exist. The policy was adopted at the PNC meeting in Algiers in 1988. In adapting the English version of the Arabic draft text, Said used his influence to rephrase the Arabic; although his modifications were insufficient to satisfy the Reagan administration, which ended by dictating the crucial words that appeared in Arafat"s speech to a special session of the UN general assembly (convened in Geneva because the US state department refused to grant Arafat a visa to attend the UN in New York), there can be little doubt that Said"s tireless representations in the American media, explaining that the declaration amounted to a "historic compromise" on the part of the Palestinians towards the Jewish state, opened the way for the US-PLO dialogue that would lead to the Madrid conference and the Oslo peace process. As the peace process gained momentum, however, Said adopted an increasingly critical stance and, in 1991, resigned from the PNC. The Oslo declaration, he argued, was weighted unfairly towards Israel; the scenario, previsioning an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho in advance of the other territories and agreement on the final status of Jerusalem, amounted to "an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles". To the end, he remained a thorn in the side of the Palestinian authority. The best-known and most distinguished Palestinian exile became the subject of censorship by the representatives of his own people, one of the standard-bearers of the liberal conscience in the increasingly illiberal climate of intolerance and corruption surrounding  President Arafat and his regime. Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian family. His father Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the US before the first world war. He volunteered for service in France and returned to the Middle East as a respectable Protestant businessman - with American citizenship - before making an arranged marriage to the daughter of a Baptist minister from Nazareth. In Out Of Place (1999), the memoir of his childhood and youth, Said described his father, who called himself William to emphasise his adopted American identity, as overbearing and uncommunicative. His Victorian strictness instilled in Said "a deep sense of generalised fear", which he spent most of his life trying to overcome. To his father, Said owed the drivenness that brought him his remarkable achievements. "I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement," he wrote. "Every day for me is like the beginning of a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it." Wadie Said revealed little about himself or the source of his money, but  certainly Edward and his sisters never wanted for anything, travelling with battalions of servants, summering (after 1947) in the cultivated comfort of Dhour el Shweir in Lebanon, enjoying sumptuous dinners on transatlantic liners. Said described his mother, whom he evidently adored, as brilliant and man- ipulative, neurotically difficult to please, giving always the impression that "she had judged you and found you wanting" - yet instilling in him a love of literature and music. Said"s first name, improbably inspired by the Prince of Wales, was the creation of his parents, whom he would come to see as "self-creations" out of an eclectic blend of elements and aspirations: American lore culled from magazines and his father"s memories, missionary influence, incomplete and hence eccentric schooling, British colonial attitudes. Arabic was forbidden at home, except when speaking to servants; even the  waiters at Groppis, the fashionable Cairo cafe, were addressed in bad French. According to Said, his un-Arab Christian name induced a split in his adolescent sense of identity, between "Edward", his outer self, and the "loose, irresponsible, fantasy-ridden metamorphoses of my private inner life". Bright but rebellious, he described himself as having been a leading troublemaker at Cairo"s Victoria College, the British-style public school whose snooty captain Michael Shalhoub would later achieve celebrity as Omar Sharif. Sent at his father"s insistence to Mount Hermon, a private school in Massachusetts, he blossomed academically, but lacked the right attitude to be acknowledged as an outstanding student. He responded positively to the American approach to essay-writing, which he found more imaginative and stimulating than the buttoned-up British approach in Cairo. The contrast between his burgeoning academic distinction and the absence  of formal recognition clearly marked him deeply. He would claim that it  was this experience, as much as the work of his more widely acknowledged intellectual mentors, including RP Blackmur, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault, that influenced his anti- authoritarian outlook. Said"s engagement with Palestine drew on deep emo tional roots, particularly his affection for his Jerusalem aunt Nabiha, his father"s sister, who, after 1948, devoted her life to working with Palestinian refugees in Cairo, although she never discussed the political aspects of  the dispute in Said"s presence. Until his 30s, Edward was too preoccupied with his studies, progressing smoothly through Princeton and  Harvard graduate school, developing his critical methodologies and indulging his passion for music, especially the piano, at which he achieved an almost professional level of competence, to take much interest in the politics of his homeland. It was the trauma of the Arab defeat in 1967, which unleashed a second wave of refugees (many of them already refugees from the 1948 exodus), that shocked him out of what he would come to see as his earlier complacency, reconnecting him with his former self. Said"s writings on English literature, such as Culture And Imperialism (1993), and western classical music drew heavily on his sense of being an outsider. Like Joseph Conrad, the subject of his PhD thesis and first  published book, he retained an "extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality", which enabled him to deploy a kind  of double- vision in his readings of the English novel, discerning the invisible colonial plantations that guarantee the domestic tranquillity of Mansfield Park, or finding in Conrad"s self-consciously circular narrative forms the sense of the potentiality of the challenges to western hegemony that would erupt during the post-colonial era. Where African writers such as Chinhua Achebe dismissed Conrad as a racist, suggesting that, whatever his gifts as a writer, his political attitudes must make him despicable to any African, Said saw such reasoning as amounting to spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic amputation. Contrary to the assumption sometimes made about him, he did not consider that the hidden political agendas and attitudes of cultural supremacy that he regarded as informing the canons of western culture from Dante to Flaubert necessarily diminished their artistic integrity or cultural power. His achievement may have been to enhance artistic comprehension by drawing attention to unstated political dimensions in the knowledge that  art must always escape enlistment for partisan ends. In a brilliant essay on Die Meistersinger that grapples with Wagner"s anti-semitism, he  quoted, with approval, Pierre Boulez"s remark that "Wagner"s music, by its very existence, refuses to bear the ideological message that it is intended to convey." A similar statement could be made about Said"s work as a critic. The anti-colonial perspective that animates his work does not issue in ideological consistency. Rather, it challenges conventional assumptions about art, music and literature, opening up new avenues of inquiry and questioning the criteria by which knowledge is organised and  husbanded. Like his hero, Theodor Adorno, Said was "the quintessential intellectual, hating all systems, whether on our side or theirs, with equal distaste". Versatile and subtle, he was better at elucidating distinctions than formulating systems. A Christian humanist with a healthy respect for Islam, he was a member of the academic elite; yet he inveighed against academic professionalism, venturing into territories well outside his area of speciality, insisting always that the true intellectual"s role must be that of the amateur, because it is only the amateur who is moved  neither by the rewards nor the requirements of a career, and who is therefore capable of a disinterested engagement with ideas and values. The unusual complexity of his background - privileged yet marginal, wealthy yet powerless - allowed him to empathise with dispossessed people, especially the victims of Zionism and its western supporters, while enjoying in the fullest measure the cultural riches of New York, a  city that rang louder than any other with Jewish achievement and success. In his final years, Said"s health grew ever more fragile, and, though passionately concerned with the unfolding Palestinian disaster in the wake of 9/11 and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he took a conscious decision to withdraw from political controversy and channel his energies into music. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he founded with the Israeli citizen Daniel Barenboim in 1999 grew out of the friendship he forged with the musician who shares his belief that art - and, in particular, the music of Wagner - transcends political ideology. With Said"s assistance, Barenboim gave master classes for Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank, infuriating the Israeli right. The orchestra received a tumultuous reception at the BBC Proms last month. It may prove a fitting legacy for an intellectual whose work illuminated our crisis-ridden world by embracing its contradictions and celebrating its complexities. In 1970, he married Mariam Cortas, by whom he had a son and a daughter.