In his various works, Said unified the disparate experiences of a seemingly separate and unconnected humanity
"It falls to us, disciples of the humane vision that Professor Edward Said helped to construct, to deconstruct the false barriers that prevent its realization, to imagine a world in their absence and to, in the words of his fittingly final exhortation to us, enter the contest of values, definitions and cultures so as to bring that world to fruition .."

By GEORGE NAGGIAR

"I urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values, definitions, and cultures uncontested." - From the Final Essay of Edward Said.

Edward Said's life and work is a story of transcendence of the cultural and spatial barriers that so often thoughtlessly divide humanity. Born in Jerusalem, the capital of the three great monotheistic faiths and a city that he once called "a seamless amalgam of cultures and religions engaged, like members of the same family, on the same plot of land in which all has become entwined with all," he would live most of his late life and finally pass away in New York City, the capital of the modern world and where men and women from every corner of the earth converge to form a modern amalgam of peoples unlike anything ever known before. There could have been no more fitting places for the beginning and end of the life's journey of Edward Said.

In between that beginning and end, Said's journey would take him from Palestine to Egypt to the United States and around the world. At home nowhere and everywhere, Said described his condition as one of exile, perpetually without a home, or out of place to use the title of his brilliant memoir. Nowhere more, however, than in his exile, was Said the symbol of his people, whose dispossession his life reflected and for whom he so eloquently advocated in works like The Question of Palestine, After the Last Sky, the Politics of Dispossession and Peace and Its Discontents. Through these writings and others, Said introduced the Palestinian people and narrative to an American-and international-audience as Zionism's all-too-often unrecognized victims. In so doing, he was widely known as one of the Palestinian people's most passionate advocates for peace, reconciliation and coexistence with Israeli Jews on the basis of justice and equality.

From that vision, he would never waver, even when it was most unpopular to do so. During the Oslo "Peace Process," he was a tireless and persistent critic, famously calling the Accords themselves a "surrender" by the Palestinian leadership and predicting with tragic foresight that they would delay, not advance, the day of Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation. Throughout the process, he called for the resignation of President Arafat and the emergence of a genuine grassroots domestic and international movement for Palestinian rights, which he understood would ensure progress towards a meaningful Palestinian-Israeli peace. Nevertheless, for his honesty and unwillingness to be blinded to Palestinian economic, political and human realities by the distorting veneer of the language and images of peace, he earned the derision of even many in his own community for supposedly "opposing peace" or "being unrealistic."

But with the predictable conclusion of the Oslo process in a storm of violence causing mutual Palestinian-Israeli suffering, which now, at best, will only further postpone the process of Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation, new movements emerged within Palestine and internationally that were based on precisely the discourse and strategy that Said had advocated all along. In Palestine, a Palestinian National Initiative, of which he was a central part, had been born and posed a new alternative to the failed strategy of endless negotiations based on unequal power. It was a truly grassroots effort that respected democracy, treated the needs of the Palestinian people and spoke in language of genuine peace and reconciliation with Israel. Throughout the world, including in the United States, the struggle of the Palestinian people had become, to use his words, "a byword for emancipation and enlightenment." In solidarity with them, divestment campaigns had been launched, boycotts of Israeli goods had been initiated and people from around the world had gone to Palestine to stand with the Palestinians in the moments of their greatest vulnerability.

In a fitting homage to him, at his final convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the leading Arab-American organization, he received a roaring standing ovation for a speech in which he, among other things, lambasted the Palestinian Authority for its failure to recognize the basic dignity, not to say moral beauty, of the very cause that its ostensible mandate was to advance. In the turn of the course of history, in the inspiring and humane language and vision of his speech, in his physical position on the podium and in the applause of the crowd for him, it was clear that Said had at last become what he had always been-the true symbol and leader of his people.

But it is a testament to the universality of his thought and the range of his interests as a scholar and human being that Said was not limited in his writings and advocacy to the one struggle with which he was both personally and nationally affiliated. Indeed, his great influence and reputation was based in large part on his other work, particularly on his reinterpretation and re-presentation of histories of formerly colonized peoples of the world, work which was foundational in the fields of both Post-Colonial Studies and Critical Race Theory.

In his seminal work, Orientalism, Said critically explored European-primarily French and British-representations of "the Orient." In examining these representations, Said exposed that "Western" "knowledge" of the Orient was less an accurate description of the peoples and culture of that place (if such generalities could themselves be meaningfully understood, which they could not) than both a preface to and later reinforcement of Western imperial rule over the Orient.

In Culture and Imperialism, his sequel to Orientalism, Said would extend his analysis to other formerly colonized peoples from around the world, to "India, the subcontinent generally, a lot of Africa, Caribbean, Australia, parts of the world where there was a major Western investment, whether through empire or direct colonialism or some combination of both, as in the case of India." In so doing, he would dis- (or, more properly, un)-cover the often hidden power that lied within the culture of European-and any-imperialism, and celebrate the resistance of formerly colonized peoples to its rule.

In both works and beyond, Said understood and taught that despite the dehumanization of and violence against the "Other" contained in colonialism and other forms of willful division, human history was an intertwined fabric, separated not by geographic, ethnic, national or religious barriers, but by deliberate delusions of the will to power. It was this will-and the structures of power and fawning intellectuals that are the predictable result of its employment-that his critical posture was almost instinctively directed against, as he himself once put. In its place, he sought to build a world of what Adorno, his intellectual hero, once called-and he later cited-a non-dominative difference. The critical study of history, society and culture that would bring that condition into reality was, for Said, the role of the intellectual.

And that role, he fulfilled. In his various works, Said unified the disparate experiences of a seemingly separate and unconnected humanity, both by showing that no encounter between peoples, even of the most odious form, left the other side unaffected, and by raising in our minds the universality of so much of the human experience. It is a tribute to him that, even as he praised the virtues of the humanism that he so eloquently defended, his own insights contributed enormously to its depth. Would that we would have made those insights our own.

But instead, today, we stand at the edge of a great valley that separates humanity (particularly Americans and the Arab/Islamic peoples of the world), cruelly dividing us into ethnic, racial and religious categories whose basis is neither history nor reason, but which, as Said taught us, obdurately betrays both. This gulf is not a natural or inevitable one, but one too often constructed for us by pusillanimous politicians and a media untrained in the art of critical practice. And its effects are to promote and thereby allow our consciences to accept an unacceptable violence of human against human-and the enormous suffering that is its handmaiden-that no just God or morality could countenance, much less sanction.

It falls to us, disciples of the humane vision that Edward Said helped to construct, to deconstruct the false barriers that prevent its realization, to imagine a world in their absence and to, in the words of his fittingly final exhortation to us, enter the contest of values, definitions and cultures so as to bring that world to fruition. And when we do, we will have torn down the symbolic-and, yes, in Palestine, physical-walls that so inhumanely separate us from each other, elevated the universal rights of all human beings to freedom and equality and built the greatest possible monument to the life and labor of Edward Said, whose beautiful mind helped us dream what, alas, his eyes could not see.

About the Author: The writer is with the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (AAPER) - www.americansforpalestine.org

Source: The Palestine Chronicle – www.palestinechronicle.com

Edward Said, who died yesterday, was not just a formidable thinker and writer - he was a loyal and thoughtful friend

Adhaf Soueif
Friday September 26, 2003
The Guardian

It was 12 years ago that Edward called me, early on a summer evening, to tell me he had just been diagnosed with leukemia. There was no hushed tone, no sadness, no fear in his voice. There was surprise and anger. It was "Guess what? I've got fucking leukemia. Apparently I'm dying." I said: "You can't be dying."
It was an impossibility as far as I was concerned, and continued to be an impossibility - until today. Our loss cannot be measured. For 22 years Edward has been my friend. And the friendship started in a way typical of him. He heard I was in New York. He had read my first published story. He phoned up and invited me and my husband to dinner at his house. We met Maryam, his wife, Wadi and Najla, his kids, and a few others. At the end of the evening he walked Ian and me out. At the door of the lift we all shook hands then he opened his arms and gave me a huge hug. We had become old friends.

Now I say to myself: he was 68, he had a wonderful family, he saw his children grown up and had huge happiness and pride in them, he leaves us his work, he has touched and influenced millions of people across the world and, in the end, death comes for each and every one of us. But it brings no comfort.

The loss to his family I cannot speak of. For us, his friends, we are orphaned. What shall we do without him? He brought love and concern and loyalty and charm to his friendships, and he kept them in good repair. He was ready with help before you even knew you needed it. Many times, alone in a strange city, my hotel phone would ring and it would be a friend of Edward's: "He said I had to look after you so I'm coming round to take you out."

When I told him last Christmas that I was going to Rome, he gave me a phone number: "Get in touch with her. She's a wonderful woman. You'll love her." It was his music teacher, from Cairo, from half a century ago. She still adored him. She said he had never lost touch and that she and her husband prayed for him every night. "Edward and his 3,000 close friends" is how one of us puts it.

Yet when you were with him, you always felt unique. He noticed if you wore your hair differently, he commented on your clothes, on what you chose to eat. In my car, recently: "Would you mind switching off this dreadful racket?" of a currently popular Egyptian singer. And then, turning to me: "But if you like this stuff, how can you bear not to live in Cairo?"

It is a measure of his no-holds-barred friendship that, when I was alone one night some two years ago, with the diagnosis of my husband's lung cancer just off the fax, it was to Edward in New York that I turned. He talked me through that first hour and gave me phone numbers of doctors, medical centres and friends who had been through it. When I made contact I found he had already called them and told them, again, to "look after" me.

At the last two of his public events that I attended with him - one in Brighton, the other in Hay - people were coming up afterwards just to touch him. It was as though he was a talisman. He laughed it off: "You know me, I'm just an old demagogue," he said.

But he wasn't. He was a guide and an example. In the most private conversation, as well as in public, he was always human, always fair, always inclusive. "What is the matter with these people?" he asked after a recent debate. "Why does no one mention truth or justice any more?" He believed that ordinary people, all over the world, still cared about truth and justice. My life and many others' are desolate without him.

The last time I saw Edward Said, I asked him to go on living. I knew about his leukaemia. He had often pointed out that he was receiving "state-of-the-art" treatment from a Jewish doctor and - despite all the trash that his enemies threw at him - he always acknowledged the kindness and honour of his Jewish friends, of whom Daniel Barenboim was among the finest.

Edward was dining at a buffet among his family in Beirut, frail but angry at Arafat's latest surrender in Palestine/Israel. And he answered my question like a soldier. "I'm not going to die," he said. "Because so many people want me dead."

On Wednesday night he died in a New York hospital, aged 67.

I first met him in the early years of the Lebanese civil war. I'd heard of this man, this intellectual fighter and linguist and academic and musicologist and - God spare me for my ignorance in the 1970s - didn't know much about him. I was told to go to an apartment near Hamra street in Beirut.

There was shooting in the streets - how easily we all came to accept the normality of war - but when I climbed the steps to the apartment, I heard a Beethoven piano sonata. No, it wasn't the "Moonlight"- nothing so popular for Edward - but I waited outside the brown-painted door for 10 minutes until he had finished.

"You've read my books, Robert - but I bet you haven't read my work on music," he once scolded me. And of course, I scuttled off to Librarie Internationale in the Gefinor Building in Beirut to buy his definitive book to add to my collection; his wonderful essays on the Palestinians, his excoriation of the corruption and viciousness of Yasser Arafat, his outraged condemnation of the criminality of Ariel Sharon.

He was not a flawless man. He could be arrogant, he could be ruthless in his criticism. He could be repetitive. He could be angry to the point of irradiation. But he had much to be angry about. One afternoon, I went to see him at the Beirut home of his sister Jean - a fine lady whose own account of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Beirut Fragments, is worthy of her brother's integrity - and he was half-lying on a sofa.

"I'm just a bit tired because of the leukaemia treatment," he said. "I keep on going. I'll not stop."

He was a tough guy, the most eloquent defender of an occupied people and the most irascible attacker of its corrupt leadership. Arafat banned his books in the occupied territories - proving the immensity of Said and the intellectual impoverishment of Arafat.

At that first meeting in Beirut in the late Seventies, I had asked him about Arafat. "I went to a meeting he held in Beirut the other day," he said. "And Arafat stood there and was questioned about a future Palestinian state, and all he could say was that 'You must ask every Palestinian child this question.' Everyone clapped. But what did he mean? What on earth was he talking about? It was rhetoric. But it meant nothing."

After Arafat went along with the Oslo accords, Said was the first - rightly - to attack him. Arafat had never seen a Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, he said. There wasn't a single Palestinian lawyer present during the Oslo negotiations. Said was immediately condemned - all of us who said that Oslo would be a catastrophic failure were - as "anti-peace" and, by vicious extension, "pro-terrorist".

Said would weary of the need to repeat the Palestinian story, the importance of denouncing the old lies - one of them, which especially enraged him, was the myth that Arab radio stations had called upon the Palestinian Arabs of 1948 to abandon their homes in the new Israeli state - but he would repeat, over and over again, the importance of re-telling the tale of Palestinian tragedy.

He was abused by anonymous callers, his office was visited by a fire-bomber, and he was libelled many times by Jewish Americans who hated that he, a professor of literature at Columbia University, could so eloquently and vigorously defend his occupied people.

An attempt was made, in his dying days, to deprive him of his academic job by some cruel supporters of Israel who claimed - the same old, mendacious slur - that he was an anti-Semite. Columbia, in a long but slightly ambivalent statement, defended him. When the Jewish head of Harvard expressed his concern about the rise of "anti-Semitism" in the United States - by those who dared to criticise Israel - Said wrote scathingly that a Jewish academic who was head of Harvard "complains about anti-Semitism!"

As his health declined, he was invited to give a lecture in northern England. I can still hear the lady who organised it complaining that he insisted on flying business class. But why not? Was a critically ill man, fighting for his life and his people, not allowed some comfort across the Atlantic? His friendship with the brilliant Barenboim - and their joint support for an Arab-Israeli orchestra that only last month played in Morocco - was proof of his human decency. When Barenboim was refused permission to play in Ramallah, Said rearranged his concert - much to the fury of the Sharon government, for which Said had only contempt.

The last time I saw him, he was exalted with happiness at the marriage of his son to a beautiful young woman. The time I saw him before, he had been moved to infuriation by the failure of Palestinians in Boston to arrange his slides to a lecture on the "right of return" of Palestinians to Palestine in the right order. Like all serious academics, he wanted accuracy. All the greater was his fury when one of his enemies claimed that he was never a true refugee from Palestine because he was in Cairo at the time of the Palestinian dispossession.

He had no truck with sloppy journalism - take a look at Covering Islam, on the reporting of the Iranian revolution - and he had even less patience with American television anchors. "When I went on air," he told me once, "the Israeli consul in New York said I was a terrorist and wanted to kill him. And what did the anchorwoman say to me? 'Mr Said, why do you want to kill the Israeli consul?' How do you reply to such garbage?"

Edward was a rare bird. He was both an icon and an iconoclast.

"The Secretary-General heard with great sadness of the death of Edward Said, the distinguished Palestinian-American writer and scholar who did so much to explain the Islamic world to the West, and vice versa," a statement by Mr. Annan's spokesman said.

"While not sharing all of Professor Said's opinions, the Secretary-General always enjoyed his company, savoured his wit, and admired the passion with which he pursued his vision of peace between Israelis and Palestinians," the statement added. "Both the Middle East and the United States will be the poorer without his distinctive voice."

A Tribute to Edward Said

By MUSTAFA BARGHOUTHI

It is with heartbreaking sorrow that the Palestinian National Initiative announce the tragic death of Edward Said who passed away yesterday after eleven years fighting leukemia. At this time our thoughts and love are with his family. We wish them strength and courage and assurance that Edward will be a man forever remembered not only for his incredible achievements but for his remarkable qualities as a friend. Though words may do little at such a time to assuage the pain and grief something must be said to pay homage to a man and a life we should truly celebrate.

A man with great courage and clear conviction Edward Said was a shining light in a confused world. As a true intellectual giant, Said inspired all fields with his accomplishments. The passion which infused his intellectual abilities presented him as a man with clear visions to be greatly admired, trusted and respected.

Though his beliefs and commitments presented him with many challenges his statements and many testimonies of outrage at the hypocrisies, contradictions, and indignities so rife in the world gave him the integrity and honesty for which he was renowned.

A prolific writer Said addressed all issues of culture, colonialism, imperialism, language and literature. As a Palestinian exile much of his political writing came from personal memories yet he remained objective and grounded not only affirming the Palestinian presence but also pointing toward a future where peace is possible. Among spokespeople for the Palestinian cause surely there was none so articulate, so inspiring, so admired.

For the Palestinian National Initiative, a movement striving for democracy in Palestine itself co-founded by Dr. Said, the death of this unique and most prominent leader, a man of values and integrity who truly believed in freedom and justice is a great loss. The Mubardara remain determined to follow in his foot steps, and remain committed to his vision, conveying all his hopes and values not just of a free Palestine, and free Palestinians but of freedom for all, the world over.

The sense of loss felt by the death of such a great intellect, gentleman and friend is immeasurable. His eminent work of decades and all that he stood for will remain forever a monument for justice, and human rights. As a man of courage, graciousness, hope and dedication, his memory will remain forever in our hearts.

Mustafa Barghouthi is Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.

We, who supported the Palestinian cause, have been orphaned with the untimely death of Edward Said. For Israeli Jews, like myself, he was the lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of growing in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness.

I am sorry I only met Edward in 1988, but I feel fortunate for the time we did spend together. His insights of, and inputs on, the global reality in general and the Palestine one in particular will guide us all for many years to come. But above all, we shall miss Edward's unique ability of articulating in the public sphere the evil inflicted upon the Palestinians in the past against the continued effort in the Western media of sidelining, if not altogether eliminating, the plight and tragedy of Palestine. There is no one who could easily feel his place on that stage -- no one who could in few sentences associate so clearly the wrongs of the past with the tragedy of the present in the land of Palestine.

The academic and intellectual world would equally be disorientated without his original thoughts and conceptualization on the West's relationship with the world. We should be grateful, nonetheless, that so many of our colleagues went in his footsteps as he so brilliantly deconstructed the power bases and more sinister interests behind the knowledge production in West on the Orient in general and the Middle East in particular.

For those of us who knew him more personally, we have all lost a dear and genuine friend, with whom one could talk about the most abstract philosophical issues and with the same ease move to more mundane problems in life -- which usually paled in comparison with his endless and brave struggle against his fatal illness.

Something of this mixture and balance was also in his books. He will be remembered, and justly so, for "Orientalism" and the works that followed shaping and contributing to the post-Colonialist and Cultural Studies. But I will also cherish the "The Politics of Dispossession" -- these short and lucid interventions, quite often immediate reactions to a recent crisis or juncture in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians, but always contextualizing the event and Said's thoughts within the much more broader view on the march of history.

A few weeks ago we had our last meaningful conversation -- on the phone -- in which he beseeched me, as he did others I am sure, not to give up the struggle for relocating the Palestinians' refugee issue at the heart of the public and global agenda. He stressed the need to continue the effort of changing the American public opinion on Palestine and he was very hopeful and encouraged by he what recognized as a significant change in European public opinion.

Edward probably left more than one spiritual and moral will to us. The one I am taking is the one above. In his memory and out of respect to his intellectual genius as well as to his moral courage, we should regroup our energies and reorganize our efforts to impress on the world that there will be no justice and no peace in Palestine, no stability in the Middle East and no tranquility in the US relationship with the Muslim world, without the return of Palestinian refugees to their home, the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the building of a state in Palestine that would respect human and civil rights, as did Edward all his life.

May his soul rest in peace.

Ilan Pappe is a senior Israeli academic at the Department of Political Science and M.A, University of Haifa and the author of many books relating to the conflict.