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Edward Wadie Said ( November 1 , 1935 – September 25 , 2003 ; ) was a well-known Palestinian American Literary Theorist , Critic , and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist. According to ''Columbia News'' ( Columbia University , where Said spent most of his career), the author of '' Orientalism '' was "one of the most influential scholars in the world." LIFE Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate Of Palestine ). His father was a wealthy Christian Palestinian businessman and an American citizen, while his mother was born in Nazareth of Christian Lebanese and Palestinian descent. According to Said's autobiography, he lived between Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12 and in 1947 he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem. According to Said, his extended family became Refugees in 1948 during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War because the family home was in the affluent quarter of Talbiya in the western part of Jerusalem that was annexed by Israel. In 1998, Said wrote: "I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt." At age 14, Said entered Victoria College in Cairo, and then Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts , the United States. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University , where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as a professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia in 1977 and subequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992 Said attained the rank of University Professor, which is Columbia's most prestigious academic position. He also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins , and Yale universities. He spoke Arabic , English and French fluently and was literate in Spanish , German , Italian and Latin . Said was bestowed numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice received Columbia's Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize Of The American Comparative Literature Association . His memoir ''Out of Place'' won the 1999 New Yorker Prize for non-fiction. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society. {Link without Title} Said's writing regularly appeared in '' The Nation '', '' The Guardian '', the '' London Review Of Books '', '' Le Monde Diplomatique '', '' Counterpunch '', '' Al Ahram ,'' and the pan-Arab daily '' Al-Hayat ''. He gave interviews alongside good friend, fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky regarding U.S. foreign policy for various independent radio programs. Said also contributed music criticism to ''The Nation'' for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim . In January 2006, author David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom Of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under surveillance starting in 1971. Most of his records are marked as related to "IS Middle East" (''"IS" = Israel '') and significant portions remain " Classified Secrets ". Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York after a decade-long battle with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia . In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor. Controversy over Said's early life In 1999, Justus Reid Weiner , a scholar at the Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs , conducted a study in which he asserted that Edward Said's family did not permanently reside in Talbiya and did not live there during the final months of the British mandate, and thus they could not be considered refugees. Said's parents never owned a house in Jerusalem, says Weiner, the house in Talbiya belonged to Edward Said's aunt and Edward Said's family visited Jerusalem only occasionally. "On his Said's birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address." According to Weiner, Said grew up in Cairo and attended Gezira Preparatory School there and probably never attended the St. George's Academy in Jerusalem except during his family's brief stays in that city. Weiner argues that Said's name does not appear on the school registry and that David Eben-Ezra, whom Said mentioned as his classmate, has no recollections of him. Weiner's article originally appeared in the Commentary Magazine ; an abridged version was published in '' The Wall Street Journal '' and '' The Daily Telegraph ''. Said was defended by several respondents, including Christopher Hitchens in ''The Nation'', who wrote that schoolmates and teachers of Said had confirmed Said's stay at St. George's School in Jerusalem. Hitchens also quoted Said as having written already in 1992 actually in 1989 that he had spent a large part of his youth in Cairo. Said himself responded to Weiner in an article titled "Defamation, Zionist-style" published in '' Al-Ahram Weekly''. In the article, Said argues that "the family house was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership". Further, Edward Said says that school records ended in 1946, while he attended St. George only in 1947, so his name could not possibly be on the registry. '' Counterpunch '' interviewed Haig Boyadjian who said he had been Said's classmate at St. George's. In an interview in 2000, Said said: "I was born in Jerusalem, my family is a Jerusalem family. We left Palestine in 1947. We left before most others. It was a fortuitous thing. ... I never said I was a refugee, but the rest of my family was. My entire extended family was driven out ...". ORIENTALISM Said is best known for describing and critiquing " Orientalism ," which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East . In '' Orientalism '' (1978), Said decried the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture". He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western Culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who Internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture. Writing in 1980, Said criticized what he saw as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West: :"So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression" The British historian , Jacques Berque , William Montgomery Watt , and Albert Hourani , also regarded ''Orientalism'' as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship {Link without Title} . PRO PALESTINIAN ACTIVISM "Above all we must, as Mandela never tired of saying about his struggle, be aware that Palestine is one of the great moral causes of our time. Therefore, we need to treat it as such. It's not a matter of trade, or bartering negotiations, or making a career. It is a just cause which should allow Palestinians to capture the high moral ground and keep it. " (Edward Said in Al-Ahram weekly) {Link without Title} As a Palestinian activist, Said campaigned first for a creation of an independent Palestinian state, and then later for a single Jewish-Arab state. From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional struggles. He supported the Two-state Solution and Voted For It in Algiers in 1988. He quit the PNC over the decision by Yasser Arafat and the PLO to support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War , a decision he considered disastrous to the interests of Palestinian refugees living in Arab League member states who supported the American-led coalition. Thereafter, Said became critical of the role of Arafat in the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, feeling that the Oslo terms were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid Round Negotiators . He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 70's. In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli Settlements . He came to prefer and support the Binational Solution - the creation of one state in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and pre-1967 Israel, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights over a two state solution with a Palestinian state on the West Bank , Gaza and East Jerusalem . :"I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial" . His relationship with the Palestinian Authority was so bad that PA leaders banned the sale of his books in August 1995, but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Barak 's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit . In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti , helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative , or ''Al-Mubadara'', an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both the established Palestinian Authority and to Islamist militant groups such as Hamas . Said's books on the issue of Israel and Palestine include ''The Question of Palestine'' (1979), ''The Politics of Dispossession'' (1994) and ''The End Of The Peace Process'' (2000). PUBLICATIONS
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| First | Amritjit |
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| Last | Singh |
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| Title | Interviews With Edward W Said |
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| Publisher | University Press of Mississippi |
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| Year | 2004 |
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| Id | ISBN 1578063663 |