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Dr. Edward Said
1935 - 2003
Biography
Edward Said
was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, Palestine. In the 1947
partition of Palestine, he and his family became refugees
and moved to Cairo where they lived with relatives. He went
to St. George's, an American school and then later to
Victoria College. He was expelled from Victoria College in
1951 and his parents sent him to Mount Hermon Preparatory
School in Massachusetts. His father was strict about
discipline in both work and study. His hobbies as a young
man were reading novels and listening to classical music. He
learned to speak several languages and to play the piano. As
a young man, he attended the Juilliard School of Music and
became quite skilled at playing the piano. He graduated form
Princeton University where he received his Masters Degree
and then attended Harvard University where he received his
Ph.D. His dissertation was on Joseph Conrad. He then took a
position in Columbia University as a Professor of
Comparative Literature.
When the Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1967, he began to
review his career in Comparative Literature. He began
thinking of his own identity as a Palestinian. At this time
his life changed and he began to get involved with his
cultural origins. He became intensely involved in literary
scholarship and Palestinian rights. He argued that
intellectual romantics have distorted the West's view of the
Middle East and Islamic world becoming largely responsible
for the influential school of literary and cultural
criticism known as “postcolonial studies” which influenced
and revolutionized all fields of modern social sciences . He
also believed that the contemporary American view of Arabs
is conditioned by a hostile media. He had always championed
the Palestinian cause. Amongst the contemporary
spokespersons for the Palestinian cause in our days surely
none became so well-known and was so articulate as him.
Holder of an endowed chair in English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University as well as a former
president of the USA Modern Language Association, a prolific
author of books and articles both scholarly and popular (an
indeed rare talent), a frequent lecturer and commentator on
radio and television, a sometime diplomatic intermediary and
congressional witness he was an urbane, brilliant man who
could always be counted on to provide polished,
sophisticated, unaccented, enlightened views on recent
Middle East developments. He was once a member of the
Palestine National Council from which he resigned in 1991 in
protest against the Oslo agreements which he thought
distorted the real path to peace. On 17 of July 2002 Edward
Said helped to found the Palestinian National Initiative, or
Mubadara, a recently established democratic opposition
movement in the realm of Palestinian domestic politics,
co-founded along with Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Dr. Haidar
Abdel-Shafi, and Mr. Ibrahim Dakak.
Also, along with the world renowned musician Daniel
Barenboim, he co-founded the “East-West Diwan” project by
which young Palestinian, and Israeli musicians along with
young people from other Arab countries could share
experiences. Amongst his last contributions, also with
Daniel Barenboim, was a unique musical education program to
be developed in the Palestine to teach, through a holistic
approach, music and science in schools (initially to be
developed in two schools in Ramallah - the Friends School
and the U.N.R.W.A. Refugee School for Girls in the
“Ramallah Refugee Camp”).
A list of some of Edward's most outstanding works:
• Beginnings (1975)
• National, Colonialism, and Literature, Orientalism (1978)
• The Question of Palestine (1979)
• Literature and Society (1980)
• Orientalme (1980)
• Covering Islam (1981)
• The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983)
• After the Last Sky (1986)
• Blaming Victims (1988),
• Criticism In Society, Culture and Imperialism
• Musical Elaborations (1991)
• The Pen and the Sword (1994)
• Representations of the Intellectual (1994)
• The Politics of Depression (1994)
• Out of Place (1999)
• Reflections on Exile (2000) |
