Remembering Said '57

Edward W. Said '57, who died last week after a long fight against leukemia, was one of Princeton's most extraordinary graduates. A Palestinian Christian who grew up in Jerusalem and Cairo, Said became one of the most important cultural critics of the 20th century. He was also an outspoken advocate of the right of Palestinians to live in freedom from occupation, and the rights of Arabs and Muslims more generally to determine their own political destiny. These interests brought Said many admirers and a very large body of enemies, and to his credit he appeared unaffected by either the praise or the opprobrium that was regularly heaped upon him.

Why does Said's work matter? For one thing, he was a rare example of an academic who was both prolific in his research and committed to social and political change beyond the ivory tower. In addition to his works of literary criticism and musicology, he published numerous books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a number of groundbreaking studies on the (mis)representation of Islam and Muslims in Western culture. Said's most famous book, "Orientalism," applied the insights of French philosopher Michel Foucault to a pair of crucial (but largely unasked) questions: How had Western scholars imagined and described the Middle East and Asia since the growth of "orientalist" studies in the late-18th century? And was this process of imagination and description contaminated by imperialism? Said took one of Foucault's most important observations — that the business of knowing and describing a subject is usually a means of exercising control over it — and applied it to the vast topic of orientalism. In so doing, he both exposed the ongoing ways in which Western scholars used "objective" analysis to rationalize Western control over the developing world, and he inspired a generation of young scholars to rewrite the histories of interaction and exchange between East and West.

Since the publication of "Orientalism" in 1978, the new academic field of post-colonial studies has transformed our knowledge of colonialism and culture. However, Said himself was acutely aware that the battle to promote understanding and to overturn prejudic requires constant vigilance and effort. On the one hand, Said's successors in post-colonial studies have sometimes forgotten the need for political engagement and a broad audience for their work, choosing not to ask uncomfortable questions of the powerful but instead to pose increasingly esoteric questions to each other. While Said was a strong supporter of the complexity, subtlety and ironies of post-colonial scholarship, he managed to balance the need for a constant questioning of one's own positions with the obligation ceaselessly to challenge injustice and oppression. He was hailed by many as a "Third World intellectual," but he never became complacent about his own success or presented his stellar ascent through the Western university system as a victory for the "wretched of the earth."

On the other hand, the old-fashioned orientalists whom Said had attempted to discredit in 1978, those European and American scholars whose analyses of Islam and the Arab world served to legitimize a continuing Western influence over the Middle East, have hardly disappeared from the corridors of academe or of power. One of Said's chief antagonists in "Orientalism," Princeton's own Bernard Lewis, has reemerged since Sept. 11th as a leading interpreter of the supposed inferiority complex of Islam and the Middle East more generally. In his bestselling books and his personal appearances at President Bush's favorite think-tanks (like the American Enterprise Institute in Washington), Lewis has served up an interpretation of Middle Eastern history that maximizes the culpability of Arabs and Muslims for social and political problems (including terrorism), and largely obscures the long and ugly story of Western occupation and interference in the region. Thus the problem that Said identified in 1978 has returned with a vengeance: Many Americans are once again dependent on a "scholarly" view of the Middle East that, in fact, merely confirms their own assumptions and prejudices and provides a spurious rationale for a new imperialism.

Said's last newspaper column, published in Cairo's Al-Ahram at the end of August, was a typical tour-de-force. Critiquing the tendency of the Bush administration to explain the Middle East in "a few sloppy terms" like "terrorism," "backwardness" and "extremism," Said called instead for "a more demanding kind of discussion in which terms are defined from numerous viewpoints and are always placed in concrete historical circumstances." While he must surely have admired the millions of people around the world who took to the streets last winter to protest the preemptive war on Iraq, this final article encapsulated his own achievements and the task he has left for us: We have to believe, as Edward Said did, that analysis and understanding are both tools of protest and the means by which we can remake our troubled world.