If you are student of religion, political science, history, literature, or any of the innumerable disciplines that examine our contemporary global society, you are probably aware that three weeks ago you lost a giant in your field. As a title, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University does little justice to a man whose penetrating insight into the dynamics of cultural exchange has spawned whole fields of study.
This is the legacy of Edward Said. Succumbing, on Sept. 25th to leukemia, a disease he had been fighting for over a decade, our world lost one of its most important critics. Said was a much-loved professor at Columbia and was known throughout the academic community for his prolific writings.
While his love was fiction and music, it was drawing attention to the Middle East and the imbalanced relationship between “the West” and “the East” that Said gained notoriety.
His 1978 book Orientalism, put Said on the intellectual map. Highlighting the institutional practice within Western academia of the systematic debasing of “the Orient,” Orientalism would form a theoretical framework for many of his later works. In 1981 he published Covering Islam, one of the most prophetic and widely applicable books in this post-September 11th world. In it, Said, a Christian, sheds light on the racist popular images of Islam and the Muslim world in Western pop-culture and mass media. Guilty of portraying the Orient as backwards and sensuous, and the Muslim as fanatic and despotic, everything from major films to the twenty-four hour news networks that permeate our society are held accountable. These are but a few of the written legacies of Dr. Said.
But beyond his books and theories lay a man of rare character in the university setting. An advocate of the Palestinian cause, Said straddled the epistemological boundary he so often scrutinized. Born in British mandate Jerusalem, raised in Cairo, educated in New England, Said’s death is a great loss for North American academia.
He was one of North American’s few celebrity intellectuals. Like his frequent collaborator Noam Chomsky, Said developed a following of students, intellectuals, and the socially conscious alike. He did this through his unique eloquence and a passion for the causes he supported. The norm today of dissociated impartiality of the Academic-turned-Pundit is a facade Said never accepted.
He was often called upon by media sources in North America and Europe to comment on the Palestinian / Israeli conflict, the Middle East and the Muslim world at large, and did so with a knowledgeable and unswerving conviction.
Some of Said’s political opinions were unpopular, like his support of an undivided and democratic Israeli / Palestinian State, but it was the way with which he held fast that made him admirable. He recognized that his theories were a part of who he was. He was not an impartial third party serving up sound bites through a satellite feed. His impact in the Middle East itself may have been limited, but he had enormous impact here, and the vacuum his death has left may be up to us students to fill.
