Late Edward Said had a mind of his own

Ghia Osseiran

November 2003

NEW YORK - With Edward Said having been a member of the Columbia faculty  since 1963 and Rashid Khalidi Professor of Modern Middle East  History now on board, I was welcomed to “Bir Zeit on the Hudson” on  my first day here at Columbia. 

I had not arrived to the university  until late into the second week due to the now all too common visa  delays that all students coming from the Middle East are encumbered  with consequent to 9-11. Though registering late, I was keen on  taking a course on literature and philosophy with the so  called “professor of terror” as they often called him. I was,  however, warned that Said was very sick.

 A few days later the course was cancelled. The doctors were working  on strengthening Said’s immunity in order to administer  chemotherapy. We were all confident he would not go gentle. “For me  sleep is death as is any diminishment in awareness” relates Said in  his memoir Out of Place, which he wrote in between intervals of  illness.   

Rage he did, battling with leukemia for over a decade, but by  Sept. 24 that battle was decisively drawn to an end. The  mortal man died, as all humans do. The innovative literary critic,  prolific author, talented musician and erudite scholar live on  through his work, but a pillar upon which the Palestinian Arab  morale rested fell that day.

 Said was not Abdel Nasser, consented. He was articulate but not as  talented a demagogue. He did not preposterously declare he would  throw the Israelis into the sea, nor did he express a wish to do  so. The war he waged was detached from mainstream politics. “The time  has come where we [Arabs] can not simply accuse the west of  orientalism and racism… and go on doing little about providing an  alternative. If our work isn’t in the Western media often enough,  or isn’t known well by Western writers a good part of the blame  lies with us,” he asserts in an article entitled Arabs Are Of This  World.

Said adopted the Palestinian cause in defiance of the overwhelming  1967 Arab defeat against Israel. Late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir  reminded the world, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian  people… They did not exist.”   Said made audible to the entire world the long voiced and yet muted  Palestinian protest against the Zionist project, dating as far back  as the turn of the 20th century with Yusuf Diya Khalidi, the  Palestinian former mayor of Jerusalem, repudiating Theodor Herzel’s Zionist  plans, while emphasizing Arab presence in Palestine.  

Burdened with a legacy of glory, the Arab world could not fathom  their loss to Israel. Nasser’s secular nation-state had proved a  failure. Islamic fundamentalism promoted itself as the alternative,  advocating a regression to tradition, while ascribing the 1967  defeat to a stray from the Islamic path. On the governmental level,  the entire region resorted to autocracies and dictatorships.

 Again Said contested boisterously as was his habit. Born in  Jerusalem, raised in Egypt, educated in the colonial schools of  Cairo and then Princeton and Harvard, to later work in Columbia,  Said advocated the Palestinian Arab cause in the most eclectic of  manners, adopting neither the Arab nor the Israeli perspective, but  calling for a single bi-national state instead.

He did not ask to be permitted to speak in the name of Arabs. He  did not seek their approval nor did he shy away from condemning  them when occasion arose. To the many Arabs disillusioned with  Islamic fundamentalism, the defensive rhetoric of terrorism as an  inevitable last resort for liberation, and the prevalent Arab  lethargy and defeatism, Said was a beacon of hope.

He condemned Palestinian concessions to Israel during the 1993 Oslo  Accords as vehemently as he condemned Palestinian suicide attacks  and Israeli terrorism. Infuriated Yasser Arafat banned his books in the  West Bank and Gaza, but Said remained unaffected.

His office at  Columbia was set on fire, his life was under constant threat and he  had managed to win himself the nickname “the professor of terror,”  but still nothing would silence the man.

 While in Palestine Arafat can now rest in peace, the Arab seat  representing Palestine in international discourse is left vacant,  and is likely to remain muddled for many years to come. Save  for “barbaric yawps” calling for a distorted Islamic jihad, one of  the most eloquent Palestinian voices has by and large been  silenced.

Ghia Osseiran is a post-graduate student at the University of Columbia, New York. She wrote this article for Alternative