09-23-08

Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, political activist, and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is a founding figure in postcolonial theory.[1]
Said was born in Jerusalem(then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father was a wealthy Protestant Palestinianbusinessman and an American citizen who had served under General Pershing in World War I, while his mother was born in Nazareth, also of Protestant[2] Christian Palestinian descent.[3]His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.
Said referred to himself as a "Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture". He experienced much confusion growing up and was quoted as saying that:
With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.[4]
According to Said's autobiographical memoir, Out of Place,[4] Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12. In 1947, he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem. However, his extended family became refugees in 1948 during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War when their neighborhood of Talbiya was captured by Jewish militia groups, along with the western part of Jerusalem, which became part of the State of Israel:
I was born in Jerusalemand had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schoolsdesigned by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to go to the United States was Victoria College in Alexandria, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading businessmen, as well as such glamorous figures as Michel Shalhoub, head prefect of the school and chief tormentor when I was a relatively junior boy, whom everyone has seen on screen as Omar Sharif.[4]
In 1951, Said was expelled from Victoria College for being a "troublemaker",[4] and was consequently sent by his parents to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place".[4]Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by the 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'.[4]Despite feeling out of place, Said did well at the Massachusetts boarding school often 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.[4]
Said earned an B.A., summa cum laude (1957) from Princeton University and an M.A. (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia Universityin 1963 and served as Professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. In 1977, Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's most prestigious academic position. Professor Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities. He was fluent in English, French, and Arabic.[citation needed] In 1999, after his earlier election to second vice president and following its succession policy, Said served as president of the Modern Language Association.
Said was bestowed with 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. In 1999, he was the first to receive the prestigious Spinoza Lens [www.spinozalens.org], a bi-annual prize for ethics in The Netherlands. His autobiographical 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.[5]
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 his 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. The orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestineand the surrounding Arab countries.
Edward Said died at the age of 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia.[6]
In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor.[7]
In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBIfile through a Freedom of Information Actrequest. 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."[8]