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Edward_Said.jpg Edward Wadie Said (إدوارد سعيد) (November 1, 1935 – September 24, 2003) was a well-known literary theorist, critic and outspoken Palestinian activist. Said was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine and raised in both Jerusalem and Cairo, Egypt. Until age 12, he lived between Cairo and West Jerusalem where he attended the Anglican St. Georges Academy in 1947. His family became refugees in 1948 just prior to the capture of West Jerusalem by Israeli forces. At age 14, Said entered Victoria College in Cairo. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities. He spoke English and French fluently, excellent colloquial and very good standard Arabic, and was literate in Spanish, German, Italian and Latin. Said was bestowed 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.
OrientalismSaid is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism"; what he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said decried the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture". [1] (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm) He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe's and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Said, writing in 1980, anticipated an eventual policy of military aggression by the United States toward the Middle East, which prediction some observers find evident in the actions of the United States after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks:
Critiquing Said, Christopher Hitchens wrote that he denied any possibility "that direct Western engagement in the region is legitimate" and that Said's analysis cast "every instance of European curiosity about the East [as] part of a grand design to exploit and remake what Westerners saw as a passive, rich, but ultimately contemptible 'Oriental' sphere". [3] (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/09/hitchens.htm) ActivismMissing image SaidSis.jpg A young Edward Said in traditional Palestinian dress standing beside his sister in 1946 As a Palestinian activist, Said defended what he claimed to be the rights of Palestinians in Israel and what many refer to as the "occupied territories." For many years, Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council, but he broke with Yasser Arafat, saying that he believed that the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 sold short the "right" of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel. He also opposed the Oslo formula of creating a Palestinian entity out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, arguing for the creation of one state in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and pre-1967 Israel, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights (often known as the binational solution).
His relationship with the Palestinian Authority was so bad that PA leaders once called for the banning of his books. In July 2000, he created a minor controversy in a stone-throwing incident on the Lebanon–Israel border, where he hurled a stone at an Israeli guardhouse in what he characterized as a gesture of solidarity with the stone-throwing youth of the First Intifada. Many Israelis condemned Said's behavior as an act of violence intended to incite anti-Israeli emotions. In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both the established Palestinian Authority and to Islamist militant groups such as Hamas. Said's books on the issue of Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979) and The Politics of Dispossession (1994). Said was also a prolific journalist and his 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. A skilled pianist, 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 Daniel Barenboim. Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York after a long battle with leukemia. Books
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