The Education of Edward W Said
The late Edward W. Said had a huge following since the publication of Orientalism in 1978.
One of the most influential scholars in the world, the Palestinian-born University of Columbia Professor of English and Comparative Literature came into the Malaysian national consciousness in 2003, only to pass away die on Sept 25 September of that year., six years ago.
In the last few months of 2003, this newspaper News Straits Times carried several commentaries advocating for alternative modes of knowing, premised upon and reacting to the Western tradition of knowledge production called Orientalism.
Said gave a new twist to our comprehension of European attitudes toward ourselves in that it not only refers to art, aesthetics and art history, but also that manifestation of what I would arguably describe as a politically conspired epistemology, resonating with much of postcolonial studies.
I first encountered Said at a public lecture on culture and resistance held at the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis in the mid 1980s.
That lecture was to be part of his 1993 bookbook Culture and Imperialism.
But then, a popular book of his — read, reviewed, debated and discussed largely in graduate seminars on campus at that time — was his 1981 Covering Islam, – showing which portrayed Said as a passionate and angry scholar denouncing the representation of Islam and Muslims in the Western media.
But such was the man, who in his 1999 autobiography Out of Place: A Memoir observes “…of my troublesome identity as an American inside whom lurked another Arab identity from which I derived no strength, only embarrassment and discomfort”.
Born in Jerusalem in later 1935, Said would spend vacation vacations in West Asia after his schooling in the United States in 1963 “since that is where my family lived and where I continued to feel most at home,” he narrated in the introduction of to The Politics of the Dispossession (1994).
All that changed forever in mid-1967.
Then, for the first time, he felt emotionally reclaimed by the Arab world generally and by Palestine in particular.
Said, began teaching at Columbia University in late 1963, in what was to be a career of synthesising scholarship and political advocacy through flamboyant, erudite radicalism and intellectual honesty.
Said’s world view and sense of history of the then Middle Eastern situation was informed by the Arab nationalism represented by the later nineteenth 19th century Nahda, the renaissance of Arabic culture that culminated in the 1917 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
The British and French promised independence for the Palestinians, but “we were betrayed by them”.
Britain and France as colonial powers redesigned Arab countries into zones of influence which they ruled as mandates or protectorates.
In addition, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised Palestine to the Zionists as a Jewish national home.
Said’s intellectual and emotional formation was set against that context, leading to the dismantling of empires by colonial powers, which saw the emergence of a series of independent Arab states, most led my by military men or traditional leaders whose watchword was “Palestine”.
He had high hopes for Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. But it was short-lived.
The six-day war in 1967 tore what had been achieved by Nasser — “To be an Arab meant a sense of defeat, profound shock, and bewildering uncertainty.”
Deep in him, Said, the scholar and intellectual, was Palestinian and Arab.
From the summer of 1967, Said began to feel that what happened in the Arab world concerned him personally and could no longer be accepted with a passive political disengagement.
This was because pan–Arabism was in ruins; and the Palestinian national movement began to emerge, first in Jordan, then in Lebanon.
Said, together with many of his academic colleagues and former students, were suddenly galvanised into the highly politicised activity.
Some flew to Jordan and joined the Resistance movement.
Said remained in New York and continued teaching, but beginning in 1968 he started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.
On the cultural and intellectual level, the appearance of an organised Palestinian movement of resistance against the Israeli occupation began as a critique of traditional Arab nationalism, its ruins, Said described, “were strewn about the battlefield of 1967”.
Said saw this as part of a national experience claiming primacy of modern Arab discourse by virtue of openness, honesty and realism.
He claimed the Palestinians were the first Arabs at the grass-root level to start a movement to repossess a land and a history.
It was a break with the pomposity, bombast and mythology of the Arab past.
A new rhetorical style came into being in which things were called by their name — Israel was called Israel and not “the Zionist entity” for the first time in Arabic publications; and footnotes began to be used systematically in political writing in Palestinian publications.
The problematics of identity began to surface.
To most Malaysians and non-Arabs, Arabs are Arabs. The stereotypes live on.
But since 1948, most Palestinian refugees had been obliged to take on the identities of the Arab states to which they became refugees.
In Syria, many became Baathists, in Egypt, they were Nasserists.
And for the first time after 1967, it became possible not only to become Palestinian again but also to choose Fatah, or the Popular Front, or the Democratic Front, or Hamas, as one’s movement of choice: each was Palestinian, and in Said’s view, jealously guarding its own vision of a Palestinian future.
Said related his many experiences on the “ground”.
He was in Amman during summer of 1969 and then again in 1970.
His stints there led him to an account in the context of a general history of dispossession, what is being done by the Palestinians to repossess their history and politics.
Said demonstrated that being an involved scholar can be an emotional and bitter experience: “From the moment I began to write on behalf of Palestinian rights and self-determination, the apprehension that as a people we still had no sovereignty over any part of the land of Palestine has dominated my efforts.”
He was far from the contested land. But he had to be involved. He had to participate. He had to make a case for Palestinian presence.
His first encounter with Yasser Arafat was at the United Nations in 1974, where he translated Arafat’s speech from Arabic into English and became acquainted with various officials of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation at that time, and subsequently his relationship to the Palestinian struggle and with Arafat developed “but never my party affiliation”.
He felt that it was important to preserve his distance: “I was a partisan, yes, but a joiner and member, no.”
Edward Said was destined to represent and reconstruct Palestinian history and society, and that of the rest of the dispossessed world.
He knew his role: “ …so far as writing was concerned, the major goal was getting ourselves the right, or permission, to tell our story.”
His ethos lives on.
A. Murad Merican is a professor at the Department of Management and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar Pera