MEQ 2008 -- Efraim Karsh: Did Edward Said Really Speak Truth to Power?

The following by Efraim Karsh is reposted here with permission of  Middle East Forum:

Did Edward Said Really Speak Truth to Power?

by Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2008, pp. 13-21

Edward Said's influence on academe looms even larger in death than during his life. On September 25, 2003, the day that he died, students and staff of Columbia University gathered in the garden outside Philosophy Hall, where the longtime professor of English and comparative literature had his office, for a candlelight vigil. It was the first of several memorials held in his honor on campuses across the United States, Asia, and Europe. Celebrity admirers, from novelist Salman Rushdie to actors Danny Glover and Vanessa Redgrave, joined a "huge crowd" at a March 2004 service in New York.[1] Almost four years later, Said's life is the subject of two documentaries—Charles Glass's Edward Said: The Last Interview and Sato Makoto's Out of Place. On May 25-26, 2007, Boğaziçi University in Istanbul held a major conference to provide revisionist luminaries including Israeli historian Ilan Pappé (now at the University of Exeter), British anti-Zionist academic Jacqueline Rose, and Said's former Columbia colleagues Joseph Massad and Rashid Khalidi an opportunity to "pay tribute, revisit, and engage with the richly variegated erudition and seminal scholarship" and "reflect critically on the location and significance of Said's intellectual legacy."[2] The conference not only examined Said's literary criticism—his professional field—and his writing on the Palestinians but also included a panel on "Said, the Public Intellectual Speaking Truth to Power." Lionizing Said as an intellectual warrior casting aside falsehood in a quest for truth regardless of consequence is a myth that may persist, but examination of his works suggests such popularity also reflects the triumph of politics over scholarship in the academy.