Did Edward Said Really Speak Truth to Power?
by Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2008, pp. 13-21
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.
Many Said obituaries attached mythical qualities to what Said termed his refusal to "accept what orthodoxy or dogma or received ideas tell you is the truth."[4] The poet Tom Paulin remembered Said's "Promethean truth-telling."[5] For Mahmoud Darwish, a poet and former senior Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) official, Said in death was an "eagle soaring higher and higher / bidding farewell to his height / for dwelling on Olympus / and over heights / is tiresome."[6]
Such accolades would delight Said who, when asked in 2001 about how he would like to be remembered, said he would want people to eulogize that he "tried to tell the truth."[7] He often argued that it was the "intellectual's role to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth, unadorned."[8] Such statements came easier to Said than truth. His accumulated works and statements demonstrate truth to be a goal he eschewed rather than embraced.
Likewise, Said claimed that "as far as the Jewish minority in Palestine was concerned, Zionism had very little to do with them" in the post-Balfour Declaration era.[12] In fact, three quarters of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine at the time were avowed Zionists who arrived there as part of the Zionist immigration waves in the preceding decades. In 1909, they founded Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew-speaking city since antiquity, two years after Jewish residents of Jaffa had purchased the land with funds borrowed from the Jewish National Fund. They established kibbutzim and developed institutions such as the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut), which played a central role in developing the construction, industrial, and agricultural sectors to support the Zionist endeavor.
As false are Said's claims that "every kibbutz in Israel is on Arab property that was taken in 1948," and that "Zionists introduced terrorism into Palestine" in the 1920s.[13] Such statements are outright errors, not just interpretations of history. Zionists established Deganyia in 1909, and an additional 110 kibbutzim and 99 moshavim (cooperative villages) by 1944.[14] Nor was there any Zionist terrorism in Palestine in the 1920s. Quite the contrary: the Arabs' primary instrument for opposing Jewish national aspirations was violence, and the relative success or failure of that instrument in any given period determined Arab politics and diplomacy. As early as April 1920, Arab nationalists in Palestine sought to thwart Zionist activity and to rally support for incorporating the country into the short-lived Syrian kingdom headed by King Faisal bin Hussein by carrying out a pogrom in Jerusalem in which they killed five Jews and wounded 211. The following year, Arab riots killed ninety and wounded hundreds more. In August 1929, Arab rioters across Palestine targeted Jews, murdering 133 and wounding three times more.
Indeed, Said's description of his childhood years in Mandatory Palestine, on which he staked personal, and by extension, national claim to victimhood and dispossession, was more imaginary than real.[15]Said, a U.S. citizen by birth, grew up in Egypt and made only periodic visits to family in Jerusalem (or for that matter in other Arab countries). Mona Anis, an Egyptian journalist and admirer of Said, recalled her shock and surprise when, in her first personal encounter with Said at a conference at Essex University in 1984, she heard him speak Arabic in "perfect Egyptian dialect." She recalled, "I remember being so taken aback by his unexpected Egyptiannness that I hardly spoke. When Said left I burst out with the question that had been perplexing me: 'How come he sounds as Egyptian as you and me?'"[16]
He castigated Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic and an outspoken supporter of Israel's security, for exhibiting the "hypocrisy of the rank coward" for "sitting in the comfort of his millions in Washington and Boston"[19] while, at the same time, Said remained in plush quarters in New York. In his 1994 book The Politics of Dispossession, he wrote that "I was pretty far away from the contested land, forced to do my bit at a great distance."[20] On another occasion, he stated that "I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle."[21] When criticized by PLO chairman Yasir Arafat as a long-distance Palestinian "jumping on the bandwagon of patriotism" while failing to "feel the suffering of his people," Said responded, "I don't understand what the accusation of living in America is supposed to mean."[22]
Nor did Said see any irony in condemning the Mubarak regime's show-trial imprisonment of Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim while continuing his relationship with the regime's newspaper, Al-Ahram, and accepting that regime's felicitations. He became such an important presence on the Egyptian cultural scene that following his death, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture dedicated a conference to his memory. There, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim refused to accept a £10,000 Egyptian (US $1,750) prize because it was "awarded by a government that in my view lacks [the] credibility that would make this award worth receiving."[23] Other novelists and literary figures refused to make the moral comprises which Said, in his desire to revel in the powerful's plaudits, would make.
Shortly after its creation in 1964, the PLO produced a short pamphlet entitled Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. It declared:
Also problematic is Said's tendency to misrepresent secondhand sources as original documents. Consider his extensive quotation from the diary of Zionist official Yosef Weitz in an attempt to prove a grand Zionist design to dispossess Palestinian Arabs. While Said would like his readers to believe that he consulted the original document, it appears that he borrowed the quotations from Israeli academic Israel Shahak, an outspoken opponent of Zionism. This is evidenced not only by Said's inability to read Hebrew, the language in which Weitz's diary was published,[33] but also by the fact that Said recycles Shahak's errors of quotation. Thus, for example, both Said and Shahak locate a June 15, 1948 Weitz quotation on page 302 in the diary when it appears on page 303, and both misspell in the exact same manner the village of Mghar.[34]
Said launched ad hominem attacks on major intellectual figures with whose views about the Middle East he disagreed. To Said, Paul Johnson, the renowned British writer, was a "retrograde social and political polemist" while Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum and publisher of the Middle East Quarterly, was a "Neanderthal." Bernard Lewis, the eminent Princeton historian who challenged Said's Orientalism[36] in the New York Review of Books,[37] was guilty of "distorting truth" and had an "extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong."[38] Said concluded that the polyglot historian "knows nothing" about the Arab world. Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, author of the influential Clash of Civilizations,[39] Said wrote, "knows nothing about civilization, he knows nothing about history."[40] Said wrote with similar vitriol toward social anthropologist Ernest Gellner and Middle East historian Elie Kedourie.
He reserved special venom for Arab academics in the United States who did not agree with him.[41] He attacked dissident Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who brought Saddam's brutality to international attention in his books Cruelty and Silence[42] and Republic of Fear,[43] as an "intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He is a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no stable principles or values."[44]
The irony of Said's judgment and dismissal[45] of such intellectuals is that he conducted no independent research whatever on the Middle East or Islamic history, politics, and society. In a 1998 interview, he admitted that "for the forty years that I have been teaching I have never taught anything other than the Western canon, and certainly nothing about the Middle East."[46] While famous for writing and lecturing about Israel and Zionism, he did not speak or read Hebrew. Still, he positioned himself on the Arab-Israeli question as an authority who "revealed for a Western audience things that had so far either been hidden or not discussed at all."[47]
For decades, he characterized scholarly and public criticism over his stance on Zionism and Israel as "the worst sort of Stalinist bullying" and, even as his books became bestsellers and were assigned in classrooms across the country, he argued that the "severest opprobrium" made his views "no longer acceptable" in the United States. He recalled that the more the "establishment [tries] to bring me back to the fold [the more] … I become enraged, and I become even more inflammatory, and I reveal even more of their horrible secrets."[48] He told some people he received death threats but would remain undeterred.[49] Later, he said he had actually suffered assassination attempts. "There have been attempts made by the extremists, who have tried to do away with me," he said in one interview toward the end of his life.[50]
Such claims were unsubstantiated. While Said said he installed a panic button in his apartment in the 1980s, he also said, "[W]e never had to use it. It was only used once, as it turned out, by a house guest, who thought it was, you know, a light switch."[51] While Rushdie, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, and the late Egyptian novelist Neguib Mafouz weathered threats, bounties and, in Mafouz's case, a near-fatal attempt on his life, Said sought to claim the same mantle. In helping him weave his myth, admirers wrote he risked "scorn and death threats from extremists to speak out for the people he calls 'the victims of the victims'";[52] how he "has enemies … the stakes in being Edward Said are high";[53] how "he is not afraid to challenge any authority… he has paid a high price for this position."[54]
Hamid Dabashi, his friend and colleague at Columbia University, noted in a long tribute published after Said's death, "I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after my graduation, I remained entirely oblivious to it … I discovered Edward Said first fromOrientalism, then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the Iranian Revolution."[58] Said's protestation that involvement in the issue of "Palestine … brings no rewards,"[59] was risible. In 1979, he published The Question of Palestine and was invited to Paris to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the apartment of Michel Foucault.[60]
His subsequent work eschewed the rigors of scholarship and instead favored political activism. On February 22, 1980, The New York Times titled a profile article, "Edward Said: Bright Star of English Lit and the PLO." Pal Ahluwalia, a professor at the University of South Australia and the author of a complimentary book on Said's "intellectual project," explained:
Plaudits and rewards increased alongside his rejectionism. In 1993, the British Broadcasting Corporation invited Said to give the Reith Lecture, its prestigious annual address. The following year, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded him its Picasso Medal. In 1997, he gave the inaugural set of William Empson Lectures at Cambridge University, as well as the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Lecture in Delhi and the Netaji Centenary Oration at the Netaji Institute in Calcutta. The following year, he served as distinguished lecturer at the Collège de France, the premier institute of learning in that country. Again in 1998, the BBC commissioned him to write and present a documentary film, In Search of Palestine. While very few professors get such opportunities, Said chose to use it as evidence of his persecution, noting that after being shown on the BBC it "more or less disappeared."[63] In 1999, the prestigious Modern Language Association elected Said its president, and the Middle East Studies Association appointed him an honorary fellow, a plaudit it has not even bestowed upon a professor like Bernard Lewis whose scholarship, unlike Said's, is in Middle Eastern studies. Several awards and honors in Europe followed.
It is ironic that while Said and his intellectual successors—Dabashi, Columbia University associate professor Joseph Massad, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, and Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and his Harvard University coauthor Stephen Walt—seek to profit from false claims of persecution and censorship, across the Arab world, a plethora of reformers and opponents of authoritarian regimes suffer for attempting to speak truth to power. By substituting polemics for research and conflating academic freedom with freedom from academic standards, Said's legacy may ultimately be to harm fact-based and lasting Middle East studies scholarship and instruction in American and European universities.
[1] "The Edward Said Memorial," Columbia News, Columbia University, New York, Mar. 25, 2004; Esther Iverem, "Q & A: Danny Glover," SeeingBlack.com, Mar. 15, 2004.
[2] "Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said," May 25-26, 2007, Boğazici University, Istanbul, Turkey.
[3] Saree Makdisi's weblog can be found at http://sareemakdisi.blogspot.com/; The Times Higher Education Supplement (London), Oct. 10, 2003; Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), Oct. 30- Nov. 5, 2003; Truth to Power: The Online Bibliography of Edward Said, accessed Aug. 28, 2007.
[4] Edward Said, "Bridge across the Abyss," Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 10-16, 1998.
[5] Tom Paulin, "Writing to the Moment," The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2004.
[6] Mahmoud Darwish, "Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading," Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2004.
[7] "Interview with Edward Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays," Booknotes, June 17, 2001.
[8] Edward Said, "A Desolation, and They Called it Peace," Al-Ahram Weekly, June 25-July 1, 1998.
[9] David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said(Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), p. 177.
[10] See, for example, Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 312; Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism(New York: Fromm, 1993), pp. 123-30.
[11] Barsamian and Said, Culture and Resistance, p. 54.
[12] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 19.
[13] David Barsamian, "Interviews: Edward W. Said," Arts & Opinion, Nov. 2003.
[14] A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, vol. I (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1946), p. 373, reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C., 1991.
[15] Justus Weiner, "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," Commentary,Sept. 1999.
[16] Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 24-Oct. 1, 2003.
[17] Edward Said, "Fifty Years of Dispossession," Al-Ahram Weekly, May 7-13, 1998.
[18] Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998.
[19] Edward Said, "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness," Al-Ahram Weekly, Aug. 24-30, 2000. He expressed a similar theme toward other Diaspora Jews in Edward Said, "Thinking about Israel," Al-Ahram Weekly, May 3-9, 2001.
[20] Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. xvi.
[21] Edward Said, "Arafat Is Only Interested in Saving Himself," The lndependent (London), June 20, 2002.
[22] Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 165-6.
[23] Mona Anis, "Speaking Truth to Power," Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 30-Nov. 5, 2003.
[24] Moustafa Bayoumi, "Edward W. Said (1935-2003)," The Village Voice, Oct. 1-7, 2003.
[25] See, for example, Bayan Nuwaihid al-Hut, Watha'iq al-Haraka al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya 1918-1939: Min Awraq Akram Zu'aytir, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Palestinian Research Center, 1984), pp. 4-34; "Report on Political and Economic Conditions in Palestine: Submitted to His Excellency the High Commissioner for Palestine by the Executive of the Seventh Palestine Arab Congress, 1925," Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/665/2; Arthur Rupin, report on a meeting with George Antonius, July 28, 1930, CZA, AM 1012/868.
[26] Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, Sept. 1965), p. 1.
[27] Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 69.
[28] Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, p. 5.
[29] Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 68 (emphasis in original).
[30] United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, Nov. 10, 1975.
[31] Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, pp. 21-7.
[32] Rory Miller, Divided against Zion: Anti-Zionist Opposition to a Jewish State in Palestine, 1945-1948(London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 148.
[33] Yosef Weitz, Yomani Ve-igrotai La-banim (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1965).
[34] Said, The Question of Palestine, pp. 102, 248, fn. 47; Israel Shahak, Min al-Arshif as-Sihyuni: Watha'iq wa-Nusus (Beirut: Munazzamat at-Tahrir al-Filastiniya, Markaz al-Abhath, 1975), p. 31.
[35] Edward Said, "More on American Zionism (2)," Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 5-11, 2000.
[36] Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
[37] Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," The New York Review of Books, June 24, 1982.
[38] Oleg Grabar and Edward W. Said, "Orientalism: An Exchange, Reply by Bernard Lewis," The New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1982.
[39] New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
[40] Edward Said, "East Isn't East," The Times Literary Supplement (London), Feb. 3, 1995; "I Find Myself Instinctively on the Other Side of Power," interview with Edward Said, The Guardian, Dec. 10, 2001; Edward Said, "Dignity and Solidarity," Al-Ahram Weekly, June 26-July 2, 2003.
[41] Edward Said, "Suicidal Ignorance," Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 15-21, 2001.
[42] New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
[43] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
[44] Edward Said, "Misinformation about Iraq," Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 28-Dec. 4, 2002.
[45] David Barsamian, "Edward Said Interview," The Progressive, Nov. 2001.
[46] Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Jennifer Wallace interview with Edward Said, "Exiled by Foes, Silenced by Friends," The Times Higher Education Supplement, Jan. 17, 1997.
[49] Matthew Rothschild, "Edward W. Said, 1935-2003," The Progressive, Sept. 28, 2003.
[50] "Interview with Edward Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays," Booknotes, June 17, 2001.
[51] Ibid.
[52] "Lion of Judea," interview with Edward Said, The Guardian, May 13, 1997.
[53] Zoe Heller, "Radical Chic," The Independent on Sunday (London), Feb. 7, 1993.
[54] Nouri Jara, interview with Edward Said on "'Orientalism,' Arab Intellectuals, Marxism, and Use of Myth in Palestinian History," Al-Jadid Magazine, Summer 1999.
[55] See Edward Said, "Les Palestiniens face aux responsabilites de la defaite; la prolongation du conflit entre Israel et les pays Arabes," Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris), Oct. 1, 1971.
[56] Edward Said, "Arabs and Jews," The New York Times, Oct. 14, 1973.
[57] Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism."
[58] Hamid Dabashi, "The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)," Counterpunch, Oct. 2, 2003.
[59] "A Highbrow Hero Who Storms the Ivory Tower," interview with Edward Said, The Sunday Times, June 20, 1993.
[60] Edward Said, "My Encounter with Sartre," The London Review of Books, June 1, 2000.
[61] See introduction to Edward Said Memorial Lecture, University of Adelaide, Oct. 1, 2005, p. 5.
[62] Said, Peace and Its Discontents, p. xxix.
[63] Edward Said, "West Bank Diary," Al-Ahram Weekly, Dec. 10-16, 1998. In July 1999, New York's WNET, a major Public Broadcast Service (PBS) affiliate, aired the documentary in New York.
[64] Edward Said, "Trying Again and Again," Al-Ahram Weekly, Jan. 11-17, 2001.Truth to Power?
That Said spoke truth to power is the legacy many of his followers seek to construct. It was the theme of many of his obituaries. "He spoke truth to power" read his obituary in The Times Higher Education Supplement. "Speaking truth to Power" was the title of another tribute in Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt's foremost English language paper, which long carried a Said column. "Truth to Power" is also the name of one of the comprehensive online bibliographies of Said's work. Said's nephew Saree Makdisi, a professor of English literature like his uncle, established a "Speaking Truth to Power" website where he posts his own "archive of interventions" on the Palestinian issue.[3]Many Said obituaries attached mythical qualities to what Said termed his refusal to "accept what orthodoxy or dogma or received ideas tell you is the truth."[4] The poet Tom Paulin remembered Said's "Promethean truth-telling."[5] For Mahmoud Darwish, a poet and former senior Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) official, Said in death was an "eagle soaring higher and higher / bidding farewell to his height / for dwelling on Olympus / and over heights / is tiresome."[6]
Such accolades would delight Said who, when asked in 2001 about how he would like to be remembered, said he would want people to eulogize that he "tried to tell the truth."[7] He often argued that it was the "intellectual's role to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth, unadorned."[8] Such statements came easier to Said than truth. His accumulated works and statements demonstrate truth to be a goal he eschewed rather than embraced.
Fabricating Facts to Fit
Said's collected works demonstrate antipathy for integrity and scholarship. Said often seeks to pass off sweeping and groundless assertions as historical fact. For example, he claimed that "historically, in nineteenth-century Europe anti-Semitism included both Jews and Arabs"[9] even though nineteenth century polemicists, such as Wilhelm Marr (himself half-Jewish), credited with coining the term, used it exclusively to describe animus toward Jews.[10] As egregious was his assertion that "the town of Hebron is essentially an Arab town. There were no Jews in it before 1967,"[11] a statement that ignores a long history dating from biblical days to the 1929 Arab massacre and expulsion of the Jewish population of that city.Likewise, Said claimed that "as far as the Jewish minority in Palestine was concerned, Zionism had very little to do with them" in the post-Balfour Declaration era.[12] In fact, three quarters of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine at the time were avowed Zionists who arrived there as part of the Zionist immigration waves in the preceding decades. In 1909, they founded Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew-speaking city since antiquity, two years after Jewish residents of Jaffa had purchased the land with funds borrowed from the Jewish National Fund. They established kibbutzim and developed institutions such as the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut), which played a central role in developing the construction, industrial, and agricultural sectors to support the Zionist endeavor.
As false are Said's claims that "every kibbutz in Israel is on Arab property that was taken in 1948," and that "Zionists introduced terrorism into Palestine" in the 1920s.[13] Such statements are outright errors, not just interpretations of history. Zionists established Deganyia in 1909, and an additional 110 kibbutzim and 99 moshavim (cooperative villages) by 1944.[14] Nor was there any Zionist terrorism in Palestine in the 1920s. Quite the contrary: the Arabs' primary instrument for opposing Jewish national aspirations was violence, and the relative success or failure of that instrument in any given period determined Arab politics and diplomacy. As early as April 1920, Arab nationalists in Palestine sought to thwart Zionist activity and to rally support for incorporating the country into the short-lived Syrian kingdom headed by King Faisal bin Hussein by carrying out a pogrom in Jerusalem in which they killed five Jews and wounded 211. The following year, Arab riots killed ninety and wounded hundreds more. In August 1929, Arab rioters across Palestine targeted Jews, murdering 133 and wounding three times more.
Indeed, Said's description of his childhood years in Mandatory Palestine, on which he staked personal, and by extension, national claim to victimhood and dispossession, was more imaginary than real.[15]Said, a U.S. citizen by birth, grew up in Egypt and made only periodic visits to family in Jerusalem (or for that matter in other Arab countries). Mona Anis, an Egyptian journalist and admirer of Said, recalled her shock and surprise when, in her first personal encounter with Said at a conference at Essex University in 1984, she heard him speak Arabic in "perfect Egyptian dialect." She recalled, "I remember being so taken aback by his unexpected Egyptiannness that I hardly spoke. When Said left I burst out with the question that had been perplexing me: 'How come he sounds as Egyptian as you and me?'"[16]
Hypocrisy
His hypocrisy was flagrant. Not only did Said present legitimate questions about the narrative he presented about his childhood in Palestine to be evidence of persecution, but he would also deny that he had ever claimed to be a Palestinian refugee, albeit continuing to write about his "fifty years of living the Palestinian exile"[17] and in reiterating his claim that he was "born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there,"[18] despite conclusive evidence to the contrary.He castigated Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic and an outspoken supporter of Israel's security, for exhibiting the "hypocrisy of the rank coward" for "sitting in the comfort of his millions in Washington and Boston"[19] while, at the same time, Said remained in plush quarters in New York. In his 1994 book The Politics of Dispossession, he wrote that "I was pretty far away from the contested land, forced to do my bit at a great distance."[20] On another occasion, he stated that "I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle."[21] When criticized by PLO chairman Yasir Arafat as a long-distance Palestinian "jumping on the bandwagon of patriotism" while failing to "feel the suffering of his people," Said responded, "I don't understand what the accusation of living in America is supposed to mean."[22]
Nor did Said see any irony in condemning the Mubarak regime's show-trial imprisonment of Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim while continuing his relationship with the regime's newspaper, Al-Ahram, and accepting that regime's felicitations. He became such an important presence on the Egyptian cultural scene that following his death, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture dedicated a conference to his memory. There, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim refused to accept a £10,000 Egyptian (US $1,750) prize because it was "awarded by a government that in my view lacks [the] credibility that would make this award worth receiving."[23] Other novelists and literary figures refused to make the moral comprises which Said, in his desire to revel in the powerful's plaudits, would make.
 |
| Edward Said in Lebanon performing what said was a symbolic gesture of joy at the end of Israel's occupation of Lebanon. |
Plagiarist?
Said claimed to value original thought,[24] but he borrowed liberally from others, especially when it came to writings about the Middle East. His repudiation of Jewish nationalism repeated and repackaged Arab propaganda dating back to the early 1920s and the 1930s.[25]Shortly after its creation in 1964, the PLO produced a short pamphlet entitled Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. It declared:
The frenzied "scramble for Africa" of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine. As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire-builders raced for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine.[26]Contrast this with a passage from Said's The Question of Palestine:
Zionism ... coincided with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and it was as part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl.[27]Or consider the pamphlet's explanation of the main difference between Zionism and nineteenth-century European colonialism:
Unlike European colonization elsewhere ... Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the "native population" in the coveted country.[28]With Said:
Zionism … was a colonial vision unlike that of most other nineteenth-century European powers, for whom the natives of outlying territories were included in the redemptivemission civilisatrice.[29]Such paraphrasing of previously published material, if conscious, borders on plagiarism. Other Said themes parallel those espoused by the 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism to be "a form of racism and racial discrimination,"[30] and by earlier polemicists' attempts to equate Zionism and Nazism.[31] James Parkes, a Christian theologian and historian of Judaism, commented in 1945 that he had already heard "too often" attempts to link the two.[32]
Also problematic is Said's tendency to misrepresent secondhand sources as original documents. Consider his extensive quotation from the diary of Zionist official Yosef Weitz in an attempt to prove a grand Zionist design to dispossess Palestinian Arabs. While Said would like his readers to believe that he consulted the original document, it appears that he borrowed the quotations from Israeli academic Israel Shahak, an outspoken opponent of Zionism. This is evidenced not only by Said's inability to read Hebrew, the language in which Weitz's diary was published,[33] but also by the fact that Said recycles Shahak's errors of quotation. Thus, for example, both Said and Shahak locate a June 15, 1948 Weitz quotation on page 302 in the diary when it appears on page 303, and both misspell in the exact same manner the village of Mghar.[34]
Intolerance to Dissent?
While Said sought to cast himself as a courageous defender of free discourse and thought, his record was opposite. He cast aspersions on anyone who disagreed with him, conflating academic challenge with victimization. "Anyone who defies or dares to challenge [American Zionists]," he wrote, "is subject to the most awful abuse and vituperation, all of it personal, racist and ideological. They are relentless, totally without generosity or genuine human understanding. To say that their diatribes and analyses are Old Testament-like in manner is to insult the Old Testament."[35]Said launched ad hominem attacks on major intellectual figures with whose views about the Middle East he disagreed. To Said, Paul Johnson, the renowned British writer, was a "retrograde social and political polemist" while Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum and publisher of the Middle East Quarterly, was a "Neanderthal." Bernard Lewis, the eminent Princeton historian who challenged Said's Orientalism[36] in the New York Review of Books,[37] was guilty of "distorting truth" and had an "extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong."[38] Said concluded that the polyglot historian "knows nothing" about the Arab world. Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, author of the influential Clash of Civilizations,[39] Said wrote, "knows nothing about civilization, he knows nothing about history."[40] Said wrote with similar vitriol toward social anthropologist Ernest Gellner and Middle East historian Elie Kedourie.
He reserved special venom for Arab academics in the United States who did not agree with him.[41] He attacked dissident Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who brought Saddam's brutality to international attention in his books Cruelty and Silence[42] and Republic of Fear,[43] as an "intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He is a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no stable principles or values."[44]
The irony of Said's judgment and dismissal[45] of such intellectuals is that he conducted no independent research whatever on the Middle East or Islamic history, politics, and society. In a 1998 interview, he admitted that "for the forty years that I have been teaching I have never taught anything other than the Western canon, and certainly nothing about the Middle East."[46] While famous for writing and lecturing about Israel and Zionism, he did not speak or read Hebrew. Still, he positioned himself on the Arab-Israeli question as an authority who "revealed for a Western audience things that had so far either been hidden or not discussed at all."[47]
For decades, he characterized scholarly and public criticism over his stance on Zionism and Israel as "the worst sort of Stalinist bullying" and, even as his books became bestsellers and were assigned in classrooms across the country, he argued that the "severest opprobrium" made his views "no longer acceptable" in the United States. He recalled that the more the "establishment [tries] to bring me back to the fold [the more] … I become enraged, and I become even more inflammatory, and I reveal even more of their horrible secrets."[48] He told some people he received death threats but would remain undeterred.[49] Later, he said he had actually suffered assassination attempts. "There have been attempts made by the extremists, who have tried to do away with me," he said in one interview toward the end of his life.[50]
Such claims were unsubstantiated. While Said said he installed a panic button in his apartment in the 1980s, he also said, "[W]e never had to use it. It was only used once, as it turned out, by a house guest, who thought it was, you know, a light switch."[51] While Rushdie, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, and the late Egyptian novelist Neguib Mafouz weathered threats, bounties and, in Mafouz's case, a near-fatal attempt on his life, Said sought to claim the same mantle. In helping him weave his myth, admirers wrote he risked "scorn and death threats from extremists to speak out for the people he calls 'the victims of the victims'";[52] how he "has enemies … the stakes in being Edward Said are high";[53] how "he is not afraid to challenge any authority… he has paid a high price for this position."[54]
Using Polemics to Climb the Career Ladder
Said substituted status as a Palestinian activist and polemicist for scholarship to achieve unprecedented celebrity for an English professor. He became enmeshed in Palestinian activism after the 1967 Six-Day war. In 1971, he wrote his first piece for Le Monde Diplomatique[55] and, two years later, he made his debut in The New York Times;[56] both articles were on the Arab-Israeli conflict. By 1977 he was a member of the Palestine National Council, the PLO's rubberstamp parliament. The young English professor who had labored in obscurity prior to embracing the Palestinian cause had come a long way. While his early studies of Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad made contributions to his scholarly field, it was his 1978 publication of Orientalism, a flawed and highly-selective examination of the way the West perceived Islam,[57] which cemented his celebrity.Hamid Dabashi, his friend and colleague at Columbia University, noted in a long tribute published after Said's death, "I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after my graduation, I remained entirely oblivious to it … I discovered Edward Said first fromOrientalism, then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the Iranian Revolution."[58] Said's protestation that involvement in the issue of "Palestine … brings no rewards,"[59] was risible. In 1979, he published The Question of Palestine and was invited to Paris to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the apartment of Michel Foucault.[60]
His subsequent work eschewed the rigors of scholarship and instead favored political activism. On February 22, 1980, The New York Times titled a profile article, "Edward Said: Bright Star of English Lit and the PLO." Pal Ahluwalia, a professor at the University of South Australia and the author of a complimentary book on Said's "intellectual project," explained:
Palestine itself becomes an almost overwhelming repetitive theme in Said's work. Indeed, the major corpus of his writing deals with Palestine, and much of it is topical and direct political commentary, very much in line with his stance on the role of the public intellectual. Hence we have to see Palestine as firmly connected to the rest of Said's cultural theory.[61]His contrarianism and rejectionism ironically augmented his authenticity among policymakers. In 1993, U.S. Central Command invited Said, one of the most outspoken critics of the U.S. military and its role in the 1991 Kuwait war, to address 500 officers. Following his appearance, CENTCOM asked him to act as a consultant on the region, an invitation he declined. In the same year, despite his virulent opposition to the nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Clinton administration invited him to the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo accords, an invitation he also declined.[62]
Plaudits and rewards increased alongside his rejectionism. In 1993, the British Broadcasting Corporation invited Said to give the Reith Lecture, its prestigious annual address. The following year, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded him its Picasso Medal. In 1997, he gave the inaugural set of William Empson Lectures at Cambridge University, as well as the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Lecture in Delhi and the Netaji Centenary Oration at the Netaji Institute in Calcutta. The following year, he served as distinguished lecturer at the Collège de France, the premier institute of learning in that country. Again in 1998, the BBC commissioned him to write and present a documentary film, In Search of Palestine. While very few professors get such opportunities, Said chose to use it as evidence of his persecution, noting that after being shown on the BBC it "more or less disappeared."[63] In 1999, the prestigious Modern Language Association elected Said its president, and the Middle East Studies Association appointed him an honorary fellow, a plaudit it has not even bestowed upon a professor like Bernard Lewis whose scholarship, unlike Said's, is in Middle Eastern studies. Several awards and honors in Europe followed.
Said's Legacy
Said's substitution of politics for scholarship in the name of "speaking truth to power" has spawned scores of students, professors, and journalists who seek to emulate his path to fame. Justifying any polemic under the rubric of speaking truth to power now brings reward in most Western universities. Said once described himself "as a teacher of how language is used and abused";[64] indeed, he provided a global audience with a master class on the subject.It is ironic that while Said and his intellectual successors—Dabashi, Columbia University associate professor Joseph Massad, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, and Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and his Harvard University coauthor Stephen Walt—seek to profit from false claims of persecution and censorship, across the Arab world, a plethora of reformers and opponents of authoritarian regimes suffer for attempting to speak truth to power. By substituting polemics for research and conflating academic freedom with freedom from academic standards, Said's legacy may ultimately be to harm fact-based and lasting Middle East studies scholarship and instruction in American and European universities.
Efraim Karsh is professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London where Rory Miller is a senior lecturer.
[1] "The Edward Said Memorial," Columbia News, Columbia University, New York, Mar. 25, 2004; Esther Iverem, "Q & A: Danny Glover," SeeingBlack.com, Mar. 15, 2004.
[2] "Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said," May 25-26, 2007, Boğazici University, Istanbul, Turkey.
[3] Saree Makdisi's weblog can be found at http://sareemakdisi.blogspot.com/; The Times Higher Education Supplement (London), Oct. 10, 2003; Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), Oct. 30- Nov. 5, 2003; Truth to Power: The Online Bibliography of Edward Said, accessed Aug. 28, 2007.
[4] Edward Said, "Bridge across the Abyss," Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 10-16, 1998.
[5] Tom Paulin, "Writing to the Moment," The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2004.
[6] Mahmoud Darwish, "Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading," Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2004.
[7] "Interview with Edward Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays," Booknotes, June 17, 2001.
[8] Edward Said, "A Desolation, and They Called it Peace," Al-Ahram Weekly, June 25-July 1, 1998.
[9] David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said(Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), p. 177.
[10] See, for example, Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 312; Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism(New York: Fromm, 1993), pp. 123-30.
[11] Barsamian and Said, Culture and Resistance, p. 54.
[12] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 19.
[13] David Barsamian, "Interviews: Edward W. Said," Arts & Opinion, Nov. 2003.
[14] A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, vol. I (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1946), p. 373, reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C., 1991.
[15] Justus Weiner, "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," Commentary,Sept. 1999.
[16] Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 24-Oct. 1, 2003.
[17] Edward Said, "Fifty Years of Dispossession," Al-Ahram Weekly, May 7-13, 1998.
[18] Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998.
[19] Edward Said, "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness," Al-Ahram Weekly, Aug. 24-30, 2000. He expressed a similar theme toward other Diaspora Jews in Edward Said, "Thinking about Israel," Al-Ahram Weekly, May 3-9, 2001.
[20] Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. xvi.
[21] Edward Said, "Arafat Is Only Interested in Saving Himself," The lndependent (London), June 20, 2002.
[22] Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 165-6.
[23] Mona Anis, "Speaking Truth to Power," Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 30-Nov. 5, 2003.
[24] Moustafa Bayoumi, "Edward W. Said (1935-2003)," The Village Voice, Oct. 1-7, 2003.
[25] See, for example, Bayan Nuwaihid al-Hut, Watha'iq al-Haraka al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya 1918-1939: Min Awraq Akram Zu'aytir, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Palestinian Research Center, 1984), pp. 4-34; "Report on Political and Economic Conditions in Palestine: Submitted to His Excellency the High Commissioner for Palestine by the Executive of the Seventh Palestine Arab Congress, 1925," Central Zionist Archives (CZA), S25/665/2; Arthur Rupin, report on a meeting with George Antonius, July 28, 1930, CZA, AM 1012/868.
[26] Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, Sept. 1965), p. 1.
[27] Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 69.
[28] Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, p. 5.
[29] Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 68 (emphasis in original).
[30] United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, Nov. 10, 1975.
[31] Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, pp. 21-7.
[32] Rory Miller, Divided against Zion: Anti-Zionist Opposition to a Jewish State in Palestine, 1945-1948(London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 148.
[33] Yosef Weitz, Yomani Ve-igrotai La-banim (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1965).
[34] Said, The Question of Palestine, pp. 102, 248, fn. 47; Israel Shahak, Min al-Arshif as-Sihyuni: Watha'iq wa-Nusus (Beirut: Munazzamat at-Tahrir al-Filastiniya, Markaz al-Abhath, 1975), p. 31.
[35] Edward Said, "More on American Zionism (2)," Al-Ahram Weekly, Oct. 5-11, 2000.
[36] Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
[37] Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," The New York Review of Books, June 24, 1982.
[38] Oleg Grabar and Edward W. Said, "Orientalism: An Exchange, Reply by Bernard Lewis," The New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1982.
[39] New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
[40] Edward Said, "East Isn't East," The Times Literary Supplement (London), Feb. 3, 1995; "I Find Myself Instinctively on the Other Side of Power," interview with Edward Said, The Guardian, Dec. 10, 2001; Edward Said, "Dignity and Solidarity," Al-Ahram Weekly, June 26-July 2, 2003.
[41] Edward Said, "Suicidal Ignorance," Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 15-21, 2001.
[42] New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
[43] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
[44] Edward Said, "Misinformation about Iraq," Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov. 28-Dec. 4, 2002.
[45] David Barsamian, "Edward Said Interview," The Progressive, Nov. 2001.
[46] Edward Said, "Between Worlds," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Jennifer Wallace interview with Edward Said, "Exiled by Foes, Silenced by Friends," The Times Higher Education Supplement, Jan. 17, 1997.
[49] Matthew Rothschild, "Edward W. Said, 1935-2003," The Progressive, Sept. 28, 2003.
[50] "Interview with Edward Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays," Booknotes, June 17, 2001.
[51] Ibid.
[52] "Lion of Judea," interview with Edward Said, The Guardian, May 13, 1997.
[53] Zoe Heller, "Radical Chic," The Independent on Sunday (London), Feb. 7, 1993.
[54] Nouri Jara, interview with Edward Said on "'Orientalism,' Arab Intellectuals, Marxism, and Use of Myth in Palestinian History," Al-Jadid Magazine, Summer 1999.
[55] See Edward Said, "Les Palestiniens face aux responsabilites de la defaite; la prolongation du conflit entre Israel et les pays Arabes," Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris), Oct. 1, 1971.
[56] Edward Said, "Arabs and Jews," The New York Times, Oct. 14, 1973.
[57] Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism."
[58] Hamid Dabashi, "The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)," Counterpunch, Oct. 2, 2003.
[59] "A Highbrow Hero Who Storms the Ivory Tower," interview with Edward Said, The Sunday Times, June 20, 1993.
[60] Edward Said, "My Encounter with Sartre," The London Review of Books, June 1, 2000.
[61] See introduction to Edward Said Memorial Lecture, University of Adelaide, Oct. 1, 2005, p. 5.
[62] Said, Peace and Its Discontents, p. xxix.
[63] Edward Said, "West Bank Diary," Al-Ahram Weekly, Dec. 10-16, 1998. In July 1999, New York's WNET, a major Public Broadcast Service (PBS) affiliate, aired the documentary in New York.
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