Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2003, pages 8-12

In Memoriam

 

Dr. Edward Said (1935-2003)

 

Palestinian, Intellectual and Fighter

 

By Robert Fisk

The last time I saw Edward Said, I asked him to go on living. I knew about his leukemia. He had often pointed out that he was receiving "state-of-the-art" treatment from a Jewish doctor and—despite all the trash that his enemies threw at him—he always acknowledged the kindness and honor of his Jewish friends, of whom Daniel Barenboim was among the finest.

Edward was dining at a buffet among his family in Beirut, frail but angry at Arafat's latest surrender in Palestine/Israel. And he answered my question like a soldier. "I'm not going to die," he said. "Because so many people want me dead."

On Wednesday night he died in a New York hospital, aged 67.

I first met him in the early years of the Lebanese civil war. I'd heard of this man, this intellectual fighter and linguist and academic and musicologist and—God spare me for my ignorance in the 1970s—didn't know much about him. I was told to go to an apartment near Hamra Street in Beirut.

There was shooting in the streets—how easily we all came to accept the normality of war—but when I climbed the steps to the apartment, I heard a Beethoven piano sonata. No, it wasn't the "Moonlight"—nothing so popular for Edward—but I waited outside the brown painted door for 10 minutes until he had finished.

"You've read my books, Robert—but I bet you haven't read my work on music," he once scolded me. And of course, I scuttled off to Librarie Internationale in the Gefinor Building in Beirut to buy his definitive book to add to my collection; his wonderful essays on the Palestinians, his excoriation of the corruption and viciousness of Yasser Arafat, his outraged condemnation of the criminality of Ariel Sharon.

He was not a flawless man. He could be arrogant, he could be ruthless in his criticism. He could be repetitive. He could be angry to the point of irradiation. But he had much to be angry about. One afternoon, I went to see him at the Beirut home of his sister Jean—a fine lady whose own account of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Beirut Fragments, is worthy of her brother's integrity—and he was half-lying on a sofa.

"I'm just a bit tired because of the leukemia treatment," he said. "I keep on going. I'll not stop."

He was a tough guy, the most eloquent defender of an occupied people and the most irascible attacker of its corrupt leadership. Arafat banned his books in the occupied territories—proving the immensity of Said and the intellectual impoverishment of Arafat.

At that first meeting in Beirut in the late Ô70s, I had asked him about Arafat. "I went to a meeting he held in Beirut the other day," he said. "And Arafat stood there and was questioned about a future Palestinian state, and all he could say was that ÔYou must ask every Palestinian child this question.' Everyone clapped. But what did he mean? What on earth was he talking about? It was rhetoric. But it meant nothing."

After Arafat went along with the Oslo accords, Said was the first—rightly—to attack him. Arafat had never seen a Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, he said. There wasn't a single Palestinian lawyer present during the Oslo negotiations. Said was immediately condemned—all of us who said that Oslo would be a catastrophic failure were—as "anti-peace" and, by vicious extension, "pro- terrorist."

Said would weary of the need to repeat the Palestinian story, the importance of denouncing the old lies—one of them, which especially enraged him, was the myth that Arab radio stations had called upon the Palestinian Arabs of 1948 to abandon their homes in the new Israeli state—but he would repeat, over and over again, the importance of re-telling the tale of Palestinian tragedy.

He was abused by anonymous callers, his office was visited by a fire-bomber, and he was libeled many times by Jewish Americans who hated that he, a professor of literature at Columbia University, could so eloquently and vigorously defend his occupied people.

An attempt was made, in his dying days, to deprive him of his academic job by some cruel supporters of Israel who claimed—the same old, mendacious slur—that he was an anti-Semite. Columbia, in a long but slightly ambivalent statement, defended him. When the Jewish head of Harvard expressed his concern about the rise of "anti-Semitism" in the United States—by those who dared to criticize Israel—Said wrote scathingly that a Jewish academic who was head of Harvard "complains about anti-Semitism!"

As his health declined, he was invited to give a lecture in northern England. I can still hear the lady who organized it complaining that he insisted on flying business class. But why not? Was a critically ill man, fighting for his life and his people, not allowed some comfort across the Atlantic? His friendship with the brilliant Barenboim—and their joint support for an Arab-Israeli orchestra that only last month played in Morocco—was proof of his human decency. When Barenboim was refused permission to play in Ramallah, Said rearranged his concert—much to the fury of the Sharon government, for which Said had only contempt.

The last time I saw him, he was exalted with happiness at the marriage of his son to a beautiful young woman. The time I saw him before, he had been moved to infuriation by the failure of Palestinians in Boston to arrange his slides to a lecture on the "right of return" of Palestinians to Palestine in the right order. Like all serious academics, he wanted accuracy. All the greater was his fury when one of his enemies claimed that he was never a true refugee from Palestine because he was in Cairo at the time of the Palestinian dispossession.

He had no truck with sloppy journalism—take a look at Covering Islam, on the reporting of the Iranian revolution—and he had even less patience with American television anchors. "When I went on air," he told me once, "the Israeli consul in New York said I was a terrorist and wanted to kill him. And what did the anchorwoman say to me? ÔMr Said, why do you want to kill the Israeli consul?' How do you reply to such garbage?"

Edward was a rare bird. He was both an icon and an iconoclast.

This article first appeared in The Independent of London Sept. 26, 2003. Copyright 2003 The Independent. Reprinted with permission.

 

 

A Tribute to Edward Said

 

By Marina Warner

I first met Edward Said when the BBC asked us to give the Reith Lectures in successive years and held a press reception to announce the forthcoming series. He was surprisingly American at first impression, especially in his voice and his colorful, informal and pithy turns of phrase. But this response soon faded because, as he wrote in his honest and poignant memoir, Out of Place, Edward Said was a child of the old eastern Mediterranean, and he had the manners, the warmth, the courtesy, and the generosity of that culture.

At that press reception, he immediately revealed personal qualities of mind and feeling that I came to recognize ran very deep inside him and were not assumed simply to impress or charm for the passing moment: when Edward showed interest in someone, in their work and well-being, he followed through with humor, affection, and irrepressible energy. He could be vehement, even scornfully abrasive, but that was part of his impetuous and fierce goodness of heart. I was sometimes scared of him, all the same, but I was one of many, many people whom he fostered spontaneously, whom he invited to give talks, whose books he commented on, whose struggles he followed.

My last conversation with him when he was still well and full of vigor was about an introduction to The Arabian Nights I had written. Acerbic, tough, but still loyal, he took the trouble to ring me from New York, roughed me up over some aspects but praised me generously for others: when I put down the telephone, he had given me the exhilarating sense that writing something, even something small like that piece, was worth doing, and worth doing well. He was a beloved teacher at Columbia University, and the news of his death has indeed spread grieving throughout the campus.

In all his numerous activities, with all the frenetic scheduling of his travels and appearances, Edward gave his supreme energies to the ideal of cultural richness, to the polyglot, multiple, heterogeneous communities that had once flourished in the Middle East, first in classical times and then under the Ottomans. His beloved wife, Mariam, was born a Christian, as he was, and her mother was headmistress of the National Secular Girls' School in the Lebanon, and a pioneering emancipationist; Edward's mother read Shakespeare with him aloud in Cairo as he was growing up. Both Edward and Mariam embodied the cultural complexity of the Middle East in their life stories as well as in their struggles to withstand condescension and ignorance about its history. Edward's breadth of reading, his engaged candor and stringency, and the visionary restlessness of his hopes, turned him into a secular prophet of our times, a public intellectual, and the scourge of many parties and groups.

But to read his literary criticism is to encounter arguments far more subtle, complex and fascinating than some of his advocates—let alone his many enemies—ever represented. His famous analyses of the relations between colonialism and literature, for example, in both Orientalism and Culture & Imperialism can't be summed up easily for political purposes, and he was infuriated by his interpreters' expedient use of them. His work overwhelmingly communicates his love of novels, thinking, poetry, and music: Joseph Conrad is defended, Jane Austen savored, Wagner regained, Freud refreshed.

The obituaries, especially in Le Monde and The Guardian, give thorough and appreciative accounts of his life's work. But The New York Times disgracefully rehearses ancient grudges and slurs, not recognizing that the secular polity Edward so fearlessly and honestly struggled for in Israel/Palestine resembles the life of its own polyglot and multi-ethnic Manhattan rather more closely than Sharon's Israel. This newspaper, in his home town of 40 years, managed to be mean-spirited about one of the finest representatives of some ideals of the old United States (now so grievously being flouted): freedom of speech, independence of mind, civil conscience and humanist sympathies across all borders of ethnic and political identity.

But to leave Edward Said in America would be to miss many other sides to his unique, mercurial, multifaceted character: he was an evident Anglophile, and not just for its literature, but for its tailoring, its elegance of tweed and shirt fabrics, of ties and shoes—and its pipes. He had converted the convivial smoking of the Middle East into a more English delight in briars, and he kept a rack of them by his reading chair (though for a long while his illness had prevented him indulging).

The leukemia which ravaged him for the last 12 years marched cruelly and inexorably with the ever-exacerbated violence in Israel/Palestine. This of course ranked high among the great sorrows of his approaching death. But at least, when the East-West Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim played the "Eroica" and other pieces at the Proms last month, and it was broadcast on the BBC, Edward witnessed the fulfilment of part of his vision: an impassioned and consummate rendering of Beethoven's thrilling, liberating music, played together by young men and women who have been raised in enmity, joining forces in an orchestra named after Goethe's poem, itself written in tribute to Hafiz, lyric poet born in Shiraz, Iran, in the 14th century. Edward heard the concert on the radio, but his last illness prevented him traveling to London, and then to Rabat as he had planned, to hear the first Arab-Israeli orchestra ever to play in North Africa.

I shall miss him: he was a rare, true friend; and the whole world will miss his forthright voice for secular ideals and the liberty of intellectual life.

Marina Warner writes from The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, in New York City.

 

 

Edward Said and the Academy

 

By Nabil Matar

Edward Said changed the face of the academy both in the United States and in the rest of the world. Although his role as a defender of the Palestinians has been recognized for its heroism, courage and integrity, his first and decisive appearance came through his academic work. It is important that this role not be marginalized as we remember a man of genius and humanity.

With the publication of Beginnings (1975) that won him the Lionel Trilling Award, Edward Said explored the construction of discourse that pointed him in the direction of his magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In Orientalism, which a few months ago was reissued, with a new preface, in its 25th year, Said appealed to Michel Foucault's theories that examined the relationship between the power of modern government institutions and the subsequent control of subjects. Said appropriated that polarization and applied it to the Western depiction of Arabs and Muslims in post-1798 literature, historiography and colonial politics.

The West, he showed, constructed an image of the Orient by means of its intellectual and administrative power to legitimize colonization and domination. The constructs of debasement and "otherness" that were used in the 19th century, he showed, were alarmingly still in use at the end of the 20th. Although the book was focused on the Arab-Islamic "Orient," Said's theory articulated a postcolonial paradigm which other disciplines, such as gender, race and Black studies, among many, also found useful.

Although much ink has been spilt defending or attacking the arguments in Orientalism, there can be no escaping the fact that the study of literature, history, and other disciplines has changed and can no longer be approached comprehensively without a discussion of Said's "discourse of power" and its implications. Since the appearance of the book, and the raging debates it generated, course titles have changed at universities large and small, and new concepts and methodologies have entered the undergraduate and graduate curricula. Said's single book may not have been the only force that brought about the change in the academy, but it certainly was one of the most resonant, polemical and influential books of the last quarter of the 20th century. Numerous critics rose to engage or challenge Said, proposing nuanced or different models to what Orientalism had offered, but they could not but admit that they were working within the field which Said had first ploughed. (See, for example, David Cannadine's recent Ornamentalism (Oxford 2001), which disagrees with Said, but cannot but echo him).

Equally important is Said's Herculean attempt to bring the question of Palestine into the academic discourse. In his Reith Lectures of 1993, Said identified the role of the intellectual/academic as the fiercely independent upholder of a moral vision, while engaging members of the national and world community. It was such a role that he assumed toward the academy—an academy in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Western Europe dominated by Zionist-leaning academics, Zionist-fearing academics, or simply uninformed and perhaps uninterested academics. Said forced these academics to assume their responsibilities as intellectuals, and to address the moral question of the dispossession and ravaging of the Palestinian people, and the blithe support for Israeli propaganda and aggression.

Although he was involved in political action, and took part in the Palestine National Council, and, yes, did throw a stone in the south Lebanon air, perhaps his most valuable and lasting contribution in the academy was to have pushed the political, ethical, and human rights "question" that Palestine represents into the university course schedules, and to have situated the "question" in the context of cultural representation, colonization and racism (Orientalism), theology (The Question of Palestine, 1980), and imperialism (Culture and Imperialism, 1994). It is because of his impassioned political advocacy, and not because of his theoretical formulations, as the South African/British scholar Kenneth Parker bluntly stated in a conference held at Cambridge in 2001 to examine "Orientalism," that hordes of scholars and critics have opposed him. It was because of his persistent advocacy of the Palestinian cause that he was accused of historical inaccuracy, bigotry, terrorism and anti-Semitism—by men and women often ill-informed, but more often driven by racism, bigotry and ideological bias.

By bringing change to the academy, Said inspired students from both the developed and developing countries to study marginalized and uncannoncial sources, to cross disciplines, and to challenge the master narratives. Few literary theoreticians have been as successful as he in finding a reception not only in the Western but the world academy, from Morocco to Palestine and Israel, from India to Australia and China, and among Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Edward Said developed the theoretical foundations of postcolonial studies, thereby opening up an area of scholarly inquiry for researchers from both the countries that had endured, and continue to endure, colonization, and those that had wielded it: he urged cooperation in the re-examination of the brutal legacy of colonization, for, in his view, only such cooperation could produce an understanding of the causes of ongoing racial and political oppositions, and could produce a world of dignity for all humanity—a humanity that has truly been diminished, and deeply saddened, by his loss.

Nabil Matar is professor of English and head of the Humanities and Communications Department at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FL. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Land of the Christians.

 

 

A Lighthouse That Navigated Us

 

By Ilan Pappé

We, who supported the Palestinian cause, have been orphaned with the untimely death of Edward Said. For Israeli Jews, like myself, he was the lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of growing in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness.

I am sorry I only met Edward in 1988, but I feel fortunate for the time we did spend together. His insights of, and inputs on, the global reality in general and the Palestine one in particular will guide us all for many years to come. But above all, we shall miss Edward's unique ability of articulating in the public sphere the evil inflicted upon the Palestinians in the past against the continued effort in the Western media of sidelining, if not altogether eliminating, the plight and tragedy of Palestine. There is no one who could easily fill his place on that stage—no one who could in a few sentences associate so clearly the wrongs of the past with the tragedy of the present in the land of Palestine.

The academic and intellectual world would equally be disorientated without his original thoughts and conceptualization on the West's relationship with the world. We should be grateful, nonetheless, that so many of our colleagues went in his footsteps as he so brilliantly deconstructed the power bases and more sinister interests behind the knowledge production in the West on the Orient in general and the Middle East in particular.

For those of us who knew him more personally, we have all lost a dear and genuine friend, with whom one could talk about the most abstract philosophical issues and with the same ease move to more mundane problems in life—which usually paled in comparison with his endless and brave struggle against his fatal illness.

Something of this mixture and balance was also in his books. He will be remembered, and justly so, for Orientalism and the works that followed shaping and contributing to the post-Colonialist and Cultural Studies. But I will also cherish the The Politics of Dispossession—these short and lucid interventions, quite often immediate reactions to a recent crisis or juncture in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians, but always contextualizing the event and Said's thoughts within the much broader view on the march of history.

A few weeks ago we had our last meaningful conversation—on the phone—in which he beseeched me, as he did others I am sure, not to give up the struggle for relocating the Palestinians' refugee issue at the heart of the public and global agenda. He stressed the need to continue the effort of changing the American public opinion on Palestine and he was very hopeful and encouraged by what he recognized as a significant change in European public opinion.

Edward probably left more than one spiritual and moral will to us. The one I am taking is the one above. In his memory and out of respect to his intellectual genius as well as to his moral courage, we should regroup our energies and reorganize our efforts to impress on the world that there will be no justice and no peace in Palestine, no stability in the Middle East and no tranquility in the U.S. relationship with the Muslim world, without the return of Palestinian refugees to their home, the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the building of a state in Palestine that would respect human and civil rights, as did Edward all his life.

May his soul rest in peace.

Ilan Pappé is a senior Israeli academic at the Department of Political Science and M.A, University of Haifa and the author of many books relating to the conflict. Source: AMIN - http://www.amin.org/

 

 

Edward Said: A Eulogy

 

By Roger Normand

Today we express our deep sadness about the death of Edward Said, and send our love and condolences to his family and friends. His incredible vitality and spirit throughout his long struggle against terminal illness gave us the hope (and perhaps the illusion) that this day would not come so soon.

At the same time, we must not forget to celebrate his extraordinarily rich and productive life. Edward Said was never afraid to explore and express his inner convictions, often against the overwhelming tides of conventional wisdom. His particular genius enabled him to reshape discourses and spawn an entire academic discipline—by virtue not only of his qualities of heart and mind, but also and especially the resonance his ideas and sentiments found within each of us. He was that rare individual able to give voice to a universal conscience, to awaken within us a collective yearning for a better world right now, in this particular time and place.

The importance of his life's work cannot be denied even by his avowed political opponents. Consider how Professor Said's crowning academic achievement—the publication of Orientalism—is more relevant today than ever, not as grand theory to discuss in intellectual salons, but as a life-affirming and life-saving prescription for a world on the brink of endless war. With literal-minded religious and political figures seemingly committed to an apocalyptic unfolding of the "Clash of Civilizations" we would do well to remember his central message: that dialogue between cultures and peoples can be either repressive or liberating. He articulated clearly and forcefully the fundamental distinction between an imposed discourse of conqueror to conquered based on an imbalance of military might, and a respectful exchange between equals based on shared principles of human rights at the heart of every true civilization.

Professor Said took sides, choosing to fight against oppression in all of its forms. Throughout his long career he fought with insight, erudition, compassion, courage, perseverance, and a stinging wit. Perhaps because his own identity was based on the merging of opposites, West and East, citizen and exile, he chose to defend all humanity, and not just the Palestinian cause as some critics like to suggest. (Who has more brilliantly dissected the flaws of Arafat than Edward Said?). Each of us faces the same matrix of moral choice as he did, and we are thankful to him for showing us an honest and honorable path.

Of his many outstanding writings, one that always remains with me is a short essay called "Decolonizing the Mind." Written in 1994, at time when Professor Said stood virtually alone among Western intellectuals in denouncing the false peace of the "Oslo process," this essay affirms the value of cultivating mental freedom to face the overwhelming crush of sorrow and oppression that blankets our world. In response to the abuse of words, the abuse of concepts, the abuse of politics, and the abuse of people, Said offers us the decolonized mind as an expression of the human rights mind, a mind that recognizes universal principles of common humanity first, before focusing on the myriad differences that can either be understood to enrich all of us together or exploited to divide us from them, me from you.

Edward Said represented the best face of the hero, a public intellectual with unflinching integrity, and we will miss him greatly. But we must celebrate as we mourn, for he is survived by a growing community of family, friends, and strangers inspired by his passionate belief that speaking the truth and fighting for right is our only real choice, and that neither illness nor death will slow our march towards universal justice.

Roger Normand is director of New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights.

 

 

"You're the Future"

 

By Laila Al-Arian

A tattered Palestinian flag hangs in my new apartment. Its faded colors are luminous against the emptiness of the cream-colored wall. Though it looks like any other flag, its history is far from average. Like a wandering Palestinian refugee, it has traveled thousands of miles to find its present home. It last adorned a podium at the American University in Cairo, during a speech by the late Edward Said.

Though I wasn't present at Professor Said's AUC speech, I heard him speak on several occasions, and was fortunate enough to have met him at a conference a couple of years ago. The morning after he gave a rousing talk on the failure of Oslo and Israel's systemic oppression of Palestinians, I spotted Dr. Said on his way to his seat and quickly approached him. Standing before me was a brilliant scholar, eloquent orator, and prolific writer. I had to say something intelligent, unique, meaningful—but all I managed to stammer out was, "Thank you for your lecture last night. It was so inspiring."

As I passed him my copy of his autobiography, Out of Place, to sign, he thanked me quietly and responded with characteristic sincerity, "You're the future." With that one line, I became ever more determined to embrace the responsibility Edward Said was cognizant of from an early age. Like so many other dispossessed Palestinians, Said empowered himself through knowledge and education. As an acclaimed writer and prominent academic, he not only revolutionized the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies, but he gave the oft-demonized Palestinians a human face. Finally, here was someone who talked about his Palestinian background with pride and did not at all fit the caricature of the menacing Palestinian that so pervaded popular culture.

Aside from his professional achievements, Edward Said is a luminary in the eyes of Palestinians living in the West, because, like so many of us, he was part of two worlds, without ever fully belonging to either. As a Palestinian American, I have always felt like a paradox in some way. I am fiercely proud of my Palestinian heritage and—though some may speciously deem these feelings mutually exclusive—I also love the United States, the only country I have ever known.

Yet, knowing my own government is complicit in maintaining the oppression of a people from which fate alone has separated me is difficult to swallow. It was Said who reconciled these seeming contradictions, by contextualizing the Palestinian question within the universal themes of equality and self-determination. Through his own life, Said demonstrated that not fitting in could be an asset, rather than a liability. If anything, it makes one recognize that compassion for subjugated people—and perhaps more importantly, the responsibility to alleviate their suffering—transcend time and space.

Edward Said did not confine himself to the comfort of the ivory tower. Whenever he addressed an audience, he never failed to convey a message of profound importance. This was especially true when I heard him speak three months ago. While I was used to hearing him impressively spout concrete, sometimes obscure, facts about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the tone of his lecture was much different this time. Entitled "On Dignity and Solidarity," it began with the story of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who was killed by an Israeli soldier while peacefully protesting the demolition of a Palestinian family's home in Rafah, Gaza. It is telling that Corrie showed more dignity than many Arabs when it comes to expressing solidarity for Palestinians, he said. Don't ever forget the legitimacy and justness of your cause:

"Isn't it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves?" Said continued. "Isn't it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done and proud to represent them."

Edward Said's final message was especially powerful because of the interplay between its content and source. It is only fitting that a man who was a symbol of hope and pride for so many emphasized the importance of self-respect and dignity near the end of his life.

The same flag that stood before Said not long ago frequently threatens to fall off the stubborn drywall it now calls home. But it is defiant. I realize it is no different than Palestinians themselves. A battered people, they have had to carry the burden of displacement and occupation—but they invariably persevere and remain standing.

Laila Al-Arian is editorial assistant for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

 

 

A Giant Among Midgets

 

By Charley Reese

Last week, television news shows took note of the deaths of Donald O'Connor, an actor-dancer; of George Plimpton, a high-toned journalist; and of some rock-n'-roll singer I'd never heard of. Completely missing from the shows I scanned was any mention at all of the death of a giant in this era of mental and moral midgets.

I refer to Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University; a Palestinian and a fearless champion of human rights; a musician and a music critic; and a writer of great note. Said died after a long and valiant fight against leukemia, a disease that never stopped him from writing, traveling and speaking until the very end.

Said was naturally reviled and bedeviled by the professional Zionists for his fearless defense of Palestinian human rights. But unlike some Zionists who fly the false flag of human rights (Elie Wiesel, for example) yet never say snot about the Palestinian suffering, Said was as concerned for Israeli human rights as he was for those of his own people. He was a fierce critic of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He was, in this ideologically divided world, a genuine intellectual and a genuinely compassionate man. He was a constant advocate of a vision of peace and reconciliation for both Palestinians and Israelis.

He was much criticized when he opposed the Oslo accords as being a surrender and a process that would lead to more clashes, but subsequent events proved him to have been exactly right. To be hated by both Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is probably the greatest endorsement a man of peace could wish for.

Said's books are not easy reads. He was a scholar, not a journalist, but if you really want to understand the world our politicians have gotten us entangled with, two of his books, Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, are well worth the effort. All of his books are worth the effort.

Most of what is written about the Middle East in America is written by ideologues, primarily Zionist and some anti-Zionist. Such books are arguments and propaganda, not serious discussions. Said, despite the most vicious personal attacks by intellectual thugs, never wavered from his vision of a just peace and a reconciliation of both peoples with equal rights.

There aren't many people in the world whom I regret not knowing or not having known, but Said is certainly one of them. How I would have loved to just have sat around and listened to him. A great mind is indeed a beautiful thing, and frankly, there aren't that many of them these days. It is entirely understandable that they are unrecognizable by television talking heads.

One of Said's many valuable lessons, applicable to us all, is that you can defend a cause without buying into bad leaders or resorting to fanaticism. Once we start justifying the means because of what we think is a noble end, we become corrupt. One astute man I know said that people should realize there are no ends, only means. As Brother Dave Gardner would have said, that's a heavy thought, but the more you think about it, the more you realize that it's true.

Said believed that what divided the world was not religion, ethnicity or nationalism, but rather the will to power, that itch in some to control others and, in order to control them, to degrade them.

We are, whatever else, all members of the same human species, all occupying the same planet. God willing, maybe one day we will arrive at a consensus that the real enemy is those people itching to control others and their possessions. Such people always hide behind the "idealistic end," which, of course, never arrives. All that is real is the suffering inflicted by the means.

Said's passing has left a hole in the world, but all of the young men and women he inspired will no doubt carry on. Even though I never knew him, I miss him already.

Charley Reese is a nationally syndicated columnist. This column first appeared Oct. 6, 2003. © 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

< Prev		Next >