Edward W. Said (1935–2003)

I've been interested in the history of Palestine for a long time, and this year I started to really become obsessed. It started when I stumbled upon a book in Philadelphia, and has been quite the journey. But lately I realized that all the words I have read have been written by Jews. It was time for a Palestinian voice, and just about every other author I read mentioned Edward Said.
I like a lot about The Politics of Dispossession but what I liked the most was that Said focused not only on show more Palestine, but on the whole region and the people who inhabit it. I hadn't thought about it until I read this book, but of course that makes sense; Palestinians have been scattered all over the world (but especially the area immediately surrounding historic Palestine), and have been for a while, so in order to learn about them we need to learn about the different countries they now reside in.
In addition to history and facts about many areas—Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt—he also wrote about current events. Since these essays are from 1969-94, wrote a bit about the (first) Iraq war. I was only a child at the time, but I remember the buildup, all the ribbons tied around trees, and hearing about how evil Saddam was. I remember “us” kicking ass and destroying the opposition. I also remember hearing that US troops shot at the backs of the retreating Iraqi army, but I didn't really have the intelligence to fully grasp what that meant. Obviously I've since learned that the war had nothing to do with freeing anyone, that the US military is full of cowards who are too dumb to think for themselves, and that things aren't always what they seem. I wish I would have read (and been able to comprehend) Said's essays back then.
Said writes about Iraq being a cultural hub for all of the Arab world; how they had some fantastic universities and how women were freer than they were in a lot of other countries in the region. Comparing that to the Iraq of 2025, after another, longer war and way too many sanctions, makes me physically sick.
Martin Buber harped a lot about how the Jews moving to Palestine, first and foremost, need to learn the culture of those around them. Learn what makes their neighbors tick, how to speak the language, and the history and norms of the area. Said agrees, and takes it a step further: He points out how, in addition the US not having any solid Arab studies programs and the lack of books translated to English from Arabic, most Arabs hardly know anything about western culture. It seems so obvious, but knowing your neighbors makes for a lot less tumultuous life.
That said, I did get frustrated with Said's writing at times. It felt like (and I have at least a dozen examples circled in the book) that Said confuses Jews, zionists, and Israelis, and uses all the interchangeably. Not all Jews are zionist, not all zionists are Jews, not all Jews are Israeli, etc It freaks me out when people don't know that, especially when one of the people is an intellectual who wrote a lot about Palestine and Israel. There's also a weirdness around Said not saying anything about how the vast, vast, vast majority of zionists are Christian (perhaps because he is a Christian). He talks about how all the politicans in the US “scramble for Jewish votes,” which to me seems crazy. Less than two and a half percent of the US population is Jewish (that's around 7.5 million people); some of them can't or don't vote and some aren't zionist. It seems like what he meant to say is that politicians scramble to get the zionist—largely Christian—vote. Said also claims that zionism benefits Jews; I would argue that zionism benefits zionists, the majority of whom are not Jewish. Finally, his repeated use of the term “Judeo-Christian” shows us what he really thinks.
Despite the most recent essay in this book being thirty-one years old, almost everything he talks about is relevant today. Starting in the 1970s, politicians referred to any Palestinian who even criticized Israel as terrorists; this is still going on, and has only gotten worse. Golda Meir, one of the first prime ministers of Israel, said that Palestinians don't exist; this is something we still hear from just about every zionist. Said was freaked out that (I don't remember the exact number) the US giving Israel over $50 billion in a few year span; now Israel gets ten times that every year. It feels like more people are talking about this stuff now, but reading about how much nothing has changed for the better sure makes me feel hopeless.
If you're interested in learning more about Palestine, but have only read books from non-Palestinians, Edward Said will fill that gap. This book is very educational, and not only has he written tons more, but this book is also filled with other recommended reading. It has flaws, sure, but it's a necessary read for anyone who cares that children are being starved to death simply because they happened to be born Palestinian. show less

A bit of an intellectual masturbation: he's all over the place, as befits Said's sprawling knowledge. He does tie it together, but doing so relies on a vague and philosophical tone throughout. It helps to have read some of his other work to understand what he is saying. The knowing irony of Said invoking Freud and Beethoven's late style, in which pieces were crafted more for themselves than the public, is that Said appears to be doing exactly the same thing here (in his last book). The show more entire speech is in service of the last paragraph, where he brings out his old saw of the humanist one state solution. It is a triumph - but only because he is so profoundly right. If he were to have made the argument in plainer language, however, it would not be such an exciting point to have made, since there is no direct connection, apart from his musing, between Freud identifying Moses as an Egyptian and the practical hope for a one state outcome. Still, a jolly romp from a great thinker - and nice and short, so you can easily get through it without a headache. show less

Edward Said's Orientalism is a masterwork, one of the earliest and most thorough examinations of the "colonialism of consciousness." Establishing an early beach head, it was the harbinger of an entire school of post colonial history. And, as a Palestinian, a person made invisible by colonialism, it is deeply felt.
One of the central tenets of the book is that the rise of "Orientalism" - the area studies of the Non-occidental East - coincided with the West's domination of that region for show more purposes of economic exploitation. The task Said gives himself is to study the patterns of bias through which generations of scholars, paying particular attention to the French, British and later American, came to analysize the lands they dominated. He is well suited to the task because not only was he on the receiving end of these prejudices but because working in the precincts of Western intellectual institutions, primarily Columbia University, he could well anticipate the hostile reaction his provocations would engender, not least because he was familiar, having been subjected to it, with prejudice against the Arabs and racism. Another key element of his thesis is that successive generations of scholars never adequately interrogated the underlying assumptions of their predecessors but built upon their biases. He created an astonishingly thorough evaluation of the West's attitude and understanding of the Orient beginning with Homer but picking up speed with Napolean's invasion of Egypt straight through to Bernard Lewis who he despises. To be fair, Said would rail against anyone's attempt to summarize or claim to enunciate the essential in another culture. His intellectual approach owes much to Foucault and others. You should be warmed that given the French influence on the region and the amount of scholarship the French have devoted to the subject long French excerpts are not translated as if to say, if you are serious about this topic you damn well better speak French. Year by year, decade by decade, Said excavates the prejudices and ignorance that went into building the institutions, though located exclusively in the West, of Oriental study. Again knowing how marginalized and anticipating the hostility, Said is extraordinarily thorough.
There are, however, two difficulties, the reader should prepare for. One is that Siad frequently criticizes texts that you are probably not familiar with so we have only his view. I found, for instance, his assertion that the West repeatedly prioritizes the Orient through sex, to be unpersuasive. Though the book is some what time stamped because only in passing does he mention the androcentric bias in history, something which will become far more prevalent in years after this publication. Secondly Said is a very pedantic writer. He has the tedious habit of using lists in virtually every sentence until it becomes a compulsion and it makes the book with its obsessive thoroughness a hard slog.
But not all is hopeless. He finds scholarly progress, those able to look past the blinders of colonial intellectual hegemony, in the works of HR Gibbs and Louis Massignol.
This book has such prominence because it opened the way for a whole wave of post-Colonial, post modernist theory. A true groundbreaker and necessary reading. show less

I’ve been ashamed I hadn’t read Orientalism, and now I know I had reason to be ashamed. It’s rightly a classic. Though its ideas have seeped out so that much was familiar, there was a lot of clarity in going back to source.

I expected a more ‘pugnacious’ book, to use a word from the back cover. But it’s not pugnacious in style or content. Perhaps in the first shock of publication it seemed so. It’s a fair-minded book, ‘humanist’ in a word he refuses to relinquish (that wins show more my heart). His point is not to condemn or consign to oblivion the entirety of the West’s scholarship and art on the Orient. He just makes us aware of the structures of thought in place. When it came to figures I have an attachment to (T.E. Lawrence; his hero Charles Doughty; other travelers), I never felt Said was telling me I have to cease to read them. And I wasn’t disenchanted, because I knew these guys were riddled with Orientalism even if I didn’t have the terms (in fact, I’m stalled in Doughty from years back where he has an egregious instance; I’ll get over it and pick him up again, for his wonderful observation and the prose style Lawrence so admired). You cannot say fairer than what he says of Richard Burton, along with the useful analysis that only Said has said.

This book is a feat of thought that probably has its little inexactitudes as his detractors like to point out. It re-visioned things and has a larger scope than the still-contentious area of 'Islam' and 'the West' (still? I’m glad he’s not alive). He explains how scholarship isn't innocent of politics – not just in the case of the West on Islam, and not even to fault that case, because scholarship cannot exist in a safe bubble, away from the hustle and bustle of the politicised world around us. I think it is this which gets backs up, more than the charge that he is anti-West (he isn’t). I’ve seen scholars respond that they are indeed innocent of politics; but if I ever cherished that thought, too much reading history has ruined me. If I can tell a not-irrelevant tale: in my own research area, in Asia, in his Orient, as an innocent researcher who didn’t know much about historiography, I grew increasingly flummoxed and exasperated by the attitudinal problems in mainstream, prestigious histories. It turns out, the best thing I could have done in order to understand what I saw was wrong with Mongol history-writing, was read Said. Its applicability goes wider than Islam-and-the-West.

The only time I think he’s irascible in tone is in the 1995 Afterword, when he’s obviously been in a feud with Bernard Lewis. I’m sorry his book met hostility in certain quarters, because, as I say, it’s not damnatory of the tradition, and if Orientalists or their heirs don’t see there’s room for criticism, that’s sad. With his 2003 Preface – the year he died – he has returned to the serene tones of the main work, although, with the downturn in world events, he sounds a sadder and a wiser man.

The book was written as a classic ought to be, without the jargon of the day and a pleasure to read. It may become too detailed in its case studies for most people’s purposes; I used the skip button, but this is not my last encounter with Said’s great work. show less