Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are tackling
a figure today who, quite frankly, resists classification.
He really does. Usually when we pull a profile
from the stack, we can slot them into a neat
box. You know, politician, artist, academic.
But today... Hmm, not so simple. We're looking
at a man whose life was essentially a series
of overlapping contradictions. He's a paradox
wrapped in, I don't know, a bespoke three -piece
suit. That is a very specific, and I have to
say, a pretty accurate image. We're talking about
Edward Said, and I want to set the stakes right
up front for you. This isn't just a biography
of a professor who wrote some interesting books.
No, far from it. This is about a man whose life
reads like a rejected movie script because it's
just too implausible. He was a comparative literature
titan, a concert level classical pianist, a member
of the Palestinian parliament in exile, and a
media icon who was, you know, simultaneously
celebrated and reviled. All of those things at
once. But beyond the resume. This is the person
who fundamentally rewired how the Western world,
how we look at the Middle East, at Asia, and
really at the very concept of the other. I don't
think it's an exaggeration to say that there
is a before said and an after said in the humanities.
That's a huge claim. It is, but it holds up.
He is widely considered the father of post -colonial
studies, but even that title feels a bit... Well,
a bit sterile. He was a disruptor. A disruptor.
I like that. He took the dusty, leather -bound
traditions of Western academia and he shook them
until the binding cracked. I mean, he forced
an entire civilization to look in the mirror
and ask, why do we see the rest of the world
the way we do? And why does that view always
seem to benefit us? And that right there, that
is the mission for this deep dive. We're going
to unpack how one man used literature, literally.
reading novels like Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad
to dismantle centuries of imperial mindset. We're
working from a really detailed biographical and
academic record here. It covers his life, his
work, the controversies, everything. So we have
a massive stack of sources here, and we're going
to need to pull apart some of the dense theory
and see how it applies to the real world. And
we have to do all of that while navigating his
personal narrative, which is defined by this
constant, almost aching sense of being... Out
of Place. Out of Place. That's the title of his
memoir. And it's the recurring motif of his entire
life, isn't it? It's the key that unlocks everything
else. So let's get into the origins of this outsider
status. Because usually when we talk about intellectual
giants, we assume they come from a place of stability,
a solid foundation. Said did not have that. Far
from it. I mean, let's just start with the basics.
Edward Waddy said, born November 1st, 1935, place
of birth, Jerusalem. But this is the crucial
context. At the time, this was mandatory Palestine
under British rule. So not Israel, not Palestine
as a state yet, a territory controlled by the
British Empire. Precisely. And right away, just
look at the name, Edward. Very British. It's
the Prince of Wales. It's stiff upper lip. And
then said Fed, unmistakably Arab. That's a clash
right there in two words. He called it the name
paradox. He said it was a burden he felt from
day one. It wasn't just a quirky coincidence.
It was a map of his family's fractured identity.
So let's talk about that family. Who were they?
His father, Wadi, was a Jerusalem -born businessman,
a Protestant Christian. But here's the twist.
He was also a veteran of the U .S. Army. Hold
on. Let's pause on that. A Jerusalem Arab serving
in the U .S. Army in World War I. How did that
happen? It's an incredible story. Wadi had spent
some time in the U .S. before the war, and he
ended up enlisting, serving in the American Expeditionary
Forces under General Pershing in France. Wow.
And because of that service, he and his family
were granted United States citizenship. So Edward
Said, born in Jerusalem in the 1930s, was a U
.S. citizen from birth. He had the blue passport.
Which puts him in this incredibly bizarre, privileged,
but also really precarious position. Absolutely.
Think about it. He's a Palestinian Arab, but
he's legally American, living under a British
mandate. And his family is Christian, Protestant
no less, in a predominantly Muslim region that
also has a significant Jewish population. It's
like he was designed in a lab to not fit in anywhere.
He was an outsider in every single context he
found himself in. And the geography didn't help
stabilize things, from what I understand. No.
The family was wealthy. His father owned a very
successful stationery business, so they were
part of a cosmopolitan elite. They moved pretty
effortlessly between Jerusalem and Cairo. So
they had a foot in both worlds. They did. But,
you know, history has a way of catching up with
everyone, no matter how wealthy you are. And
in late 1947, the situation in Palestine began
to completely disintegrate. This is the lead
up to the 1948 war, the war that Israelis call
the War of Independence and Palestinians call
the Nakba, the catastrophe. Precisely. The intercommunal
violence in Jerusalem between Arabs and Jews
made daily life impossible. So they had to leave.
And I think it's important to clarify here. He
didn't leave as a refugee in a tent camp. No,
absolutely not. That's a crucial distinction
he himself made throughout his life. He left
in a car to another comfortable home in Cairo.
But the psychological break... The loss of home
was the same. He became an exile. That's it.
Saad was always very aware of his privilege compared
to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
who ended up in refugee camps. But, you know,
privilege doesn't cure displacement. The wound
is still there. And in Cairo, he was thrown into
another strange environment. Another colonial
incubator. He was sent to Victoria College. This
was known as the Eaton of the Middle East. The
Eaton of the Middle East. So this is where the
elite sent their kids. Oh, absolutely. Ken Hussein
of Jordan went there. The actor Omar Sharif went
there. It was a school designed to create the
perfect colonial elite to turn young Arabs into
proper British gentlemen. And based on the records,
Saad wasn't exactly buying what they were selling.
He was a rebel. A brilliant one, but a rebel
nonetheless. The sources paint a picture of a
boy who was intellectually miles ahead of his
peers, but was constantly described as behaviorally
What does troublesome even mean in that context?
It means he talked back. He questioned authority.
He didn't fit the mold of the deferential colonial
subject they were trying to create. And it all
came to a head in 1951. He was expelled. Expelled.
The man who would go on to hold endowed chairs
at Columbia and lecture at Harvard got kicked
out of high school. It just highlights this incredible
restlessness in his character. He couldn't conform.
And this expulsion led to a really pivotal decision
by his parents. What did they do? They looked
at their brilliant, difficult American citizen
son, and they decided that there was simply no
future for him in the Middle East. The old world
was crumbling, so they sent him away. To the
United States, to Massachusetts of all places.
Northfield met Herman, an elite private boarding
school. Imagine the whiplash. He goes from the
chaotic, vibrant, colonial, but still Arab streets
of Cairo to the austere, cold, puritanical quiet
of rural Massachusetts in the 1950s. Talk about
culture shock. It must have been brutal. It was
more than shock. He described it as profound
isolation. He later reflected that his parents
sent him away because the prospects for what
he called deracinated people, uprooted people
like them, were so uncertain in the new Middle
East. So they were trying to save him in a way.
They were. But in doing so, they completely severed
his connection to his culture, to his home. He
spent his teenage years as this lonely Arab boy
in America, constantly trying to prove he was
smart enough to belong, while everyone just looked
at him as a curiosity. But isn't that the classic
immigrant story in some ways? You have to work
twice as hard to get half as far. It is, and
he absolutely did. He channeled all that alienation,
all that feeling of being an outsider into pure
academic achievement. He was either valedictorian
or salutorian. The records vary slightly, but
he was at the very top of his class. And that
academic success was his ticket. It was his ticket
to the Ivy League. He went to Princeton for his
B .A., graduated in 1957. Then he went on to
Harvard for his master's and his Ph .D. Now,
what's interesting to me is his academic focus
during this time. He wasn't writing about the
Middle East. He wasn't writing about Palestine.
No, not at all. He was diving headfirst into
the Western literary canon. His senior thesis
at Princeton was on Andre Deed and Graham Greene.
His Ph .D. dissertation at Harvard was on Joseph
Conrad. So he's becoming an expert in European
literature. That is the key to understanding
his later power. This is so important. He didn't
attack the West from the outside, shouting from
the margins. He mastered its culture better than
the Westerners did. He learned the rules of the
game to change the game. Perfectly put. He knew
their literature, their philosophy, their music,
their languages, English, French, Arabic, fluently.
By the time he joined the faculty at Columbia
University in 1963, he was the quintessential
Ivy League professor of English and comparative
literature. He was an insider. He was wearing
the tree jacket. He was teaching the great books.
Yes, but he was an insider with an outsider's
memory, an outsider's eye. He was reading these
canonical books and noticing things, patterns,
absences that his white American colleagues were
completely missing. Things that were invisible
to them. Because it was their water. It was the
air they breathed. And that slow burning realization
that he was seeing something they couldn't eventually
exploded in 1978 with the publication of one
of the most influential academic books of the
20th century, Orientalism. Okay, Orientalism.
This is the big one. This is the main event.
If you only know one thing about... Edward say
it's probably this book. But we need to be really
careful here because the word Orientalism itself
is tricky. Very. Before 1978, if I said I'm an
Orientalist, that was a compliment. Yeah. Right.
It just meant I was a scholar of the East. Exactly.
It was a perfectly respectable professional title.
It meant you studied the languages, the history,
the art, the culture of the Orient, which was
this, you know. very vague and sprawling term
for basically anywhere from north africa to japan
it was seen as a neutral scientific academic
pursuit yes the pursuit of knowledge for its
own sake and side comes along and says neutral
there is nothing neutral about this he completely
redefined the term he turned it inside out for
side orientalism wasn't just a field of study
It was, and this is his famous definition, a
style of thought based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction made between the
Orient and, most of the time, the Occident. Okay,
let's unpack that. That is a lot of syllables.
Ontological and epistemological distinction.
What does he mean by that? OK, so ontology is
the study of being of what things are. Epistemology
is the study of knowledge of how we know things.
Right. So he's saying that the West decided there
was a fundamental, unchangeable difference in
the very being of an Easterner versus a Westerner.
And based on that difference, they created a
whole system of knowledge about the East. A system
of knowledge that confirmed the difference. Precisely.
The West defined itself as rational, developed,
humane and superior. And to make that definition
stick, to have something to compare. itself to,
it had to define the Orient as the opposite,
irrational, backward, barbaric, and inferior.
So it's a mirror. The West looks at the East
and sees everything it congratulates itself for
not being. Or, and this is also crucial, everything
it desires but suppresses. It's a fantasy. Said
argued that the Orient that Western scholars
and poets and politicians talked about wasn't
a real place with diverse people. It was a caricature.
It was a stage, a stage where the West could
project its fears and its desires. The Orient
was sensual. It was mysterious. It was despotic.
It was violent. It was everything the civilized
West was not. He used that famous image on the
cover of the book, The Snake Charmer, by Jean
-Léon Jérôme. I'm looking at it now. It's a 19th
century painting. Yes. It shows a naked boy handling
a snake for an audience of older men sitting
against this intricately tiled wall. Yeah. And
it looks, I mean, it looks incredibly realistic.
The detail is photographic. And that realism
is the trap. That is Said's entire point. Jerome
didn't paint a specific moment he witnessed.
He pieced it together in his Paris studio from
sketches and props. He painted a timeless, decaying
fantasy. What are the giveaways? Look closer.
Notice the peeling tiles on the wall. That's
a classic trope. It's meant to suggest that the
East is a place of ruined glory, that its best
days are behind it. Okay, I see that. And notice
the passivity of the audience. The men are just
sitting there, mesmerized, almost lethargic.
They aren't working, they aren't building, they
aren't doing anything productive. They are just
existing. for the Western viewer's gaze. So the
subtle message of the painting is these people
are lazy, they're exotic, they are stuck in the
past, they're decadent. And therefore, they need
us, the dynamic, modern, rational West, to come
in and run things for them. It's the intellectual
justification for empire. You've got it. It's
the permission slip. You don't conquer people
because you want their land or their oil. That
sounds greedy. You conquer them because they
are incapable of governing themselves. You're
doing it for their own good. It's the white man's
burden. It is the very definition of the white
man's burden. And Setti traced this way of thinking
back way further than 19th century French painters.
He went all the way back to ancient Greece. To
Aeschylus. To Aeschylus and his play The Persians
from 472 BCE. Wow. Okay, so that's one of the
oldest plays we have. It's about the Greco -Persian
Wars. Right. And in that play, which is written
for a Greek audience, how are the Persians depicted?
They're emotional. they're despotic, they're
grieving, they're doomed. And the Greeks, they're
rational, they're democratic, they're victorious.
The heroes and the villains. The binary is established
right there at the dawn of Western literature.
us versus them. And Sade argues that this binary
is part of the deep DNA of Western culture. But
hold on a second. Isn't that just how cultures
work? I mean, the Greeks thought everyone who
wasn't Greek was a barbarian. The Romans did,
too. The Chinese thought they were the Middle
Kingdom and everyone else was peripheral. Why
is Orientalism different from just, you know,
standard issue xenophobia? That is a very sharp
and important question, and it's one that Sade
anticipated. The difference, he argues, is power.
Power. Modern Orientalism isn't just prejudice.
It's prejudice backed by the most powerful military
and economic machine in human history. It's the
intimate relationship between knowledge and power,
a concept he borrowed heavily from the French
philosopher Michel Foucault. OK, so unpack that
for me. Knowledge and power. It means that the
people with the guns and the ships get to write
the textbooks. The British didn't just conquer
India with soldiers. They conquered it with cartographers,
with linguists, with archaeologists, with administrators.
who studied and classified and categorized every
aspect of Indian life. They created a version
of India that served their own interests. Exactly.
Because the West had the power, their version
of the story became the Truth with a capital
T. The Orientalist, the scholar or the colonial
officer or the novelist claimed to know the Orient
better than the Orientals knew themselves. There
is a famous quote from Karl Marx that Said uses
to illustrate this. Marx, talking about French
peasants, wrote, They cannot represent themselves.
They must be represented. Wow. Said took that
and applied it to the colonial world. The West
appointed itself the voice, the mind, and the
will of the East. The colonial subaltern, as
later theorists would call them, was viewed as
incapable of speaking for themselves. This must
have gone over like a lead balloon with the actual
Orientalists. Put it mildly. I mean, you can
just imagine you spent your entire life studying
Arabic grammar at Oxford. And this young, charismatic
guy from Colombia tells you that your entire
career is just a footnote to racist imperialism.
The backlash was nuclear. This wasn't a polite
academic disagreement over Sherry. This was a
street brawl. And who was the main opponent in
the other corner? The main opponent, the undisputed
heavyweight champion of traditional Orientalism,
was Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis, the Princeton
professor, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies
for decades. He was the expert whom governments
in Washington and London called when they wanted
to understand why Muslims are angry. He represented
everything said was attacking. So what was Lewis's
defense? How did he push back? Lewis's primary
argument was that Said was politicizing scholarship.
He accused Said of ignoring the genuine, often
painstaking contributions of Western scholars
who had deciphered ancient languages, preserved
historical texts, and, in his view, objectively
studied Eastern cultures. So Lewis is saying,
I deal in facts, you deal in ideology. That was
the line. He accused Said of a kind of intellectual
vandalism, of ignoring the specific findings
of Orientalists in favor of a sweeping, politically
motivated condemnation of the entire field. He
even accused Said of pollution of the mind. Pollution
of the mind. That is not academic language. That's
personal. It was deeply personal. Lewis also
argued that Said was creating what he called
a culture of complaint, where people in the Middle
East could just blame all their problems. dictatorship,
economic stagnation, you name it, on the West
and on colonialism instead of taking responsibility
for their own societies. And what was Sade's
report to that? Sade didn't pull any punches
either. He argued that Lewis's so -called facts
were always selected and framed by his pro -Western,
pro -imperial assumptions. So the bias was baked
in from the start. Yes. He called Lewis a perfect
exemplification of the establishment Orientalist
whose work was, in the end, propaganda disguised
as scholarship. Sedd pointed out that Lewis's
advice to Western governments usually seemed
to align perfectly with their foreign policy
goals, often involving military intervention.
So Sedd saw him not as a neutral scholar, but
as a servant of power. A servant of American
and specifically Zionist power. That's how Said
framed it. It was a clash of titans and it got
very ugly. It sounds like they were just talking
past each other. Lewis is saying, look at the
data, look at the history I've uncovered. And
Said's saying, but I know why you're telling
the history that particular way. That is the
absolute crux of the disagreement. And frankly,
in the long run, Said won the war. How do you
figure? Not necessarily because every historian
or literary critic agrees with every single one
of his points. Many don't. But he won because
he completely changed the terms of the engagement.
He changed the questions people had to ask. Exactly.
You simply cannot write a history book about
the Middle East today or curate a museum exhibit
of 19th century art without addressing Saeed's
critique. If you ignore him, you just look naive
or, frankly, ignorant. He made the invisible
framework visible. Yes. And it spawned... entire
fields of study. Post -colonial studies as a
discipline in universities basically exists because
of this book. And it wasn't just limited to the
Middle East, right? The outline mentions nesting
Orientalisms. What is that? That's a fascinating
extension of his theory. It's the idea that this
hierarchy of othering doesn't just happen between
West and East. It happens internally, too. Like
Russian dolls of prejudice. A perfect metaphor.
Scholars like Milika Bakic Hayden and Maria Todorova
applied it to the Balkans. They argued that Western
Europe looks down on Eastern Europe as its Orient.
Then, within Eastern Europe, the more westernized
countries look down on the Balkans. And within
the Balkans. The northern Balkans might look
down on the southern Balkans. Everyone needs
someone to be their orient so they can feel a
little more western, a little more civilized.
It's the classic high school cafeteria hierarchy,
but applied to geopolitics. It's cruel, but it's
an incredibly powerful analytical tool. But said
wasn't done disrupting things. Fifteen years
after Orientalism in 1993, he dropped another
intellectual brick on the accelerator, culture
and imperialism. This one feels more literary
to me just from the title. Orientalism was about
historians, politicians and area studies experts.
Culture and imperialism goes right after the
novelists. It does. And this is where said introduces
one of his most important and I think elegant
analytical tools. Contrapuntal reading. Contrapuntal.
That's a musical term, isn't it, from Counterpoint?
It is. And we'll definitely get to the musical
later because it's central to who he was. But
yes, in music, Counterpoint is when you have
two or more independent melodies playing at the
same time. They interact. They harmonize. They
might create tension, but they remain distinct.
So how do you apply that to a novel? Sidere argued
we should read novels the same way. We need to
read the main story, the romance in the drawing
room, the coming of age story. But we also need
to listen for the quiet background melody that
makes the whole story possible. And that background
melody is the empire. OK, give me an example.
How do you read, say, Jane Austen, Contra Buntley?
Mansfield Park is his great example. On the surface,
it's a classic story of a country estate of manners,
morals, and marriage plots. Right. The patriarch
of the family, Sir Thomas Bertram, is a pillar
of society. At one point in the novel, he leaves
the estate to go to Antigua. Okay. And why does
he go? to check on his plantations and for 150
years most literary critics just saw that as
a plot device it gets the strict father figure
out of the house so the young people can get
into trouble standard narrative stuff but said
stops and asks the question that no one else
was asking wait a minute Why does he have a plantation
in Antigua who is working there? Slaves. Slaves.
Sedd points out with devastating clarity that
the beautiful, orderly, moral life of Mansfield
Park is entirely funded by the brutal, immoral,
and chaotic system of slave labor in the Caribbean.
You can't have one without the other. They are
inextricably linked. You cannot have the polite
English Tea Party without the brutal Caribbean
plantation. So he's not saying Jane Austen is
a bad person who supported slavery. He's saying
that Jane Austen and her readers took for granted
an imperial system that was so vast and so profitable
that it became invisible. It was just the background
noise of life. The empire is the invisible foundation
of the novel. That's the contrapuntal reading.
And then, of course, there is his lifelong obsession
with Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness. The
ultimate novel of empire. His Ph .D. was on Conrad.
Set had a very complicated relationship with
Conrad. He deeply admired the artistry of the
writing, but he was absolutely ruthless in his
analysis of its politics. Because Conrad is critical
of imperialism, isn't he? The book is about the
horror of what the Belgians were doing in the
Congo. It absolutely is. Conrad shows the greed,
the brutality, the hypocrisy. He exposes the
horror. But, and this cites a crucial point,
Conrad still doesn't give the Africans a voice.
There's just scenery. I remember from the book
they're described as limbs, eyes. Shadows. They
don't really speak. They are props for the white
man's psychological drama. Kurtz goes crazy.
And the narrator, Marlow, learns a profound lesson
about the darkness in the human soul. But the
Africans themselves are just the backdrop for
this European existential crisis. They have no
interior life. They are denied language. They
are denied psychology. They are denied humanity.
So Seed argues that the novel's very structure,
its very form, denies them agency. Even in a
book that is actively criticizing empire, the
imperial mindset dictates who gets to be a fully
realized human character. Wow. That is such a
powerful idea. That you could be a critic of
the system and still be completely trapped inside
its logic. Which is exactly what Said tried to
avoid in his own life. He didn't just want to
be an academic in an ivory tower pointing out
flaws in old books. He wanted to be a public
intellectual. And he had a very specific, very
demanding definition of that role, didn't he?
He laid it out in his BBC Reef lectures. He did.
He said the intellectual's job is to sift, to
judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice
and agency return to the individual. He didn't
see the intellectual as a servant of the government.
Quite the opposite. He believed the intellectual
has to be an amateur in the original sense of
the word, amateur, one who does it for the love
of it, not for a paycheck or to please a government
or a corporation. Their job, their duty is to
speak truth to power, even when it's uncomfortable,
especially when it's uncomfortable. And for him,
speaking truth to power meant. above all, talking
about Palestine. It was the defining cause of
his public life. He said the 1967 Six -Day War
was a moment that politicized him. He was in
the U .S., and he felt the American media was
presenting a completely one -sided, distorted
narrative. What was the narrative he was seeing?
That the Arabs were irrational aggressors, they
were terrorists, or they were just, you know,
non -entities who got in the way of Israeli progress.
He wrote a piece called The Arab Portrayed in
1968 to begin to counter that. But this is where
people often get confused about Said's position.
Because he was such a fierce and eloquent advocate
for the Palestinian cause, people assume he was
anti -Jewish or that he wanted to destroy Israel.
But his actual writings are much, much more nuanced
than that. So much more. He wrote a seminal essay
called Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.
Now, just note the title. He is centering the
Palestinian experience of Zionism. Right. But
he isn't denying the history of Jewish suffering
that led to Zionism. In fact, he explicitly acknowledged
the unique horror of the Holocaust and the historical
Jewish need for a safe haven. He never disputed
that. He even said in a 2003 lecture. very late
in his life, that by any standard, Israeli Jews
have a valid claim to the land based on their
long history. He did. He was one of the few Palestinian
intellectuals of his generation willing to say
that publicly. He recognized that two peoples
have deep, legitimate historical connections
to the same small piece of territory. So his
argument wasn't that Jews should leave. No. His
argument was that a Jewish claim to the land,
however valid, cannot be used to cancel out or
erase the Palestinian claim. He rejected what
he called religious Zionism or any fundamentalism
that said, God gave this land only to us, so
you have to leave. He famously called it a conflict
between two communities of suffering. Yes. And
because he held this incredibly complex and,
frankly, difficult view, passionately supporting
Palestinian rights but also acknowledging Jewish
history and trauma, he managed to anger hardliners
on both sides of the conflict. But his biggest
political breakup was not with his opponents.
It was with his own people's leadership. It was,
specifically with Yasser Arafat and the PLO.
And said he was a major figure in that world
for a long time. A huge figure. He was a member
of the Palestinian National Council, their parliament
in exile from 1977 to 1991. He helped draft the
1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.
He was a major player. But then came 1993. The
Oslo Accord. The Oslo Accord. I remember the
photos. Bill Clinton on the White House lawn
with Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin. They shook hands. The world thought,
finally, this is it. Peace. The world popped
the champagne. leaders got Nobel Peace Prizes,
and Edward Said resigned from the PNC. Why? Why
walk away at what seemed like the moment of victory?
Because he didn't see it as a victory. He saw
it as a capitulation. While everyone else was
watching the ceremony, he was doing what he always
did. He was doing a close reading of the text.
He read the actual document. He read the fine
print. And he saw the details that everyone else
missed. He argued that Arafat was getting a few
ceremonial titles and control over, you know,
garbage collection in the West Bank, while Israel
retained total control of the borders, the water,
the airspace, and crucially, security. He called
it a Palestinian Versailles. A surrender treaty.
Yes. He was particularly furious about the issue
of the right of return. The right of Palestinian
refugees from the 1948 war to return to their
homes. Homes like his own families in Jerusalem.
He felt that Arafat had completely abandoned
the refugees in the diaspora in exchange for
a limited form of self -rule for those in the
territories. He predicted, with what turned out
to be chilling accuracy, that the accords would
not lead to a sovereign state. but to a permanent
occupation disguised as autonomy. And Arafat
and the new Palestinian Authority did not take
that criticism well. Not at all. In 1995, the
Palestinian Authority officially banned Edward
Said's books in the West Bank and Gaza. That
is the ultimate bitter irony. The man who did
more than almost anyone to put Palestine on the
global intellectual map. get censored by the
very government he fought for. It proves his
point about the intellectual's role, doesn't
it? You can't serve the government and the truth
at the same time. Eventually, you have to choose.
Did they ever lift the ban? They did, interestingly,
in 2000, after Arafat rejected the terms offered
at the Camp David summit. Said praised him for
it, and his books were unbanned. But the fundamental
rift remained, and his own political thinking
continued to shift. How so? By the late 90s,
he had completely given up on the two -state
solution. Really? But that's still the standard
diplomatic line for almost everyone today. He
felt it was geographically and politically impossible
because of the sheer number of Israeli settlements
built on land that was supposed to be part of
a Palestinian state. So he began arguing for
a binational one state solution. One state for
two people. One secular democratic state for
two peoples. Equal rights, one vote per person.
No Jewish state, no Islamic state. a state for
all of its citizens. Which sounds idealistic
and wonderful, but given the level of hatred
and violence on both sides, it seems incredibly
difficult to implement. Sedd would argue that
partition had already been tried and had failed
miserably, so trying to find a way to live together
was the only moral and practical option remaining.
But as activism wasn't always just writing essays,
sometimes it got physical, or at least photographic.
We have to talk about the stone. Oh, boy. The
photo that was heard around the world. So this
set the scene for us. It's July of 2000. Sed
is visiting southern Lebanon. The Israeli army
had just withdrawn from the area, ending an 18
-year occupation. There was a celebratory mood.
Sed goes to the border, the so -called blue line
that separates Lebanon and Israel. And he's photographed.
He's winding up like a baseball pitcher, and
he throws a stone across the border toward the
Israeli side. And the media went berserk. Utterly
berserk. Commentary magazine ran a piece with
the... headline, The Professor of Terror, the
Freud Society in Austria canceled a lecture he
was booked to give. It was presented as definitive
proof that underneath the tweed jacket and the
intellectual jargon, he was just a violent extremist.
But what was Sed's explanation for it? He called
it a symbolic gesture. He said he was with his
family, it was a moment of joy, and he threw
a pebble in the direction of an empty guardhouse
to celebrate the end of the occupation. He compared
it to a contest of skill with his son to see
who could throw farther. A contest of skill sounds
a little bit, well, it sounds a bit like spin.
It does sound a little manufactured, I agree.
But independent witnesses, including journalists
who were there, confirmed there was no one on
the other side. He wasn't aiming at a soldier,
it was an act of protest, of symbolism. Still,
Columbia University had to step in. What does
his employer say? They investigated and ultimately
issued a statement saying that while his actions
were incautious, they were protected as a form
of free expression. They defended his academic
freedom. It's amazing to think that a professor
of literature could generate that much political
heat. But then again, the FBI clearly thought
he was a person of interest. This is one of the
most fascinating details to emerge after his
death. The FBI had a file on him and it started
all the way back in 1971. They tracked him for
decades. What were they looking for? Were they
looking for bomb plots or secret meetings? This
is the incredible part. They were looking at
his reading lists. The declassified files show
that FBI agents were actually reading his books
and articles, reading Orientalism and writing
reports, trying to decipher if his theories on
narrative and imperialism constituted a threat
to U .S. national security. That is absolutely
wild. You have G -men in Hoover's FBI trying
to parse post -structuralist theory to find the
treason. It sounds absurd, but in a strange way,
it completely validates Said's whole thesis.
The government understood that ideas are power.
They understood that challenging the fundamental
narrative of Western innocence and superiority
is a threat to the establishment. They were right
to be worried, in a way. He was undermining their
moral authority with every book he wrote. So
we have the scholar, the activist, the political
dissident, the target of surveillance. But we
are missing a huge piece of the puzzle, the piece
that in some ways ties it all together, the thing
that kept him sane. Music. The music. Yes. And
this isn't just a side hobby. You cannot understand
Edward's side without understanding that he was
a concert pianist level musician. He practiced
for hours every single day of his adult life.
He wrote brilliant music criticism for The Nation
magazine. He wrote four books on music. And this
connects all the way back to that word we used
earlier when we talked about his literary criticism.
counterpoint. Exactly. In Western classical music,
think of a Bach fugue or a Beethoven symphony
counterpoint is the art of combining different
independent melodic lines. They each have their
own integrity. They might even be dissonant for
a moment, but they weave together to create a
complex, unified and beautiful whole. They don't
erase or destroy each other. And he applied this
musical idea to politics and culture. He did
profoundly. He believed that culture shouldn't
be. silos clashing with each other in a zero
-sum game. They should be contrapuntal. The Israeli
narrative and the Palestinian narrative are two
distinct melodies. They should exist in the same
space, interacting, challenging each other, but
ultimately sharing the land, creating a more
complex harmony. He didn't want one voice to
drown out the other. He wanted a polyphony. A
polyphony. That's the perfect word. And he didn't
just write about this idea. He built it. He made
it real. The West Eastern Divan Orchestra. one
of the most beautiful and hopeful cultural projects
of the late 20th century. He co -founded it in
1999 with his best friend, Daniel Barenboim.
Barenboim, the celebrated Israeli conductor and
pianist. Yes. An Israeli Jew and a Palestinian
Arab, two giants in their fields, best friends.
They decided to create an orchestra made up of
young musicians from Israel, Palestine, Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan. Kids who were literally
raised from birth to hate and fear each other.
And they put them in a room together in Seville,
Spain. They gave them stands and sheet music.
Made them play Beethoven. And Wagner. And Brahms.
And it wasn't about holding hands and singing
Kumbaya. It was about intense professional discipline.
What do you mean? In an orchestra, you have to
listen to the other player to make the music
work. It's a non -negotiable requirement. If
the Israeli O -Boys doesn't listen to the Syrian
flutist. The chord is out of tune. The symphony
falls apart. It was a practical, grueling workshop
in coexistence. A model for the world he wanted
to see. It's his most tangible living legacy,
especially because he was doing all of this,
his most intense work, while he was dying. That's
the tragic backdrop to his most productive years,
isn't it? It is. In 1991, he was diagnosed with
chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He lived with it,
fighting it, for 12 years. And he didn't slow
down. He sped up. He felt the deadline. He wrote
his beautiful haunting memoir out of place while
he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. He
was writing scathing critiques of the U .S. invasion
of Iraq in 2003 from his hospital bed. Just months
before the end, he published an essay called
Resources of Hope. He passed away on September
24, 2003, in New York. And he was buried in a
Protestant cemetery in Lebanon. Not in Jerusalem,
which he could never return to, but in the region.
a final return to the East, even if he remained
in some ways an outsider to the very end. So
looking back at this massive, complicated life,
what is the final verdict? Did he win? I mean,
the Middle East is still in chaos. The othering
of different groups seems worse than ever in
some ways. In terms of day -to -day politics,
he died a frustrated and often disappointed man.
The situation in Palestine got worse after his
death, not better. But in the world of ideas,
he won. He absolutely won. You cannot uncork
the bottle he opened. The ideas are out there.
They're everywhere. The term Orientalism is now
a standard concept in our language. We are, as
a culture, so much more aware of how media and
scholarship can shape our view of foreign cultures.
But there is a danger in his legacy, too, isn't
there? The culture of complaint that Bernard
Lewis warned about. There is, and it's a real
one. Sometimes people misuse Saeed's ideas as
a blunt instrument to shut down any and all legitimate
criticism. They scream, Orientalism. Any time
a Westerner criticizes a non -Western government
or culture, which Saeed's himself would have
hated, he would have despised it. He was a fierce
critic of everyone, especially Arab dictators
and corrupt regimes. He didn't want immunity
from criticism for the East. He wanted equality.
equality of analysis. He wanted the same critical
standards applied to everyone. So after this
whole deep dive, what does this leave us, you
and me and everyone listening? with today? I
think it leaves us with a profound challenge.
There's a concept developed by the historian
Lorenzo Camel, which builds directly on Seed's
work. It's called biblical Orientalism. Biblical
Orientalism. What's that? It's the idea that
we continue this tradition by simplifying complex
peoples and political situations into ancient
religious caricatures to make them easier to
digest. We turn modern political actors into
biblical figures. We see this every single time
we turn on the news. Every single day. And Said's
final enduring lesson is to resist that simplification
at all costs. He asks us to look at the other,
whether that's a Palestinian, an Israeli, a rural
American voter, a Chinese factory worker, whoever
it is for you, and refuse to see them as a symbol.
Refuse to see them as a problem to be solved
or a type to be categorized. See them contrapuntally,
as another equally valid melody in the song.
Precisely. And so if we accept Said's fundamental
premise that we construct the other through stories
and art to make ourselves feel superior or safer,
the question we have to ask ourselves tonight
is a deeply uncomfortable one. What is that question?
Who is your Orient today? Who is the group of
people that you have decided is irrational, backward,
and dangerous so that you can feel rational,
modern, and safe? Because whoever they are, you're
probably wrong about them. That is a question
that requires a lot more than an hour to answer,
but it's exactly the right one to end on. Indeed
it is. Thank you for listening to The Deep Dive.
Keep reading and keep questioning. And keep listening
for The Counterpoint.