Edward Said argued Western scholarship invented the Orient it claimed to study
In 1978 a Columbia literature professor published Orientalism, claiming that centuries of Western writing about Asia and the Middle East served empire more than truth. The book helped found post-colonial studies, turned Orientalist into an accusation, and set off a long, bitter feud with the historian Bernard Lewis.
Edward Wadie Said was born in Jerusalem on 1 November 1935 to Protestant Arab Christian parents; his father, Wadie, had earned American citizenship by serving in the US forces in the First World War and ran a stationery business in Cairo. Edward's childhood moved between the two cities until the family left Jerusalem during the 1947 to 1949 war. Expelled from Victoria College in Cairo in 1951 for bad behaviour despite strong grades, he was sent to a Massachusetts boarding school, where he felt alienated but finished at or near the top of a class of 160.
That sense of being out of place, he later said, ran through his thinking. Fluent in English, French and Arabic, he graduated from Princeton in 1957 and earned a Harvard doctorate in 1964, joining Columbia's English and Comparative Literature faculty in 1963 and teaching there until 2003. His first book grew from his dissertation on Joseph Conrad, and one scholar called Heart of Darkness foundational to his whole career. He drew on Gramsci, Fanon, Foucault and Adorno, lectured at more than 200 universities, led the Modern Language Association and gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 1993 on the role of the intellectual.
Orientalism argued that a subtle Eurocentric prejudice against Arab and Islamic peoples, rooted in romanticised images reaching back to Aeschylus's The Persians of 472 BCE, had quietly justified European and American imperial ambitions. Western study of Islam, he claimed, was less objective scholarship than a way of affirming European identity. In Culture and Imperialism (1993) he extended the idea, linking English, comparative literature and anthropology to the imperial project.
The backlash was fierce. Said called Lewis an Establishment Orientalist whose work edged towards propaganda; Lewis replied that Said had politicised the field and let his biases run free. The historian Nikki Keddie complained that Orientalism had become a slogan used to dismiss scholars rather than engage them. Said was also a political activist, and he died on 24 September 2003.
Source: Edward Said
