Edward Said Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Edward Wadie Said was born on November 1, 1935, in Jerusalem, then under the British Mandate in Palestine, to a Christian Arab family. His father, Wadie Said, was a successful businessman who had lived in the United States and held American citizenship, and his mother, Hilda, maintained a cosmopolitan household that was Arabic and English speaking. His childhood unfolded between Jerusalem and Cairo, a dual setting that imprinted on him the sensation of being, as he later wrote, out of place. He attended St. George's School in Jerusalem and, after the family settled more permanently in Egypt, Victoria College in Cairo, a colonial-era institution whose student body included young people from across the region. In his teens, he was sent to the United States to complete secondary school at Mount Hermon in Massachusetts, an early dislocation that sharpened his awareness of language, accent, and cultural codes.

Said studied literature at Princeton University, earning his B.A. in 1957. He completed graduate work at Harvard University, receiving an M.A. in 1960 and a Ph.D. in 1964, with scholarly interests that ranged from comparative literature to philosophy and philology. He became a pianist of considerable ability during these years, a passion nurtured alongside his reading of canonical European texts, especially Joseph Conrad, whose meditations on exile and narration would remain central to Said's thinking.

Academic Career
Said joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1963, where he spent the rest of his career and eventually became University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At Columbia, he was regarded as an exacting teacher and a charismatic lecturer, moving easily between close reading and far-reaching historical analysis. He wrote early works on the novel and on the theory of beginnings, including Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) and Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). These books established his reputation as a critic able to connect literary form to intellectual and political contexts without losing sight of textual nuance. He mentored generations of scholars and worked with colleagues who reshaped humanistic study, among them figures in comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies who debated his claims, extended them, and sometimes challenged them.

Orientalism and Intellectual Influence
Said's 1978 book Orientalism became one of the most influential works of the late twentieth century in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on philology, history, and the analysis of discourse associated with Michel Foucault, he argued that the West's representations of Asia and the Middle East formed a system of knowledge bound up with power, empire, and inequality. The book showed how travelers' tales, academic studies, and works of art often stabilized a hierarchy in which the "Orient" was imagined as sensual, static, or irrational in contrast to a rational and progressive "Occident". Orientalism sparked intense debates. Supporters credited it with revealing the politics of scholarship; critics, including the historian Bernard Lewis, accused it of overgeneralization. The disputes were consequential and often personal, but they made Said a central interlocutor for scholars across disciplines. He expanded this line of inquiry in The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), and Culture and Imperialism (1993), where he elaborated how cultural narratives and imperial power were entwined.

Political Engagement and Palestine
Alongside his academic work, Said became one of the most prominent Palestinian voices in the English-speaking world. He served as an independent member of the Palestine National Council from 1977 to 1991, interacting with leaders such as Yasser Arafat and colleagues including Hanan Ashrawi during critical years of diplomacy and conflict. Said advocated consistently for human rights, secular democracy, and coexistence, and he was sharply critical of authoritarianism, whether in Arab states or in the structures of occupation. He supported early dialogues with Israelis and later opposed the terms of the Oslo Accords, arguing that they entrenched inequalities. His essays for publications such as the London Review of Books, Al-Ahram Weekly, and The Nation reached wide audiences, and he engaged public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky in efforts to broaden discussion of U.S. policy and media narratives about the Middle East. The public nature of his role brought controversy, including a 2000 incident at the Lebanese-Israeli border when he was photographed throwing a symbolic stone; he defended the act as a gesture without harm and as an expression of solidarity.

Music and Collaboration
Music was a parallel vocation. Said wrote music criticism with the same combination of erudition and moral seriousness that animated his literary essays. His book Musical Elaborations (1991) explored how listening, interpretation, and history intersect in performance. A deep friendship and collaboration with the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim became a defining part of his later life. Their conversations appeared in Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), and together they founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999, bringing together young musicians from across the Middle East and beyond to rehearse and perform in conversation rather than conflict. The orchestra embodied Said's conviction that shared practices of interpretation and discipline could model forms of civic life that politics often failed to deliver. Visual collaborators such as the photographer Jean Mohr joined him in After the Last Sky (1986), merging image and text to portray Palestinian lives with intimacy and complexity.

Memoir and Later Works
Said's memoir, Out of Place (1999), is a luminous account of childhood and formation in which family figures such as his father Wadie and his mother Hilda appear not as symbols but as vividly rendered individuals. The book tracks schools, cities, and languages that never fully cohered into a single home, a condition he came to call contrapuntal, borrowing a musical term to describe simultaneous, overlapping lines. In essays gathered in Reflections on Exile (2000) and in lectures on the responsibilities of intellectuals, he argued for a humanism attentive to difference and resistant to dogma. He returned repeatedly to Conrad and to the ethics of reading, urging students and readers to hold together aesthetic judgment and worldly awareness. Even as he confronted illness, he kept up a heavy writing schedule and corresponded widely. Friends, colleagues, and interlocutors ranged from artists to diplomats; among them were Barenboim, Ashrawi, and writers and critics who debated him in print and in person.

Personal Life
Said married Mariam C. Said, and together they made a home in New York, where they raised two children, Wadie and Najla. Their household was a site of hospitality for students, artists, and fellow exiles, a space where literature, politics, and music intertwined. The family often traveled to performances and lectures, and Mariam Said played a sustaining role in the musical initiatives that grew from the partnership with Barenboim, helping to build institutions that endured beyond Edward Said's lifetime. Said was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1991. He continued teaching, writing, and performing public service until his death on September 25, 2003, in New York City.

Legacy
Edward Said transformed how culture and power are studied and discussed. His account of Orientalism recast debates in literary studies, history, anthropology, and international relations, and his analyses of media and representation entered public discourse. He stands alongside thinkers who broadened the humanities toward questions of empire, migration, and identity, while insisting on the value of close reading and the pleasures of art. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, co-founded with Daniel Barenboim, remains a living testament to his belief in dialogue across differences. His students and colleagues at Columbia and around the world have carried forward his arguments, revised them, and sometimes rejected them, a sign of the vitality he sought. His writings on Palestine, his exchanges with figures like Yasser Arafat and Hanan Ashrawi, and his conversations with artists such as Jean Mohr and Barenboim ensured that scholarship and worldly engagement were never severed in his work. Through books, essays, and performances, he left a body of thought that invites readers to hear more than one line at once, to read contrapuntally, and to link criticism with the pursuit of justice.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Edward, under the main topics: Equality - Honesty & Integrity - War.

Other people realated to Edward: Susan Sontag (Author), Christopher Hitchens (Author)

• 1999 Out of Place: A Memoir (Book)
• 1993 Culture and Imperialism (Book)
• 1981 Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (Book)
• 1979 The Question of Palestine (Book)
• 1978 Orientalism (Book)