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<text> <title> (Jun. 21, 1993) Envoy to Two Cultures:Edward Said </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Jun. 21, 1993 Sex for Sale </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> PROFILE, Page 60 Envoy to Two Cultures </hdr> <body> A scholar and humanist, Edward Said is the controversial voice of Palestine in America and an eloquent mediator between the Middle East and the West By ROBERT HUGHES Huge as American academe is, it has few public intellectuals--men or women whose views carry weight with general readers off-campus. Near the top of any list of such people is a tall, elegantly tailored, 57-year-old American of Palestinian descent who for the past 30 years has taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City: Edward Said. Said (pronounced Sigh-eed) owes his fame partly to his cultural criticism, notably his 1978 book Orientalism, a study of how ideas and images about the Arab world were contrived by Western writers and why. Now comes Culture and Imperialism (Knopf; $25). A plum pudding of a book, with excursions on such matters as Irish-nationalist poetry and the building of an opera house in Cairo for the launch of Verdi's Aida, it is the product of a culturally hypersaturated mind, moving between art and politics, showing how they do or might intermesh--but never with the coarse ideological reductiveness of argument so common in America nowadays. Said's theme is how the three big realities of empire--imperialism, "native" resistance, decolonization--helped shape, in particular, the English and French novel. Culture and Imperialism includes brilliant readings of Conrad, Kipling, Camus, Yeats and other writers. It has been extolled by such critics as Camille Paglia and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and roundly damned by others, especially English ones, who fixated on Said's suggestion that an awareness of Caribbean slavery ran under the ironic tranquillity of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. In England you can dump on God, Churchill or Prince Charles, but touch Jane Austen and you're toast. So is Jane Austen why Said's office at Columbia has been vandalized, and why he has received death threats from Jews, Iraqis, Palestinian extremists and Syrians? Is his dislike of poststructuralism the reason why thousands of American Jews think of him as an enemy, the P.L.O.'s man in New York? Guess again. The fact is that Said, though by no means the only public Arab intellectual in America, is the most visible one: the voice of Palestine-in-exile. For more than 20 years he has been writing in defense of Palestinian rights and against the usurpation of Palestine territory by Jordan and Israel. His books on the subject, like The Question of Palestine (1979), are written, he says, "to bear witness to the historical experience of Palestinians." Hence the attacks. A few years ago, an article on Said ran in Commentary magazine under the defamatory headline "The Professor of Terror." In 1985 his name turned up on a "confidential" blacklist circulated by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, implying that he was one of a group of "pro-Arab propagandists" in American academe who "use their anti-Zionism merely as a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism." When an academic association exposed this document, B'nai B'rith hastily retracted it and disowned its author. But trying to defend Palestinians against Israel's massive propaganda resources in America is, by any standard, an uphill slog, and Said has no illusions about it. "My endless beef with the Palestinian leadership is that they've never grasped the importance of America as clearly and as early as the Jews," he says. "Most Palestinian leaders, like Arafat, grew up in tyrannical countries like Syria or Jordan, where there's no democracy at all. They don't understand the institutions of civil society, and that's the most important thing!" Said is not, in fact, a Muslim, but an Anglican. He was born in Jerusalem in 1935, the son of Arab Christians; his father, a wealthy merchant, fled to Cairo in 1947. English church, English education. In Cairo he went to Victoria College, "the Eton of the Middle East"--an anomaly, as Said remembers it, in an Egypt seething with anti-British feeling. Willy-nilly, this training ground for the colonial elite made him a child of Empire, giving him "a wonderful, very tough, English public-school education--ceaseless work." Its teachers were all English, extras from Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, "nostalgic for home and free to cane the little wogs under their tutelage. There was general denigration of Arab society and the Arab world. The place to be was England. What mattered was English culture and English ideas." At 15, fractious young Edward was expelled for "rowdyness," whereupon his father, who held dual Palestinian-U.S. citizenship, sent him to a boarding school in Massachusetts--"a tremendous dislocation for me, but academically very easy, after what I'd come from." At 18 Said became an American citizen. He went to Princeton for a year, studying literature, music and moral philosophy. Then he transferred to Harvard, where, after five years, he got a doctorate in English literature. Looking back, Said thinks, the odd thing about his student years was that "I never attached myself to a mentor, never at all. It's my perverse streak--I'm a natural autodidact." This liking for the self-taught is at the heart of Said's attitude toward work. He thinks the narrowness of students' reference is "one of the great generational dividers," and dislikes the current academic obsession with "professionalism," which basically means finding and keeping your knowledge slot in an overpopulated field. This, he complains, is apt to turn lively undergraduates into timid graduate students "afraid of stepping outside the consensus." Professionalism, as understood in American academe today, "means you learn all the current rules of how to say things. I think that's one of the reasons why intellectual life in America is so stunted. It's a colossal bore. I'm much happier being a shameless amateur, in the original sense of loving things and doing them because you're curious about them, not because you have to." Said's amateur passion, his violon d'Ingres, is music. He is an accomplished pianist; in April he gave duet recitals in New York and Washington with the Lebanese pianist Diana Takieddine. For some years he wrote music criticism for The Nation, and in 1991 he published a collection of his essays, Musical Elaborations. Today, afflicted by leukemia and acutely aware of the shortness of life, he is thinking of writing "a memoir of my pre-political life, which ended in 1967. What a strange world I grew up in!--a vanished world now. It's very hard even to find traces of it. I can let memory play all the tricks it wants. I want that, actually. Then maybe I'll write some fiction." His writing and teaching have always ranged widely. Their base--laid long ago at Harvard--is the tradition of German philology, exemplified in America by the emigre scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), that explores the modes and levels of representation in Western writing. "Representation"--how we see other cultures, how we depict them in our own through imagination and stereotype--is the core of Said's work, especially of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. But Said despises what he calls "the minority mentality" on American campuses. "My books are one long protest against it. The status of victim is not a passive blanket that you pull over yourself. You can always do something. Anyway, there's no such thing as a pure unmediated culture, any more than there's a pure unmediated self. All people, all cultures, are hybrid. I'm against essentialism. I'm against provincial nationalism. Yet people still insist on getting it wrong; they make the most absurd constructions on my work. It's not about saying imperialism was bad--you don't need a book to tell you that." Not the least absurd is the idea that Said's criticism aims to downgrade the classics by unmasking some of their authors' social or political assumptions. "How can you not believe in quality? I can't stand that line, it's so stupid." Politics--and the haunting, obsessive questions of Arab identity--entered Said's life long after music and literature. His effort to put them together started after the 1967 war with the seizure of the West Bank. "Many of my friends who had studied in America began to be drawn back, and I began to be involved in the re-emergence of Palestinian nationalism." He set out to relearn classical Arabic. He got extra encouragement from his wife Mariam Cortas, the daughter of a Lebanese educator. "Mariam also grew up in the Middle East, but in an entirely Arab system." The canard that Said supports Arab terrorism goes back to the '70s, and it is supported, his critics say, by the fact that from 1977 until 1991 he was a member of the Palestine National Council, a Palestinian parliament-in-exile consisting of some 400 members worldwide, which serves as an umbrella for the P.L.O. as well as for nonmilitary and nonterrorist organizations. Never mind that Said has always urged the P.L.O. to seek the conference table, not the car bomb; or that, to the U.S. government, the P.N.C. and the P.L.O. were wholly distinct. For the Israeli right and its American supporters they were one and the same thing. Thus in 1988, at the height of the Israeli crackdown in occupied Palestine, when Secretary of State George Shultz proposed talking to Said and another Palestinian-American professor, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, to discuss his Middle East peace effort, Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vehemently objected. The meeting took place anyway. None of Said's political foes have been able to cite a single utterance by him that could be construed as anti-Semitic or as condoning either tyranny or terrorism. Hence they fall back on innuendo, smear tactics or--in the case of Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi whose recent book Cruelty and Silence, directed against Arab acquiescence in the horrors of Saddam's regime, also fiercely attacks Said--on distortions of his views. The feud between Makiya and Said has been seized on, to the pleasure of neither, by American anti-Arabists. Said, declaimed A.M. Rosenthal in the New York Times last April, is the kind of Arab intellectual who preaches to other Arabs that "the enemy is, guess--the West, not the despotisms among whom they chose not to seek tenure." Such folk, he added, are the "silent servants" of terrorism and tyranny. And such punditry is wide of the mark. Far from lending support to Middle Eastern despotisms, Said has harshly criticized them. He spoke out (while academe remained largely silent) for Salman Rushdie against the Iranian mullahs and their fatwa: "Those of us from the Moslem part of this world cannot accept the notion that democratic freedoms should be abrogated to protect Islam." He has inveighed against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez Assad in Syria. The "traditional discourse" of Arab nationalism, he wrote on the eve of the Gulf War, is "unresponsive, anomalous, even comic." The Arab media are "a disgrace," incapable of dealing with "life in the Arab world today with its terrible inequities, its self-inflicted wounds, its crushing mediocrity in science and many cultural fields." In sum, if Said is the Arab world's propagandist, it should hire a new one fast. He has always rejected the "tyranny and atavism" of Islamic fundamentalism, in the name of the secular, liberal and humane strand in Arab culture whose voices are silenced by Middle Eastern regimes and ignored in America. "People try to characterize me as a spokesman for the Arab states," says Said, "but I'm not. I've always tried to retain my independence. I've always spoken out against the leaders." He isn't optimistic about the future, on either side. He sees Americans clinging to their Arab stereotypes--the fat grasping sheik, the crazy fundamentalist bomber. Meanwhile, "most Arabs today, including cultivated ones, have no hope of any kind of cultural exchange between them and the West. The mood is so desperate. The fundamentalist movement is in a sense an act of desperation: `The West won't listen to us, so we turn away from them.' That's the most discouraging thing, to me--the wholesale condemnation of America and the West, without trying to discover that America is a very contradictory, various place." Were ever two cultures so far apart, so blinded by their own distorted images of each other? But what better subject could there be, in this insanely fractured time, for an authentic humanist like Said? </body> </article> </text>