In his Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said suggests that "as an intellectual I present my concerns before an audience or constituency. But this is not just a matter of how I articulate them, but also of what I myself, as someone who is trying to advance the cause of freedom and justice, also represent. I say or write these things because after much reflection they are what I believe, and I also want to persuade others of this view"(1). This is an important statement of the identification between the "self", its concerns, the discourse emanating from its intellectual activities, and the role it aspires to play in the world. Said goes on to emphasise this vital ingredient: "There is therefore this quite complicated mix between the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my experience, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice"(2). It is therefore essential for any understanding of Said s intellectual legacy, his appeal for the Arabic culture, his cultural project, and its impact on the Arabic culture to be keenly aware of this "quite complicated mix". The unique mix that went into the making of this remarkable individual appealed, for many reasons and on many levels, to Arab intellectuals and enabled them to take pride in interacting with his cultural project. It is also the reason for Said s wider appeal to the intellectuals in the previously colonised countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
As an Arab Western intellectual, Edward Said is heir to, or a product of, the complex and often painful process of the Arabs interaction, or rather fascination, with the West. For many Arab intellectuals, Said is an Arab embodiment of the main object of desire of the whole Arabic culture, the West. Hence it is safe to totally embrace him without running the risk of being accused of betraying one s identity or alienation from one s culture. If the individual is a product of his/ her culture, it is not fair to claim that Said is a product of the Arabic culture which has been burdened for decades with defeat, tyranny, and schizophrenia and at the same time struggling to liberate itself from their shackles. He is the product of the best strand of the rational, liberal humanitarian western culture,(3) and particularly that of its most powerful languages, the hegemonic English language, and to a lesser extent, the French and German ones. This is so, not only because he did not write a single text in Arabic, despite his admirable effort to regain his Arabic language and his joy in speaking it in his endeavour to recapture his national identity(4). But also because as we shall see, his cultural formation took place in the context of the English language education, from Victoria College in Alexandria to the Ivy League Universities of the United States. Naturally, his intellectual project is a product of this highly rational strand of the Western culture. When Ferial Ghazoul, one of Said s students, planned a special issue of her journal, Alif: Journal for Comparative Poetics,(5) on Said along the interesting strand of intellectual influences and connections which illuminates Said s project, it was revealing that there was no single Arab intellectual connection. It was easy to trace Said s interaction with ideas from Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukacs, Frantz Fanon, Erich Auerbach, Maurice Merleau Ponty and other Western intellectuals, but it is hard to find a single Arab intellectual of their calibre whose ideas or discourse played a role in his project. This is in no way a denial of the role played by Arabic culture in Western renaissance, or the impact of its flourishing Andalusia on European literature and thought. In fact Said endeavoured to remind the West of its indebtedness to earlier Arabic culture, and to disseminate some of its modern achievements. Indeed, in his work one find many references to Al Hallaj, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Khaldun, Jamal al Din al Afghani, George Antonius, Jurji Zaydan and a number of his Arab contemporaries. Yet it is hard to identify any significant intellectual connection with any of them, apart from the impact of his fellow Palestinian, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, which is more political and personal. It is safe to say that there is little significant Arab contribution to Said s intellectual project. Yet, as this essay elaborates, Said made significant contributions to both Arab causes, such as Palestine, freedom and justice and the Arab intellectual scene.
It is true that he became, and particularly after revisiting his Palestinian identity following the 1967 war, an eloquent voice of dissent in his Western culture, and this enhanced the Arab intellectuals identification with him and his appeal in the Arabic culture. But one should not forget that tolerating, if not celebrating, difference and dissent is an integral part of liberal rational western practice,(6) and is relatively alien to Arabic public life with its conforming and co opting practices, where the common intellectual struggles to gain the blessings of those in power and aspire to be subservient to them, from the time of the old Sultans to that of contemporary despots and subaltern dictators. Even more, Arabic culture, particularly in its recent history witnessed the tidal wave of intellectuals using their connections with the state to crush and discredit their fellow intellectual opponents. This lamentable situation enhanced the allure of Said in Arabic culture as a dissenting intellectual who "speaks truth to power" rather than subjugating truth to the service of those in power. In this respect, Said is perhaps the best product so far of the Arab interaction with the west.
Arab Western Interaction
This interaction has a long history,(7) but its modern phase, from which Said emerges, goes back to the turn of the nineteenth century with the famous French Expedition to Egypt in 1798. This brief encounter with the West had a seismic cultural impact on the Arabs, which shook them out of their insular and regressive existence and catapulted them into the modern world.(8) Countries, as well as individuals, responded with an ambitious programme of modernisation, while others recoiled from the shock by a return to the traditional past. The initial success of those who selected the path of modernity in the first half of the nineteenth century led to the wide acceptance of this trajectory by countries and individuals alike. The Arab world at the time was keen to catch up with the West, particularly Europe, and modelled its modern project on it. Although the last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the colonialisation of many Arab countries,(9) this did not dampen the will to progress or the open acceptance of many western values, institutions, and ideas.
The traditionalists equated modernisation with Westernisation, perceiving it from the outset as a process of undermining Islam and its Arabic culture, and launched an assiduous attack against it. Yet the first few decades of the twentieth century were marked by an enthusiastic embrace of Western models in most aspects of Arab social and cultural life. The Arabs embraced western, mainly European, educational and legal systems, Western dress, European codes of conduct, and developed the necessary infrastructure for cultural transition which resulted in a marked change in the intellectual climate and the genesis of modern Arabic narrative genres, such as the novel, the short story and drama.(10) They also went to the West in large numbers, particularly the Levantines, and Edward s father, Wadi Said (1895 1971), was one of them. He left Palestine for the United States in 1911 and lived there until 1920.(11) During his time in the United States, two Arabic journals edited by Levantine emigrants were published,(12) an indication of a sizeable Arab community in America. Like Wadi Said, many Arabs from the Lebanon, Syria and Palestine went to the Americas and embraced its social and cultural life. But the most telling aspect of Said s father s experience in the United States is his total adoption of the West. He changed his name to William, became an American citizen, enrolled in the US army and participated in the First World War in France in 1918.
Although Wadi Said returned to Palestine in 1920 at the insistence of his mother, and married in the traditional Arab way in 1932, his adoption of the Western model governed the rest of his life. This was clearly reflected in the naming of his children,(13) and their education. He was an Arab Christian of a Protestant denomination, and his sense of being a minority, even within the small Christian Arab community, led him to take certain pride in his American citizenship, which all his children enjoyed, but not his wife. This was the time when United States was the paragon of freedom and modernity, and the champion of oppressed nations and minorities, a far cry from the America of the present time.
By the time he left the United States one of the most influential, innovative literary movements in modern Arabic culture had been formed in New York. In 1920 a group of Levantine intellectuals established al Rabitah al Qalamiyyah (The Pen Association) headed by Jibran Khalil Jibran (1883 1931).(14) The establishment of the Pen Association as the first Mahjar movement was a Levintine development homologous to its Egyptian counterpart, the Diwan group.(15) It is not a mere coincidence, that while Jibran and his colleagues some of whom have been publishing cultural periodicals such as al Sa ih (1912 24?) and al Funun (1913 18) for years before al Diwan Group emerged in Cairo in the same year. Both groups reflected the culmination of a long process of development from neo classical verve to romantic sensibility, which started at the beginning of the century with Jibran s Ara is al Muruj (Prides of the Meadows, 1906) and Al Arwah al Mutamarridah (Rebellious Spirits, 1908), and the highly sentimental works of Mustafa Lutfi al Manfaluti (1872 1924).(16) Both, the Pen association and the Diwan Group were responding to genuine cultural needs and developing their work and ideas in isolation of each other, yet both were strongly embracing Western romantic notions and adapting them to Arabic cultural conditions. When Abbas Mahmud al Aqqad (1889 1964), the leading figure of the Diwan, discovered the work of the Pen Association he strongly identified with it and perceived it as a vindication of his Group s ideas which were meeting strong resistance in Egypt. He republished some of the work of members of the Pen Association in Egypt, and collected the critical articles of Mikha il Nu aimah in what became the latter s first book, Al Ghurbal (The Sieve, 1923).
In his introduction to Nu aimah s book, Al Aqqad states clearly that the Pen Association developed parallel ideas to theirs, but with more flare, sophistication and maturity. This is an implicit confession that first hand contact with the West was highly appreciated at the time and viewed with great admiration. The Diwan Group was equally driven by cultural and patriotic agendas which limited its impact to Egypt; while the Pen Association was literary inspired and had first hand contact with many of the major works of European romanticism. This broadened its appeal and made it highly influential in many Arab countries, from Iraq to Tunisia. However, the two movements consolidated the hold of Western romantic ideas, innovative literary enterprise, and rational thought on the vibrant field of modern Arabic literature. By the beginning of the following decade their combined endeavour triumphed with the formation of the Apollo Group in 1932, the first pan Arab Romantic Movement.(17) Thus the actions and attitudes of Edward Said s father were representative of a wide range of activities and endeavours taking place at the time in the Arab world. The adoption of Western models was all encompassing affecting the way of life as much as cultural modes of expression and thought. This was particularly pronounced among the Christian minorities of the Arab world who felt a stronger affinity with the West than their Muslim counterparts.(18) This is in no way a indictment of the Christian minorities, but a statement of fact that owes a great deal to their socio cultural background, which enabled them to play, particularly in Greater Syria, a significant role in the struggle against European occupation, and the formation of Arab nationalism. They also played a momentous role in changing and modernising the Arabic language and mobilised the Arabic grammatical laws of derivations to absorb new words and concepts into the system without upsetting it; thereby, in a sense, made classical Arabic conducive to the demands and rubrics of modernity.
A Western Formation
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, but despite his American citizenship, he was not brought up in America, whose Arab community was priming with Romantic liberalism. He spent his childhood and the early years of his cultural and educational formation in colonial Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s, with intermittent visits to and vacations in Palestine.(19) At the time Egypt, and particularly Cairo, was a turbulent place full of contradictions and teeming with social and political movements which spanned the whole political spectrum, from the Muslim Brothers to the Communists. But Edward was neither aware of nor touched by any of this, for he was raised in the protective cocoon of the liberal, cosmopolitan Egypt of foreigners and minorities. He enjoyed the comforts of a well to do middle class family and the benefits of solid private education. In the mid 1940s as a young boy he was shocked when Mr. Pilley, the British secretary of the Gezira Club, called him an Arab. "Arabs aren t allowed here, and you re an Arab.(20)" Yet there was what Said later called "a fatalistic compact between my father and myself about our necessarily inferior status. He knew about it, I discovered it publicly for the first time face to face with Pilley, yet neither of us saw it as worth a struggle of any kind, and that realisation shames me still.(21)"
The events of the following years saw the Palestinian Nakbah, the loss of his home, and the uprooting of many of his relatives, but the young boy, Edward Said, was protected from its tragedy by his father s wealth and his American citizenship. He went first to an English school in 1941, then to Cairo School for American Children in 1946, then to the Victoria College in 1949, the school of the children of the colonial elite.(22) In 1951 he went to the United States, and after a year in Mont Hermon, he enrolled at Princeton. He then went to Harvard for his postgraduate studies, which culminated in his doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad in 1963.(23) This education and cultural formation established his strong foundation in Western literary culture and methodology, and ironically enhanced his appeal to Arab culture and intellectuals two decades later. But it also took him away from the "inferior status" of the "Arab". His father warned him, upon his arrival in America, "in the United States one should stay away from the Arabs. They will never do anything for you and they will pull you down They ll always be a hindrance. They neither keep what is good about Arab culture, nor show any solidarity with each other.(24)" And it seems that Edward headed his advice: he neglected his Arabic language and culture, specialised in English and comparative literature, and pursued a scholarly career in American academia.
Yet the nagging sense of being "out of place" continued to haunt him, and the accumulation of "hurt" and "injustice"(25) finally caught up with him and drove him back to his culture. One can now read Said s career retrospectively and see how his acute sense of being an "exile" and "out of place" motivated his existential choice of Conrad as a topic of research for his doctorate, a writer who, like himself, experienced displacement both geographically and linguistically. This was a writer with whom Said shared the perspective of a decentred self, capable of seeing the culture of the "other" from within and from outside at the same time. Conrad was also a writer who raised issues of identity, uprooted and broken histories, subjectivity and the dynamic tension between cultures, powers and people.
Said s sense of exile and "hurt" also drove him, at an early age of his career, to break new grounds. The 1950s and 1960s were dominated in American Academia by the all "American" approach of New Criticism, which a young scholar would have normally accepted without questioning. In a move highly unusual for a young scholar writing his dissertation, Said rejected the methodology of the New Criticism, finding its treatment of the text as a verbal icon autonomous from its context, and divorced from the author s history identity and experience inadequate to unlock the hidden meanings of Conrad s work. Instead of their textual analysis and linguistic investigation of the text, Said opted for the more sophisticated approach that reveals the underlying nature of consciousness at work in the text under discussion and articulates its essence. He selected the phenomenological approach of the Geneva School,(26) which eschewed formalist or objective methods in favour of a phenomenological study of the work that aim to constitute an author s world view from his literary language. It sees in the literary work the essence and structure of human consciousness as shaped by the author s history, identity, vision and experience and read in it the sedimentation of all of these in a trans subjective mode of understanding which does not divorce the text from its author or history. Said found its sensitive hermeneutic strategy, which probes the work for signals that disclose the structure of consciousness, more conducive to the underlying sense of displacement and exile at work in Conrad s texts. The Geneva School s concept that the author s projection of imaginative worlds are the key to his existential identity requires that the critic identifies recurring patterns of space time experience prevalent in the author s work. This Said found attractive in articulating the underlying structure of consciousness that attracted him to Conrad.
New Beginnings
Using such a new approach in the American academy with its unique blend of existential and phenomenological criticism, Said established his academic credentials from an early age. His cumulative work(27) in the nine years between the publication of his doctorate and the appearance of his accomplished book Beginnings(28) established him as an erudite scholar with unique methodology, profound insight and sensitive critical judgement. These were the years of the rise of literary theory in America, and instead of following in the footsteps of the Russian formalists, French structuralists or deconstructionalists (whose theories he had nonetheless deeply absorbed) as many of his contemporaries did,(29) he developed a different and unique theoretical genealogy. He neither rooted his project in the semiotic structuralist genealogy that led eventually to deconstruction as the Yale critics, nor in the Marxist literary theory as Fredric Jameson and others. He was already ahead of his American colleagues since his early rejection of New Criticism and selection of the Geneva School approach for his doctorate. It was the publication of his Beginnings: Intentions and Method in 1975 that established his reputation as a unique scholar who developed his own path.
In his intransitive Beginning he rooted his work in the overlooked work of Giambattista Vico, whose The New Science (1725) questions the universality of knowledge and the certitude of accepted convictions and establishes the historicity of these concepts. He then combined this concept of knowledge with the archaeology of Michel Foucault after subjecting it to a rigorous Nietzshean questioning of its origin and purpose. From this he posits his unique theory of "the novel as beginning intention." By the time he wrote Orientalism, he had modified this theoretical approach by providing it with a geographical dimension through the work of another Italian intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, who gave the national identity and geographical locations their important role in our perception of culture and thought. The use of Gramsci s work and the dialogue with his ideas coincided with Said s discovery of the work of Frankfurt School and particularly that of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. In his later work, Said became much closer to Adorno, his ideas and critical method than to any other thinker. This is not only because Said shares Adorno s passion for music and admires his great writing on it, but also because of the breadth, variety and individuality of his thinking, and his ability to blend the creative, critical and philosophical elements in a lucid and impossibly simple style. The same can be said about Said. More importantly, if Adorno has offered us through his "negative dialectics" the theory of the untheorisable in philosophy and music, Said has achieved a similar theorisation in the literary field. Like Adorno, Said grew to emphasise the importance of individual honesty and passion, rejecting orthodoxy, and defending the virtue of "nicht mitmachen," not playing along or compromising in the name of practical expediency. Those who knew Said would recognise the Adorno like uncompromising stance of his later years, particularly in his politics.
Orientalism s New Path
The disastrous defeat of 1967 and the encounter with Ibrahim Abu Lughod(30) played a decisive role in Edward Said s intellectual re orientation towards his Arab identity and culture. Abu Lughod recruited Said to the AAUG (The Association of Arab American University Graduates) and asked him to write his first text on an Arab topic.(31) Said wrote an article for the special issue edited by Abu Lughod of the Arab World, the Arab League s monthly published in New York. There was some speculation on whether this was the seed from which the project of Orientalism germinated, since Said raised in this article the question of representation, or rather misrepresentation of a whole culture. In his homage to Abu Lughod, Said settled this issue when he wrote: "I used the occasion to look at the image of the Arabs in the media, popular literature and cultural representations going back to the middle ages. This was the origin of my book Orientalism, which I dedicated to Janet and Ibrahim."(32) But from that time on, Said s interest in and engagement with the Arab world in general, and the Palestinian question in particular, never ceased.
It would, however, be simplistic to reduce Said s re engagement with the Arab world to this, for it was a lengthy process, as he indicates in Out of Place. It continued to simmer under the surface of his many interests for a long time until the demands of a questioning Arab like Abu Lughod then the cataclysmic events of the wars provided its conduit for development. Said was a highly driven individual who was keen to excel and consolidate his academic achievement through major theoretical work,(33) before taking off in a new direction. It was not until 1978 that the book that made his international reputation, Orientalism, was published. A book he wrote without interruption in less than a year,, it is doubtful that Orientalism would have been written without the ramifications of the 1967 and 1973 wars and Said s greater involvement in the Palestinian politics. It is also important to note that between these two wars, Said spent a year in Beirut, finishing Beginnings and perfecting his Arabic.(34) But it was no doubt, the coverage of these two wars in the Western media and the synergy between the words and actions of the occidental establishment, that motivated his grand project by directing his attention to the wide gulf between the reality of the orient and its representation in Western discourse. This led him to provide us with the most compelling narrative of European humanism s complicity in the colonial project of subjugating and misrepresenting the orient that exists. Orientalism married the theoretical acuteness and acumen of Beginnings with the inventory of hurt and injustice suffered by the orient. This provided the book s powerful theoretical postulations with a strong moral underpinning that not only made it relevant to a large number of wronged cultures but also appealed to the humanistic drive at the heart of liberal western culture itself.(35)
While Said had gained recognition in the field of English literature and modern languages before the publication of Orientalism, he had made little or no impact outside these circles, and was entirely unknown in the Arab world. The breadth of this groundbreaking book s coverage and the originality of its thesis quickly made it an international success. It soon became the cornerstone of a larger project of deconstructing colonial discourses and practices as they impact on culture and politics, on values and perception, on literature and identity. With his two subsequent books, The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), Said went on to provide his theory of Orientalism with case studies vindicating its methodology and opening the flood gates of many post colonial case studies that continued to flow ever since. The wide debate triggered by this project has continued to grow ever since with the flourishing disciplines of post colonial criticism, cultural criticism, and new historicism.
Orientalism was the book that introduced Said to the Arab world. Unfortunately, it was badly translated into Arabic;(36) as Rawda Ashour, a professor of English literature and an accomplished novelist and critic, writes in her able study of Said s work. "The Arabic translation of Orientalism is confused, ambiguous and suffers from many problems, the most obvious of which is the transformation of a lucid and enjoyable book into a difficult text laden with incomprehensible terminology.(37)" Aside from obfuscating his brilliant argument, the translation had a negative impact on his legacy and perception or misperception of his work in Arabic culture and among its intellectuals. This was Said s first book to be translated into Arabic and the thick verbosity, pretentious terminology and confused vocabulary of the translation associated Said with a type of sterile and problematic language that was the hallmark of the coterie of Adonis,(38) a clique that clung to Said for some time and complicated the way he was perceived in Arab intellectual circles for years, until he successfully shock it off.(39)
Thanks to the opacity of the translation, many ardent opponents of modernity and Westernisation in the Arab world, the Islamicists and traditionalists, who by virtue of their ideology would logically be the natural enemies of Said s cultural and ideological stance, exuberantly embraced the book. They perceived it as a new rendering of their traditional attack on the orientalists, articulating in the language of their adversaries their grievance and sense of injustice and hurt vis à vis the West. It is ironic that they saw a text so radically at odds with their own approach as an extension of their attack on the work of the orientalists an attack which in their case had been historically motivated by religious convictions and a belief that the orientalists aim had been to undermine Islam and distort its image.(40) Thus, instead of seeing Said s seminal work as exposing (and undermining) the basis and motivation of the orientalist discourse,(41) they considered it the latest in a series of diatribes against the misrepresentation of Islam in European discourse. In the process, the crux of Said s most persuasive argument concerning the dialectics of knowledge and power, the complicity of discourse in the dynamics of hegemony and imperialism, and the fabrication of an inferior orient as justification for its subjugation and conquest were completely overlooked. Overlooked, too, was the book s insight into how the orient was used by Europe as an image of an absolute "Other", inferior and exotic. More importantly, Said s implicit call for the orient to represent itself and purge its culture of the traces and sedimentation of the orientalist legacy were lost.(42)
Though the message of Said s Orientalism was distorted in Arabic intellectual circles and indeed among the wider public through the traditionalists widely disseminated misrepresentation of his main thesis as a kind of identity politics the book did spark a wider debate on the issues it addressed. A meaningful discussion on its insights was conducted by those who had read the book in its original English or French translation, and their number grew with time.(43) In addition, some of the Western writings on Orientalism s theoretical insights were translated into Arabic in the 1990s in a way that redressed the balance. Thanks to these efforts, which eventually corrected the earlier misunderstanding of Orientalism, and as a result of the dissemination of Said s later writings and growing engagement with the Arab politics, his impact on the Arab intellectual scene could be compared with that of the early pioneers of engagement with Western discourse in Arabic culture; towering figures like Rifa ah Rafi al Tahtawi (1801 73), Ahmad Faris al Shidyaq (1804 87), and Khayr al Din al Tunisi (1810 90) whose contributions radically changed the terms of cultural interaction with western discourse. For his trajectory from a deep concern with Western culture to an equally profound interest in Arabic issues gave many intellectuals great hope and impetus.
Said s Travelling Theories
Whatever the damage in Arab intellectual circles caused by the misrepresentation of Orientalism, it was soon overcome by Said s erudition, range, élan, and prolific productivity. The publication in 1983 of The World, the Text and the Critic, which contains some of his most astute theoretical essays, coincided with the launch in Cairo of Fusul,(44) the first journal in Arabic dedicated to literary criticism and literary theory. Fusul soon became a pan Arab cultural forum for theory and critical debates, and within a few years it had energised the Arabic critical scene and invigorated its voracious quest for theoretical investigation. It changed the nature of Arabic critical discourse and conducted a far reaching dialogue with many strands of modern critical theory, particularly structuralism, Russian formalism, Marxism, deconstruction, reception theory and psychoanalytic interpretation of literature. It is true that in the early years of Fusul the names of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson were encountered far more frequently than Said s. Fusul also translated works by many of these literary theorists in its pages, but nothing by Said.(45)
This regrettable situation was soon corrected with the re launch in Ramallah, in the early 1990s, of the Palestinian quarterly, Al Karmal, which translated a number of his important critical essays.(46) Even in Fusul, with the maturation of contemporary Arabic critical discourse, Said and his ideas gained more currency as did those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze. This shift can be explained by the ephemeral appeal of structuralism, its predecessors and offshoots, and their ability to lend themselves to an imitative reproduction of their tenets. Arabic criticism had to go through this less demanding phase of theorisation, borrowing and adaptation and what Said called, the "remorseless indignation of orthodoxy and the expression of tired advocacy"(47) before grappling with the critical theories of the latter group with their more subtle and complex critical insights.
The publication of Said s famous articles, "Travelling Theory"(48) and "Travelling Theory Reconsidered,"(49) dealt a sharp blow to the prevailing tone of Arab critics, who had long contented themselves with simply replicating Western theory, or, at best applying its tenets to Arabic texts. The encounter with Said s "travelling theory" encouraged many to shake off their dependency on, even enslavement to, these theories. More specifically, Said in these two articles argues against literary theory turning into a cultural dogma which, appropriated by schools or institutions, quickly acquires the status of authority, erecting walls around itself and becoming the closed domain of specialists and acolytes. He argues instead for a more attractive alternative, a theory of permanent dissonance, of deconsecration, decentralisation, and demystification, a Gramscian counter hegemony that rejects enslavement to dominant systems. According to Said, any study of the way in which theories travel reveals the inevitability of change and transformation at every junction of the journey and with regard to every aspect of the theory techniques of dissemination, communication and interpretation. And for Said, with his belief in noncoercive human community, this is as it should be. Theory, as he states in the second essay, "is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile [in] a geographical dispersion of which the theoretical motor is capable [in a] movement [that] suggests the possibility of different locales, sites, situations for theory without facile universalism or over general totalizing."(50)
Just as in Orientalism, Said called upon the orient to represent itself and speak out, here he is arguing for the critic s liberation from the dogma of theory. He observed that in "the Arab world there is this tendentious reliance on and even blind replication of unitary theories without a clear effort to change these theories to something relevant to the Arab culture."(51) Many Arab critics, such as Ceza Qasim (Egypt), Muhammad Barrada (Morocco), Ferial Ghazoul (Iraq), Yumna al Id (Lebanon), Subhi Hadidi (Syria), and Fakhri Salih (Jordan), to mention but a few, embraced his call and spoke out of the need to liberate Arabic critical discourse from the grip of Western theory and the drudgery of imitation. It is no longer viable to import Western literary theory or apply it blindly to Arabic literary phenomena or texts. Nonetheless, it is easier to reject the tyranny of universalism, as Said has shown us the way, than actually to make a lasting contribution to its modification and change. Thus, though many Arab critics have understood Said s lesson that "no one today is purely one thing"(52) , the task of dealing with literary theory with creativity, originality and sophistication and in a way that takes into account cultural plurality is still in its infancy in Arabic critical discourse.
Many Arab critics also understood Said s aversion to linear subsuming histories and a unitary sense of identity, as well as his preference for a contrapuntal approach sensitive enough to deal with the complexity of historical experience. "All cultures", he wrote, "are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic. This, I believe is as true of the contemporary United States as it is of the modern Arab world."(53) Admittedly, it is more difficult to practice contrapuntal criticism without the advantage of Said s multicultural erudition and talent for musical elaborations. Nonetheless, precisely because of Said s approach, Arab critics are now more confident in using critical notions without being bound by them. The growing sophistication of Arabic critical discourse is in part due to Said s contribution, and this greater sophistication in turn contributes to a wider appreciation of his work.
Cultural Criticism
It is natural therefore that Said s next major work, Culture and Imperialism (1993), which saw the culmination of his critical project of deconstructing the Western narrative, received considerable attention in Arab intellectual circles long before it was translated into Arabic. It was extensively reviewed in the Arabic press, quoted in academic papers, and inspired several academic studies. In a recent paper, Radwa Ashur(54) enumerates several academic projects inspired by Said s approach undertaken by young researchers in Egyptian universities. A recent example of the book s impact, was the fact that the January 2004 conference organised by the Egyptian Society of Literary Criticism took as its main theme al Naqd al Thaqafi, "cultural criticism."(55) Al Naqd al Tahqafi is becoming increasingly the Arabic term used for the critical approach associated with the work of Said. Increasingly, Arab intellectuals have shown a marked preference for Said s cultural criticism over the "post colonial" strand of his work, Naqd ma Ba d al Isti mar, preferred in the West. There are several reasons for this, the most obvious being deep rooted Arab sense of cultural confidence deriving from an often exaggerated pride in its classical legacy. This is buttressed by the tendency to understate colonialism s impact on Arabic culture. Unlike many colonised countries which adopted "the language of the coloniser" in their writing, Arabic culture has a sustained literary history and a pride in its language and cultural integrity was not eroded by colonialism. With the notable exception of Algeria, the bulk of the cultural output, even during the period of colonialism was written in Arabic and was marked by the quest for national identity and resistance to colonialism.
The work of those Arab intellectuals who did write in French or English, even those that achieve prominence in the West, tended to be dismissed by the Arab intellectual mainstream as a marginal contribution to the language in which they are written, rather than seen as Arab cultural products. In addition, the early fascination with Western genres, which led someone like, Naguib Mahfouz for example, to aspire in the 1940s to emulate Sir Walter Scott s historical novels, and in the 1950s the European realistic novel, has dwindled and receded. By the 1970s and 1980s, Mahfouz was conducting a creative intertextual dialogue in his novels with archetypal Arabic narrative form for example the folk epic, as in his 1977 Malhamat al Harafish,(56) The Arabian Nights, as in his 1982 novel Layali Alf Layla,(57) and the dictionaries of the notables, as in his fascinating 1987 novel Hadith al Sabah wa l Masa (58). This shift to a creative dialogue with Arabic narrative forms and genres enriched Arabic literature and here one needs to mention that Said played an important role in promoting the mature examples of Arabic narrative. He used his enormous symbolic capital and influential position in the cultural field to lend credence to many works of Arabic literature. He introduced to the wider literary audience the work of numerous writers, such as Naguib Mahfuz, Ahdaf Souief, Gamal al Ghitani (Egypt), Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid al Barghouthi (Palestine), Al Tayyib Salih (Sudan), Halim Barakt (Syria) and Ilyas Khoury (Lebanon), to mention but a few.
By a pleasant concurrence, the shift in Arabic literature to a creative dialogue with older Arabic narrative forms and genres coincided with the introduction of Said s critical contribution. This led to the embrace by the Arab intelligentsia of his cultural criticism, seen as a more comprehensive approach to culture and criticism in so far as it brings together history, geography, the notion of knowledge and power and critical insight. Thus cultural criticism in contrast to post colonial strand of Said s thought does not confine itself to issues of representation, but goes beyond them to a more comprehensive reading of the text. The Western response to Said s project, on the other hand, is generally motivated by reading the colonised work written in the main languages of the colonisers, namely English and French.
Arab critical discourse is increasingly embracing Said s contribution not only for its perceptive critical insights but also for its effort to liberate Arab criticism from the drudgery of living on the crumbs of Western theory. In particular, Arab critics felt that the absence of an original all encompassing theory of Arab culture is responsible for the adoption of imported theories, making their own methodology derivative and ultimately trapping them in a methodological nexus against which they rebelled. Said s theory, which they saw as a genuine Arab contribution launched into a world of creativity and equality, thereby offering a way out of the methodological dependency on the West. Though well aware that Said s contribution is deeply rooted in Western thought and methodology and indeed is created in a Western language they put the emphasis on the subversive power of its rebellion against the reigning orthodoxy and methods in the field. Because of Said s towering accomplishment, the trajectory of his intellectual output, and his increasing involvement in Arab cultural and political affairs, he served as a role model for many Arab intellectuals for the last decade of his life. This was vital for the Arab culture at a time in which it suffered from low ebb culturally and politically, and was often subjected to a barrage of Western Abuse. He was often treated as a paragon of wisdom whose words were taken as inspired and insightful revelation, something he disliked. The role of the intellectual who speaks truth to power is Said s most appealing and lasting contribution to the Arabic cultural scene.
Speaking Truth to Power
Traditionally, ever since Abu Zarr al Ghifari refused to be co opted by the Ummayad Caliphs in the 8th century, Arabic culture has revered the oppositional intellectual who articulates the unsaid and speaks truth to power. But since the death of the critic, dramatist and short story writer Yusuf Idris (1927 91), and the co option and silencing of most Arab intellectuals, the Arabic cultural scene has lacked the voice of a strong and effective oppositional intellectual with the stature, recognised achievements, and moral authority needed to speak truth to the corrupt subaltern powers that dominate today s cultural and political scene in the current Arab world. It is perhaps this role that is Said s most appealing and lasting contribution to the Arabic cultural scene.
Said describe the prevailing situation in the Arab world of the last decades as follows:
"In the Arab world, the brave, if airy and sometimes destructive, pan Arab nationalism of Nasser period which abated during the 1970s has been replaced with a set of local and regional creeds, most of them administered harshly by unpopular, uninspired minority regimes. They are now threatened by a whole array of Islamic movements. There have remained, however, a secular cultural opposition in each Arab country; the most gifted writers, artists, political commentators, intellectuals are generally a part of it, although they constitute a minority many of whom have been hounded into silence or exile."(59)
Said was well aware that this sorry state of affair was the product of the unholy alliance between the oil rich states, the United States and its increasing involvement in the Middle East, and the corrupt political regimes. He was equally aware of the impact of this alliance on what secular intellectuals represent and of the lasting damage inflicted specifically on their secular project and more generally on the wider political and cultural world. The secular cultural opposition suffered the most from the deterioration of the political and cultural expediency. This lamentable situation, in which intellectual have been co opted to an extraordinary degree, undermined the legitimacy of the intelligentsia in the eyes of its constituency. Most Arab "intellectuals" were stuck in the habit of mind which Said calls avoidance "that characteristic turning away from difficult and principles position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to be too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation of being balanced, objective, moderate."(60) These considerations take an even cruder form in the Arab world, where the issue is not seeming controversial but of being persecuted, harassed, imprisoned or barred from working or publishing.
In this context tragic developments took place in the region at a stifling speed and with dizzying effects on the readers and intellectuals alike. At a time of accelerating political deterioration in the Arab world, with Arab regimes loosing their legitimacy in the eyes of their people, the gulf between the structure of people s feelings regarding national, social and political issues and the actions and discourse of their governments had never been wider in modern time. The secular intellectuals found themselves pressed between the hammer of the illegitimate regimes (which co opted or silenced them) and anvil of the rising Islamic fundamentalism (which marginalise their role and deprive them of their natural constituency). Both readers and secular intellectuals sought a figurehead, or rather a rallying point of a fearless vocal intellectual. There was need for an intellectual who speaks for what Franz Fanon, a vital source of Said s thought, calls "the wretched of the earth", the oppressed and the marginalised, but also for an ethical approach to politics based on the principles of real justice that makes life human and possible in the face of pernicious moral vacuum. Who else, but a towering figure like Said, could put down the barons of American media with devastating elegance and panache, and defend Arabic culture.
The Nahda brought freedom from the religious texts, and a surreptitiously introduced new secularism into what Arabs said and wrote. Thus contemporary complaints by New York Times idiot savant Thomas Friedman and tired old Orientalists like Bernard Lewis who keep repeating the formula that Islam (and the Arabs) need a Reformation have no basis at all, since their knowledge of the language is so superficial and their use of it non existent as they show no acquaintance whatever with actual Arabic usage where the traces of reformation in thought and practice are everywhere to be found.(61)
In his last decade Said played such a role, not only by his distinguished intellectual project that probed the central relationships between history, narrative and politics, but also by his active involvement in the Palestinian question. The intellectual, for Said
"is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being faceless professional, a component member of a class just going about her/ his business. The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for a public. .. whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, rather that to produce them, to be someone who cannot easily be co opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug."(62)
This could serve almost a description of Said himself and his role in the Arab intellectual scene at the time. His blistering attack on the institutional expediency that spews Orwellian newspeak to disguise the truth and stifle morality and justice was among his prized achievements in this respect. In the deafening silence and intellectual vacuum which the din of official media and the stifling jargon of conformity, the Arab public was hungry for such a vocal and authoritative voice. This coincided with Said s active presence on the cultural scene, with his regular columns and articles in Arabic in Al Hayah(63) and in English in Al Ahram Weekly. Although most of these articles were political journalism, rather than scholarship, by virtue of their stance they were on a par with his literary essays that continued to appear in Arabic translation. Said s literary and cultural project certainly undermined the bastion of regressive traditional power, and helped to detonate a wider cultural debate. Here was an Arab intellectual, independent from these various powers both economically and politically, and representing in the public consciousness achievement and international fame, who was willing to be mobilised on behalf of their ongoing struggle and embattled community.
Said was without doubt a vociferous public critic of these powers. But to play this role, that the Arab public demanded of him, Said was keen to demonstrate to that public the importance of reconciling "one s identity and the actualities of one s own culture, society, and history to the reality of other identities, cultures, peoples. This can never be done simply by asserting one s preference for what is already one s own: tub thumping about the glories of our culture or the triumphs of our history is not worthy of the intellectual s energy, especially not today when so many societies are comprised of different races and backgrounds as to resist any reductive formulas.(64)" In other words, he felt strongly about the need to re educate the public in order to bring it along with him. It may not be possible to measure the success of his effort, but his message is being filtered through the writing of many Arab intellectuals, and particularly critics. In his recent books, the Egyptian critic, Jabir Asfur, develops new language and critical idiom drawn from that of Said s.(65) In addition, two major Arabic periodicals dedicated their recent issues to his work.(66)
Although Said s project is passionately persuasive, it defies closure and certainty. The fact that his work is purely secular in its orientation increases its appeal both to intellectuals and the wider public in the Arab world. What enlarges his constituency even more is the trajectory of his intellectual orientation outlined in the first part of this essay. This provided his work with legitimacy and authenticity that enhances its relevant to the contemporary scene in Arabic Culture. Indeed this intellectual trajectory in some ways parallels that of Arab culture in the modern period. Like Arabic culture, it started with unquestioning acceptance of the western model and subjected itself to the process of re education in its schools. But under the impact of cumulative "hurt" and "injustice" suffered at the hands of the west, began to rethink the unconditionality of this acceptance. The parallel ends there, of course, for in the case of the Arab world, this questioning led some to reject the West totally, and more generally was accompanied by regression and despondency. To this situation Said brought a breeze of fresh air with his secular criticism, penetrating insight and courage.
I am sure that in the years to come his impact on the Arabic culture, as elsewhere, will grow and flourish. For the changes he has already engendered cannot, or may I say should not, be easily reversed. This prediction is based on both the growing interest in his work in the Arab world since his departure and on one of Said s basic ideas that "all criticism is postulated and performed on the assumption that it is to have a future."(67) And the future of his work is clearly demonstrable through the growing interest in his accomplishments in the Arab world not only in the field of his politics and moral stance, but also in his most difficult theoretical texts. In his introduction to Siad s posthumously published, On Late Style, Michael Wood argues that Said;s premature departure took place in his middle rather than late period. Yet he poses the interesting question:
Is this to say that Said himself didn t have a late style? He certainly had the politics and morality he associated with late style, a devotion to the truth of unrecinciled relations, and in this sense his own work joins the company of the essays, poems, novels, and operas he writes about. But lateness is not all, any more than ripeness is, and Said found the same politics and morality, the same passions, in other places and persons; indeed they are his own earlier politics and morality and passion. Lateness elucidates and dramatizes (68), as he says in another context, makes it hard for us to go on without our delusions."(69)
But one can confidently say, in conclusion, that Said s work, not only in literary and musical criticism, where he made a lasting contribution to these fields, but also on politics, morality and the intellectual will make it hard for Arabic culture and Arab intellectuals to go on with their delusions.
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(1)ـ Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London, Vintage Books, 1994), p. 9
(2)ـ Ibid.
(3)ـ The emphasis here is on one strand, since Said himself devoted a large part of his intellectual project to fight the other negative strands in the Western culture.
(4)ـ For a detailed account of his profound relationship with the Arabic Language, see his elequant essay, Living in Arabic , published posthumously in Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, 12 - 18 February 2004.
(5)ـ See the special issue on Said of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, The American University in Cairo, No. 25, 2005.
(6)ـ The West is also full of bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
(7)ـ This interaction started in the seventh century and reached its peak in the ninth and tenth centuries. This was a period of expansion of Arabic culture in the Islamic world and great cultural development and awareness of the importance and acquisition of knowledge, regardless of its origin. It started with the translation of Greek, Syriac, Aramaic and Hellenic works into Arabic first during the Umayyad period then the Abbasid s. In 830, Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), was established as an institution wholly devoted to translation of mostly western works. This is the phase of great acculturation, translation of the Greek canon and assimilation of many of its tenets into an ever expanding Arabic culture, in control of its project, for the source of the knowledge it was acquiring was absent and not a player in the culture or the process of interaction. The mirror image of this phase took place after the Crusades, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, when the European adopted and translated, particularly into Latin, Arabic knowledge and works in large numbers. The interaction in these two phases was marked by peaceful interchange in which the self was dealing with the knowledge of an absent other, and set its own pace and agenda. But this is not the case in the third phase of the Arabs interaction with the West, which started with the nineteenth century, and is marked by tension, conflict, colonialism and power-politics. This phase has been aptly studied by Said in his classic work, Orientalism.
(8)ـ Although I devoted a book-length study, (The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 1993), to demonstrate the complexity of the process of change and modernity and how its seeds germinated long before the turn of the nineteenth century, the French Expedition is used here as a significant milestone on the road of this lengthy process.
(9)ـ Apart from Algeria which was colonised in 1830 most of the Arab countries fell under the yoke of colonialism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
(10)ـ For a detailed study of the process of cultural transition see my book, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature (London, 1993).
(11)ـ For a detailed account of Said s father s time in the United States read Chapter 1 of Edward W. Said, Out of Place (1999).
(12)ـ Those were al-Sa ih edited by Abd al-Masih Hadad (1881-1950) and al-Funun edited by his fellow Palestinian Nasib Aridah (1887-1946).
(13)ـ In addition to Edward, whose Western name was a burden as he tells us in the opening pages of Out of Place, there was Gerald, Rose-Mary, Jane, Joyce and Grace.
(14)ـ Other members of the group were Mikha il Nu aimah (1889-1978), Nasib Aridah (1887-1946), Rashid Ayyub (1881-1941), Abd al-Masih Hadad (1881-1950) and Amin al-Rihani (1867-1940).
(15)ـ The main members of this group are Abbas Mahmud al- Aqqad, Ibrahim Abd al-Qadir al-Mazin (1890-1949) and Abd al-Rahman Shukri (1886- 1958) who was the most poetically gifted of the three. Shukri also was the one who introduced his group to the major works of English romanticism after his return from two years in England.
(16)ـ Many scholars credit the poet Mutran Khalil Mutran (1972-1949), his poetry, and his journal, Al-Majallah al-Misriyyah (1900) with the role of the precursor of romanticism.
(17)ـ This group was formed in Cairo but had members from most Arab countries. It disseminated many Western romantic ideas and called for the freedom of poetry from traditional and archaic molds.
(18)ـ The rejection of Western ideas and resistance to them was mostly coined in Islamic terminology and hence remained alien to Christians in the Arab world.
(19)ـ Three years after his birth, another Mahjar group of Levantine intellectuals, al- Usbah al-Andalusiyyah (the Andalusian League), was formed in 1932 in San Paulo. The famous members of the group were Iilya Abu-Madi (1890-1957), Rashid Salim al-Khuri (1887-1984), Ilyas Farahat (1893-1977), Fawzi al-Ma luf (1899-194?) and Michel Ma ruf.
(20)ـ Edward Said, Out of Place, p. 44.
(21)ـ Ibid, p. 45.
(22)ـ For more details on Said s reflections on his life in Egypt, see, What Cairo means to me, Interview conducted in 1994 by Mona Anis in Cairo, and Edward Said: Optimism of the will By Mona Anis. in Al-Ahram Weekly website.
(23)ـ His doctoral thesis was later published as his first book, Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, 1966.
(24)ـ Edward Said, Out of Place, p. 229.
(25)ـ There are several instances in which he felt hurt and injustice , see Ibid, p.248.
(26)ـ The major critics of this School are Marcel Raymond, Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard. Their work employs the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the perceptive phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. They developed the early phenomenological criticism of Roman Ingarden into a complex approach which probes the texts for key signs and recurring metaphors to elaborate the structure of its consciousness
(27)ـ Many of these early papers appeared many years later in his Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (2001).
(28)ـ Edward Said, Beginnings: Intentions and Method (1975).
(29)ـ The European literary theory was introduced to the American academia by Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) who was a member of the Russian Formalist School, the Prague Linguistic Circle before emigrating to America and working in its academy in the 1940s. But his brand of formalism and semiotic analysis was not influential in the academy until the early 1960 with the rise of French structuralism and the emergence of the Yale critics particularly Paul De Man and Michael Riffatere who made structuralism and particularly deconstruction fashionable in America for some time.
(30)ـ See Said s account of this encounter and the impact of his friendship with Abu-Lughod on his life and thought in Edward Said s homage to Abu-Lughod in, My Guru: the death of a Palestinian Intellectual , London Review of Books, Vol. 23, No: 24, 13 December 2001, pp. 19-20.
(31)ـ Salman Abu-Sittah relates the other side of the story and how Abu-Lughod told him of his first encounter with Edward Said in the 1950s at Princeton University. He introduced himself to him as a Palestinian, and Edward jumped off his chair saying me too. At the heights of the anti-Arab media hype in America in 1968 and upon the establishment of the AAUG, Abu-Lughod remembered his first brief encounter with Said, and asked him to write about the Arab character in English literature, and how it was misrepresented and distorted. When he received the article, which was Said s first academic text on an Arabic topic, he was very impressed with its depth and erudition. See Al-Kutub-Wijhat Nazar, No: 61, February 2004, p. 80.
(32)ـ Edward Said, My Guru: the death of a Palestinian Intellectual , London Review of Books, Vol. 23, No: 24, 13 December 2001, pp. 19.
(33)ـ Particularly in Beginnings: Intentions and Method (1975) and in most of the studies which appeared later in his The World, the Text and the Critic (1983).
(34)ـ In his interview with Suhbi Hadidi, Edward Said refers to the role of his return to his Palestinian identity, his sabbatical in Beirut, his study of Arabic language in 1972 and the 1973 war as the sources of the inspiration of this book. See Subhi Hadidi, ed. Ta qibat ala al-Istishraq (Postscripts on Orientalism, 1996).
(35)ـ This is not the place for a detailed study of this influential book and its impact on the international academic scene, but I hope someone else is covering this in this issue.
(36)ـ The book was translated into Arabic by Kamal Abu-Deeb as Al-Istishraq: al-Ma rifah, al-Sultah, al-Insha and published in Beirut, Dar al-Ilm Lil-Malayin, in 1981, then many years later it was translated by Muhammad Inani and published in Cairo, Al-Hay ah al- Ammah lil-Kitab, 2002.
(37)ـ Radwa Ashour, Hikayat Edward , Al-Kutub Wijhat Nazar, No: 85, Cairo, November 2003, p. 14.
(38)ـ Adonis, is a Syrian Alawite poet and critic who played, with several others, a significant role in modernising Arabic poetry. But in order to perpetuate his poetic achievement he devoted his critical effort to justify his poetic approach and encouraged younger poets to follow in his footsteps. He launched a journal, Mawaqif, to create a supporting cultural trend. In the 1980s, with the rise of oil-rich countries and their ascending role in Arab media, he published a laudatory book on Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahab, the regressive Saudi theologue, positing him as one of the pillars of Arab modernity. Adonis was promptly appointed cultural advisor to Al-Hayah, an Arabic daily owned by the regressive and oil-rich Saudis, continued to write a weekly column for it, and helped to recruit many writer to contribute to its cultural pages, including Said.
(39)ـ The association with Adonis s clique resulted in Adonis introducing one of his disciples to Said who translated Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. With Said s wider involvement in the Arab cultural field and his awareness of the political and cultural ramifications of his association with Adonis s coteries he realised that this has harmed his work, and decided to distance himself from this clique and find better translator into Arabic for his subsequent work.
(40)ـ This is the case in Husain al-Harrawi, al-Mustashriqun wa-l-Islam (Orientalists and Islam, 1936), Bint al-Shati , Turathuna al-Thaqafi bayn Aydi al-Mustashriqin (Our Cultural Legacy in the Hands of Orientalists, 1957), Najib al- Aqiqi, al-Mustashriqun (The Orientalists, 1965) and Malik Ibn Nabiyy, Intaj al-Mustashriqin wa-Araruh fo rhe Fikr al-Islami al-Hadith (The Work of the Orientalists and its Impact on Modern Islamic Thought, 1969).
(41)ـ See for example Abd al-Rahman Badawi, Mawsu at al-Mustashriqin (Encyclopedia of The Orientalists, 1984), Salim Yafut, Hafriyyat al-Istishraq (Archaeology of Orientalism1989), Salim Humaish, al-Istishraq fi Ufuq Insidadih (Orientalism in Its Closed Horizon, 1991).
(42)ـ The main exception in this regard is Sadik Jalal al- Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse , Khamsin, no. 8, (London, 1981).
(43)ـ See for example Salim Yafut, Hafriyyat al-Istishraq (Archaeology of Orientalism1989), Salim Humaish, al-Istishraq fi Ufuq Insidadih ( Orientalism in Its Closed Horizon, 1991), Falih Abd al-Jabbar, Al-Istishraq wa-l-Islam (Orientalism and Islam, 1991).
(44)ـ Fusul: Majallat al-Naqd al-Adabi (Fusul: A Journal of Literary Criticism) is a quarterly which appeared in Cairo in 1982 and soon became a pan-Arab cultural forum for theory and critical debates.
(45)ـ Later on, and soon after his departure, Fusul corrected this and devoted an issue to the work of Edward Said, following in the footsteps of other serious cultural periodicals, such as Alif: A Journal of Comparative Poetics, Cairo, No. 25, 2005 and Al-Kutub: Wijhat Nazar. , No: 85, Cairo, November 2003.
(46)ـ See for example Al-Karmal, issues No: 48, 49, 68, 72-73 which all have translated essays by Said. It is thanks to the Syrian critic, Subhi Hadidi, that many of Said s serious texts and ideas were properly introduced to the Arab reader.
(47)ـ Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London, Granta Books, 2000), p.452.
(48)ـ Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge. Mass, Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 226-47.
(49)ـ Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, pp. 436-52.
(50)ـ Ibid, p. 452.
(51)ـ Suhbi Hadidi, Ta qibat ala al-Istishraq, p. 142.
(52)ـ Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 407.
(53)ـ Ibid, p. xxix.
(54)ـ A paper submitted to a conference on History and the Text organised by the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of Kairoun University, Tunisia, 2003.
(55)ـ The conference took place in Cairo in January 2004 with participant from universities in several Arab countries.
(56)ـ See Naguib Mahfouz s novel, Malhamat al-Harafish (Harafish, 1977).
(57)ـ See Naguib Mahfouz s novel, Layali Alf Layla (Arabian Nights and Days, 1982) .
(58)ـ As is the case in his fascinating novel, Hadith al-Sabah wa- l-Masa (Talk of Morning and Evening, 1987) which has not yet been translated into English.
(59)ـ Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. 86.
(60)ـ Ibid, p. 74.
(61)ـ Edward Said,, Living in Arabic , Al-Ahram Weekly.This text is also available in the following link: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/677/cu15.htm
(62)ـ Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. 9.
(63)ـ Towards the last years of his life, Said was clearly aware of the equivocal position of publishing in Al-Hayah, and the mixed messages involved in writing for a Saudi owned paper. It was Adonis who convinced Edward Said to write for Al-Hayah in the first place. But he increasingly felt uncomfortable. Said expressed this uncomfortable position to me personally in a conversation during a long walk in Warwick one morning. He justified it by his need to communicate with the wider Arab audience, which his articles in this newspaper reached. His political stance was unequivocal, but its very publication in this newspaper often led to misunderstanding and ambiguity. It is difficult to assess the full impact of these articles on the Arab reader without further study.
(64)ـ Ibid, p. 69.
(65)ـ See his books, Nazariyyat Mu asirah (Contemporary Theories, 1998) in which he deals directly with Said s many works, and Afaq al- Asr (Horizons of our Time, 1997).
(66)ـ See Al-Adab monthly in Beirut, December 2003 issue, which is entitled Edward Said; His Impact on the World and on US , and Al-Karmal, issue No: 78, winter 2004.
(67)ـ Stathis Gourgouris, The Late Style of Edward Said ,Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Cairo, 25, 2005, p168.
(68)ـ Edward Said, Musical Elaborations, p. 21
(69)ـ Michael Wood, introduction, to Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, (London, Boomsbury, 2006), p. xvii.