Edward W Said - The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966 - 2006

Humanism is the onlyI would go so far as sayingthe final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

EDWARD W. SAID , Humanism and Democratic Criticism

M y life with Edward Said, a period of almost three and a half decades, flashed before me as I thumbed through the contents of this new edition. I was immediately reminded of the time when he asked me whether I had read Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness. Edward and I had recently met, and I told him that the only novel of Conrads I had read was LordJim, but he insisted I read Conrads masterpiece. Eventually I did, while I was pregnant with our first son, Wadie. At the time, I was enrolled in Edwards Modern British Literature undergraduate course at Columbia University. The other students did not know that I was pregnant, nor did they know I was Edwards wife. But shortly before the semester came to a close, our first son, Wadie, was born. We were a young family with an intellectual vitality of our own, sustained by Edwards boundless energy and endless knowledge. I felt fortunate to be surrounded by the ideas, discussions, and colleagues who were a vital element in our daily life as a family.

I also remember when, a few months after we married, Edward received a contract from a publisher to write a book. At the time, I had assumed that he would write on the British satirist Jonathan Swift, a writer whom he greatly admired. But to my surprise, Edward chose a completely different subject. That book was Beginnings: Intention and Method. Najla, our daughter, was born a few days before the manuscript went to press, and Edward dedicated Beginnings to the three of us, his family. While I helped Edward prepare the manuscript, Beginnings was also, in a way, a new beginning for Edward, launching his innovations in literary theory and cultural criticism.

Soon after the publication of Beginnings, Edward and Noam Chomsky began discussing coauthoring a book on the Middle East, but the demands on their time did not permit it. The discussions with Noam, however, indirectly led Edward to embark on Orientalism, which he researched and began writing while a fellow at Stanford Universitys Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. As his research assistant, I spent my days at the Stanford University Library browsing the stacks and looking through all the wonderful books. By the fall of 1976, he had written enough material on the book to deliver the Gauss Seminars at Princeton University, based on Orientalism. The audiences reaction was explosive. Edward was criticized, challenged, and, at times, harshly rebuked. But he always looked back on the experience of those seminars as a test that he had passed and one, he added, from which he had learned a lot.

Even that experience could not have prepared us for the public reception of Orientalism, which frankly came as a complete shock. Edward was amazed at the vast number of reviews of the book from across all the disciplines. Reviewers seemed either to celebrate Orientalism or loathe its very existence, with nothing in between. As if overnight, Edward became a world-renowned public intellectual.

Orientalism was deeply connected to Edwards experience of exile as a Palestinian living in the United States. His political engagement with Palestine had been largely shaped by the 1967 War, which we both witnessed separately in New York. Observing Israels shocking defeat of the Palestinians deeply affected us, and it prompted Edward to travel to Jordan, where, before the days of Black September in 1970, he met with many of those directly involved in the liberation struggle. In the United States, he became a critical Palestinian voice in a culture where Palestinians were either invisible or stereotyped as terrorists. Edward worked tirelessly for Palestine, translating and even writing parts of Yasser Arafats speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974. Out of these experiences ultimately came The Question of Palestine, Edwards thoroughly researched and urgent book on the tragic encounter Palestinians have had with Zionism. The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, and later that year the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis soon had everyone talking about Islam. Edwards next project became clear; Covering Islam, which critically examined Western media portrayals of Islam and Muslims, was published in 1981.

How to represent the experience of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation became the subject of After the Last Sky