Remembering Edward Said

Edward Said was a Palestinian American literary theorist who was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He was born in Jerusalem in Palestine in the November 1, 1935, and spent his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, where he attended the British and American elite schools. Later, he left for the United States, where he earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and a doctorate in English literature from Harvard. Said then joined Columbia University in 1963, where he became a professor of English and Comparative Literature in 1991. He is best known for his Orientalism (1978), where he analyzes cultural representations and misrepresentations of Orientalism; a term he coined to refer to the Western portraying of the Middle East, Asia and North African societies "the East." He said that the Orientalist scholarships have been linking to the imperialist societies and colonial ideologies that produced a lot of political work, to serve the power-relationship. His theory is based on the knowledge of the colonial literature, literary theory, and post-structuralism. In his book, Said argues that much of the Western study of Islamic civilization meant the European political thought of self-assertion, and not for the intellectual achievement of the objective academic study of Eastern cultures, especially, when heinsiststhat the Western writing about the Middle portrayed as a condition of existential irrational and weak, and the feminization of the Other, contrasts with the West rational, strong, masculine. This binary relation derives from the European psychological need to create a difference of cultural inequality between West and East. As a continuation of his ideology,his CoveringIslam (1981) displays on how the Western media distort the image of Islam. Said analyzes the relations between theIslamic world, Arabs, east and west, France, Great Britain and the United States States. Another remarkable book is Culture and Imperialism (1993), in which he traces the connection between imperialism and culture in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, since he offers an excellent clarification for the English novels as an accomplice to the Empire. For that, Noam Chomsky said: "Edward Said helps us to understand who we are and what we must do if we are to aspire to be moral agents, not servants of power." Edward Said died in 25 September 2003, and left eternally works to his readers.

Maysa Hussein