With the death of EDWARD SAID---University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University---our collective strength to battle the desire for dominance; aggressive expansionism and naked exploitation of the Palestinians---and by extension the dispossessed---is severely diminished. The present moment needs him most as it is witness to the increasing tide of imperialism. As tanks roll up towards Baghdad or roll down the streets of Palestinian ghettoes, there is one voice less to resist them; there is one source of immense knowledge less to tell us what the facts are; there is one very keen intellect less to analyze these facts for us, to interpret the meaning of the tanks and the suicide squads. This is why our link with one great moral engagement---Palestine---has been partially severed; our forces to battle injustice are diminished.
I think of Edward Said, Noam
Chomsky and Eqbal Ahmed together because all of them are academics in the
United States and all have raised their voice against oppression. Said, like
Chomsky and Bertrand Russell, was a truly renaissance scholar. And when I think
of renaissance scholars the people who come to the mind are Erasmus and Sir
Thomas More. This is because they combine interest in many fields of
scholarship and do not confine themselves to narrow specialisation.
Moreover, they are also the
great moral philosophers. They combine great scholarship with great commitment
to some cause. In Chomsky’s case whereas his linguistics is divorced from the
political and social activism, his immense knowledge about politics is directly
related to it. In Edward Said’s case the moral sense informs both social
activism and writing. His major book, a truly groundbreaking work, is Orientalism (1978) which gives us a new
theory of literature, history and politics informed by moral commitment and
concerns about colonialism. In a nutshell, Said argues that colonialist
scholarship constructed an ‘Other’. This alienated entity, this ‘Other’, was
the ‘Orient’. Some features of this Orient were exaggerated, some suppressed
and the complexity was ignored. So what emerged was a simplistic stereotype of
the ‘Orient’ which made Western people put down, marginalize, hold in contempt
or patronize the ‘Orient! What needs to be added to this is that when Eastern
writers write about the West, they do exactly the some. Indeed, if one books at
Bernard Lewis’s book on the Muslim
Discovery of the West, one finds ‘othering’ of the most infantile and appalling
kind also.
Moreover, when the Western
scholars actually increased the knowledge about the Orient it was used to
dominate it. Knowledge is a tool of domination and it is a pity that the Arab
world---and we in Pakistan---do not have enough of it. Said said this in his
interview to David Barsamian:
---in no important Arab
University is there, for example, a department of Israeli studies, nor do
people study Hebrew.
But for me the only salvation is in fact to encounter it [the great power of Israel] head on, learn the language, as so many Israeli political scientists and sociologists and Orientalists and intelligence people spend time studying Arab society.
Why shouldn’t we study them?
It is a way of getting to know your neighbour, your enemy, if that’s what it
is, and it’s a way of breaking out of the prison which suits the Israelis
perfectly to have Arabs in, whether Palestinians or others (Culture and Resistance 2003, p. 19).
Said is the first important thinker to trace out the linkages between literature and politics. His major insight is to bring to the surface the undetected, subtle and yet highly significant links between art and power.
The other aspect of his achievement, social activism, is
expressed in his consistent opposition to Israeli Zionist policies in Palestine
and the high handed interventions of the United States. In one of his books Peace and Its Discontents (1995) he
argues that the ‘Oslo accord has helped the Israelis gain recognition,
legitimacy, acceptance from the Arabs, without in effect conceding sovereignty
over the Arab land, including annexed East Jerusalem, captured illegally by
war’ (p. xxxi).
In the interviews by David Barsamian, Culture and Resistance (2003) he talks
of the various positions he has taken. As always, he has championed unpopular
causes because, as he always points out, even liberals in the USA keep quiet
about Palestine. His office was burnt; he received death threats; he was called
a Nazi; he was marginalized from mainstream media. But his students listened to
him in teach-ins. His books were sold all over the world. He was in demand as a
lecturer---In short, he made Palestine a living presence in the world.
And yet if you read his biography Out of place: A Memoir (1999), written in the certain knowledge of
his impending death, it does not talk of Palestine except in passing. It does
not talk of his intellectual work---not at all. It does not talk of Edward Said
whom we all know from the books, the articles, lectures, T.V shows etc. No!
This book talks of a little Arab Christian boy whose parents, Palestinian Arab
Christians, were exiles in their own Arab world. He talks about his dominating,
demanding father and his mother who demands much more from him than he can
offer. The little boy is a failure in his own eyes; his parents’ eyes; his
school teachers’ eyes. He is underconfident; shrinking; shy; withdrawing;
uncommitted. The boy becomes an young man and studies in the most prestigious
American universities---Princeton and Harvard---and yet there is almost nothing
of these universities there. That is the memoir. It is a strange
document---almost a confessional statement of unresolved psychiatric problems
one would give to one’s psychiatrist. And this is what Edward Said left, and
left knowingly, to the world. Does he mean to say that with such self-doubts;
such soul-searching; such lack of confidence; such lack of courage---even with
all these disadvantages one can transform oneself if one believes in a cause?
The cause is an epiphany---Greek term for an encounter with a deity---which
brings out the best in a person.
This may be so but I am sure one needs certain innate
qualities of personality and the chance to give one’s best. Whether the
‘qualities’ can be made or improved---I don’t know! Whether the chance can be
provided? Yes, to some extent---by creating that space where, without fear or
favour, one can speak one’s mind. Edward Said had this space. It was called
Columbia University---this is what the Arab world, and Pakistan, needs. If we
want pay true homage to Edward Said we must have intellectual Spaces like
Columbia University---places where dissent and knowledge create that magic personality
which comes once in a while. We must remember that moral courage, like cowardice,
is not only innate; they are also constructed. Laws which ensure freedom from fear;
spaces like universities create courage. If we create such spaces the Edward
Saids of Pakistan will live amongst us and become our conscience. If not, we
will become monsters and pygmies with no conscience.