The Death of Edward Said -- A tribute

I had a written a tongue n cheek article for a local daily for this week but due to the untimely death of Edward Said, the submission has been delayed.

Edward Said’s death is a great loss to the world. The perfect way of paraphrasing the previous sentence would be by plagiarizing the title of Frantz Fanon’s legendary book: Edward Said’s death is a great loss to the, ‘Wretched of the Earth’. Palestinians have lost a spokesperson, Columbia University has lost a Professor, the music world has lost an accomplished pianist and I have lost a mentor.

In the last three decades nobody from the East has so profoundly influenced the Western academia in cerebral terms as this frail and gentle man from Palestine. He was a comparative literature Professor at Columbia University and to put it succinctly, he was in the business of ‘changing the way people think’. Edward Said was the one who first came up with the idea that literature should be treated as a document of history. The idea was rejected by the sniffy and snobby western academics who wanted to retain literature in the vague world of culture but the idea was so strong that it not only shook but redefined the very basics of western learning. This literary idea was so revolutionary that it had a domino effect and consequently left nothing untouched in the western academia: anthropology, sociology, history, science, almost every field of learning had to be revamped and redefined.

In America Edward Said’s book,’ Culture and Imperialism’ is part of the reading list for P.H.D students of English, European literature and most of the liberal art disciplines. In the book he makes reference to Jane Austin’s book Mansfield Park in which the head of the family Mr. Bertram who for his financial well being is dependant on his estates in the Caribbean. If someone has read Mansfield Park, he/she will know that in the entire book there is only a single sentence that mentions the estate while the entire Victorian novel is based on events unfolding in England but Edward Said took this single sentence, used it as a historical document and built an entire indictment against British imperialism. He highlighted how all the characters, especially the heroine, Fanny Price whose entire upright no-sex, Christian morality would have been impossible without the exploitation of slave labor on agricultural estates far away from England. He highlighted how the entire serenity of Mansfield Park or western wealth, western sense of certitude and morals would be non-existent without imperialism, without the exploitation of third world countries. The latest Hollywood rendition of Mansfield Park also highlights this aspect. Oops, one can almost draw a parallel to the Pakistani concept of absentee Land-lords but I will shut-up here as friends and family already dub me as a traitor to my creed but the point has been made: Edward Said was in the business of changing the way we think.

One cannot mention the name of Edward Said without mentioning the name of Joseph Conrad in conjunction, especially Conrad’s novella, ‘The heart of Darkness’. Not a single book of Edward Said is without a reference to Joseph Conrad’s,’ Heart of Darkness’; any tribute to Edward Said is incomplete without a reference to Joseph Conrad whose book, ’Heart of Darkness’ has been immortalized by Edward Said for times to come. Edward Said’s P.H.D thesis as a student was also based on Joseph Conrad and Conrad was the foundation on which Edward Said built all his intellectual weaponry.

Although Edward Said is known in the world not for his academic accomplishments but for the stand he took for the Palestinians. Nobody has defended the Palestinians right of self-determination more comprehensively and eloquently than Edward Said. Even a week or two before his death, Edward Said was writing and submitting articles to journals and dailies world wide. He had a tireless and uncanny devotion to the people of the world suffering under the yoke of oppression. Paradoxically and shamefully his books are banned in Saudi Arabia and Palestinian territories while they are freely available in Israel.

Food for thought is also the fact that his book, ‘Culture and Imperialism’ was dedicated to a Pakistani; the first words that the reader reads when he opens up the book is, ‘Iqbal Ahmed’. A man who influenced the entire world was himself influenced by a Pakistani; a Pakistani little known in his own country.

The three decades that he spent in Columbia; he took on and criticized all the powerful lobbies and interest groups of the west. Many powerful lobbies in the US tried to censure him and have him fired from his post but they all failed.
At the death of Edward Said what as a society we need to do is ask ourselves that if there was an Edward Said in Pakistan who would have spoken against the two most powerful lobbies in the country: Mullahs and the Military, what would have become of him? He would have either been hung for blasphemy or for treachery. We really need to ask ourselves this one question: how many Pakistani Edward Said’s as a society have we killed?