The News Circle Advisory Board is pleased to select Professor Edward Said as the "Arab-American of the Year 2000" for his scholarly and political contributions to society. Edward Said is the professor, the author of 17 books, the cultural critic, the scholar of opera, the pianist, the lecturer, the Middle East analyst, the relentless critic of the Israeli policy of domination, the foremost spokesman and advocate of the Palestinian and Arab causes who called the Oslo agreement "an instrument of Palestinian surrender." His office was set on fire in 1985. He is the man with many dimensions able to combine a rigorous intellectual life and political presence.

Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, educated in secondary schools there and in Cairo, then obtained his B.A. from Princeton, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He has been teaching at Columbia University since 1963, and is now University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He is the author of 17 books which have been translated into 26 languages. Among them are Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1980), The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), After the Last Sky (1986), Musical Elaborations (1991), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994) and, most recently, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996), Entre Guerre et Paix (1997), as well as editing Henry James’ Complete Stories 1884-1891 for the Library of America. He writes a monthly columns for Al-Hayat (Lebanon) and Al-Ahram (Egypt), is a regular contributor to newspapers in France, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Spain, the Arab World, Pakistan, India, Japan, and is music critic of The Nation magazine. 

He serves on the editorial board of 20 journals, and is the general editor of a book series   Convergences   at Harvard University Press. He has lectured at over 200 universities in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, and in 1997 delivered the inaugural set of Empson Lectures at Cambridge University, as well as a series of lectures at the College de France at the invitation of Professor Pierre Bourdieu. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, a member of the PEN Executive Board, he is at present president of the Modern Language Association. He has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, most recently doctorates from the University of Chicago, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Birzeit University, the University of Michigan, and in March 1998, the Sultan Owais Prize for general cultural achievement; in 1999, doctorates from the American University in Cairo and the National University of Ireland. 

He has been visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins and Toronto. In late May 1998, he participated in a new production of Beethoven Fidelio for which he wrote a new English text replacing all the spoken dialogue with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In August 1999, with Daniel Barenboim and Yo-Yo Ma, he conducted a workshop for young Arab and Israeli musicians in Weimar, Germany. Between 1977 and 1991, he was a member of the Palestine National Council. His memoir Out of Place has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf (USA) and Granta (UK), and in November 1999 he was awarded the first Spinoza Prize given in the Netherlands. In April 2000 he will be publishing The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (Pantheon) and Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard University Press).

 Recipient of the ADC Alex Odeh

Humanitarian Award. 

By WILLIAM HANNOSH 

Professor Edward Said recently was honored by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in a special banquet held at the Irvine Airport Hilton, Irvine, California. Professor Said was presented with the Alex Odeh Humanitarian Award, perhaps the highest award the ADC gives out. Helena Odeh, daughter of the late Alex Odeh, was on hand to present the recognition to Professor Said. Christina Shay, mayor of Irvine, was also present to welcome the community and to thank them for choosing her city to host the event. 

In his acceptance speech, Professor Said first addressed Michel Shehadeh, an ADC representative and political activist whom the U.S. government has sought to deport from this country because of his past peaceful political activism and beliefs. Professor Said thanked Shehadeh for prevailing for such a long time so that "we could meet together."

 Professor Said then thanked the ADC and the audience for recognizing him with this prestigious award. "I’m so grateful for this award. Alex Odeh, really is a martyr who gave the ultimate for a cause in which we all deeply believe," he said. With that, the professor seemed to give a winding illustration of the Arab community’s history in the United States. 

Before he addressed the audience of 500 people, a video was shown titled, At a Glance, in which the professor is shown narrating and describing the state of affairs in the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In it he says, "We hear about the peace process, but who’s giving these people peace?" The video especially focuses on the daily destruction of Arabs’ lives and the deliberate uprooting of their homes. 

The academic and Columbia University English professor stressed the important achievements that ADC has helped to bring about, and he thanked that organization for all it has done. He spoke about the disgrace and turmoil that Arab-Americans faced after the 1967 Six Day War. During the 1960s, "it was enough to be Arab-American, to be considered a criminal," he said. He then went on to speak about the rejuvenation and hope that was created during the 1970s and 1980s when the ADC was first on the move. He said, "We used to be silent. We used to be ugly. Now we’re neither one nor the other, thanks to the efforts of ADC. " The professor seemed to have the fondest memories of the creation of the Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), which he described as the organization that "established a voice for peace in the Middle East." 

Professor Said’s address was generally warm and hopeful for the future of Arab-Americans. He congratulated the ADC for its strides in recent publicity and media campaigns. He especially mentioned the ADC’s action against Israeli vendors of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, its movement against Burger King, and its mobilized reaction against the clothing company, Benetton. But in addition to this, he stressed three main issues in which Arab-Americans could become more politically active. They included the sanctions against the people of Iraq, the lop-sided American foreign policy against Palestine, and the unjustified bombing of Sudan, which has resulted in the loss of that country’s main pharmaceutical factory.

On Iraq, Professor Said referred to daily American air attacks as "a war going on which is totally unreported by the (American) press." He referred to the embargo against Iraq as unjustified and "uniquely cruel." 

On Palestine, the professor referred to American foreign policy there as a "short-sighted and stupid peace policy aimed to serve Clinton’s purposes." Professor Said lambasted President Yassir Arafat by saying, "he has no limit to the amount of hands he wants to kiss. . . there aren’t enough hands and other parts of the body he wants to kiss just to serve his white master." In regards to Palestine, Professor Said urged those in the audience to speak up against the American foreign policy used there. 

The late Alex Odeh, an activist and West Coast regional director/political organizer for the ADC, was killed 15 years ago by a bomb blast that went off at his ADC office in Orange County, California. His killers are believed to have taken refuge somewhere in Israel. To this day, no one has been prosecuted for that murder. The Humanitarian Award was dedicated to Alex Odeh’s memory. There is also a sculpted image of Alex Odeh in front of the Santa Ana Public Library, in Santa Ana, California.

 **  William Hannosh is The News Circle assistant editor.  Currently he is studying  law  in San Diego, Southern California.

 

What’s It All About 

By MONA ANIS 

 Mona Anis previews Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir, a reconstruction of the writer’s childhood and youth, and an indictment of the moral capriciousness of power, a capriciousness that, ironically, even now continues to besmirch Said’s reputation.In a review of Edward Said’s book The Politics of Dispossession which appeared in the Sunday Times of 17 July, 1994, British writer and journalist Paul Johnson, a former editor of the left-of-centre British weekly The New Statesman, made an amazingly frank confession: Edward Said "irritated" him, he said. Why? "At the risk of being accused by Said of orientalism if not racism," he wrote, "I would say that he [Said] exhibits the most prominent characteristic of the Arab intellectual: he is unreasonable." Perhaps by invoking such a ‘risk’ Johnson hoped to deflect attention from the real content of his statement. For, in his sweeping generalization about Arab intellectuals and their supposed ‘unreason’, Johnson is merely reiterating a tired clichè   the same kind of banal prejudice that one finds, in fact, in the work of the European orientalists that Said set out to criticize two decades ago in Orientalism. 

People like Duncan Macdonald, for example, who complained of "the oriental’s liability to be stampeded by a single idea and blinded to everything else", or like Hamilton Gibb, who imagined that he had identified an "aversion" among Muslims "from the thought-process of rationalism". Indeed, later in the same article Johnson treated his readers to a classic expression of the kind of old-fashioned colonialism once championed by such pillars of Empire as Lord Cromer. What in Cromer is the expression of a distasteful historical ideology, however, is in Johnson, merely bizarre. What other words can one find to describe comments such as "It is an axiom of the Western mode of discourse that no really good case can be sufficiently understated... 

To orientals, and for the purpose of this argument, I include Said among them, it has no appeal at all. They work on the principle that no good case   or no bad case for that matter   can be sufficiently overstated." ‘Orientalism’ aside   for this is a term that contains a mixed bag of things   Johnson’s statement is obviously racist. Apparently, Edward Said’s credentials as an academic, intellectual and polemicist, credentials to which Johnson cannot help but refer in his otherwise mean-spirited piece, cannot erase the fact that he is an ‘oriental’, and this makes him either unworthy to listen to or some kind of counterfeit. None of this would matter very much were Paul Johnson, whose ideological twists and turns have confused observers, the only writer to be ‘irritated’ by Edward Said. For more than 20 years now Said has been the bite noire of any number of otherwise ill-assorted bedfellows. The main reason for this, of course, is his powerful advocacy of the Palestinian cause in the West. The real reason for Johnson’s irritation, and the irritation of those who share his views, has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘unreason’. Said, in fact, is all too reasonable as far as Johnson is concerned, and this is obvious if one considers that Said   accomplished in many fields, multilingual, at ease across intellectual disciplines   has, over the years, won many fair-minded Westerners to the cause he advocates. It is this that has angered his opponents.

 In campaigns that have run the gamut from the bizarre to the mendacious, they have for years been trying to besmirch his name. Recently, they have found a new accusation to level at Said, and this has been the object of an international press campaign. Not only is Said an irritating, over-stating oriental who at bottom condones terrorism   the line adopted by the Zionist lobby in the US for years   he is also, we are now told, an outright liar. 

This, in sum, is the drift of a long-winded article recently published in the conservative American magazine, Commentary. Entitled "My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said" and written by an Israeli scholar who claims to have spent three years researching Edward Said’s past, the article hits us with the ‘discovery’ that the house in Jerusalem in which Said was born was owned not by his father but by his father’s sister. The Commentary article was picked up by the London Daily Telegraph, which dedicated three articles to the subject   one, entitled "Said Deconstructed", written by none other than Paul Johnson’s son, Daniel Johnson. Mainstream US newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Boston Globe then joined the fray over who owned the title deed to the house that Said was born in. As Andrè Sharon, a schoolmate of Said’s at Victoria College in Cairo, wrote in a letter to the New York Times: "Such a fuss over a house! Again, with respect, you have missed the point. We are talking about extremely warm and closely-knit Middle Eastern communities."

 If the Said family house in Jerusalem was not owned by Edward Said’s father, then neither were the places in which he lived during his long stay in Cairo. For here they rented apartments in which to live, in much the same way as Said now does in New York City. Where does Edward Said belong? He is "homeless... unhoused and wanders across languages," as George Steiner once described "those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism." Steiner was quoted recently in the The Observer as saying that Said’s true home, like that of another 20th-century intellectual, Theodor Adorno, is the text. Commenting on the attacks on Edward Said, Steiner told The Observer this is "where my passport is, and this is where Edward Said’s passport is also." Steiner’s remarks must have doubly pleased Said, who used the Steiner quotation about the artist in an age of quasi-barbarism in an article written for Granta almost a decade ago, an article in which he wholeheartedly endorses the proposition that a whole genre of 20th-century literature is ‘extra-territorial’, by and about exiles and symbolizing the age of the refugee. And of Adorno, as those who know Said’s work will appreciate, the German philosopher, critic, and musicologist has always been something of a maotre spenser for Said who, in Representations of the Intellectual, writes: "Adorno was the quintessential intellectual..." 

For him life was at its most false in the aggregate   the whole is always the untrue, he once said   and this placed an even greater premium on subjectivity, on the individual’s consciousness, on what could not be regimented in the totally administered society....The intellectual does not have a story, but only a sort of a destabilizing effect; he sets off seismic shocks, he jolts people, but he can neither be explained away by his background nor his friends." Those who want to discover where Edward Said belongs should look in his books and study his writings. But so much for this latest unpleasant episode, which nevertheless will not detract from the pleasures many readers will gain from Edward Said’s latest autobiographical text, scheduled to appear soon.

 Out of Place: A Memoir, is both a frank attempt to reconstruct the past and a chronicling of the life of a young man caught between the blandishments of the powers that be and a slowly emerging but stubborn selfhood. At the beginning of the book, and especially in the first chapter dealing with childhood in Cairo and Said’s relation with his mother, there is a moving, Proustian tone. "I am still haunted," Said writes, "by the memory of the sound, at exactly the same time and place, of her voice calling me ‘Edwaad’, the word wafting through the dusk air at closing time of the Fish Garden, (a small Zamalek park with aquarium) and of myself, undecided whether to answer her or remain in hiding for just a while longer, enjoying the pleasure of being called, being wanted, the non-Edward part of myself taking luxurious respite by not answering until the silence of my being became unendurable." As the memoir progresses, and especially in the sections where he narrates his experience as a boy of 16 at the evangelical US boarding school, Mount Hermon, one is reminded more of the young Stephen Dedalus of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here Said writes "I soon discovered that I would have to be on my guard against authority and that I needed to develop some mechanism or drive not to be discouraged by what I took to be efforts to silence or deflect me from being who I was, rather than becoming who they wanted me to be. In the process, I began a lifelong struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions. Its unfairness, in my opinion, depended principally on its prerogative for changes in its bases of judgment. 

You could be perfect one day, but morally delinquent the next, even though your behavior was the same." Out of Place cannot, of course, be reduced to passages that echo this or that great work for to do so would be to do great injustice to a richly textured and variegated book. Before anything else it issues from Edward Said’s wish to write back, or counter-narrate, both as a means of recovering what for him is the true image of the past and of refuting present representations of it. Said has explained elsewhere the Palestinian’s vital need to narrate and to renarrate: "With no acceptable narrative to rely on, with no sustained permission to narrate, you feel crowded out and silenced," he writes. 

His life, as an adult, and beginning it seems from childhood, has been a long battle against constant attempts to silence him. The current volume ends before 1967: there is, then, plenty of time to be encapsulated in a second renarration. And there is little doubt that a great many readers, more generous of mind and less easily irritated than Paul Johnson, will be hoping it appears sooner rather than later. 

**Mona Anis writes for Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, Egypt.

 

Said’s Place: Destroying Place 

By NAJEEB NABIL KHOURY

Although I have never met Edward Said, he has been an integral part of my intellectual and personal life. Professor Said’s work and life have been a reaction against discourses that attempt to order the world in oversimplified, yet powerful manners. This ordering or putting in "Place" comes at a great political and humanitarian expense. 

This is an expense Prof. Said has refused to accept and so he has damaged the stereotype of marginalized professors through his admirable political activism; in fact, he has shown how all-intellectual endeavors are inherently political, destroying the "Place" of professors in the process. As much as any of Prof. Said’s writings or lectures, his mere presence and being have affected the world. Professor Said’s intellectual sophistication, candid political opinions, and articulate nature have done just as much damage to the "Place" assigned Arabs and Arab-Americans as any of his writings. Since this "Place" assigned to Arabs has often been deemed inferior, marginal, and ugly in the West, Said was one of the main forces that made me proud of my Semitic features and cultural background. Said’s sophistication and criticisms of Arab politics, however, also made me acutely aware that my pride could not come at the expense of defining myself over and against the dominant culture by claiming some sort of purity in my background, i.e., I could not escape my "Place" by putting the dominant culture in its "Place." 

Rather, Edward Said has taught me to think critically in a world of infinitesimal possibilities, metaphysical assumptions, and discursive creations. He has shown me that not feeling comfortable in your perceived role is not necessarily a liability; rather, living on the periphery or living in the interstices of our created world can give you a power and voice stronger than imaginable. For all of us who are "Out of Place," as if anyone is not, Prof. Said serves as a companion, an inspiration, and a guide.

** Najeeb Nabil Khoury is a law student at Harvard University.