NEW YORK, Sept 25: Professor Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor and leading spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the United States, died on Thursday. He was 67.
Prof Said was suffering from leukemia for a few years and died at a New York hospital late Wednesday, his editor Shelley Wanger at Knopf publishing house said.
Through his writings and speeches, he became a leading voice in the Palestinian struggle. Prof Said wrote numerous columns for a number of papers the world over, including Dawn.
“Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel’s concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective,” Prof Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Cairo.
In 2000, he prompted a controversy when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.
Hamid Dabashi, chairman of Columbia’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department, said in a statement: “Over the past three decades he was the most eloquent spokesman for the plight of the Palestinians.”
A short biography released upon his death said Prof Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of British-ruled Palestine, but he spent most of his adult life in the United States. He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause but also on a variety of other subjects, from English literature, his academic specialty, to music and culture.
When it came to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Prof Said was consistently critical of Israel for what he regarded as mistreatment of the Palestinians.
He wrote two years ago after visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israel’s “efforts toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs” had actually strengthened Palestinian determination.
Prof Said moved to the United States as a student. He received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton in 1957 and a master’s and PhD from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964.
Most of his academic career was spent as a professor at Columbia University in New York, but he also was a visiting professor at such leading institutions as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
He was a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include Orientalism, A Question of Palestine and The End of the Peace Process in 1979 and After the Last Sky in 1986.
NEW YORK, Sept 25: Professor Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor and leading spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the United States, died on Thursday. He was 67.
