It happened 12 years ago, in my third year at university but I still remember it quite vividly, as if it were only the other day.

The Gulf war was about to reach its climax. The Americans had bombed Iraqi Republican Guard positions in the south of the country and probably hundreds had died. But we in America really weren’t being told how much “collateral damage” (a term pioneered by the Pentagon and popularized by CNN) was being inflicted on the Iraqis. Day in and day out, those keeping track of the war had no choice but to listen to the propaganda being meted out to the press by America’s war commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Luckily for me, I was studying in a university known for its history of political activism, dating back to a temporary university takeover by students in 1968 protesting against racial discrimination. Even more fortunately, there were people like Edward Said around. His formal title was the rather high-sounding Dominion Professor in the Humanities, but when you met him, spoke to him and interacted with him, you found a charming and unassuming person.

He was supposed to be an authority on comparative literature and his field of specialization was 19th century English literature, especially writers like Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen. If you saw him (he did not have a beard then), he would be the epitome of sartorial elegance — tweed jacket, bow tie, rimmed glasses and a pipe. There was such a demand for his classes at Columbia that there was a waiting list and students who wanted to enrol either had to be those pursuing graduate study or in their last year of undergraduate study.

Because of his support of the Palestinian cause, he had his fair share of enemies. And as at most campuses in America, especially the more prominent ones, the Jewish student organizations were more than well-represented and tended to hound him. That also didn’t stop him, and other like-minded and concerned professors, from organizing massive ‘teach-ins’ at the university. Going to them was quite an experience in itself.

The idea behind a teach-in, as opposed to a sit-in, was that it would engage students about the war in a productive, non- disruptive exercise. Faculty members came and spoke on the need for America to exercise restraint and about the long-term damage its actions would cause to the rest of the world, especially the Middle East.

Often, the featured speaker would be Edward Said, and students from other universities in the New York area, as well as non-student activists, would come to attend. The auditorium would be overflowing with students.

A measure of Edward Said’s eloquence can be had from the fact that he spoke as well as he wrote. Much of the audience would be spellbound by this dapper Jerusalem-born Palestinian Christian (with degrees from Princeton, Harvard and Yale). However, there would always be people from the Jewish Students Union or, worse still, the orthodox Jewish students group. They would make it a point always to ask questions that had little relevance to the theme of the teach-in — which was America’s invasion of Iraq — and made personal attacks on Mr Said, clearly because of his advocacy of the Palestinian cause.

The man’s greatness lay in the fact that he would not let these harangues and diatribes — framed sometimes in almost indecent language — get to him and would almost always answer with dignity and reason. Maintaining such restraint actually endended up troubling the person asking the loaded question, with Edward Said standing on the podium perfectly unfazed. The end result usually was that the Jewish questioner would either quietly walk back or launch a personal, mostly incoherent attack on the professor which would eventually be drowned out in applause from the massive crowd.

The teach-ins at Columbia, of which Edward Said was such an important part, were proof that a truly educational experience could indeed come from a non-academic/non-classroom setting. And this is not to say that as a teacher of comparative literature, he wasn’t a huge influence on his students in terms of the perspectives and insights that he offered while teaching a text. Besides, his students also owed much to his literary works, especially Orientalism, which completely revolutionized the way in which writing, and not just of a literary nature, is perceived and comprehended.

As a university teacher of a popular seminar class or as a key speaker in a teach-in, Edward Said had this ability to establish a connection with his audience.

He will be sorely missed by all his students, admirers and readers.