NAME: Professor Edward W. Said

AGE: 67

NATIONALITY: Palestinian

CLAIM TO FAME: Leading advocate for Palestinians

EDWARD W. Said, the Columbia University professor and literary critic whose eloquent advocacy of Palestinian nationalism made him a leading and controversial spokesman for the cause in the US, has died of leukemia. He was 67.

Born into a wealthy Christian family in Jerusalem when Britain controlled Palestine, Dr Said was raised there and in Cairo but lived in the US since he was a teenager. He graduated from Princeton University, earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard University and became a distinguished academic, articulate in the languages of art, literature, history and music.

He went on to write more than 20 books — on subjects as diverse as author Joseph Conrad, French theory, musicology and the Middle East — and was regarded as an influential literary and cultural critic. Over four decades as a humanities professor at Columbia, he taught English and comparative literature but not international affairs.

His 1978 book, Orientalism, was considered a seminal examination of the way the West perceives the Islamic world. It was translated into 26 languages and helped establish an academic field of post-Colonial studies. In 1999, he became president of the Modern Language Association, the professional association of college and university teachers of literature and languages.

Dr Said was passionate on the subject of the suffering brought on by conflicts in the Middle East and highly critical of the media’s failure to present balanced, fair coverage of the situation. “There is no acknowledgement that Palestinians are going through things even South African blacks were spared during apartheid,” he said in an interview two years ago. “Their homelands were never bombed by F-16s or Apache helicopters.”

As part of an effort to protest the treatment of Palestinians, he helped launch a campaign at Columbia to pressure the university into selling holdings in companies that do business in Israel. It prompted a counter-campaign among Jewish groups decrying what they saw as a creeping tide of anti-Semitism on campus.

But Dr Said had his differences with the Palestinians as well and he broke ranks with Yasser Arafat. He resigned from the Palestine National Council in the early 1990s, saying the PLO lacked credibility and moral authority. He was critical of the signing of the Oslo Accords, calling them an instrument of surrender that wouldn’t permit the return of Palestinian refuges to their homes.

He had long regarded the United States as a dishonest broker in the peace effort because of its support of Israel. But rather than advocating a separate land for Palestinians, he called for the creation of one state where Arabs and Jews would have equal rights.