Because of his stature and intellectual prowess, Professor Edward Said was considered a threat by the Jewish Israeli lobby in the United States, whose mission is to force America to subscribe to only the pro-Israeli view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Living in the most Jewish city in America, New York, Professor Said was always under intense scrutiny, and as the recipient of numerous death threats one might say, under the gun, literally and figuratively. Professor Said was the target of savage personal attacks by the former New York Times' columnist, rabid Zionist A.M. Rosenthal, in the 1990s. The rightwing Jewish neoconservative publication, "Commentary" labeled him "Professor of Terror." According to The New York Times, Israeli "scholar" Justus Reid Weiner spent several years researching his (Said's) early life to "prove" (in a 1999 article in "Commentary," where else?) that Said had spent most of his childhood in Cairo. Weiner should have saved his breath, because Said never denied that he had grown up in Cairo as well as Jerusalem. Said told the London Times: "I don't think it's that important in any case. I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I have represented the case of my people, which is quite different."

In Said's obituary, The New York Times reported: "Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his childhood in a well-to-do neighbourhood of thick-walled stone houses that is now one of the main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a prosperous businessman who had lived in the United States, took the family to Cairo in 1949 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves. At the age of 12 Edward went to the American School in Cairo, then to the elite Victoria College, where his classmates included the future King Hussein of Jordan and the actor Omar Sharif (of "Lawrence of Arabia," and "Dr. Zhivago" fame)." After Cairo, Said moved to the United States, where he received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1957 and a master's and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1960 and 1964. In 1963 Said became an assistant instructor in the English department in Columbia University, becoming a full professor in 1970. In 1977 Dr. Said was appointed to an endowed chair, becoming the Parr Professor of English and comparative literature and later the Old Dominion Foundation professor in humanities, a position he held until he was named a university professor, the highest academic position at Columbia." Professor Said belonged to that rare multicultural breed of intellectuals, fluent in both English and Arabic, as he put it, "a man who lived two separate lives," "one as an American University professor, the other as a fierce critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause." "I've never felt that I belonged exclusively to one country, nor have I been able to identify patriotically with any other than losing causes," he wrote in The Nation in 1991. As Dr. Said became more prominent, defending Palestinians in written statements and in interviews as victims of Israeli brutality, he came under attack from supporters of Israel who accused him of supporting terrorism."

Dr. Said published his first book, "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography" (1966), "in which he began to explore themes that led to his theories about culture and imperialism. His second book, "Beginnings" (1975), examined literary inspiration.

Richard Kuczkowski praised that book in The Library Journal as "an ingenious exploration of the meaning of modernism," and it won Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award in 1976. His next book was "Orientalism," with its theory that the Orient and especially the Arab world have been created by the Western imagination as a series of dreaming, reductive stereotypes. "Orientalism" established Dr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger faculty and graduate students on the left for whom that book became an intellectual credo and the founding document of what came to be called postcolonial studies. Central to Dr. Said's argument was the notion that there was no objective, neutral scholarship on Asia and especially Arab world. The very Western study of the East, in his view, was bound up in the systematic prejudices about non-Western world that turned it into a set of clichés. Since the enlightenment, Dr. Said wrote, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the Middle East who found many of his points valid but who rejected numerous assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic and oversimplistic. "It is a pity that it is so pretentiously written, so drenched in jargon, for there is much in the book that is superb as well as intellectually exciting," wrote British historian J. H. Plumb in The Times. But Plumb and others contended that Dr. Said made no effort to actually examine the real, historical relations between West and East, or "to sort out what was true in the Western representation" of the East from what was false and caricatured. They argued that Dr. Said's assumption was that the Orientalists simply invented the East to satisfy the requirements of cultural superiority and Western imperialism and that he ignored the vast body of scholarship that grappled with the East on its own terms."

America's foremost Arab intellectual, Edward Said will forever be remembered for his advocacy of the Palestinian cause. Two years ago, he said that Israel's "efforts towards exclusivity and xenophobia towards Arabs" has actually strengthened Palestinian resolve. He wrote in Cairo's English-language Al-Ahram Weekly recently: "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." It is worth noting that while The New York Times had three columnists - A. M. Rosenthal (now retired), William Safire and Tom Friedman -- who wrote passionately in support of Israel, Professor Edward Said had to dispatch his pro-Palestinian views to Cairo to be published. America has thousands of Zionists, Zionist journalists, and now a Zionist President, espousing the Israeli cause every day. Yet, they cannot stand to have one journalist cataloguing the mistreatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis! Make no mistake Professor Said was three times the intellectual and three times the journalist as Rosenthal, Safire or Friedman are, yet he was shut out of the US, his adopted country!

From 1977 to 1991, Dr. Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council, a parliament in exile. Since the PLO was outlawed in the US, the Israelis demanded that not only should the US government not talk to Said, but also that Said be arrested! Secretary of State George Schulz retorted that the US government was free to talk to an American citizen like Said, who was also free to join any organisation of his choice. Said had a falling out with Yasser Arafat after the 1993 Oslo accord, accusing Arafat and the Palestinian Authority of becoming "willing collaborators with the Israeli military occupation, a sort of Vichy government for the Palestinians." After Oslo, Said came to the conclusion that separate states for the Jews and Palestinians were unworkable and that there had to be one country: "I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen." If Professor Said believed that the one-state solution is best way for the Palestinians, who are we to argue?

In "The Question of Palestine" (1979) Dr. Said wrote: "In sheer numerical terms, in brute number of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism had done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists." In an interview with the New York Magazine in 1989 Dr. Said added: "The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim. They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and terrorism is understandable. But what the Israelis do, in killing the Palestinians on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the horrific and unjust dispossession of the Palestinian people." In "Culture and Imperialism" (1993), Said "argued that 19th and 20th-century British novelists -- even so apparently nonpolitical a writer as Jane Austin -- provided a cultural legitimisation for colonialism. He maintained that writers like E. M. Forster, (Polish-born) Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling engaged in a novelistic process whose main purpose was not to raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy attention, but to keep the empire more or less in place." In 2002, during a visit to Lebanon, Said stirred up controversy by throwing a rock towards an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. In spite of protest from Jewish students and the Israeli lobby, Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and his actions were protected by the principles of academic freedom. Dr. Said was an excellent musician and pianist who for several years wrote music criticism for The Nation.

An Episcopalian Christian married to a Quaker, Edward Said was also a defender of Islamic civilisation in Covering Islam (1981), in which he argued that the Westerners depicted Arabs as synonymous with trouble -- "rootless, mindless, gratuitous trouble." Earlier this year, the writer was amused to hear a Jewish activist denounce "militant Palestinian Muslim intellectuals like Edward Said!" After September 11, Palestinian legislator Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Said's friend, was asked on American television whether Islamic and Christian civilizations could coexist. Dr. Ashrawi said that as a Palestinian Christian living with an Islamic civilization she was perfectly happy. She was not invited back! In a moving tribute to her friend, Dr. Ashrawi said of Said: "He had a gentle identification with the oppressed and an intimidating rage against the oppressor, a warm embrace of the victim and a cold rejection of the culprit, a love for post-apartheid South Africa and all that its struggle stood for, and a total loathing for discrimination, racism and degradation of human life and rights. He had the warmest sense of pride and love when talking about Wadi and Najla, the children who always filled his life, and Mariam, the gentle wife whose love was never in question. He had a raging thirst for the recognition and validation of a human narrative to vindicate the almost unbearable suffering of the Palestinian people and to render them part of an inclusive human experience. He had the integrity and compassion to extend recognition to the horrific suffering of the Jewish people and the unspeakable pain of the holocaust, and simultaneously to demand of Israel recognition of its own culpability for the plight of the Palestinian people." It is the writer's lasting regret that having lived within 50 miles of Columbia University for the last 20 years, and having visited the University on numerous times, the writer never ventured into Professor Said's Columbia office to just say "Thank You!" to someone the writer considered a friend, a mentor and a source of inspiration.

If Professor Edward Said had sold his soul like V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie did to please their Western masters, he would have probably won all the literary accolades the West has to offer including the Nobel Prize in literature. But Said's incorruptible integrity was not for sale. As Dr. Ashrawi says of her friend of forty years: "Edward is a great scholar, a brilliant mind, a creative artist, an ardent nationalist, an advocate of justice, a free spirit, an unrelenting force of integrity, an uncompromising fighter on behalf of human dignity, and all the other sets of superlative depictions that he so aptly deserves." It is a safe bet that with the passing of time, as Naipaul and Rushdie's literary lights flicker to extinction, Professor Edward Said's star will continue to dazzle brighter and brighter.