Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian cause in the US Edward Said, who has died aged 67, was one of the leading literary critics of the last quarter of the 20th century.
As professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, he was widely regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the most articulate, visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the US, where it earned him many enemies.
The broadness of Said's approach to literature and his other great love, classical music, eludes easy categorisation. His most influential book, Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to change the direction of several disciplines by exposing an unholy alliance between the Enlightenment and colonialism. As a humanist with a thoroughly secular outlook, his critique on the great tradition of the western Enlightenment seemed to many to be self-contradictory, deploying a humanistic discourse to attack the high cultural traditions of humanism, giving comfort to fundamentalists who regarded any criticism of their tradition or texts as off-limits, while calling into question the integrity of critical research into culturally-sensitive areas such as Islam.
Whatever its flaws, however, Orientalism appeared at an opportune time, enabling upwardly- mobile academics from non-western countries (many of whom came from families who had benefited from colonialism) to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with "narratives of oppression", creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western "other".
Said's influence, however, was far from being confined to the worlds of academic and scholarly discourse. An intellectual superstar in America, he distinguished himself as an opera critic, pianist, television celebrity, politician, media expert, popular essayist and public lecturer.
Latterly, he was one of the most trenchant critics of the Oslo peace process and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat. He was dubbed "professor of terror" by the right-wing American magazine Commentary; in 1999, when he was struggling against leukaemia, the same magazine accused him of falsifying his status as a Palestinian refugee to enhance his advocacy of the Palestinian cause, and of falsely claiming to have been at school in Jerusalem before completing his education in the United States.
The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles in New York was predictable, given his trenchant attacks on Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians and his outspoken condemnations of US policies in the Middle East. From the other side of the conflict, however, he encountered opposition from Palestinians who accused him of sacrificing Palestinian rights by making unwarranted concessions to Zionism.
As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared to concede that Jews had historic claims to Palestine, he said: "I don't deny their claims, but their claim always entails Palestinian dispossession." More than any other Palestinian writer, he qualified his anti-colonial critique of Israel, explaining its complex entanglements and the problematic character of its origins in the persecution of European Jews, and the overwhelming impact of the Zionist idea on the European conscience.
Said recognised that Israel's exemption from the normal criteria by which nations are measured owed everything to the Holocaust. But while recognising its unique significance, he did not see why its legacy of trauma and horror should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who were "absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity", of their rights.
"The question to be asked," he wrote in The Politics Of Dispossession (1994), "is how long can the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for its behaviour towards the Palestinians, arguments and sanctions that were used against other repressive governments, such as South Africa? How long are we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza . . . are directly connected to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of the victims of Nazism?" He insisted that the task of Israel's critics was not to reproduce for Palestine a mirror-image of a Zionist ideology of Diaspora and return, but rather to elaborate a secular vision of democracy as applicable to Arabs and Jews.
Elected to the Palestine national council (PNC) in 1977, as an independent intellectual Said avoided taking part in the factional struggles, while using his authority to make strategic interventions. Rejecting the policy of armed struggle as impermissible - because of the legacy of the Holocaust and the special conditions of the Jewish people - he was an early advocate of the two-state solution, implicitly recognising Israel's right to exist. The policy was adopted at the PNC meeting in Algiers in 1988.
As the peace process gained momentum, however, Said adopted an increasingly critical stance and in 1991, resigned from the PNC. The Oslo declaration, he argued, was weighted unfairly towards Israel; the scenario, previsioning an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho in advance of the other territories and agreement on the final status of Jerusalem, amounted to "an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles".
Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian family. His father Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the US before the first World War. He volunteered for service in France and returned to the Middle East as a respectable Protestant businessman - with American citizenship - before making an arranged marriage to the daughter of a Baptist minister from Nazareth.
In Out Of Place (1999), a memoir, Said described his father, who called himself William to emphasise his adopted American identity, as overbearing and uncommunicative. His Victorian strictness instilled in Said "a deep sense of generalised fear", which he spent most of his life trying to overcome. To his father, Said owed the drivenness that brought him his remarkable achievements. "I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement," he wrote. "Every day for me is like the beginning of a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it."
Said described his mother, whom he evidently adored, as brilliant and manipulative, neurotically difficult to please, giving always the impression that "she had judged you and found you wanting" - yet instilling in him a love of literature and music.
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he founded in 1999 with Daniel Barenboim, an Israeli citizen, grew out of the friendship he forged with the musician, who shared his belief that art transcends political ideology. The orchestra received a tumultuous reception at the BBC Proms last month.
In 1970, he married Mariam Cortas, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Edward Wadie Said, writer and academic, born November 1st, 1935; died September 25th, 2003