Despite his towering influence, particularly on the academic left, Edward W. Said today seldom shows up on the list of dangerous thinkers loathed by conservatives or blamed for undermining the Western academy. Whether intentional or not, this conservative ambivalence about Said’s legacy is merited. While he is considered the godfather of postcolonialism, a theoretical approach toward accounting for the legacy of colonialism, Said’s personal life and intellectual output defy any simplifying labels that might be placed upon him — whether by the left or the right. Rather than a mere critic of the Western canon, Said was a sophisticated thinker who saw both colonizers and the colonized as inheritors of a shared cultural patrimony.
Said’s universalism shone brightly in his passion for classical music, a conservative artistic milieu if there ever was one. In addition to his university responsibilities and political activism, Said was the classical music and opera critic for The Nation from 1986 until shortly before his death from leukemia in 2003. His writings on music are less widely known than his political and scholarly output, though Columbia University Press has dutifully collected and published them over the years, including in a collection released this year, titled “Said on Opera.”
Said’s love of classical music was not merely a pastime. Toward the end of his life, Said attempted to blend two of his worlds — politics and music — by co-founding the East-West Divan Orchestra, which sought to unite Israeli and Arab musicians within a shared cultural project. The decision to create such an organization, not without controversy, was a unique distillation of Said’s perspective on culture and politics. While he excoriated the injustices of Western imperialism, including the way that systems of knowledge were often deployed to crush the oppressed, he remained an ardent universalist. Said saw the cultural achievements of the West as part of a shared cultural heritage to be critiqued and grappled with, not an alien imposition to be rejected. It is that legacy, expressed in his love of opera, which makes revisiting Said as a scholar and humanist more necessary than ever in an era of political polarization and cultural turmoil.
Said was a talented pianist, having practiced as a child during his upbringing in Cairo and played to small audiences while an undergraduate at Princeton University. His rapid scholarly ascent in literary studies and his simultaneous work as a public spokesperson for Palestinians in the United States did not allow him to develop his musical abilities. Yet he remained an avid fan and critic throughout his life. In Said’s near-worship of Glenn Gould, the Bach performer extraordinaire, one could see the lingering allure of the piano virtuoso and even a potential alternative life path.
Though his appreciation for classical music and opera predated his academic interests and political concerns, Said brought his unique critical sensibility to bear in his essays on the subject. As the theater and opera director Peter Sellars writes in his preface to “Said on Opera,” “If you have spent the day, the week, the month, and the year opposing, with every cell in your body, the ratification of the Oslo Accords, which go through in spite of your opposition, and inaugurate an era of unprecedented Palestinian suffering and oppression, you come to Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata ready for the heights and the depths, the heartbreak, the despair, and the unfathomable consolations, generosity, and relief of this music.”
For understandable reasons, Said would never be primarily known for his love of music, nor his writings on the topic. In addition to his groundbreaking scholarly works on the Middle East, among them classics like “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism,” Said, for much of his adult life, was simply the most prominent Palestinian public intellectual in the United States. Educated at two of the nation’s most prestigious universities, Princeton and Harvard, and holding an endowed professorship at Columbia, he was a rare and indispensable voice in a debate that even today too often remains one-sidedly biased against the Palestinian perspective.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Said began to speak publicly on behalf of the Palestinian national cause, at a time when doing so was widely viewed in mainstream circles in the U.S. as tantamount to sympathizing with terrorism. No amount of sensitivity, empathy and humanity, qualities that suffuse Said’s work, were enough to keep away the vicious calumnies. In 1989, an essay in Commentary magazine, then still published by the American Jewish Committee, declared Said the “Professor of Terror.” Said was, and still is, maligned by his enemies as an extremist, an antisemite and a mouthpiece for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — that is, until its chair, Yasser Arafat (Said’s “master” according to the Commentary article), decided to recognize Israel as part of the Oslo Accords, which Said presciently called the “Palestinian Versailles.”
The attacks against Said would also come from within the academy. In the 1980s and 1990s, the perceived dominance of “post-” theories in the academic humanities was the subject of intense controversy and a number of enduring polemics, most famously Allan Bloom’s 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Postmodernism was denounced for denying the possibility of making true or factual statements; poststructuralism was criticized for its use of impenetrable jargon; and postcolonialism, with Said as its exemplar, was alleged to teach students “moral relativism,” along with an eliminationist loathing for the Western canon, claims that resurfaced after the 9/11 attacks.
Yet these criticisms failed to dull Said’s appeal. To a wide range of Palestinians and their supporters, and indeed even to some of his critics, Said remained known for his brilliance and intellectual leadership and as a voice of opposition to racism within the Western academy. What chiefly distinguished Said from the conservatives in the academic culture war was not his stance toward the Western canon, but his mission to investigate the social and historical background of its greatest works. Far from disdaining the cultural products of the West or seeking to displace them, as some of his supposed adherents do today, Said was an avid and enthusiastic consumer of them. His critiques of Western hegemony were made through attention to the great works of Western culture, including not only novels and historical works but also the classical music he explored through his practice and writing.
At times, Said was even frank, though not without self-scrutiny, about his own preferences for Western musical styles. In his final interview, Said described his upbringing and the types of music that he connected with as a child. “It was all Western classical music. Arabic music was exclusively, as I recall, related to family events,” he said. “It contrasted terribly with the Western music, you know Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, that I loved and could sometimes play.”
As his own standing grew as a spokesperson for Palestinians, along with demands on his time as a public intellectual, Said never wavered in maintaining his connection with classical music. “He never stopped playing the piano, and, for all of the demands on his time and books to read and lectures to give at the height of his career and fame, he continued to write about music,” writes Sellars. “Turning to music drew Edward back to a place and a practice that fed his inner life, his inner self, the private person whom the world rarely glimpsed.”
Said’s growth as a scholar would eventually produce “Orientalism” in 1978. It was a searing critique of Western writing on the Middle East that remains his best-known work, though it was one he was never fully satisfied with. In that work, Said employed the concept of “discourse” to describe how the West imagined and managed the Orient. In this, he drew from Michel Foucault while employing his own unique perspective as an exiled Palestinian living in the U.S. The book struck the academy like lightning. It electrified some on the left, who saw in it a long-awaited reckoning with the political shortcomings and biases of high scholarship. To its detractors on the right, the book was the opening chapter of an assault on a venerable field, then personified by the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis. “Orientalism” also faced heat from Marxists, including the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, who questioned Said’s originality and faulted him for practicing “Orientalism in reverse.”
But in Said’s own life, “Orientalism” arguably marked an end to his radical period. Indeed, midway through his career, he had already begun to evince serious doubts about the trajectory of the scholarly revolution he helped to spark. Said’s writings had generated a powerful rebuttal to an ossified conservative establishment. Yet as the popularity of postcolonial theory grew, he was concerned about an equally stagnant new leftist orthodoxy — self-assured and intolerant of criticism — emerging in its place. “The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum ‘solidarity before criticism’ means the end of criticism,” Said wrote. “I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for.”
Said’s discomfort with the theoretical direction of academia eventually led him to despise the “political correctness” of the 1990s and activist attacks on the work of so-called dead white men. But he refused to align himself with the right-wing assault on the humanities ostensibly waged in the name of countering this ill. He never, like Bloom, suggested that the academy itself was outmoded. Having spent time outside his field in the political arena, Said recognized that the conservatives were merely seeking to promote their own dogma over others. “Although some of the things they say have some merit — especially when they pick up on the sheer mindlessness of unthinking cant — their campaign totally overlooks the amazing conformity and political correctness where, for example, military, national security, foreign and economic policy have been concerned,” Said wrote.
In the final stage of his career, Said sought to shape a critical approach to politics, including his unwavering commitment to the Palestinian cause, which would embody his own belief in cultural universalism. It was an intellectual journey that eventually brought him back to his lifelong passion for music. In 1999, along with his friend, the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, he began a revelatory new project: the East-West Divan Orchestra. The goal of the orchestra, which brought together young Israeli and Arab musicians in southern Spain, was to foster cultural connections among people otherwise alienated by conflict in their homelands. While not avowedly political, the purpose of the ensemble, still operating today, was to act as an “orchestra against ignorance,” demonstrating that Jews and Arabs could partake in a universal cultural project together, regardless of the political realities of their time.
In an interview with Time magazine, while he was struggling with leukemia, Said described the orchestra as “one of the most important things I have done in my life.” He added: “The orchestra is nonpolitical and has no ulterior motive. It doesn’t pretend to be building bridges and all that hokey stuff. But there it is, a paradigm of coherent and intelligent living together.”
Late in life, Said, the quintessential radical professor, would come to appear as a more principled defender of the Western tradition than his conservative counterparts, with concern for his homeland never far away. In a London Review of Books essay criticizing the historian Paul Lawrence Rose for defending the informal ban on performing the music of the antisemitic composer Richard Wagner in Israel, Said excoriated a “simplistic approach [which] has it that art is, in effect, only a repetition — perhaps cunningly disguised — of the artist’s political and moral beliefs, as if style, form, idiom, irony, play no role whatever.”
Said saw in Israel’s Wagner ban a form of “defensiveness and retrospective bitterness,” which Israel, if it were interested in resolving its conflict with the Palestinians, would need to discard. “In my opinion,” wrote Said, “there are better ways to deal with others — even hated and feared others — than to wish they were not there, and expend a great deal of intellectual, political, and military effort to get rid of them.”
His engagement with the perennial Wagner controversy encapsulated his broader sensibility of reckoning with past injustice and persecution. In the colonial context, erasure of the oppressing power and its cultural products is not possible, but a lyrical counterpoint in which cultures can be fully understood in relation to one another might be a path forward. Across his career, Said would subtly integrate the form of the lyrical contrasts that he appreciated in classical music into his social and political thought. “Said’s method matched his ethical and political worldview,” said Suzanne Schneider, deputy director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a longtime researcher and teacher of Said’s work. “It rejected not only the conservative ideal of Western civilization, but also what he saw as a reactionary effort to reconstitute an authentic indigeneity purged of the West’s corrupting influence.”
In introducing what is called in classical music a “contrapuntal” style to his analysis of colonial literature, Said was also making a political intervention — and not only in the academy or in his musical writings. Said’s move toward supporting a binational state in Israel and Palestine at the end of his life was not just a despairing response to the failure of the Oslo process to produce a two-state solution. It was also a natural extension of his belief that the histories of Israelis and Palestinians could not be separated without causing terrible violence to the welfare and culture of both peoples. Israelis and Palestinians are too intertwined, their identities constitutive of one another, to support a hard break, he would argue. It was a lesson that has remained unheeded by many on both sides who still believe a violent, final separation remains possible or desirable.
Said’s specter continues to haunt the schools he once inhabited, many of them now wrapped in controversy amid the ongoing war in Gaza. At Columbia, where a police raid on a pro-Palestine encampment attracted a national audience this spring, Said’s legacy was visibly present. One student protester was photographed holding a sign reading: “Columbia, why require me to read Prof Edward Said if you don’t want me to use it?”
The idea of Said as an immortal symbol of dissent against the establishment contains grains of truth. Yet too much is lost when we situate his lifelong work as primarily political and nationalistic. It has “become easy to turn Said into a series of placards without depth or nuance,” writes Timothy Brennan, a former student of Said’s, in his biography, “Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.” Indeed, some of Said’s own forays into music later met with scorn from those who claim him as a symbol of rebellion.
In 2010, Said’s beloved East-West Divan Orchestra was denounced as a tool for “normalization” of Israel by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, or PACBI. Though PACBI claims to honor Said’s legacy, through their actions they fiercely opposed what he saw as one of the most important projects of his life — an attempt to create a basis for equality between Arabs and Jews, outside of the apartheid-like system administered by Israel today.
Despite these attacks, the project continues to expand. In 2016, the Barenboim-Said Akademie opened in Berlin with the aim of providing scholarships for students across the Middle East to study classical music. Barenboim has described the academy as “an experiment in utopia.” Whether a classical orchestra can push back against the tidal wave of hatred and violence now enveloping Israel and the Palestinian territories is questionable. Yet its continued existence, even amid the current war, stands as a living testament to the legacy of Said and his radical vision for peace between two peoples.
The persistence of Israeli domination over the Palestinians was a source of great torment for Said at the end of his life. Others in his position would and have sought comfort in the delusive prospect of restoring all that Palestine lost in its encounter with Zionism. Influenced by his musical proclivities, Said embraced something different and arguably more promising: a difficult, dissonant, but ultimately harmonious basis for a fruitful coexistence. Just as two distinct melodic lines played simultaneously can produce pleasing music, so can Israeli Jews and Palestinians pursue their respective futures in the same land, Said believed, without denying that right to the other.
“Edward was painfully aware that some divides are irreconcilable, where there will be no healing, no peace. Sometimes emotions and resentments run so deep that prospects for recovery and resolution seem impossible,” writes Sellars in “Said on Opera.” “As someone who spent the last years of his life insisting that Palestinians and Israelis recognize each other and each other’s histories,” Sellars adds, Said’s response to Mozart’s operatic treatment of reconciliation “is moving and sadly unsentimental: this music is best when it is played and acted with as much lightness as possible.”
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