MIDDLE EAST: Professor Edward Said (67), whose death was announced yesterday, was Palestine's sole world-ranking intellectual.
He was a professor who won the devotion of his students and an author who wrote on many subjects, ranging from English literature to politics and music.
He served in the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years, then resigned in 1991 in protest at the policies of the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat. At that time Dr Said argued that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), headed by Mr Arafat, lacked credibility and moral authority.
Dr Said was one of the few Palestinian academics who stood squarely against the Oslo accord, signed with great ceremony on the White House lawn on September 13th 1993. Palestinian colleagues who attended the event now say that he was "right".
In a book of conversations with David Barsamian, Culture and Resistance, published this year, Dr Said argued that Oslo was not designed to obtain self-determination for the Palestinians but to transform the PLO into an instrument for providing Israel with security while it continued to colonise the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the lands where the Palestinians want to establish their state.
In his view, Israelis and Palestinians could never coexist peacefully until the Israelis, who he felt saw the Palestinians as "inferior", recognised them as partners and agreed to live side by side with them in a single democratic state.
For Dr Said, the only formula was "one state solution".
Born in Jerusalem in 1935 into a prosperous Palestinian family, the young Edward Said grew up between Cairo, where his father's business was located, and Jerusalem, where the family felt it belonged. He shuttled between the two cities during the violent twilight years of the British mandate, when Palestinian Arabs fought European Zionist Jews for possession of Palestine. He became deeply attached to his family house in the Talbieh neighbourhood of West Jerusalem, where he spent time with uncles, aunts and cousins. The elegant Said flat in cosmopolitan Zamalek, an island in the Nile, was a place to stay rather than a home. In December 1947, Dr Said's family fled the Holy City for Cairo following a series of deadly bombings in Jerusalem. He did not return for half a century.
During his school years he became fluent in English and French as well as in Arabic. He studied at Columbia University and stayed on to teach there as well as to write. His most famous book, Orientalism, a critique of Western colonialist attitudes, has been translated into more than two dozen languages.
He became an activist committed to the Palestinian struggle for recognition and self-determination after the 1967 war, when Israel, which had occupied 78 per cent of Palestine in 1948, captured the remaining 22 per cent.
During the final years of his life, Dr Said and the Israeli pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim, became close friends. Dr Said convinced Mr Barenboim to hold master-classes for Palestinian musicians at Bir Zeit; the latest took place last month.
Dr Said and Mr Barenboim established a youth orchestra of Arab and Israeli muscians in the belief that if they learnt to play together they could learn to get along with each other. The orchestra recently played its first Arab world concert in Morocco.
Dr Said was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991 but did not require treatment until 1994, when he underwent chemotherapy and radiation. It was found that he suffered from a rare variation of the disease which resists chemotherapy and he had to undergo experimental treatment. This granted him a temporary remission which came to an end on Wednesday night.