Edward Said is the classic outsider. He was born 64 years ago into a middle-class family in Jerusalem, the son of a father who had set up a bookselling business after an adventurous youth in which he had run away to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army only to end up fighting with the US army in the first World War.
The young Said went to a British public school in Egypt - which he hated and was expelled from - and finished his schooling, courtesy of his father's US citizenship, in Massachusetts. He has spent most of his life in America, and has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York for many years.
His 16 books of literary criticism, Middle Eastern history and politics - from the mould-breaking Orientalism in the 1970s to the anti-Oslo Agreement Peace and its Discontents in the 1990s - have turned him into one of the West's most iconoclastic intellectual figures. He is both admired and hated in the US as a scourge of both its university and foreign policy establishments. Until 1991 he was a member of the Palestinian parliament in exile. His forthcoming memoir about the early years of his life is entitled Out of Place. He is an example of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno's maxim that "for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live".
Part of him is Arab and part Christian. He jokes that the only people Christian missionaries in Palestine were able to convert were other Christians, so that his mother's family were turned from Greek Catholics into Baptists, while his father's Greek Orthodox family became Anglican.
He has been an agnostic since the age of 14. He loved reading John Henry Newman in his college days for the elegance of the great Victorian's style and logic. The religious ideas were a different matter. "In my opinion the source of most of our problems is religious. I grew up in a country where the natural product of the country was religion. That's what we make - you make Guinness, we make monotheism."
He shakes his head with amazement as he recounts his recent return to the house in Jerusalem that was once his family home. He found it had been taken over by an American fundamentalist group, which supported Israel on the grounds that all Jews would have to return home before the "Second Coming", when they would have either to convert to Christianity or be killed.
He is the most famous and trenchant critic of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process initiated by the 1993 Oslo Agreement. "There is no way we could have a Palestinian state out of that accord which means anything even geographically," he says.
There are no fewer than 144 Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, including 20 on the best land in the heart of the Gaza strip. He describes the "bypassing" roads built and controlled by the Israelis to link these settlements. He points to the rapidly spreading "megalopolis" of Jerusalem, which the Israelis have pushed out so that it has swallowed up a quarter of the West Bank.
Said says that if you leave out the 20 per cent of autonomous Palestinian territory which is jointly controlled by Israel and Yasser Arafat's new "authority" - and to which the Israelis control the exits and entrances - Arafat has less than 4 per cent of the territory under his exclusive control.
He is stinging about Arafat's personal role, calling him the "Israeli enforcer" and the "Petain of the Palestinians, with his regime like Duvalier's, Papa Doc's."
"I think he's a tragic figure. He accomplished a great deal before 1993. We had been a forgotten people - by virtue of our dispersal we had no identity, properly speaking. Under his leadership the PLO unified the Palestinian people, giving everyone a point of reference, a national authority."
NOW "he is presiding over the dissolution of all he has accomplished." His only aim is to keep himself in power, says Said: to that end he dismantled the popular structures put in place by the intifada uprising and re-established the old corrupt Arab clan structure, based on a system of patronage which he controls personally, down to the smallest item.
"I am his major critic," he goes on. "He reads every article I write. He knows that I represent lots of people, inside and outside Palestine. My credibility is high - I'm not in the pay of any Arab government; I'm totally independent and as a result of that I've acquired a huge constituency in the Arab world." He writes a twice-monthly column which is syndicated all over the Middle East, in samizdat versions where his writings are banned.
His own view of the way forward is a long one: to reject the partition solution and get back to the PLO's original idea of "a single, secular, democratic state for Arabs and Jews where all would be citizens". He supports the work of his friend Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, who leads a new generation of university-educated young Palestinians struggling for civil rights inside the theocratic Israeli state.
Bishara was wounded last week when he tried to stop Israeli troops expropriating land in Arab villages inside Israel, land which under Israeli law is considered to belong to the Jewish people.
"This is an anomaly that exists nowhere else in the world," says Said. "A Jew in New York has more rights than I do. Even though I was born in Palestine, I can't return, while under the `law of return' he can immediately return and get Israeli citizenship."
Said says the Jews only had real sovereignty in Palestine for around 200 years, in the time of David and Solomon. The Arabs conquered Jerusalem in the 8th century and have been there ever since. This historical lens provides him with the rationale for his belief that one day - albeit a distant day - the Israelis will have to learn to live with their Arab neighbours, the vast majority in the region, in a single, democratic state.
He feels that his work as a literary critic feeds into his political activism as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause abroad. He has always been interested in "exiled writers out of place ": Jonathan Swift , the Tory Irish pamphleteer; Joseph Conrad the Pole writing in English; Eric Auerbach, the Jewish classical scholar and refugee from Nazi Europe in Turkey.
He is also interested in the workings of what he calls "false humanism". He criticises those who, while claiming to support universal rights and values, in practice afford more rights to powerful people like the whites and the Jews, over those of black people and Arabs.
Another of Said's missions is "to create a language that is transparent, and accessible to many audiences". He believes the modern university system is jargon-ridden and over-specialised.
He works hard to make his addresses easier for the ordinary person to understand: "It's very difficult. I've been teaching for 40 years, yet even today when I go into class I still feel profoundly nervous. I always feel I'm on the edge of unintelligibity, of inaccuracy. It's a very precarious sense, but I think it's terribly important to persist in it, and not to settle into a routine."
"Living on the edge" has also helped him in recent years as he struggled against an incurable form of leukaemia. During a particularly painful 12 weeks of treatment last summer, he was able to escape from the illness by going back in his imagination to the Palestine and Egypt of his youth to put the finishing touches to his memoirs. He finishes the interview with an enthusiastic declaration of his passion for Ireland and its history of political and cultural struggle. "You've had many more years of imperialism than we've had and you've produced a fabulous culture of resistance and an extraordinary spirit which I desperately hope we in Palestine can live up to by about 10 per cent."
He has always valued "the longevity of the Irish example", noting "the powerful undercurrent in high British culture, starting with Spenser, of horrendous, bloodthirsty hatred and contempt for the Irish". He is a huge fan of Field Day, which he calls "a revisionist literary movement of the highest order". He compares it with groups of scholars in the Arab world, Israel, India and the US which are trying to re-read and reevaluate their countries' history. "But Field Day is distinct because they're great writers. No other group has anything like that collection of distinguished poets, playwrights and actors - people like Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin and Stephen Rea. These people are a combination of scholarship and creativity that is, I think, unparalleled in the world today."