Said relates that he found the latter particularly galling, given that his entire project in Orientalism had been to highlight the shortcomings of just such a category of earlier scholars. "The general validity of the point made in Orientalism," he writes, "was now being aimed at me."
In the end he concludes that the positions on either side of him were in effect both caricatures. Given Said's comprehensive range, and ever-present sympathy for the dispossessed and the underdog, it is hard not to side with his humane and tolerant centrist position, and see his critics as, by contrast, wounded and obsessive wolves howling in the night air. That either extreme should be responsible for the education of the young -- as of course they often are -- can only fill an impartial observer with horror.
Said's writings on Joseph Conrad, of which there are several examples here, illustrate this generosity of mind. On the one hand, he maintains, Conrad was writing with what were essentially imperialistic assumptions. But on the other, more than any of his fellow novelists, he perceived the horror and the corruption that the colonial enterprise inevitably involved.
On a less confrontational note, this book contains some wonderful evocations of Cairo in the era of Said's youth. It seems to have been a kind of paradise in which Ancient Egyptian, contemporary European (French and English), and modern Islamic elements coexisted in such a way as to make the city the undisputed capital of the Arab world. In addition to its pleasure gardens and esplanades along the Nile, Said celebrates the city's "adventure, sexuality and magic," its "cohabitation of Islamic, Mediterranean and Latin erotic forms," and senses "a sort of Proustian world replicated in an Oriental city." He affirms that the language he has loved best is Arabic in its spoken Cairo dialect.
This well illustrates Edward Said's own general position, that of an internationalist, but with a special understanding of Middle Eastern, and especially Arab, traditions.
He has unfortunately not been well in recent years, and as a result has, among other things, had to stop playing the piano in public. But if there's a particular combination of perspectives the world is currently desperately in need of, it can't be far removed from the one he here so consistently and persuasively displays.
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