Beneath Edward Said’s Confused Condemnations of Western Scholarship Lay His Own Insecurities

An urbane and sophisticated Ivy League professor of English literature, specializing in the work of Joseph Conrad, Edward Said was also the author of a gun-toting Yasir Arafat’s first speech at the UN, praising terrorism and condemning “Zionist racists and colonialists.” Said later broke with Arafat because he felt the latter made too many concessions at Oslo. But Said is best known for his 1978 book Orientalism—one of the most influential works in the humanities of the last half-century—which argues that all Western scholarship about the Middle East or Islam is fundamentally untrustworthy, and itself an exercise in imperialism. Sameer Rahim, reviewing a new biography of Said, explores his contradictions: