Agencies

NEW YORK, 26 September 2003 — Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose writings included the book “Orientalism,” died in New York at age 67 yesterday after a battle with leukemia, a colleague at Columbia University said.

Said was a literary critic and theoretician but was also known as a prominent Palestinian activist. Arab commentators said Said would be remembered as a Palestinian patriot and a towering intellectual who broke ground in the theory of literature and Orientalist studies. For many years he was a member of the Palestinian National Council but he broke with Yasser Arafat in the belief that the Oslo peace accords signed in 1993 betrayed Palestinian refugees.

Said called the Oslo accords “a Palestinian Versailles” that further eroded Palestinian human and national rights, and opposed a segregated two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, proposing an integrated, democratic country instead.

“I spoke to Mrs. Edward Said and she told me he has passed away this morning at a New York hospital,” said Hamid Dabashi, chairman of Columbia’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department.

Said was a professor of comparative literature at Columbia. His books include “Orientalism,” “A Question of Palestine” and “The End of the Peace Process.” His theory of Orientalism said that false and romanticized images of the Middle East and Asia were used to justify Western colonialism and imperialism in the region.

“Over the past three decades he was the most eloquent spokesman for the plight of the Palestinians,” Dabashi said.

Said’s friends recalled him saying he was “not dead and not alive” as doctors gave him larger doses of chemotherapy to battle his cancer.

“His death is a big loss for the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause because he was one of the people who had struggled the hardest to bring our issue into the minds of people around the world,” said Palestinian Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr, adding that the government would open a book of condolences in Ramallah and Gaza City.

“He was an enlightened messenger to the world when he was speaking about the problems of the Palestinians and was a great friend to all Palestinians,” Abu Amr said.

Leading lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi described his death as a “huge loss for the Palestinian cause, for the world of ideas and for humanity.”