“The terrible conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics such as ‘America’, ‘the West’ or ‘Islam’ and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed.”

When Edward Said, who has died at the age of 67 of leukemia, wrote these words, one of these conflicts had just come to an end. The war on Iraq had been fought on behalf of “democracy” and “freedom”, and to Said’s mind this was a continuation of a trait of the old imperial powers, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, to simplify and belittle what it called the “Orient” in order to justify dominating it. Said’s book “Orientalism”, which 25 years ago dealt with these representations, was enormously influential in the world where he earned his living, the world of literary studies.

But Said had another life outside academia, as the most eloquent and subtle spokesman for the Palestinians, and it was the esteem he enjoyed from his first calling that made it possible for him to find a platform for his second. In both capacities — as a cultural and literary critic and as a tireless advocate of the rights of the Palestinians — he reminded his audiences of the complexity of human history, the diversity of human lives.

He was himself an embodiment of that diversity. Born in Jerusalem as the son of Palestinian Christians, he grew up in Palestine and Egypt, studied in Lebanon, and spent most of his working life in the United States. Late in life he published a book of conversations with the Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. His last book “Freud and the Non-European”, therefore, came down on the side of an “unresolved sense of identity”. The reality for much of history, he argued, had been cultures and civilizations which were interdependent, flowing into and out of each other, and nation-states based on exclusive ethnic and religious identity suppress that reality.

He remained a critic not only of US and Israeli policy but equally of the Palestinian leadership and of Arab governments in general.

He continued to base his work on what he called “humanism” long after the word had gone out of fashion in both East and West, and by humanism he said he meant “to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purpose of reflective understanding.” Too few writers and intellectuals in our part of the world are willing or able to use their minds to this end, and now that Edward Said has fallen silent, there are few who will be willing to resist the simplifications of the powerful and the mass media and remind us that “no one can possibly know the extraordinarily complex unity of our globalized world.”