Said the Palestinian Reading through your valuable memorial edition for the late Palestinian-American intellectual and academic Edward Said and the additional material appearing on Said in the following month's issue ( Cairo Review of Books November & December 2005), I was surprised to see so little attention given to what was, besides literature, music and the arts, the most important element in Said's life: the Palestinian cause. Said's colleague at Columbia University in New York, David Damrosch, writes eloquently in your memorial issue of the importance of Said's work in comparative literary studies for younger generations of scholars, and writers in both the November and December issues of your publication write interestingly of Said's childhood in Cairo, his interest in classical music, his family and social circumstances and his influence on cultural and literary studies generally. However, none of the writers really discuss Said's commitment to the Palestinian cause in any detail, nor do they mention Said's path- breaking books on Palestine, which gave prominence to the Palestinian issue for western readers. I cannot be the only reader whose appreciation of the often biased character of western reporting of Palestine and of the Arab world more generally was sharpened by reading Said's 1981 book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, an early exercise in media analysis and one that is still in print in variously updated editions. Nor can I have been the only reader whose understanding of the Palestinian issue was enhanced by reading Said's writings on the subject, which appeared at a steady pace over three decades, from The Question of Palestine in 1979 to essay collections such as The End of the Peace Process and From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap in the 1990s. The fact that you do not discuss these works in any detail in the coverage given to Said's work is all the more surprising in that many of the pieces collected in the latter two volumes, representing Said's thinking on Palestine from the signature of the Oslo Accords onwards, first appeared in the shape of the regular columns Said contributed to Al-Ahram Weekly. Said also produced further volumes on Palestine, including After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives and Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. Edward Said spent much of his life and expended great energy doing whatever he could to achieve justice for the Palestinians. His position within the western, and particularly the American, intellectual system and his status as an Arab and Palestinian intellectual meant that what he could do, above all, was write, promoting the Palestinian cause and insisting on the fact of Palestinian identity and history in whatever forums were open to him. Reading The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam today, over two decades since their first publication, one is struck by how much work Said felt he had to put in, first in telling the history of Palestine and how this fits in with that of the wider Middle East from the perspective of the Palestinians, material available in the west chiefly not being told from that perspective, and second how patient he felt he needed to be in pointing out obvious misrepresentations and distortions in existing "coverage", whether by journalists or by academics and experts. In his 1996 introduction to a new edition of Covering Islam, Said complained of the "highly exaggerated stereotyping and belligerent hostility" he had detected in western representations of the Middle East. Ten years on, has this situation really changed? I was disappointed not to find greater recognition of Edward Said's work to correct such stereotypes and show up such hostility in your otherwise excellent publication. Maha Loutfi Sidon, Lebanon ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Seeking information My grandmother just passed away. That said, I came across letters from Yehia Hakki written to her. The letters date 1935-1937. They corresponded for 2.5 years as pen pals. He talks about law school and radio stations. No one has ever read them until her death and she held them sacred until she died. Just an interesting side note. I am trying to find his autobiography and having no luck. Could you lead in the right direction? This relationship developed into a marriage proposal so many years ago. Karen Pansky Canada ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reply While we agree that Edward Said's work on Palestine was perhaps neglected in the recent editions of the Cairo Review of Books in the way that you suggest, this was not by design. A future issue of the Review will be devoted to this aspect of Edward Said's life and work, complementing the material that has already appeared on his work on literature and music. For a period of ten years, from 1993 to 2003, Al-Ahram Weekly was proud to publish a regular column by Edward Said dealing largely with Palestine and the Middle East. Many of these columns have since been published in the books you mention. Said's contribution to the Palestinian cause was a signally important one, and we hope adequately to recognise that contribution in a future issue. As for the authobiography of the late Egyptian novelist Yehia Hakki it has not been translated into English, but you may wish to look up the English translation of his most famous novel Qandil Um Hashim (Um Hashim's Lamp). Further titles by Hakki are available in French translation. Hakki's autobiographical essays collected in his complete works are unfortunately not available in translation. There is a Society of Friends of Yehia Hakki in Egypt, with novelist Bahaa Taher and Hakki's daughter, Noha, on the executive board of the society. You may wish to get in touch with the Society of Friends of Yehia Hakki, and we will be pleased to forward any letters. Editor
