Timothy Brennan’s Interview with Al-Estiklal: ‘Why Does the Arab World Still Need Edward Said?’

Timothy Brennan is a cultural theorist, literature professor, speaker, and activist. He is known for his work on American imperialism and the political role of intellectuals.

Brennan was a student and friend of Edward Said, and familiar with his ideas, which made it easier for him to write an intellectual biography of the thinker Edward Said, Places of the Mind.

He worked closely with Said’s family, interviewing a wide range of his friends and colleagues and (should have) unearthed archives housed at Columbia University, where Said taught throughout his career. Thus, we present to our readers Al-Estiklal’s interview with Professor Timothy Brennan.

 

 

1. In the book, you did not present a simple biography of Edward Said, but you gave us how Edward Said’s thought crystallized for us during his life path. Could you explain that more?

 

Timothy Brennan: The book was very explicitly sold to me as an intellectual biography, and it was always a balancing act, my editor pushing me more and more toward anecdotes and dramatic vignettes, and although obliging and offering many at my own insistence, (and the book is full of them, and never far from them) I held out for a narrative arc based on the drama of his ideas—especially to show how being a literary critic and a theorist of Continental philosophies was no early life detail that he happily outgrew, but what formed him politically, and made his public interventions effective and memorable.

Nothing mattered more to Said than the mission and status of the intellectual in the technologically besotted, pundit-ridden corporate world of Anglo–America. What it means to be an intellectual, and how he became the one he was, is, therefore, the most important thing to capture in any biography of Said. If you don’t do that, you’re not being true to him, and you’re missing the most durable thing about his legacy. There are some who think that Said’s ideas are not the most important thing about him. But I think this misses what made Said of lasting importance: namely, bringing the humanities to the center of the political discussion, and embodying the image of the humanist intellectual as a creator of agendas, guardian of the historical record, and theoretician of the possible. A lot of people do not grant that point, and I was eager to show it.

 

2. Could we say that the majority misread Edward Said, especially what he presented in his book Orientalism?

 

Timothy Brennan: Indeed, people often misread Orientalism as a book primarily about Western caricatures of the Arab or Muslim other, but many books of that sort had been written by Arab intellectuals before Said. That was not his chief contribution. We assume he is simply condemning “orientalists,” but his view is more complicated than that. For one thing, although he has very damaging things to say about Ernest Renan, H. A. R. Gibb, and Edward Lane, he is much more enamored of people like Raymond Schwab and Louis Massignon. Remember that Said was in awe of some contemporary orientalists like Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson (he often spoke or corresponded with both men) and felt himself their protégé to a certain extent.

So, one of Orientalism’s neglected undercurrents is his apprenticeship under the great philologists he explores in that book—the “orientalists” referred to in the title—whom he is supposedly castigating, but whom he is also trying to learn from. He is in awe of their erudition, their familiarity with languages, their sustained, minute studies of obscure texts, and yet, at the same time, their ability to turn this specialist knowledge into a grand drama of the human spirit.

There is no question that he treated their example as an object lesson to follow. He studies their “images, rhythms, and motifs” and their “ingeniously obvious motifs” in order to account for how they, as humanists, created a kind of authority that reinforced prejudices already in circulation. He wants to learn these techniques for the other side, as it were.

 

 

3. In your book, we can clearly see that you want to tell us that Edward Said is much more than just his book on Orientalism. Could you explain that to us?

 

Timothy Brennan: Oh, yes, Said is much more than Orientalism. One can even say his best work lies outside it. First of all, no one to this day has written better introductions to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the origins and meaning of Zionism, and the facts on the ground in the state of Israel than Said.

His The Question of Palestine (1979) is a masterpiece, particularly its long chapter titled “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” In this book and in the anthology with Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims (1986), he offers primer-like volumes in a human, sweeping, magisterial voice which is quite unlike anything available elsewhere, even now.

It shows him as what he was: the walking encyclopedia of the movement, replete with topographical maps, minutiae from the Hebrew press, and a commanding knowledge of the English literature, which he often used to illustrate, enliven, or humanize his informational texts. It is Said, moreover, who in Covering Islam (1981)—a treatment of the Iranian hostage crisis—described for the first time the phenomenon of “Islamophobia.” This work of media critique (the propaganda function of American media) is a neglected side of his thinking.

Beyond all this, there are the hundreds of literary essays he wrote—amazingly influential in their field, accessible, conversational, erudite, quite unique in their voice, and able (in an era of obscurantist post-structuralist “theories”) to keep a more open-ended, belletristic voice of the deliberate amateur in play.

Then, there is his autobiographical writing. He had started two novels at different points of his life and wrote a brilliant and moving short story, An Ark for the Listener, about the post-1948 diaspora, but gave up fiction in place of the memoir, Out of Place (1999), which is his finest writing, I think. Not only did this memoir capture and bring back to life the forgotten world of his childhood—and thereby memorializing a representative Palestinian experience for the world to see and understand—but it deeply impressed professional novelists like Patricia Highsmith, and Nobel prize-winners like Kenzaburo Oe and Nadine Gordimer, both of whom tell him in letters that his writing shook them out of their doldrums and changed their fiction.

Said’s writing on music is the last side of him I will mention here (although there are others); Said’s first inspirations were musical, not literary, and he had long planned to make a career as a pianist. His eventual collaborator, the great pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, said that Said knew “everything” there was to know about classical music. So it is delightful to see Said indulge himself in his music criticism, which allowed him to show the aesthetic sides of his sensibility (one he often denied himself in his literary criticism).

 

4. Why was Edward Said less successful in achieving his goals for Palestine than in other areas of his work?

 

Timothy Brennan: Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Said was less successful in achieving his goals for Palestine than in other areas of his work, but this is not at all to say that he achieved nothing. He almost single-handedly changed the conversation on Palestine, making a critique of Zionism actually popular in some circles. In any case, he made it professionally acceptable. In his early years as an activist, he was drawn to the most radical factions of the PLO (although he never formally joined any of them).

However, very soon he was persuaded (by his friend Eqbal Ahmad) that a military solution was impossible, that the only way to succeed was to occupy the moral high ground and win over public opinion (especially American public opinion) in the same way that the anti-apartheid movement had in support of the ANC in South Africa.

Said did more than anyone in getting people to realize that the PLO was an anti-colonial liberation movement, and therefore should get the kind of enthusiastic support that the Viet Cong, for example, did among American college youth, or the Mau Mau rebels, or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Said may have been more or less sidelined by the PLO leadership—and his advice was rarely followed—but his role was nevertheless an important one in some respects.

Rather, Said did a lot to humanize Arafat in the eyes of the Western media, showing him to be a thoughtful, courageous, good-humored man and a worthy leader. According to the FBI, moreover, it was Said’s advice that was sought over that of other PLO representatives at the PLO Permanent Observer mission at the UN. Said was, in effect, the unofficial liaison between the U.S. and PLO, and in that role, he helped broker agreements under both the Carter and Reagan administrations, where he was invited to the State Department. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which meant he had the ear of the U.S. government’s main strategists and think-tank operatives.

Probably, his greatest political effect will appear, in retrospect, to have been the voluminous essays he wrote for the Arab press in the last decade of his life, which range from memoir to popular culture reviews, to polemical confrontations, biographical portraits, and political-economic analysis. They are astounding in their variety of genres, tones, and styles, and exhibit the mind of someone with unlimited energy (even while ravaged with cancer), who never feels he has done enough.

Finally, Said was an early and lonely opponent of the Oslo Accords—a position for which he took flak, but that seems in retrospect to have been more than justified—and he popularized the One-State solution.

 

 

5. Do we need Edward Said as a thinker today? And why does the Arab world need his ideas today, despite the complexity of the political situation?

Timothy Brennan: I can only answer with a resounding “yes,” and I believe that the reception of my biography—which has been very widely reviewed, excerpted, and translated—proves that I am not alone in thinking so.

It is clear that people from China to India to Turkiye, Argentina, and Cameroon are still very invested in Said, avidly read and debate his books, watch his lectures on YouTube, and consider him a genuine figure of third-world liberation. It may be impossible to reproduce his particular array of talents, but we can recognize the model. In today’s technophilic, post-critical academia, and at a time when the humanities have never been more under attack by state legislatures, media wonks, and benighted university administrations, how can we not say that Said’s message is not still relevant? It is precisely him to whom we should be turning.

He died too young, so unfortunately he is not here. But if one followed his leads, what model did he leave us? I would put it this way; unexpectedly, it had to do with the idea of being, on the face of it, unthreatening (as a literature professor will appear to most people).

Being a person who is both widely read and curious about what they do not know; there is, or at least was, in many societies—certainly, Europe in the early 20^th century, in West Bengal today, and elsewhere—a particular authority granted those without direct access to power, with no financial stake in outcomes, a learned, general, non-partisan observer, if you will. This role he felt could be played best by the literary humanist intellectual, and it was a valuable axis along which to acquire a public hearing. Said’s love for the amateur and autodidacticism—which he gets from Vico and Gramsci—was more than the playing-down of credentials; it was an improvisatory, unsanctioned knowledge that arose from reading without particular plan or use.

This approach to what he called the “worldliness” of the intellectual allowed him, I think, to be righteously angry in his public performances. It was now permitted to speak bluntly when a cool, bureaucratic indifference (supposedly the proper conduct code for respectable authority figures) would signal a kind of ethical lack; and, second, that the club to which one wanted to belong as an intellectual was not the inside of power at all costs (in the spirit of the fake debates between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate in which, despite their differences, both sides know that the chief goal is remaining in the Senate) but fealty to a position, a belief culture, with its own constellation of influences, and its own constituencies.

He was, as I put it in the biography, a “secret agent” (to borrow an image from one of Conrad’s novels)—a man whose actual views on American anti-intellectualism, the pompous aestheticism of new critical orthodoxies, the imperial swagger of American liberalism, the lobotomized cheerleading of American popular culture, and so on (views he held from the 1950s onwards) could not simply be blurted out. It was explosive stuff, and he had to find a way to be heard. This required maneuvering, speaking in code, a strategy of deflection, and so on.

A literary scholar is alive to problems of representation, and so can forge a language that can be effective in the political sphere, in Said’s case, by launching vague coinages like “affiliation,” the “dynastic,” or “Orientalism” itself (which then carry this immense symbolic weight), and also, the skillful art of evasion—the fashioning of a syntax that accuses while dodging, and that by this tact (or evasion) sidestepping unwanted encounters while making one’s point.

On the other hand, if you take a late essay like “On Defiance and Taking a Position,” you will see that Said also found limits to negotiation. His conduct over the Oslo Accords, where he compares the PLO leadership to Buthelezi (that is, one who presides over a Bantustan, a collaborator with the occupying power), is a good example of his polemic edge at times.

All in all, he conveyed that intellectual inquiry was serious business. In a postmodern age, there was not a trace of cynicism, archness, or irony in him. Sincerity and earnestness were rather the mode, and honestly, I think it was his secret weapon.