Edward Said: A Personal and Intellectual Tribute

There are a very few intellectuals ––Bertrand Russell, E.P. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky come to mind in the English-speaking world— whose writings and whose lives provide a kind of pole that thousands of people look toward so as to feel that they are not wholly lost or marginal for possessing instincts for justice and humanity, and for thinking that some small steps might be taken towards their achievement. Edward Said was, without a doubt, such a man. The daze and despair so many of us here at Columbia feel, now that we have taken in that he has gone, is only a very local sign of what is a global loss without measure. And to think of what it must be like for his own brutalized people to lose him, is unbearable.

Read the rest of Akeel Bilgrami’s tribute (delivered at a memorial service for Edward Said on September 29, 2003) from today’s post at Three Quarks Daily. (Thanks, Abbas Raza.)

After my last posting on Said, Projjal Dutta of ArtsIndia wrote to recommend an article by Irfan Husain at the Dawn.