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Hence the attacks. A few years ago, an article on Said ran in Commentary magazine under the defamatory headline "The Professor of Terror." In 1985 - his name turned up on a "confidential" blacklist circulated by the Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, implying that he was one of a group of "pro-Arab propagandists" in American academe who "use their anti-Zionism merely as a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism." When an academic association exposed this document, B'nai B'rith hastily retracted it and disowned its author. But trying to defend Palestinians against Israel's massive propaganda resources in America is, by any standard, an uphill slog, and Said has no illusions about it. "My endless beef with the Palestinian leadership is that they've never grasped the importance of America as clearly and as early as the Jews," he says. "Most Palestinian leaders, like Arafat, grew up in tyrannical countries like Syria or Jordan, where there's no democracy at all. They don't understand the institutions of civil society, and that's the most important thing!"
Said is not, in fact, a Muslim, but an Anglican. He was born in Jerusalem in 1935, the son of Arab Christians; his father, a wealthy merchant, fled to Cairo in 1947. English church, English education. In Cairo he went to Victoria College, "the Eton of the Middle East" -- an anomaly, as Said remembers it, in an Egypt seething with anti-British feeling. Willy-nilly, this training ground for the colonial elite made him a child of Empire, giving him "a wonderful, very tough, English public-school education -- ceaseless work." Its teachers were all English, extras from Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, "nostalgic for home and free to cane the little wogs under their tutelage. There was general denigration of Arab society and the Arab world. The place to be was England. What mattered was English culture and English ideas."
At 15, fractious young Edward was expelled for "rowdyness," whereupon his father, who held dual Palestinian-U.S. citizenship, sent him to a boarding school in Massachusetts -- "a tremendous dislocation for me, but academically very easy, after what I'd come from." At 18 Said became an American citizen. He went to Princeton for a year, studying literature, music and moral philosophy. Then he transferred to Harvard, where, after five years, he got a doctorate in English literature. Looking back, Said thinks, the odd thing about his student years was that "I never attached myself to a mentor, never at all. It's my perverse streak -- I'm a natural autodidact."
This liking for the self-taught is at the heart of Said's attitude toward ( work. He thinks the narrowness of students' reference is "one of the great generational dividers," and dislikes the current academic obsession with "professionalism," which basically means finding and keeping your knowledge slot in an overpopulated field. This, he complains, is apt to turn lively undergraduates into timid graduate students "afraid of stepping outside the consensus." Professionalism, as understood in American academe today, "means you learn all the current rules of how to say things. I think that's one of the reasons why intellectual life in America is so stunted. It's a colossal bore. I'm much happier being a shameless amateur, in the original sense of loving things and doing them because you're curious about them, not because you have to."