At least someone on the Left follows Jihad Watch. Hugh should pull off more stunts at the expense of the humorless and clueless. As I said at the time, there's no fun to be had in a secular court, why sue? No, the fun begins when the fatwas start to fly!

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:32 AM

Nowadays "higher education" lowers those who are in their system. Obviously the system teaches nothing of value if people can't recognize sarcasm when they see it. Yet people scrimp and save to send their kids to a once prestigious place as Columbia. Save your money folks or better yet, send the kids to trade school. We need plumbers and mechanics more than we need PC indoctrinated zombies who want to spread the "Islamania is peace" baloney. Leave that to those born in the ummah-they're all over the place as it is.

Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS at December 21, 2007 9:35 AM

Say, Hugh,

That reminds me--your campaign for "Antislamischer Fuerer" is coming along smashingly! We've got the boys out doing the rounds breaking glass, busting heads...the usual sort of thing, but with that characteristic Fitzgeraldian flair, know what mean?

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:38 AM

"[we]"

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:39 AM

Best regards, your loyal brownshirted campaigner,

J. Crackbrain Piggery

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:42 AM

I've been commenting on the Spec since IFAW, striking blows at their stupid political correctness.

I would be embarrassed to attend idiotic Columbia U. PC mental midgits.

Posted by: darcy at December 21, 2007 9:47 AM

When Hugh gets started, get out of the way. Just further proof that the Ivory Tower is no more emotionally or mentally mature than those it supposedly teaches. They can dish the criticism, but not take it. Further more, where is the slander on the Middle Eastern Studies, aka Muslim Apology Studies, faculty members? Hugh you sly dog, you developed subliminal writing. Unless of course the publications true intent is to discredit all those who don't kiss up to those poor, misunderstood, oppressed masses in islam.

Posted by: Kevin at December 21, 2007 9:53 AM

Envy. Pure envy. Hugh just happens to be more popular at Columbia that Ms. Morris.

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:54 AM

The implication is that more people are reading Hugh, which is all to the good. Now, if only Hugh would re-read his own material, removing foreign phrases and little-known allusions, we would have a historical figure.

Posted by: StillBreathing at December 21, 2007 9:56 AM

StillBreathing,

Don't mess with success!

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 10:02 AM

Prompted by Robert's post above, I read quickly through the piece written by Rosalind Morris. It goes on and on, offers no evidence of anything other than that the claim, made by someone, that Nadia el-Haj had studied at Bryn Mawr with Barnard's President Judith Schapiro, was incorrect -- as if that made any difference to judgments about the value of Nadia el-Haj's ludicrously tendentious work, which was what the vote on her fitness for tenure was supposed to have been all about. Despite some crushing judgments unanwerably offered by experts in the field on the quality of that work, Nadia el-Haj was voted tenure. This was not only because her department is topheavy with sympathizers with the same cause but because, at the very same time as the El-Haj case, Joseph Massad was being pushed, hard, by his pals (George Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, and others) and Dwight Bolinger may have decided not to contest or block Nadia Abu el-Haj at the same time as the Massad outrage was being attempted.

As I read the piece, I thought it so turgid, so badly written in every respect, so comical withal in its failure to produce any evidence for its assertions and in its hysterical attempt to cover that up with mere rambling, that surely, I said to myself, this must be one more freshman whose trying out for the Columbia Spectator, and this is her maiden effort. Eventually, I thought, she will no doubt learn how to amass facts, and possibily even acquire the ability to use the English language, if not well, much less beautifully, at least acceptably. I was. you see, in a charitable mood. I did wonder, however, what Jacques Barzun would have made of Columbia's standards today. in apparently admitting someone who found it so difficult to express herself, or to think.

I came to the end of the piece, and found this:

"The author is a professor of anthropology and the associate director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not constitute an official statement on behalf of either the department of anthropology or the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society."

Non e possibile. Je n'y crois pas. Ne vozmozhno. But there it is: "Professor of Anthropology" and "Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society."

I hope Jacques Barzun, down in San Antonio, never finds out about Rosalind Morris, or has to endure a sample of her prose.

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 10:06 AM

You are famous Hugh! A Columbia anthropology professor says you are a soft-porn peddler.

Its says on her biography page at Columbia:

Biography

"Rosalind Morris focuses her fieldwork in two main areas: Thailand and South Africa. Over the past decade, she has devoted her attention to thinking about a number of inter-related issues and questions concerning: the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development; the relationships between value and violence; the sexualization of power and desire; the theorization of gender; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her writings on all of these issues, she attends to questions of representation. Her writings include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, the archive of visual anthropology, and the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa’s mining towns. Other essays have addressed the history of fetishism, the violence of culture in anthropological theory, translation and radicalism, mediatic war, photography and its discontents, sex, gender and sexuality, and art in South Africa. She is a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture."

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anthropology/fac-bios/morris/faculty.html

Hugh, you need a biography like this....

Posted by: greatcometof1577 at December 21, 2007 10:13 AM

Rosalind Morris prompts me to post again that MESA Nostra Contest, first put up here in late January 2005, which was inspired by my having to endure reading assorted "scholarly works" by members of Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies (MEALAC for both short and long) faculty.

Here it is:

It's contest time at Jihad Watch, with our TaqiyyaFest still open for entries, and now a new offer from the Vice President of our Board, Hugh Fitzgerald:

Readers of JihadWatch are aware that MESA Nostra is the professional organization in which, in order to become a uomo d'onore, or a donna d'onore for that matter, no kneecaps need be broken, no nightclubs broken up, no trucks hijacked, no girls put on the streets, no cocaine contraband prescribed by "los medicos" of Medellin be distributed. No, there are only two requirements to become a Made Man in MESA Nostra. The first is easy: you must view the entire Middle East through ideological blinkers, in which Islam scarcely matters, and in which, whatever happens, Jihad-conquest and dhimmitude will be ignored, so that contemporary expressions of millennium-old doctrines, attitudes, impulses will be interpreted without the slightest reference to those doctrines, attitudes, impulses.
That is content.

There is also form.

What would Shakespeare have been like had he not forced himself to squeeze his dramatic verse into the Elizabethan doublet of iambic pentameter? Or Spenser, without the Spenserian stanza? It is not only writers in Elizabethan England who found such constraints productive. How impressive that 20th century French writer who managed to produce a novel without using the letter "e," or that other one who composed a series of works based on a single device: the beginning and the final sentences of whatever he wrote were phonetically identical, though semantically wildly different, and he assigned himself the writerly task of beating a plausible path through the overgrown jungle of language, a path that led ineluctably from that first sentence to the same-sounding, but different-meaning, last sentence.

Many of those in MESA Nostra may not realize it, but they are akin to Shakespeare and Spenser, Georges Perec and Raymond Roussel. For them it is not a question of verse-forms, or lipograms, or homophonic puns. Their self-imposed constraint consists in limiting their scholarly lexicon to fewer than fifty nouns, and two-dozen verbs. They harness these exhausted nouns, these over-worked verbs, and put them to work, no matter the subject. No matter the subject.

Thus the prose produced by one member of MESA Nostra will sound remarkably like that of another. Here we mean the enthusiastic, full-throated members of MESA Nostra, those whose interests do not stray very far from "Iraq" and "Palestine" and "colonialism" and "empire," and the obvious ring-changing variants: "occupied Iraq/Palestine," "Iraqi/Palestinian people," "Israeli colonialism," "American empire." Many members of MESA Nostra membership have a deep and abiding personal and professional interest in these matters, as they do in little else. They can do no other.

But a few members of MESA Nostra are members-in-name-only, who remain different in mental makeup, and distant from the bureaucratic intrigues, the political tendentiousness, the anti-American,anti-Israel, anti-Western themes and variations. These "non-member" members do not write about the "construction of Palestinian identity" nor the "(de)construction of Israeli identity." Rather, they write about "The Methods of the Mudaddithin," or "Ephraim of Edessa," or "Xavier de Planhol and Agricultural Desolation in the Berber Heartland," or "Yemeni Jews as Chattel Slaves" or "The Destruction of the Coptic Churches of Upper Egypt," or "Schacht, Jeffery, Gottheil: Three Masters of Morningside Heights" or "Arabic but not Quran'ic: The Evidence of Numismatics" or "Twelver-Shi'ism in Mevlevistan" or "Ibn Battuta, the Rihla, and the Destruction of Hindustan" or "Why There Was No Arab Copernicus or Vesalius: An Inquiry" or "Aisha and Marriage in the Islamic Republic of Iran" or "Quran'ic Memorization and Comparative I.Q. Levels in Post-Independence India" or "Sir William Jones and the Re-Discovery of India" or "The Role of Hadrami Traders in the Muslim Conquest of the East Indies" or "The Story of Thomas Pellow" or "Indo-Persian Miniatures of Jihad-Conquest in the British Museum Collections: A Catalogue Raisonee" or "Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge: A Critical Edition" or "Book-Binding at the Abbasid Court" or "The Role of Hungarian Converts in Ottoman History" or "The War Within Islam: Universalist Claims, Arab Supremacist Doctrine" or "The Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and Pacta Sunt Servanda: Muhammad and Grotius on the Law of War and Peace" or …well, you get the idea. But these are not the people whom we have in mind when we discuss MESA Nostra at JihadWatch. We are talking about the other kind.

And it was with that other kind in mind – the card-carrying careerists, the blurb-and-reference swappers, the runners-for-office, the risers-high, the much-interviewed, the solemn dispensers of wisdom to the unwary, the True Believers – that we created the MESA Nostra Contest.

The contest is simple. Below is a single paragraph, itself consisting of a single sentence, transparently written in Mesanostran. Contestants are asked to identify the author.

"In conclusion, I feel that this work of analysis, by focusing on the implications of the phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops and their supporters throughout the American empire, both equally unappeasable in their demonstrable need for "the Other," does what in a quasi-heuristic sense it was intended to do, as it manages to break away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of postcolonial subalternity, or even of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive interrogation of the counter- or, more exactly, anti-mimesis which is inherently essential to Mesopotamian or indeed to Cairene, Abbasid, Jordanian or Palestinian thought for, as a native of (Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Islamabad, Ramallah, Teheran, etc. – choose one) and hence a non-European, I am of necessity self-assigned to that category of people best placed to perform such a mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised specificity, but of equal necessity, not as one obviously intent on de-undermining or rather meta-determining the poststructuralist or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the other hand my critique is quite meta-consciously deeply para-rooted within, as well as up-rooted out of, and obviously from, Western thought with its inalienably alien constructions of meta-identity and hypersexuality, which necessarily give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serves merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing."

The prize for the first correct entry emailed to director@jihadwatch.org will be a nicely framed copy of Professor Hamid Dabashi's celebrated Poem in Prose to Edward Said, which you may read now by googling "Hamid Dabashi" and "Edward Said." For many, that will be prize enough.

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 10:13 AM

So that everyone has immediately available the full text of Hamid Dabashi's tribute to Edward Said, it is presented here as a public service:

The Moment of Myth
Edward Said (1935-2003)
By HAMID DABASHI

Close proximity to a majestic mountain is a mixed blessing -- one is at once graced by the magnanimity of its pastures and the bounty of its slopes, and yet one can never see where one is sitting, under the shadow of what greatness, the embracing comfort of what assurance. The splendor of mountains -- Himalayas, Rockies, Alborz -- can only be seen from afar, from the safe distance of only a visual, perceptive, appreciative, awe-inspiring grasp of their whereabouts.

A very happy few -- now desolate and broken -- have had the rare privilege of calling Edward Said a friend, fewer a colleague, even fewer a comrade, only a handful a neighbor -- the closer you came to Edward Said the more his intimate humanity, ordinary simplicity, the sweet, endearing, disarmingly embracing character -- his being a husband, a father, a father-in-law, an uncle, a cousin -- clouded and colored the majesty that he was. Our emails and voicemails are still full of his precious words, his timely consolations, anecdotal humor, trivial questions, priceless advice -- all too dear to delete, too intimate to share. We were all like birds flying around the generosity of his roof, tiny dandelions joyous in the shade of his backyard, minuscule creatures pasturing on the bounteous slopes of the mountain that he was.

The prince of our cause, the mighty warrior, the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source of our sanity in despair, solace in our sorrow, hope in our own humanity, is now no more.

In his absence now it is possible to remember the time when you were and he was not part of your critical consciousness, your creative disposition, your presence in the world -- when he did not look over your shoulder watching every single word you wrote.

If remembering the time that you were but he was not integral to you is not to be an exercise in archeological futility, then it has to account for the distance, the discrepancy, between the bashful scholasticism of the learning that my generation of immigrant intellectuals received and the confidence and courage with which we can stand up today in face of outrageous fortune -- hand in hand with our brothers and sisters across races and nations, creeds and chaos -- and say, "NO!"

Today, there is a solidarity of purpose among a band of rebels and mutineers -- gentiles are among us and Jews, Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, atheists we are and agnostics, natives and immigrants -- who speak truth to power with the voice of Edward Said the echo of our chorus. How we came here -- where we are, hearing with his ears, seeing with his eyes, talking with his tongue -- is a question not for making an historical record but for taking moral courage.

Now in the moment of his myth, when Edward Said has left us to our own devices and joined the pantheon of mythic monuments, is precisely the time to have, as he once said, a Gramscian inventory of our whereabouts -- once with, and now without him. Today the world is at once poorer in his absence and yet richer through his memory -- and precisely in that paradox dwell the seeds of our dissent, the promise of our future, the solemnity of our oath at the sacred site of his casket.

I come from a generation of immigrant intellectuals who mark the origin and disposition of their critical intelligence from the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). The shape of our critical character, the voice of our dissent, the texture of our politics, and the very disposition of our courage, are all rooted in every nook and cranny of that revelatory text. It was in the year of the Iranian Revolution, 1979, less than a season after the publication of Orientalism, that Samuel Klausner, who taught us theory and method, first introduced me to Edward Said's spectacular achievement in an utterly prosaic manner. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing a dual degree in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies. By the time I read Orientalism (inhaled it rather, in one deep, satisfying swoop -- drank it like a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade on a hot summer day), I had already read Karl Marx, Max Scheller, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead on the sociology of knowledge. What Said had argued in Orientalism was straight out of a sociology of knowledge angle -- and yet with a globality of vision, a daring, defiant imagination, and with such an assured audacity that I remember I could not believe my eyes -- that I was reading these words in that particular succession of reason and rhetoric.

By the mid-1970s, my generation of sociologists at Penn had already started reading Michel Foucault in a systematic and rather unusual curriculum given that the discipline of sociology was then being rapidly sold out to federally funded policy research and demography -- a downward spiral from which a once groundbreaking discipline never recovered. But at that time at Penn, Phillip Rieff, Digby Baltzell, Samuel Klausner, Harold Bershady, Victor Lidz, and Fred Block were serious theorists with a relatively universal approach to their sociological concerns. I wrote my doctoral dissertation with Phillip Rieff advising me on the sociological aspect of my work and with the late George Makdisi on the Islamic aspect. But the seed that Orientalism had planted in my critical consciousness never left my thoughts after that fateful Fall semester of 1979 when we read it with Samuel Klausner in that dimly lit, tiny room on the fifth floor of McNeal Building off Locust walk on the Penn campus -- smack in the middle of the hostage crisis in Iran, when I could hear a chorus of Penn undergraduates shouting in unison, "Nuke Iran, Maim Iranians!"

Take Orientalism out of that curriculum, Edward Said out of our consciousness, and my generation of immigrant intellectuals would all be a bunch of dispirited souls susceptible to chronic melancholy, or else, horribile dictu, who would pathetically mutate into native informers of one sort or another -- selling their souls to soulless sultans in DC or else to senile patriarchs in Princeton.

I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after my graduation I remained entirely oblivious to it. It was Orientalism that would not let go of the way I thought and wrote about modern or medieval Islamic or Iranian intellectual history. From then on, I began a journey, at once professional and personal, moral and intellectual, that brought me literally to his doorstep on the campus of Columbia University -- where I now teach. To my dying day, I will cherish the precise spot next to Miller Theater on the corner of 116th and Broadway where I met Edward for the first time and went up to him and introduced myself -- the gratitude of a liberated voice in my greetings.

I discovered Edward Said first from Orientalism then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the Iranian Revolution, and then from there I began an almost Jesuit training in every single book he ever wrote and the majority of his essays and articles, reading and re-reading them like a dutiful student preparing for a doctoral exam, long after I was giving doctoral examinations.

Today, of the myriad of things I have learned from Edward Said, nothing matters to me more than the rhapsodic eloquence of his voice -- the majesty, confidence, courage, audacity, and poise of his diction, without which my generation of immigrant intellectuals would have been at the mercy of mercenary academics and embedded journalists who have now flooded the gutters of the mass media -- uttering their pathologies with thick Arabic, Persian, or South Asian accents and yet speaking with a nauseating "We" that sides with the bankrupt architects of this predatory empire. In Edward Said's voice, in his princely posture and magisterial air of confidence, the fragile tone of our almost silent objections and the frailty of our say in the matter suddenly rose to the occasion.

Through Edward Said we suddenly found comrades we never knew we had, friends and families we never suspected in our own neighborhood -- Asia, Africa, and Latin America suddenly became the extension of our home away from home. Jose Marti I discovered through Edward Said, as I did Kojin Karatani, Chinua Achebe, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Seamus Deane, Masao Miyoshi, Ngugi wa Thiongo. Everyone else we thought we knew he made new sense of for us -- Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmat, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

As the color of our skin began to confuse the color line drawn tyrannically between blacks and whites in the United States -- segregated in the respective corners of their misplaced confidence about their races -- we Asians and Latinos, Arabs, Turks, Africans, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Afghans and South Asians were instantly brought together beyond the uncommon denominator of our origin and towards the solidarity of our emerging purpose, the nobility of our handshake with Edward Said.

For years after I had come to Columbia, I could not quite reconcile the public, mythic, iconic Edward Said, and the immediate Edward of my increasing acquaintance and friendship, camaraderie and solidarity. It was as if there was an Edward Said the Magnificent for the rest of the world and then another Edward for a happy few. The two were not exactly irreconcilable; they posited a question, a distance in need of traversing -- how could a mortal so fragile, frail, and accessible cut a global figure so monumental, metaphoric, parabolic?

When two years ago an infamous charlatan slandered me in a New York tabloid and created a scandalous website to malign my public stand against the criminal atrocities he supports, my voicemail was flooded with racist, obscene and threatening messages by the lunatic fringe he had let loose. Smack in the middle of these obscenities, as if miraculously, there was a message from Edward -- a breath of fresh air, refreshing, joyous, re-assuring, life-affirming: "Hamid, my dear, this is Edward . . ." Life was so amazingly beautiful. I kept listening to those obscenities just for the joy of coming to Edward's message. There was something providential in his voice -- it restored hope in humanity. Today at Edward's funeral, the heartbroken few who could look over the shoulder of the pallbearers of Edward's coffin were witness to yet another sublime restoration of hope when Daniel Barenboim played Bach's Prelude in E-Flat from Part I of the Well-Tempered Clavier as a musical tribute to his deceased friend. Those in the vicinity of this miracle saw and heard that the Maestro's loving farewell was no longer just a virtuoso pianist playing a beautiful piece of music-- but that they were privy to Daniel Barenboim speaking with Edward Said for the very last time, in the common language of their choice, privilege and transcendence.

Edward Said was the walking embodiment of hope -- one extraordinary incident that sought and detected an extraordinary sparkle in otherwise very ordinary people who happened on his watch. Years before, when I had open heart surgery and my dear, now departed, friend and colleague, Magda al-Nowaihi was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Edward was extraordinary in his support: calling on us regularly, sending us his new books and articles, reading our manuscripts, making fun of what he called our postmodernisms -- he was the sound of our laughter, the color of our joy, the shape of our hope. Magda fought her malignant cancer for years until her young children became teenagers; I defied my congenital fate and lived -- Edward, the model of our endurance, the measures of our truth, the meaning of our daring to walk into a classroom.

The closer I became to Edward the more impossible it seemed to tell what exactly it was that went into the making of his heroic character in such mythic measures -- by now I was too close to the mountain, embraced by its grace, oblivious to its majesty. But even in public, the account of his life that Edward Said published is no different. One reads his Out of Place (1999) in vain looking for a clue, a succession of historical or psychological causes and traits, as to what great or consequential events make for a monumentally moral life. Everything about Edward Said was rather ordinary, and yet an extraordinary adventure was made of the prosaic occurrences of this very life.

Born in Palestine in 1935, named Edward after the Prince of Wales, he lived a life of exile like millions of other Palestinians in the Arab world. Sent to Mount Hermon High School in New England, and subsequently to Princeton and Harvard for his higher education, Edward Said reports of no extraordinary event that one can identify, analyze, theorize as the defining moment of the mythic figure that he cut at the time of his untimely death. Edward was an ordinary man. Edward Said was a giant. The distance was covered by nothing other than the glory of his daring imagination.

Knowing Edward Said personally was a study in how heroes are made from the flesh and blood of the most ordinary and perishable realities. A Palestinian, an exile, an academic intellectual, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, a father, a friend: none of this common and abundant evidence of a disjointed world can account for the sum total of Edward Said as a towering figure measuring the very definition of a moral life.

"Did you know Professor Said," I asked Chaplin Davis here at Columbia when looking for a place for Miriam Said to receive the flood of visitors who wanted to pay their respects last Friday. "I never met him," she said, "but I know he was a warrior," and then she looked at me with a bright set of shining eyes and added ". . . for justice." "It was just like a light going off on campus," another colleague said of Edward's death.

If one is to begin anywhere to place the particulars of Edward Said's moral and intellectual life together it is not in the prosaics of his exilic life that he shares with millions of others, Palestinian or otherwise, but in the poetics of his creative defiance of his fate -- where he was able repeatedly to give birth to himself. At his death, Edward Said was the moral mandate, the volcanic outburst of a life otherwise wasted in and by accidents that accumulate to nothing. Exile was his fate and he triumphantly turned it into the fruit of his life -- the gift he gave to a world now permanently cast into an exilic departure from itself.

We can find few places in Out of Place that reveal the creative concatenation of such moments better than the concluding paragraph of the book. Like his life, Said's autobiography has to be read from its endings and not from its beginnings. "Sleeplessness for me," he says, "is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost" (295). He stayed awake when the world went to sleep -- the insomniac conscience of the world, conversant with Minerva, observant with his eyes wide awake, like a wise owl, all-seeing, all-hearing, vigilant. "There is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier."

It is here, in the twilight borderline of repeated promises of a dawning light against the assured persistence of darkness, when it appears that the darker moments of our despair must yield to brighter hopes, that we always find Edward Said waiting for the rest of us to awake, to arrive. "With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place." Right here, I believe, Edward Said has rested his case and left his indelible mark on the rest of us, trying, as we are, to learn from him how to complement fatefully while remaining humanly incomplete. That, in my judgment, is the principal reason why such a multitude of people ordinarily at political and ideological odds with each other deeply loved Edward without contradicting themselves or him. His was a spontaneous soul -- he generated and sustained good will and moral purpose on the impulses of the premise he was given, not on the projected idealism of some metaphysical certainty.

What was paramount about Edward Said is that in his utter solitude he was never alone. He always spoke for an otherwise muted possibility of living a moral life against all odds, a graceful David swinging his sling and launching his stones against the Goliath of a world so mercilessly cast in the logic of its own madness -- to be the moral voice of a people, and to turn the tragic fate of that people into the tragedy of a global predicament in which we have all become homeless Palestinians. His virtue was to turn the vices of his time into momentous occasions for a more universal good that went beyond the specificity of one wrong or another. There was a catholicity to his liberating knowledge, a generosity to his moral rectitude, that easily transgressed boundaries and put to shame all territorial claims to authenticity. He was, as he rightly said, always slightly out of place, but that only brought out what was wrong with that place that could not completely accommodate him in the entirety of his character and culture.

In his legacy, Said has made a universal virtue out of the particular predicament that the world handed him at birth. Born in Palestine but denied his ancestral claims on that land, raised in Egypt but schooled with a British colonial education, dispatched to the United States by way of his father's claiming a more permanent part of his American dream but constantly driven to speak the truth of that lie to the powers that hold it, Said turned the inevitability of his fate into the defining moment of his stature as the iconic figure of an entire generation of hope -- against a whole culture of despair.

Edward Said's life has its most immediate bearing as an eloquent testimonial of a people much maligned and brutalized in history. His life and legacy cannot and must not be robbed of that immediacy. It is first and foremost as a Palestinian -- a disenfranchised, dispossessed, disinherited Palestinian -- that Edward Said spoke. The ordinariness of his story -- particularly in those moments when he spoke openly, frankly, innocently of his early youth, adolescence, sibling rivalries, sexual maturity, etc. -- is precisely what restores dignity to a people demonized by a succession of purposeful propaganda, dehumanized to be robbed of their homeland in the broad daylight of history. No assessment of his multifaceted achievements as a teacher, a critic, and a scholar, no laudatory endorsement of his universal humanism, no perfectly deserving appreciation of him as a musician, an essayist, a subaltern theorist, a political activist, etc. -- nothing should ever detract from his paramount significance as a Palestinian deeply wounded by the fate of what he repeatedly and wholeheartedly called "my people."

But Edward Said was not just a Palestinian, though a Palestinian he proudly was. Edward Said also became an icon, a moral paragon in a time when taking desperate measures have cast doubt on the very possibility of a moral voice, and here the ordinariness of his life makes the extraordinary voice that he was even more enduring. Said was not just a Palestinian. But he made every one else look like a Palestinian: made homeless by the mad logic of a brutal game of power that has robbed the whole world of any semblance of permanence.

How to remain an incessantly moral voice in a morally impermanent world, how to transfigure the disfigured mutations of the world into a well-mannered measure of truth, how to dismantle the power that false knowledge projects and yet insist that the just is right and the truth is beautiful -- that is the legacy of Edward Said, right from the mountain top of his majestic peak visible from afar, down to the slopes of his bountiful pastures which few fortunate souls were blessed to call home."

[Hamid Dabashi is the Chair of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) Department, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.]

Please read it aloud to friends and family. Bring to dinner parties, cocktail parties, post-game parties, parties and meetings and gatherings of every kind. And whenever you have the chance, pull out your print-out of Hamid Dabashi's tribute to Edward Said and read it aloud. With feeling. Just the way you imagine that Hamid Dabashi himself, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia, would read it, were he present to do so.

And don't stop there. E-mail it around the world to friends, acquaintances, anyone at all who needs cheering up. What could be more likely to induce laughter than such a product, of such an author, and what could be funnier than the fact that that author is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor at Columbia University?

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 10:17 AM

I remember that post!

Do they do anything academic at Columbia anymore? Other than being unable to read and comprehend English? Hugh and the commentators to his post were defending a long standing Western tradition of admiring the feminine mystique. We like and love women. Wish I could say the same about Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat or the entire Radical Jihadist Islamofacists.

Posted by: tanstaafl at December 21, 2007 10:19 AM

I still say that the only cure for people like Rosalind Morris is a year spent at a Saudi university.

So long as people like her are barricaded in the fantasy world of a Western university, they'll be insulated from the reality of the outside world.

She needs to come face to face with the campus virtues police at a Saudi university, try arguing with them over her right to dress and act as she pleases, before she'll begin seeing the world as it is.

Posted by: rational at December 21, 2007 10:51 AM

There must be a call for a live debate between Hugh and this spokesperson of Columbia.

And Hugh must agree to have one hand of his intellect tied behind his back.

And one still would have to give the overwhelming odds to Hugh.

Bet, and it's easy money.

Posted by: dgene at December 21, 2007 11:07 AM

One more thing. Rosalind Morris appears to believe that I have an association with Campus Watch. I have none. I've just taken a look at the Campus Watch site. It posts twenty-nine pieces by me. Twenty of the twenty-nine are re-postings from Jihad Watch, New English Review, and Front Page Magazine. These things are posted without my knowledge, and without my permission, as is now the standard practice in much of Blogland. I have no present association with Campus Watch at all. Indeed, the extent of my association in the past was slight. I was commissioned to write about Columbia's MEALAC. I gave them an initial nine items, and then I decided to end my piece-work arrangement. I was always horrified by the pictures in Jacob Riis’s “How The Other Half Lives.”

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 11:16 AM

Well, I think that the muslim male has his brain in his underwear but gee, why make him bring himself to a higher level - beat the female for his behavior!

I think that Columbia has proven itself to be nothing but an organization of dimwits. They don't know history - past or present, and they are fools at every opportunity.

Posted by: R_not at December 21, 2007 12:32 PM

"tight-lipped"....hmmmm.

Posted by: MP at December 21, 2007 12:42 PM

So that's soft porn...got me all worked up...had to take a cold shower to calm myself down. I can see why the muslim spiritual leader had a problem with that.
And he has no cold shower. I suppose he could jump in a creek, or a lake to subside his passions.
I don't think Hugh's suggestion is suable, but it is funny...

Posted by: duh_swami at December 21, 2007 12:48 PM

"...Columbia has proven itself to be nothing but an organization of dimwits."
-- from a posting above

This is the kind of remark that undoes legitimate criticism. Columbia, like other universities, has professors of distinction, and some not so distinguished, and then it was what may be called The Usurpers. For they have clambered into academic life as careerists, fixing on this or that modish fashion (which fashion usually turns out to be a collection of phrases), and riding that fashion, and all the things that go with it, right to the top. They can be identified by their constant use of such phrases, or even words. I use some of those words -- "hegemonic," "discourse," "post-colonial" (which strips "colonialism" of any sell-by date) in that satirical paragraph I composed and offered up as the MESA Nostra bit of prose whose author is to be identified.

The Usurpers review each other's books. They provide blurbs. They write references for grants --- Guggenheim, Fulbright, everything that isn't nailed down and that can be used for a summer, or a year, at Bellagio, in southern France, even perhaps right here at home. They not only hire one another, but promote one another, and keep out with what Nabokov once called "the thud of a vindictive racket" those of merit and intelligence whose very presence represents a permanent threat to The Usurpers.

They are less likely to be found, these Usurpers, in those fields, such as the hard sciences, where fakery and fashion are soon exposed by the nature of the subject matter. But where anything goes, gender, sex, race, colonialism, postcolonialism, then the sky's the limit. It used to take a dictator to keep the Usurpers in academic life -- Trofim Lysenko and Nikolai Marr would not have lasted one minute in Soviet universities and institutes had they not had the backing of Joseph Stalin. But now the Usurpers have seen a good thing, and that great good thing for them is the university. One thinks of Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, of Judith Butler, of the marxisant Jameson, of so many others. And at the same time, one thinks of all of those who had a real, deep, profound love for history, for literature, and who entered graduate school, and did what they could, and then along the way were undone by the Usurpers, not offered a job, or offered one only in some remedial subject for impossible students, or not promoted. Nowadays, many of the best undergraduates, sensing the situation (after all, they have those professors, those Usurpers, and their initial love of History or Literature is not to be encouraged by the likes of these people, simply give up, and head off to Law School or something else, leaving graduate studies in the field, so often, to those who find nothing appalling about the Usurping Professors, because they are little would-be Usurpers themselves. It's not always and everywhere the case, but it is far too often the case. That is one of the reasons that Jacques Barzun writes about the "death" of the American university. In the transmission of culture, once regarded as its most important task, the enterprise is sick.

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 1:18 PM

And at the same time, one thinks of all of those who had a real, deep, profound love for history, for literature, and who entered graduate school, and did what they could, and then along the way were undone by the Usurpers, not offered a job, or offered one only in some remedial subject for impossible students, or not promoted.

As a one-time would-be Ph.D., I concur. Fortunately, I read the writing on the wall and left for greener pastures. But, as they say, they can't take my education (in the primary sources, which were the only things worth reading anyway) away from me and I could, and did, just ignore all the race, sex, class BS they threw my way for as long as possible.

Posted by: venividivici at December 21, 2007 1:25 PM

Hugh et alios,

Do know that my silly (perhaps forgettable) jokes are meant to be self-deprecating comic relief to weightier matters, self-parody or parody of others' projection; not mockery or satirical swipes at anyone here. I only intend insult of the craven and the bellicose. Besides that, what I know about academic life is gotten entirely from without it.

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 1:58 PM

JohnC: Do know that my silly (perhaps forgettable) jokes are meant to be self-deprecating comic relief to weightier matters, self-parody or parody of others' projection; not mockery or satirical swipes at anyone here.

That's exactly what I try to do. The only reason I get away with it is because I am not very good at it. On one hand Islam is a serious concern, on the other hand Islam provides us with a never ending supply of silly stuff to have fun with. Discrediting Islam with sarcasm and humor is a legitimate tool against serious Islam. Humor jihad, infidel style,
a highly respectable position...

Posted by: duh_swami at December 21, 2007 2:34 PM

SWAMI,

Thanks for bucking my spirits up.

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 2:45 PM

"The implication is that more people are reading Hugh, which is all to the good. Now, if only Hugh would re-read his own material, removing foreign phrases and little-known allusions, we would have a historical figure."

Posted by: StillBreathing

StillBreathing,

I just open a separate tab on my browser, and pull up a dictionary. I've had to Google a phrase or three, which get me through the speed bumps in the articles, but sadly I tend to forget their meanings later. Hugh has increased my vocabulary, but not to the point where I'm confident about my using such high-dollar words, myself. My latest favorite is "circumambient"; I love that one.

I look on it as sort of a game. Hugh tosses in a new word, I puzzle over it, make a guess, then check the dictionary, to find out if I was even close.

Seriously, though--it's reading things like those in the main article above, which make me less disappointed in having missed out on college.
*************************************************

"Non e possibile. Je n'y crois pas."

And, Hugh... I just love it when you speak French!

Posted by: Abscedere at December 21, 2007 3:18 PM

Just saw the link Hugh advised Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat to check out. That ought to keep Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat in a "tent" for awhile. As for me, nice song, great pipes, but maybe when it comes to soft-core 20's/30's porn, nothing. Man, I love being an infidel.

Posted by: Kevin at December 21, 2007 4:01 PM

"There must be a call for a live debate between Hugh and this spokesperson of Columbia.

And Hugh must agree to have one hand of his intellect tied behind his back."

...posted by dgene

Like from chugging an entire '98 Chateauneuf du Pape immediately prior to taking the podium? Yes, in the interest of fairness!

Posted by: Infidel33 at December 21, 2007 4:34 PM

Hugh,

Please, when the contest you sponsor has finished its course, broadcast the name of this monstous abuser of our otherwise common language, whose twisted prose and tortured thinking processes you display for our edification and amazement, boldly and prominently, won't you?

Is this a bad joke, or do supposedly educated and enlightened persons ACTUALLY write like this in a seriously professional capacity? If your answer is affirmative, then this is not a scholarly association of accomplished thinkers, but A BEDLAM OF BUFFOONISH BLINKERS.

Tell me, sir, is this FOR REAL?

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 8:11 PM

It's an old contest. Google a bit, and you will find the answer to your question, and much, much more.

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 8:17 PM

This technophobe can Google, even Ga-Ga a bit, but without a Rosetta Stone to decipher this gibberish, I'll end up where I started from, I fear.

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 8:54 PM

In other words, how do I begin my quest for Cosmic Consciousness? A key word or phrase might do.

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:14 PM

Three words: MESA Nostra Contest.

Posted by: Hugh at December 21, 2007 9:31 PM

Another radical feminist defending the jihadists. What does this specialist in "theorizing of gender" and "sexualization of power and desire" have to say about women in burkhas, or women being stoned in Iran on suspicion of adultery?

Posted by: usapatriot at December 21, 2007 9:42 PM

Thanks, Hugh.

One word: PLASTICS

(sorry--I had to throw that in there)

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 9:44 PM

O m m m ... Enlightenment!

BTW, Hugh, did you know that the Lower Slobbovian Nationalist Party--LSNP (not to be confused with the Nationalist Party of Lower Slobbovia--NPLS, a splinter group) has given your candidacy its fullest support? This coup should solidify your standing throughout the Eurabiasian Universality.

Ein Antijihadische Volk!

Ein Antijihadische Reich!

Ein Antijihadischer Fuerer!

Posted by: John C at December 21, 2007 10:10 PM

"Discrediting Islam with sarcasm and humor is a legitimate tool" --posted above

Oh yeah. Because they hate mockery so much! Their brittle belief system can't take it! Ergo -Mock, mock, mock!

Posted by: darcy at December 22, 2007 9:06 AM