Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
Region	Western Philosophy
Era	20th-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
name	Edward Saïd
size	250px
birth date	November 01, 1935
birth place	Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
death date	September 25, 2003
death place	New York City, New York, United States
religion	Christianity
School tradition	Postcolonialism, Postmodernism
Notable ideas	Occidentalism, Orientalism, "The Other"
influences	Derrida, Vico, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Gramsci, Adorno, Conrad, Blackmur, Williams, Foucault, Chomsky.
influenced	Hamid Dabashi, Homi K. Bhabha, John Esposito, Gayatri Spivak, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Fisk, Mahmood Mamdani, Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, Nigel Gibson, Derek Gregory, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha. }}

Edward Wadie Saïd ( , ; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism. Robert Fisk described him as the Palestinians' "most powerful political voice."

Said was an influential cultural critic and author, known best for his book ''Orientalism'' (1978), which catapulted him to international academic fame. The book presented his influential ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. Said contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction of Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's ''Orientalism'' and following works proved influential in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence several other fields in the humanities. ''Orientalism'' affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East. Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.

Said also came to be known as a public intellectual who frequently discussed contemporary politics, music, culture, and literature, in lectures, newspaper and magazine columns, and books. Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian growing up in a Palestinian Christian family in the Middle East at the time of the creation of Israel, Said argued for the creation of a Palestinian state, equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return, and for increased pressure on Israel, especially by the United States. He also criticized several Arab and Muslim regimes. Having received a Western education in the US, where he lived from his high school years until his death, Said tried to use his dual heritage, the subject of his prize-winning memoir ''Out of Place'' (1999), to bridge the gap between the West and the Middle East and to improve the situation in Israel-Palestine. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council for over a decade and his pro-Palestinian activism made him a figure of considerable controversy.

With his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, the Palestinian territories, and surrounding Arab nations. It opened in 1999. Said was also an accomplished pianist. In 2002, he and Barenboim published a book of their earlier conversations on music, titled ''Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society''. Active until his last months, Said died in 2003 after a decade-long battle with leukemia.

Early life

Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father, a US citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins, was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I. He moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His mother, born in Nazareth, also had a Protestant background and was half-Lebanese. His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.

Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12. He claims to have attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem, but this has been a matter of some dispute. As the Arab League declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. In a ''London Review of Books'' article, Said gave a more detailed account of his upbringing:

In 1951, Said was expelled from Victoria College for being a "troublemaker", and was consequently sent by his parents to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place". Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'. Though these themes of interweaving cultures, feeling out of place, and being far from home affected him dissonantly and would echo through Said's work for the rest of his life, Said managed to do well at the Massachusetts boarding school often 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.

Fluent in English, French, and Arabic, Said earned a Bachelor of Arts (1957) from Princeton University, and a Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) in English Literature from Harvard University.

Career

In 1963, Saïd joined the faculty of Columbia University, in the departments of English and Comparative Literature, where he would serve until his death in 2003. In 1974 he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, in 1975-6 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford, and in 1977, Saïd became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1979, Saïd was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Saïd was also a visiting professor at Yale University and lectured at more than 100 universities. In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's highest academic position. He lived near campus in The Colosseum on Riverside Drive.

Saïd also served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the ''Arab Studies Quarterly'', and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the executive board of PEN, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, the Council of Foreign Relations, and the American Philosophical Society.

In 1993, Said was invited to present the BBC's annual Reith Lectures. In a series of six talks, entitled Representation of the Intellectual he examined the role of public intellectuals in modern society. The BBC made these lectures available to the public in July 2011.

Saïd's writing regularly appeared in ''The Nation'', ''The Guardian'', the ''London Review of Books'', ''Le Monde Diplomatique'', ''Counterpunch'', ''Al Ahram,'' and the pan-Arab daily ''al-Hayat''. The themes of his writings included literature, politics, the Middle East, music, and culture.

Literary criticism

After expanding on his thesis to produce his first book, ''Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography'' (1966), Said, swirling with a wealth of ideas which he received from studying the works of Giambattista Vico and others, presented his award-winning second book, ''Beginnings: Intention and Method'' (1974), a work on the theoretical underpinnings of literary critical projects. Other literary critical texts by Said include ''The World, the Text, and the Critic'' (1983), ''Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization'' (1988), ''Culture and Imperialism'' (1993), ''Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures'' (1994), and the posthumous ''Humanism and Democratic Criticism'' (2004) and ''On Late Style'' (2006).

Fascinated, like his postmodern influences, with how people perceive things in cultural contexts, and by the effects of society, politics and power on literature, Said is considered a founder of postcolonial criticism. His work on Orientalism is particularly important, but his interpretations of Conrad, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, Yeats, and other writers have also proven influential among critics.

“Orientalism”

Said is most famous for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In his most famous book, ''Orientalism'' (1978), Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture." He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and the US' colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In ''Orientalism'', the book, Said asserted that much western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study, a form of racism, and a tool of imperialist domination. ''Orientalism'' had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Maxime Rodinson, and Richard William Southern, Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term that he transformed into a pejorative):

Said argued that the West has stereotyped the East in art and literature, since antiquity – such as the composition of ''The Persians'' by Aeschylus. Even more so in modern times, Europe has dominated Asia politically so that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that Western scholars could not recognize. Western scholars appropriated the task of exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves, with the implication that the East was not capable of composing its own narrative. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.

Said concluded that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up. In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia. After stating the central thesis, ''Orientalism'' consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

Criticism

''Orientalism'' and other works by Said sparked a wide variety of controversy and criticism. Ernest Gellner argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe. Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian Empires intervened. Others argued out that even at the height of the imperial era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims. Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.

Strong criticism of Said's critique of ''Orientalism'' came from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya addressed what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's ''Orientalism'' on the perception and status of their scholarship.|group="nb"}} Bernard Lewis in particular was often at odds with Said following the publication of ''Orientalism'', in which Said singled out Lewis as a "perfect exemplification" of an "Establishment Orientalist" whose work "purports to be objective liberal scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda ''against'' his subject material". Lewis answered with several essays in response, and was joined by other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who also regarded ''Orientalism'' as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.

Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic. According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations in Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans. The critic Robert Irwin writes that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.

Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic "Occidentalism" to oppose to the "Orientalism" of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment; that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism. More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as ''Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'') and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).

Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern". Given Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own arguments that "any and all representations … are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer … [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation" could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism", unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of ''any'' objective truth.

Supporters

Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film. His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of ''Orientalism'', he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics, such as Lewis. ''Orientalism'' is regarded as central to the postcolonial movement, encouraging scholars "from non-western countries…to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with 'narratives of oppression,' creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western 'other.'"

Said's importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash, Nicholas Dirks, and Ronald Inden, and Cambodia, such as Simon Springer, and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. His work continues to be widely discussed in academic seminars, disciplinary conferences, and scholarship.

Influence

Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book ''Orientalism'' has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting, his supporters praise his influence as liberating. Postcolonial theory, of which Said is regarded as a founder and a figure of continual relevance, continues to attract interest and is a thriving field in the humanities. ''Orientalism'' continues to profoundly inform the field of Middle Eastern studies. He was a prominent public intellectual in the United States, praised widely as an "intellectual superstar," engaging in music criticism, public lectures, media punditry, contemporary politics, and musical performance. His breadth of influence is regarded as "genuinely global," resting on his unique and innovative blend of cultural criticism, politics, and literary theory.

Barack Obama was among Said's students when Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia in the early 1980s. In May 1998, then Illinois state senator Obama and his wife Michelle sat with Said and his wife at an Arab community event in Chicago at which Said gave the keynote speech. The report in which the Chicago event was included discussed the politician's efforts to address the Palestinian cause, though the writer's dominant theme—in 2007—was that Obama had adopted the Israeli cause and neglected the Palestinian one.

Music

Being not only an avid music lover, but also an accomplished pianist, Said wrote extensively about music, including being the music critic for ''The Nation'' for several years, and writing three books on music: ''Musical Elaborations'', ''Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society'' (with the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim), and his last book, ''On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain''. In music, Said often saw a reflection of his ideas on literature and history, and he would find real life possibilities in bold composition and performance. A posthumous collection of essays was published in 2007 by Columbia University Press, entitled ''Music at the Limits''.

The music of Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz has been deeply influenced by the writings of Said. Fairouz's First Symphony references the essay ''Homage to a Belly Dancer'' and his Piano Sonata is titled ''Reflections on Exile'' after the collection of essays by Said.

In 1999, Said jointly founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Barenboim. The award-winning youth orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries, and has performed internationally, including within both Israel and Palestine. Said and Barenboim also worked together to establish The Barenboim-Said Foundation in Seville. The government-funded foundation was eventually constituted in 2004 with its purpose being to develop several "education through music" projects. In addition to managing the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim-Said Foundation assists with other projects such as the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine project and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project in Seville.

Politics

Pro-Palestinian activism

Throughout his adult life, Said involved himself in the effort for Palestinians statehood. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council. He was also an early proponent of a two-state solution and, in 1988, voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 1970s. In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. Said's relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad in 1995 that PA leaders banned the sale of his books, but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.

In an article entitled ''Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims'', he argued for the legitimacy and authenticity of both the Zionist claim to a land (and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland) and Palestinian rights of self-determination. Said's books on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians include ''The Question of Palestine'' (1979), ''The Politics of Dispossession'' (1994) and ''The End of the Peace Process'' (2000).

A photograph taken on July 3, 2000, of Said in South Lebanon throwing a stone across the Lebanon–Israel border drew criticism from some political and media commentators, some of whom decried the act as "terrorist sympathizing.". Said explained the act as a stone-throwing contest with his son, and called it a ''symbolic gesture of joy'' at the end of Israel's occupation of Lebanon. "It was a pebble. There was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away." Although he denied aiming the rock at anyone, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper ''As-Safir'' asserted that Said had been less than from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower when he aimed the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed-wire. While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia University faculty members, some students, and from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Columbia provost issued a five-page letter defending Said's act on the grounds of freedom of expression: "To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Said." Said said that there were repercussions, however, noting that in February 2001 the Freud Society of Vienna cancelled an invitation for him to give a lecture. The president of the Freud Society cited "the political situation in the Middle East and its consequences" as a reason, going on to explain that anti-Semitism "has become more dangerous" in Austrian politics and that the Society had decided on the cancellation "to avoid an internal clash."

Said made a documentary film about Palestine for BBC named ''In Search of Palestine''. BBC was unsuccessful in getting it on U.S. television.

In ''Culture and Resistance'' (2003), Said likened his situation to that of Noam Chomsky: "It's very similar to him. He's a well known, great linguist. He's been celebrated and honored for that. But he's also vilified as an anti-Semite and a Hitler worshiper." Said went on to explain:

In 2003, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or ''Al-Mubadara'', an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to Fatah and Hamas. Three years later, in January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under FBI surveillance as early as 1971. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.

Criticism of US foreign policy

In a 1997 revised edition of his book ''Covering Islam'', Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.” Said opposed many US foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East and elsewhere. He critiqued US involvement in Kosovo and Iraq under President Clinton, and US support for Israel was a constant topic that he addressed in his activism. Although growing increasingly weak from his battle with leukemia, Said spent many of his last months speaking out against the then recent invasion of Iraq. In an April 2003 interview with ''Al-Ahram Weekly'', Said argued that the Iraq War was ill-conceived:

Death and tributes

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a 12 year-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He was survived by his wife of 33 years, Mariam (née Cortas); a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.

Subsequently, several prominent writers published elegies for Said, including Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Michael Wood, and Tariq Ali.

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Said's honor.

In 2008, Verso Books published ''Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said'', a book of essays by 15 authors, including Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi and Elias Khoury. The book was edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür.

A critical memoir, ''Edward Said: the charisma of criticism,'' by H. Aram Veeser was published by Routledge in March 2010.

In August 2010, the University of California Press published a large volume of essays by some 29 authors about every aspect of Said's intellectual contributions. Edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, ''Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations'' includes interviews with Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, as well as the writings of Joseph Massad, Jacqueline Rose, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Asha Varadhjan, RR Radhakrishnan, Ardi Imseis, Ghada Karmi, Sabry Hafez and many others.

Edward Said memorial lectures

Since Said's death in 2003, several institutions have instituted annual lecture series in his memory, including Columbia University, University of Warwick, Princeton University, University of Adelaide, American University of Cairo, and Palestine Center, with such notables speaking as Daniel Barenboim, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Cornel West.

Bibliography

Awards

Besides being honored with memberships and posts to several prestigious organizations and institutions, Said was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world. Said was the recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize. He received the Lionel Trilling Award (twice), the first occasion being the first time the award was given. He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award. In 2001, Said received the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and he was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais prize. His autobiography, ''Out of Place'', won him the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature. Said Was named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin in 2003, shortly before his death.

Honorary Degree at The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS): Orientalism once more (2003) / Edward W. Said / The Hague: ISS, 2003. Lecture delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa on the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, 21 May 2003.

See also

Blaming the Victims

List of Columbia University people

Palestinian Christians

Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis

Notes

References

Further reading

Kennedy, Valerie. ''Edward Said: A Critical Introduction''. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.

McCarthy, Conor. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Rubin, Andrew N., ed. ''Humanism, Freedom, and the Critic: Edward W. Said and After''. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.

External links

The Edward Said Archive

BBC Orientalism documentary

"Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights." Lecture given at UC Berkeley. Part 1, Part 2.

"Barenboim and Said: 'Parallels and Paradoxes". Interview with Scott Simon on ''Weekend Edition Saturday'' (2002-12-28, National Public Radio).

''Democracy Now!'' interview with Edward Said (2001-3-14)

Edward Said at ZMagazine.org

Edward Said at The Electronic Intifada

Review of ''Reflections on Exile and Other Essays'' and ''Edward Said: The Last Interview'', in ''Other Voices'', vol. 3, no. 1.

Edward Wadie Said at the International Institute of Social Studies

Category:American Middle Eastern studies Category:American political writers Category:Postcolonial literature Category:Postcolonialism Category:Islamic politics and Islamic world studies Category:Anti-Zionism Category:American literary critics Category:American agnostics Category:American humanists Category:American writers of Arab descent Category:Arab Christians Category:American people of Palestinian descent Category:Palestinian academics Category:Palestinian Christians Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Columbia University faculty Category:Deaths from leukemia Category:1935 births Category:2003 deaths Category:American writers of Asian descent Category:People from Jerusalem Category:Scholars of nationalism Category:Palestinian Protestants Category:Cancer deaths in New York Category:American activists Category:Palestinian political writers Category:Palestinian literary critics Category:American orientalists

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Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
color	#B0C4DE
name	Avram Noam Chomsky
birth date	December 07, 1928
birth place	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
residence	U.S.
nationality	American
field	Linguistics
alma mater	University of Pennsylvania (BA 1949, MA 1951, Ph.D 1955)
Work institutions	MIT
known for	Generative grammaruniversal grammartransformational grammargovernment and binding theoryX-bar theoryChomsky hierarchycontext-free grammarprinciples and parametersMinimalist programlanguage acquisition devicepoverty of the stimulusChomsky–Schützenberger theoremChomsky normal formpropaganda model
Signature	Noam Chomsky signature.svg }}

Avram Noam Chomsky (; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) of in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy theorem, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His social criticism has included ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. He is also the eighth most cited source of all time, and is considered the "most cited living author". Chomsky is the author of over 100 books.

Life and career

Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky)—a native of what is present-day Belarus—grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English". Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Although Chomsky's mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, he was influenced largely by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night". Chomsky was influenced also by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization, as well as by hanging around anarchist bookstores.

He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature", though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one". Chomsky also describes tensions he experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—''The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew''—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.

In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it"; however, he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR. Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived together in separate houses, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz", responded, that in "some respects, the kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book ''Syntactic Structures'', one of his best-known works in linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in ''The New York Review of Books''. This was followed by his 1969 book, ''American Power and the New Mandarins,'' a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title: ''Intellectuals and the State''.

Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.

Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts, and travels often, giving lectures on politics.

Contributions to linguistics

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his ''Syntactic Structures'', a distillation of his '' Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field, is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to Rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.

It is a popular misconception that Chomsky ''proved'' that language is entirely innate and ''discovered'' a "universal grammar" (UG). In fact, Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has which the cat lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD) and suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P;)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as ''Lectures on Government and Binding'' (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.;

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of the language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates and Michael Tomasello argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.

His best-known work in phonology is ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply ''SPE''). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed Universal Grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.

Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses. In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English. Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism. In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.

Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory). Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.

An alternate method of dealing with languages is based upon Formal Power series. Formal Power series as well as the relationship between languages and semi-groups continued to occupy M. P. Schützenberger at the Sorbonne. Formal Power Series are similar to the Taylor Series one encounters in a course on Calculus, and is especially useful for languages where words (terminal symbols) are commutative.

Contributions to psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's ''Verbal Behavior'', a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. He defined "Verbal Behavior" as learned behavior that has characteristic consequences delivered through the learned behavior of others. This makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky—Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.

In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned," cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.

Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper ''On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 13, pages 83–99). MacCorquodale's argument was updated and expanded in important respects by Nathan Stemmer in a 1990 paper, ''Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 54, pages 307–319). These and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties. Consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. The review has been further critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Skinner and others, including by quoting out of context. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy."

It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 ''Cartesian Linguistics'' and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to Jean Piaget at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (''Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky,'' Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Courrège and Antoine Danchin, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by Jacques Mehler and Stanislas Dehaene in particular in the domain of numerical cognition lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Approach to science

Chomsky sees science as a straightforward search for explanation, and rejects the views of it as a catalog of facts or mechanical explanations. In this light, the majority of his contributions to science have been frameworks and hypotheses, rather than "discoveries."

As such, he considers certain so-called post-structuralist or postmodern critiques of logic and reason to be nonsensical:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Although Chomsky believes that a scientific background is important to teach proper reasoning, he holds that science in general is "inadequate" to understand complicated problems like human affairs:

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them... But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Debates

Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with such varied intellectuals as Jean Piaget, Michel Foucault, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, George Lakoff, Richard Perle, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Alan Dershowitz, to name a few. In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said that "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way.... I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is.... People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."

Political views

Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism. Chomsky tries to avoid the ambiguity of labels, although he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union. He published a book on anarchism titled ''Chomsky on Anarchism'', published by the anarchist book collective AK Press in 2006.

Chomsky has engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events, which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those the powerful do not want to hear and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident.

Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic. He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism, including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s." Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question/answer following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."

Regarding the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Chomsky believes that the United States acted improperly, saying "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."

He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a propaganda arm and "bought priesthood" of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, with the three parties intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter Lippmann, Chomsky along with his coauthor Edward S. Herman has written that the American media manufactures consent among the public. Chomsky has condemned the 2010 supreme court ruling revoking the limits on campaign finance, calling it "corporate takeover of democracy."

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana are attacked because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poor: He has stated:

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

Chomsky is critical of the American "state capitalist" system and big business, he describes himself as a socialist, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist and is therefore strongly critical of "authoritarian" Marxist and/or Leninist and/or Maoist branches of socialism. He also believes that socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. He believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."

Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."

Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:

One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow – the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.

Chomsky holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views with tax resistance and peace walks. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". He maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II to defeat the Axis powers was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. He believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".

Chomsky has made many criticisms of the Israeli government, its supporters, the United States' support of the government and its treatment of the Palestinian people, arguing that " 'supporters of Israel' are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction" and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence." Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, saying, "I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state." Chomsky hesitated before publishing work critical of Israeli policies while his parents were alive, because he "knew it would hurt them" he says, "mostly because of their friends, who reacted hysterically to views like those expressed in my work." On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and ultimately refused his entry to the West Bank via Jordan. A spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister indicated that the refusal of entry was simply due to a border guard who "overstepped his authority" and a second attempt to enter would likely be allowed. Chomsky disagreed, saying that the Interior Ministry official who interviewed him was taking instructions from his superiors. Chomsky maintained that based on the several hours of interviewing, he was denied entry because of the things he says and because he was visiting a university in the West Bank but no Israeli universities.

Chomsky has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media, and opposes censorship. He has stated that "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". With reference to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Chomsky suggested that "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government -- Hillary Clinton, others -- and also by the diplomatic service." Chomsky refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him and prefers to counter libels through open letters in newspapers. One notable example of this approach is his response to an article by Emma Brockes in ''The Guardian'' which alleged he denied the existence of the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky's complaint prompted The Guardian to publish an apologetic correction and to withdraw the article from the paper's website.

Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:

I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs.

Some critics have accused Chomsky of hypocrisy when, in spite of his political criticism of American and European military imperialism, early research at the institution (MIT) where he did his linguistic research had been substantially funded by the American military. Chomsky makes the argument that because he has received funding from the U.S. Military, he has an even greater responsibility to criticize and resist its immoral actions.

Influence in other fields

''Chomskyan'' models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "...I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 ... Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.

Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)

The model attempts to explain this perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through," which combine to systematically distort news coverage.

In explaining the first filter, ownership, he notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model expects them to publish news that reflects the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups that attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.

Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic élite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."

They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to élite interests.

Academic achievements, awards and honors

In early 1969, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, and many others.

Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following:

University of London

University of Chicago

Loyola University of Chicago

Swarthmore College

University of Delhi

Bard College

University of Massachusetts

University of Pennsylvania

Georgetown University

Amherst College

University of Cambridge

University of Colorado

University of Buenos Aires

McGill University

Rovira i Virgili University

Columbia University

Villanova University

University of Connecticut

University of Maine

Scuola Normale Superiore

University of Western Ontario

University of Toronto

Harvard University

Universidad de Chile

University of Bologna

Universidad de La Frontera

University of Calcutta

Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Santo Domingo Institute of Technology

Uppsala University

University of Athens

University of Cyprus

Central Connecticut State University

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Peking University National Tsing Hua University He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989).

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.

Chomsky is a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of the MIT Harvard Research Journal.

In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society. In 2007, Chomsky received The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus. In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since 2009 he is honorary member of IAPTI.

In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. In April 2010, Chomsky became the third scholar to receive the University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship.

Chomsky has an Erdős number of four.

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine ''Prospect''. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls". In a list compiled by the magazine ''New Statesman'' in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".

Actor Viggo Mortensen with avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2006 album, called ''Pandemoniumfromamerica'' to Chomsky.

On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.

In June 2011, Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which cited his "unfailing courage, critical analysis of power and promotion of human rights".

Bibliography

Filmography

''Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media'', Director: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)

''Last Party 2000'', Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch (2001)

''Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times'', Director: John Junkerman (2002)

''Distorted Morality—America's War On Terror?'', Director: John Junkerman (2003)

''Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause'' (TV), Director: Will Pascoe (2003)

''The Corporation'', Directors: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; Writer: Joel Bakan (2003)

''Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land'', Directors: Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)

''On Power, Dissent and Racism: A discussion with Noam Chomsky'', Journalist: Nicolas Rossier; Producers: Eli Choukri, Baraka Productions (2004)

''Lake of Fire'', Director: Tony Kaye (2006)

American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals, Director: Richard Hall (2008)

In the Time We've Got, Director: Christopher Ives (2008)

''Chomsky & Cie'' Director: Olivier Azam (out in 2008)

''An Inconvenient Tax'', Director: Christopher P. Marshall (out in 2009)

''The Money Fix,'' Director: Alan Rosenblith (2009)

''Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space'', Director: Denis Delestrac (2010)

''Article 12: Waking up in a surveillance society'', Director: Juan Manuel Biaiñ (2010)

See also

American philosophy

Axiom of categoricity

Chomskybot

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

English studies

Important publications in computability

Knowledge worker

List of American philosophers

References

External links

chomsky.info official website

Noam Chomsky at MIT

Noam Chomsky articles on libcom.org

Noam Chomsky at ''Democracy Now!''

Column archive at ''The Guardian''

Articles and videos featuring Noam Chomsky at AnarchismToday.org

;Interviews and articles

Talks by Noam Chomsky at A-Infos Radio Project

Interview about Human Rights by scholars (English with French subtitles) – 2009

Chomsky media files at the Internet Archive

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Alyssa McDonald on New Statesman, September 2010.

The Real News (TRNN) ">Noam Chomsky Interviews on The Real News (TRNN)

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance -discussion on the "Bush doctrine" and its implications, C-SPAN, Feb 2004

Philosophies of Language & Politics -talk at The Commonwealth Club, October 2009

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Coordinates	55°45′06″N37°37′04″N
name	Mahmoud Darwish
birth date	March 13, 1941
birth place	al-Birwa, British Mandate of Palestine
death date	August 09, 2008
death place	Houston, Texas, United States
occupation	Poet and writer
nationality	Palestinian
period	1964-2008
genre	Poetry
influences	Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian exodus, Nakba }}

Mahmoud Darwish () (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile.

Biography

Darwish was born in the village of al-Birwa in the Western Galilee. He was the second child of Salim and Houreyyah Darwish. His family were landowners. His mother was illiterate, but his grandfather taught him to read. After Israeli forces assaulted his village of al-Birwa in June 1948 and expelled the villagers, the family fled to Lebanon first in Jezzin and then in Damour. A year later, they returned to the Acre area, which was now part of Israel, and settled in Deir al-Asad. Darwish attended high school in Kafr Yasif, two kilometers north of Jadeidi. He eventually moved to Haifa.

He published his first book of poetry, ''Asafir bila ajniha'' or Wingless Birds, at the age of nineteen. He initially publish his poems in Al Jadid, the literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, eventually becoming its Editor. Later, he was Assistant Editor of Al Fajar, a literary periodical published by the Israeli Workers Party (Mamam). Web Site of the Israeli Labor Party . Darwish was impressed by the Arab poets Abed al-Wahab al Biyati and Bader Shakher al-Siyab.

Darwish left Israel in 1970 to study in the USSR. He attended the University of Moscow for one year, before moving to Egypt and Lebanon. When he joined the PLO in 1973, he was banned from reentering Israel. In 1995, he returned to attend the funeral of his colleague, Emile Habibi and received a permit to remain in Haifa for 4 days. Darwish was allowed to settle in Ramallah in 1995, although he said he felt was living in exile there, and did not consider the West Bank his "private homeland."

Darwish was twice married and divorced. His first wife was the writer Rana Kabbani. In the mid-1980s, he married an Egyptian translator, Hayat Heeni. He had no children. Darwish had a history of heart disease, suffering a heart attack in 1984, followed by two heart operations, in 1984 and 1998.

His final visit to Israel was on July 15, 2007 to attend a poetry recital at Mt. Carmel Auditorium in Haifa, in which he criticized the factional violence between Fatah and Hamas as a "suicide attempt in the streets".

Literary career

Darwish published over thirty volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. He was editor of ''Al-Jadid'', ''Al-Fajr'', ''Shu'un Filistiniyya'' and ''Al-Karmel'' (1981). On May 1, 1964 when the young Darwish read his poem “Bitaqat huwiyya” [Identity Card] to a crowd in a Nazareth movie house, there was a tumultuous reaction. Within days the poem had spread throughout the country and the Arab world. Published in his second volume "Leaves of Olives" (Haifa 1964), the six stanzas of the poem repeat the cry “Write down: I am an Arab”. The second stanza reads:

Write down I am an Arab And I work with comrades in a stone quarry And my children are eight in number. For them I hack out a loaf of bread clothing a school exercise-book from the rocks rather than begging for alms at your door rather than making myself small at your doorsteps. Does this bother you?

Palestinian poetry chronicles the Nakba (catastrophe of 1948) and the resultant unending tragedies; the Nakba is always in the background since without it this poetry cannot exist. The mid 1980s saw the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and preceded the outbreak of the first Intifada (uprising) on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in December 1987. A single poet undertook that chronicle. This was Mahmoud Darwish, mainly in one collection: Ward aqall [Fewer Roses] (1986), and more specifically in one poem, “Sa-ya’ti barabira akharun” [Other Barbarians Will Come”].

Darwish's work won numerous awards, and has been published in 20 languages. A central theme in Darwish's poetry is the concept of ''watan'' or homeland. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that Darwish "is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging...."

Writing style

Darwish's early writings are in the classical Arabic style. He wrote monorhymed poems adhering to the metrics of traditional Arabic poetry. In the 1970s he began to stray from these precepts and adopted a "free-verse" technique that did not abide strictly by classical poetic norms. The quasi-Romantic diction of his early works gave way to a more personal, flexible language, and the slogans and declarative language that characterized his early poetry were replaced by indirect and ostensibly apolitical statements, although politics was never far away.

Literary influences

Darwish was impressed by the Iraqi poets Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. He cited Rimbaud and Ginsberg as literary influences. Darwish admired the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, but described his poetry as a "challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?"

Attitude toward Israel

Darwish is widely perceived as a Palestinian symbol and a spokesman for Arab opposition to Israel. He rejected antisemitism: "The accusation is that I hate Jews. It's not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews." Darwish wrote in Arabic, but spoke English, French and Hebrew. According to Israeli author Haim Gouri, who knew him personally, Darwish's Hebrew was excellent. Four volumes of his poetry were translated into Hebrew by Muhammad Hamza Ghaneim: ''Bed of a Stranger'' (2000), ''Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?'' (2000), ''State of Siege'' (2003) and ''Mural'' (2006). Salman Masalha, a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew writer, translated his book ''Memory for Forgetfulness'' into Hebrew. In March 2000, Yossi Sarid, the Israeli education minister, proposed that two of Darwish's poems be included in the Israeli high school curriculum. Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected the proposal on the grounds that Israel was "not ready." It has been suggested that the incident had more to do with internal Israeli politics in trying to damage Prime Minister Ehud Barak's government than poetry. With the death of Darwish the debate about including his poetry in the Israeli school curriculum has been re-opened.

Political activism

Darwish was a member of Rakah, the Israeli communist party, before joining the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut. In 1970 he left for Moscow. Later, he moved to Cairo in 1971 where he worked for al-Ahram daily newspaper. In Beirut, in 1973, he edited the monthly ''Shu'un Filistiniyya'' (''Palestinian Affairs'') and worked as a director in the Palestinian Research Center of the PLO and joined the organisation. In the wake of the Lebanon War, Darwish wrote the political poems ''Qasidat Bayrut'' (1982) and ''Madih al-zill al'ali''(1983). Darwish was elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 1987. In 1988 he wrote a manifesto intended as the Palestinian people's declaration of independence. In 1993, after the Oslo accords, Darwish resigned from the PLO Executive Committee.

Views on the peace process

Darwish consistently demanded a "tough and fair" stand in negotiations with Israel.

Despite his criticism of both Israel and the Palestinian leadership, Darwish believed that peace was attainable. "I do not despair," he told the Israeli newspaper ''Haaretz''. "I am patient and am waiting for a profound revolution in the consciousness of the Israelis. The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace."

1988 poem controversy

In 1988, one of his poems, ''Passers Between the Passing Words'', was cited in the Knesset by Yitzhak Shamir. He was accused of demanding that the Jews leave Israel, although he claimed he meant the West Bank and Gaza: "So leave our land/Our shore, our sea/Our wheat, our salt, our wound." A specialist on Darwish's poetry Adel Usta, said the poem was misunderstood and mistranslated, while poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay wrote that "the hysterical overreaction to the poem simply serves as a remarkably accurate litmus test of the Israeli psyche ... (the poem) is an adamant refusal to accept the language of the occupation and the terms under which the land is defined".

Views on Hamas

In 2005 an outdoor music and dance performances in Qalqiliya were suddenly banned by the Hamas-led municipality, for the reason that such an event would be forbidden by Islam. The municipality also ordered that music no longer be played in the Qalqiliya zoo. In response, Darwish warned that "There are Taliban-type elements in our society, and this is a very dangerous sign".

In July 2007, Darwish returned to Ramallah and visited Haifa for a festive event held in his honor sponsored by ''Masharaf'' magazine and the Israeli Hadash party. To a crowd of some 2,000 people who turned out for the event, he voiced his criticism of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip: "We woke up from a coma to see a monocolored flag (of Hamas) do away with the four-color flag (of Palestine)."

Music and film

Many of Darwish's poems were set to music most notably Rita, Birds of Galilee and I Yearn for my Mother's Bread and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs, by Arab composers, among them Marcel Khalife, Majida El Roumi and Ahmad Qa'abour. In the 1980s, Sabreen, a Palestinian group in Israel, recorded an album including versions of Darwish's poems "On Man" and "On Wishes". Khalife was accused of blasphemy and insulting religious values because a song entitled ''I am Yusuf, oh my father'' based on Darwish's lyrics, cited a verse from the Qur'an. In this poem, Darwish shared the pain of ''Yusuf'' (Joseph) who was rejected by his brothers, who fear him because he is too handsome and kind. "Oh my father, I am Yusuf / Oh father, my brothers neither love me nor want me in their midst". The story of Joseph is an allegory for the rejection of the Palestinians.

Tamar Muskal, an Israeli-American composer incorporated Dawish's "I Am From There" into her composition "The Yellow Wind," which combines a full orchestra, Arabic flute, Arab and Israeli poetry, and themes from David Grossman's book ''The Yellow Wind''.

In 2002, Swiss composer Klaus Huber completed a large work entitled Die Seele muss vom Reittier Steigen…, a chamber concerto for cello, baryton and countertenor which incorporates Darwish's ""The Soul Must Descend from its Mount and Walk on its Silken Feet".

In 1997, a documentary entitled ''Mahmoud Darwish'' was produced by French TV directed by French-Israeli director Simone Bitton.

Darwish appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's ''Notre Musique'' (2004).

In 2008, Mohammed Fairouz set selections from ''A State of Siege" to music.

In 2008 Darwish starred in the five screen film ''id - Identity of the Soul'' from Arts Alliance Productions, where he narrates his poem "A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies" along with Ibsen's poem "Terje Vigen". ''Id'' was his final performance and premiered in Palestine in October 2008, with audiences of tens of thousands and currently (2010) continues its worldwide screening tour.

Quotations

''Why are we always told that we cannot solve our problem without solving the existential anxiety of the Israelis and their supporters who have ignored our very existence for decades in our own homeland?''

''We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history.''

"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."

"We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair."

"We have to understand - not justify - what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves."

“Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile. The sarcasm is not only related to today’s reality but also to history. History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.”

"I will continue to humanise even the enemy... The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings." Several poems are to Jewish lovers. "These poems take the side of love not war,"

Awards

The Lotus Prize (1969; from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers)

Lenin Peace Prize (1983; from the USSR)

The Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (1993; from France)

The Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom (2001)

Prince Claus Awards (2004)

"Bosnian stećak" (2007)

Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings (2007)

Death

Mahmoud Darwish died on August 9, 2008 at the age of 67, three days after heart surgery at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas. Before surgery, Darwish had signed a document asking not to be resuscitated in the event of brain death.

Early reports of his death in the Arabic press indicated that Darwish had asked in his will to be buried in Palestine. Three locations were originally suggested; his home village of al-Birwa, the neighboring village Jadeida, where some of Darwish's family still resides or in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Ramallah Mayor Janet Mikhail announced later that Darwish would be buried next to Ramallah's Palace of Culture, at the summit of a hill overlooking Jerusalem on the southwestern outskirts of Ramallah, and a shrine would be erected in his honor. Ahmed Darwish said "Mahmoud doesn't just belong to a family or a town, but to all the Palestinians, and he should be buried in a place where all Palestinians can come and visit him."

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning to honor Darwish and he was accorded the equivalent of a State funeral. A set of four postage stamps commemorating Darwish was issued in August 2008 by the PA.

Arrangements for flying the body in from Texas delayed the funeral for a day. Darwish's body was then flown from Amman, Jordan for the burial in Ramallah. The first eulogy was delivered by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to an orderly gathering of thousands. Several left-wing Knessets members attended the official ceremony; Mohammed Barakeh (Hadash) and Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta'al) stood with the family, and Dov Khenin (Hadash) and Jamal Zahalka (Balad) were in the hall at the Mukataa. Also present was the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin. After the ceremony, Darwish's coffin was taken in a cortege at walking pace from the Mukataa to the Palace of Culture, gathering thousands of followers along the way.

Published work

Poetry

''Asafir bila ajniha'' (''Wingless birds''), 1960

''Awraq Al-Zaytun'' (''Leaves of olives''), 1964

''Ashiq min filastin'' (''A lover from Palestine''), 1966

''Akhir al-layl'' (''The end of the night''), 1967

''Yawmiyyat jurh filastini'' (''Diary of a Palestinian wound''), 1969

''Habibati tanhad min nawmiha'' (''My beloved awakens''), 1969

''al-Kitabah 'ala dhaw'e al-bonduqiyah'' (''Writing in the light of the gun''), 1970

''al-'Asafir tamut fi al-jalil'' (''Birds are Dying in Galilee''), 1970

''Mahmoud Darwish works'', 1971. Two volumes

''Mattar na'em fi kharif ba'eed'' (''Light rain in a distant autumn'') 1971

''Uhibbuki aw la uhibbuki'' (''I love you, I love you not''), 1972

''Jondiyyun yahlum bi-al-zanabiq al-baidaa''' (''A soldier dreaming of white lilies''), 1973

''Complete Works'', 1973. Now ''al-A'amal al-jadida'' (2004) and ''al-A'amal al-oula'' (2005).

''Muhawalah raqm 7'' (''Attempt number 7''), 1974

''Tilka suratuha wa-hadha intihar al-ashiq'' (''That's her image, and that's the suicide of her lover''), 1975

''Ahmad al-za'tar'', 1976

''A'ras'' (''Weddings''), 1977

''al-Nasheed al-jasadi'' (''The bodily anthem''), 1980. Joint work

''The Music of Human Flesh'', Heinemann 1980, Poems of the Palestinian struggle selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

''Qasidat Bayrut'' (''Ode to Beirut''), 1982

''Madih al-zill al-'ali'' (''A eulogy for the tall shadow''), 1983

''Hissar li-mada'eh al-bahr'', 1984

''Victims of a Map'', 1984. Joint work with Samih al-Qasim and Adonis in English.

''Sand and Other Poems'', 1986

''Hiya ughniyah, hiya ughniyah'' (''It's a song, it's a song''), 1985

''Ward aqal'' (''Fewer roses''), 1985

''Ma'asat al-narjis, malhat al-fidda'' (''Tragedy of daffodils, comedy of silver''), 1989

''Ara ma oreed'' (''I see what I want''), 1990

''Ahad 'asher kaukaban'' (''Eleven planets''), 1992

''Limaza tarakt al-hissan wahidan'' (''Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?''), 1995. English translation 2006 by Jeffrey Sacks (Archipelago Books) (ISBN 0-9763950-1-0)

''Psalms'', 1995. A selection from ''Uhibbuki aw la uhibbuki'', translation by Ben Bennani

''Sareer El-Ghariba'' (''Bed of a stranger''), 1998

''Then Palestine'', 1999 (with Larry Towell, photographer, and Rene Backmann)

''Jidariyya'' (''Mural''), 2000

''The Adam of Two Edens: Selected Poems'', 2000 (Syracuse University Press and Jusoor) (edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche)

''Halat Hissar'' (''State of siege''), 2002

''La ta'tazer 'amma fa'alt'' (''Don't apologize for what you did''), 2003

''Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems'', 2003. Translations by Munir Akash, Caroyln Forché and others

''al-A'amal al-jadida'' (''The new works''), 2004. A selection of Darwish's recent works

''al-A'amal al-oula'' (''The early works''), 2005. Three volumes, a selection of Darwish's early works

''Ka-zahr el-lawz aw ab'ad'' (''Same as almond flowers or farther''), 2005

''The Butterfly's Burden'', 2007 (Copper Canyon Press) (translation by Fady Joudah)

Prose

''Shai'on 'an al-wattan'' (''Something about the homeland''), 1971

''Wada'an ayatuha al-harb, wada'an ayuha al-salaam'' (''Farewell, war, farewell, peace''), 1974

''Yawmiyyat al-hozn al-'aadi'' (''Diary of the usual sadness''), 1973 (Turkish translation, 2009 by Hakan Özkan )

''Dhakirah li-al-nisyan'' (''Memory for Forgetfulness''), 1987. English translation 1995 by Ibrahim Muhawi

''Fi wasf halatina'' (''Describing our condition''), 1987

''al-Rasa'il'' (''The Letters''), 1990. Joint work with Samih al-Qasim

''Aabiroon fi kalamen 'aaber'' (''Bypassers in bypassing words''), 1991

''Memory for Forgetfulness'', 1995 (University of California Press) (translated by Ibrahim Muhawi)

''Fi hadrat al-ghiyab'' (''In the presence of absence''), 2006

''athar alfarasha'' (''A River Dies of Thirst: journals''), 2009 (Archipelago Books) (translated by Catherine Cobham)

References

External links

Mahmoud Darwish: Official website

"Fady Joudah Reads Mahmoud Darwish" Center for the Art of Translation

IDENTITY of the SOUL

Essay on Mahmound Darwish at Thought Catalog

FAQ on Mahmoud Darwish at the Institute for Middle East Understanding

Listen to Mahmoud Darwish (videos in Arabic and French)

Homage to Mahmoud Darwish Hour-long radio program from Voices of the Middle East

Roundtable discussion on Mahmoud Darwish at the Institute for Middle East Understanding

Darwish poems

Darwish biography

2002 Article on Darwish from ''The Progressive''

Short biography, two poems and one excerpt at ''Fence''

Five Darwish poems at ''Poemhunter.com

Seven Darwish poems at a Geocities fansite

Poem of Darwish in a light projection of artist Jenny Holzer in London

Poem by Darwish at the ''Virginia Quarterly Review''

Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre

Poets.org ''In Jerusalem''

Poets.org ''I Belong There''

Poems Found In Translation another translation of ''I belong there''

YouTube Mahmoud Darwish -Abiroun

Marcel Khalife.com Oh My Father, I am Yusif

Mahmoud Darwish's Last Volume of Poetry: A Palestinian Throws the Dice

Michael Palmer reads Mahmoud Darwish's "The Strangers' Picnic" Video of U.S. poet Michael Palmer reading a poem from Mahmoud Darwish's collection ''Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems''

Category:Palestinian poets Category:Palestinian communists Category:Palestinian Muslims Category:Lenin Peace Prize recipients Category:1941 births Category:2008 deaths Category:Laureates of the Prince Claus Award Category:Palestinian non-fiction writers

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