Edward Said (1935-2003) died from leukaemia in a New York hospital on September 24, 2003.

After cremation in the United States, Said's ashes will be brought to Lebanon at the end of October for interment in the Protestant cemetery in the village of Broummana, the home of his wife's family located northwest of Beirut. Said had expressed his wish to be buried in the mountains of Lebanon, that bit of Arab soil with which he had great family and emotional ties.

News of his passing made newspaper headlines. Tributes, remembrances and eulogies are just mushrooming all over the world, and threaten to swell into a tidal wave. Seldom in the history of modern times has a public intellectual been so honoured and missed. Even the death of French philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre in 1980 did not have such a global impact.

Most newspaper stories, especially in the West, have described Said as the "Palestinian-American writer and the most articulate voice for the Palestinian cause". That he was, for he had redeployed his cultural capital as a world-renowned scholar in articulating the sufferings of the Palestinian people over the last few decades. Only Yasser Arafat is better known on a global scale as a public image of the Palestinian struggle.

As a young student in Princeton and Harvard, then as a young lecturer in Columbia since 1963, Said apparently did not show much interest in politics, much less in Middle Eastern politics.

Internal contradiction

The 1967 Arab-Israel War "marked the greatest event of my political life", as Said repeatedly stressed. For the first time, he "felt genuinely divided between the newly assertive pressure of my background and language and the complicated demands of a situation in the US that scanted, in fact despised what I had to say about the quest for Palestinian justice."

That internal contradiction can be traced to his birth and early experience.

Said was a product of the Palestinian middle class. His father was a Palestinian, a successful businessman in Jerusalem, when Palestine was still under British rule. His mother had both Palestinian and Lebanon blood. The whole family was also Protestant, a minority among minorities in a land of overwhelmingly Muslim population.

In 1948, the whole family had moved to Cairo, and later to the US, when Said was still in his teens. The Arabic language was his mother tongue, and he returned to the Middle East much later to refresh his knowledge of his native language, even though all his writing was done in English.

His long work in pursuing the Palestinian cause therefore, was bound to exact heavy personal costs in the racially charged atmosphere of American politics.

He encountered numerous death threats, first from extremist Jews, and later, ironically, from ultra-nationalist Arabs who thought his stance too conciliatory. His office at Colombia was fire-bombed. His lectures on the Middle East throughout the US drew protests and even physical disruption from militant Jewish groups. Unsurprisingly, he received a vast quantity of hate mails.

With a great sense of humour, Said talked about his ambiguous association with the PLO, and said he felt like "a diplomat of terrorism, given a place at the (negotiating) table". His influence was so vast that he was invited by successive Secretaries of State from Cyrus Vance onwards to be a conduit of messages between Yasser Arafat and the White House.

Universal dignity and peace

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to his memory, for people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide, to cast him as the stereotype of an intellectual committed to his radical nationalist dream.

He had many times condemned all forms of terrorism. Most recently, he appealed for both Jewish and Arab intellectuals, in their diasporas as well as in the Middle East, to engage in a new kind of dialogue, based on recognition of past sufferings of the Holocaust and the Nakba.

His message was one of universal human dignity and peace, not of hatred and bloodshed.

His attempt at critical independence explains why he kept symbolic his participation in Yasser Arafat's parliament in exile. While serving as a member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC ), he rarely spoke or even voted, and often did not stay for the duration of the meetings.

When he resigned from the PNC in 1991, it was partly due to the discovery of his deadly tryst with leukaemia. More than likely, however, he was disillusioned with the direction in which PLO under Arafat was taking in the Palestinian struggle. After the Oslo Accord was reached, he was to criticise Arafat bitterly for having betrayed the aspirations of all Palestinians. The two men had obviously fallen out.

The massive media attention devoted to Said's death probably has something to do with the bloody conflict in the Middle East, which escalates by the day. It is also probably due to his role as a mediator of worlds in articulating the Arab and Muslim worldviews to the Western world after the shock of 911.

But the world is a big place, and the world has a short memory. I cannot help wondering if, half a century from now, the name Edward Said would even be mentioned in a footnote in history text books.

On the other hand, his contribution to the world of knowledge and learning is sure to endure for a long time to come. Now that he has passed on, we can conclude - tentatively at least that Edward Said had to be among the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century.

He had a productive life, and his writings had a massive world-wide impact that transcended continents, audiences and academic disciplines. He not only transformed the study of literary criticism, but expanded the horizons of his intellectual landscape to such diverse territories as cultural study, history, anthropology, political analysis, geography, education, media studies, migration and exile, diaspora and multi-culturalism, American diplomatic history and even music. (He was an accomplished musician.)

Celebrated works

You could say that Edward Said's life and work was a standing rebuke to the narrow academic specialisation and pigeonholing that he himself so lamented.

His most celebrated works (though also bitterly attacked works) were Orientalism (1978 ) and Culture and imperialism (1993). In these controversial masterpieces, written in provocative and yet flourishing prose, he analysed the ubiquitous intertwining of cultural and power.

The main theme running through these works is that a vast range of cultural products, from the classics of Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Gustav Flaubert or Verdi, to the most contemporary academic writing about the Middle East, is deeply rooted in the Eurocentric narrative of the imperial powers.

In short, on the world-historical stage, the identity of the conquered is defined by the conquerors, and inevitably such external definitions of cultures and civilisations will turn out to be based on nothing but misunderstanding, ignorance and prejudice.

I am oversimplifying his complex ideas of course. It is easy (and it has often been done ) for intellectuals in the developing third world to cite Said in support of their anti-colonialist sentiments, forgetting perhaps that these anti-colonialist feelings can be another manifestation of post-colonial colonialism. Anti-racism can turn out to be the worst form of racism.

In fact, Said himself had often repeated that he had never wanted to be a cheerleader for "third-worldist" counter-assertions. Far from it, he repeatedly scorned what he called "the politics of blame". His disillusion with Arafat had to do with a lot of corruption and oppression in Palestine under the PLO control.

Said's brilliance was to take this common knowledge - which most of the intellectuals in former colonies of the world would have intuitively realised - and developed it into a philosophical enquiry not unlike that of Derrida and Foucault.

Questions he raised

Therefore, Said's greatest contribution lies not in the answers he furnished, but in the new question he raised. If orthodox history and culture are merely manufactured truths issuing from sheer power, then where or what is the real truths? It is a question that Said never answered clearly in his life time.

I came upon Said and this question struck me like a thunderbolt, in my long reflection on inter-racial and inter-faith relation in Malaysia. I suddenly realised that even our ethnic identity and religious faith could be the manufactured products of our power relations. What then could be our ethnic or religious essences? And how can we begin to think about mediating between civilisations?

And yet, plunging into the fissure and living in the difference between civilisations, Edward Said would be destined to the margin, longing for the homeland, and yet forever exiled. The mediator of worlds has no world to belong to, except perhaps the world of words.

Perhaps the margin is where the intellectual is most effective, as Said pointed out in his 1993 BBC Reith Lectures. An intellectual is one who, while articulating the sufferings of some of the dispossessed and the dislocated, can also universalise his moral appeal to apply to all dispossessed and dislocated people of the world. (This is a point often missed in discussions on race and religion in Malaysia.)

Throughout his long years of political activism and his erudite scholarship, Edward Said was motivated by this universal moral concern: "I guess what moves me mostly is anger at injustice, an intolerance of oppression, and some fairly unoriginal ideas about freedom and knowledge." He was a critical engaged humanist right down to his finger tips

May God bless him and may he rest in peace.