For me, commemorating the passing of Edward's Said comes automatically. Not so much out of the feeling that I owed him some kind of a debt, which is true, but for a mundane reason, that every September doctors in my field of specialisation gather in one of the major cities in the US for a conference, which has become more or less our yearly highlight.

It was on a trip home from last year's meeting during a stop over in Tokyo that we learnt of his passing.

One year on, the issues about which Said wrote with great erudition and passion - the naked imperialist zeal of the power elite in Washington, xenophobia and prejudice towards Arabs and Muslims, the absence of democracy in the third world, the continuing injustice of Israel towards the Palestinian people - subjects which had developed out of his original thesis of Orientalism and later elaborated 'Culture and Imperialism', continue to animate political discussions.

One year later, I read again his last essay, which he contributed to the Aug 2003 issue Le Monde Diplomatique one month before his death, which encapsulates the major themes of his writings as a cultural critique.

He was an occasional contributor to that monthly journal. As though aware of his imminent departure, in that final essay, "L'humanisme, dernier rampart contre la barbarie - vingt-cinq ans aprs la publication del' Orientalism (Humanism, the last rampart against barbarism - 26 years after "Orientalism"), he revisited the original theme of Orientalism, the work that catapulted him to fame as a scholar and cultural critique.

The essay distilled from his eclectic writings on the political implications of western colonialism and post-colonial domination, especially in the context of the Muslim world, the reciprocal rise of religious fanaticism, the imperialist project of the present US administration, his moral stand on these issues and finally suggested a solution for a way out this historical-cultural mess.

As many of the conflicts today involve the Muslim world, Orientalism is still very much alive. It is not difficult to perceive how public consent for the grotesque violence perpetrated on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq was wrung out using its tool of manipulative representation of the other.

On the anniversary of his passing I thought it would be of benefit to bring to readers' attention Said's last essay, which essentially sums up his major ideas.

Significantly in that essay, in countenance of domination of the 'other', of which Orientalism as an academic pursuit has become a political tool, is Said's proposition to mount a resistance to it.

Humanism

His essays show an emphatic will to study the 'other' through the proper historical and cultural contexts, with the objective of mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence, an enterprise that he called humanism.

This is something that he elaborates on in the last chapters of 'Culture and imperialism', without clearly defining it as such. After all, this is a term that has different connotations to different people.

For those with a religious outlook, this term is loaded with heuristic arrogance, which has been as much responsible for our mess, in its process of liberating man from the darkness of a God-centred world view.

This commemorative piece is largely a translation and adaptation from the essay that appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique a month before his death, and I hope my pedestrian French does justice to it.

In introducing the essay, Said reminded us that he was jolted into political engagement after the catastrophic defeat of the Arabs in the six day war of 1967, which finally marked the disappearance of the contradictory worlds that he grew up in, in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon.

From that experience came the ground breaking work Orientalism. Many readers would agree that Orientalism is never far from the tumults of modern history.

It opened with a description, written in 1975, of the Lebanese civil war, where a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown Beirut that "it had once seemed to belong to ... the orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval".

The civil war ended in 1990, however the violence and blood bath in the Middle East, of which it is part of, continues up to this day.

The Oslo peace process floundered, the second Intifada exploded and the Palestinian endured terrible sufferings in occupied West Bank and Gaza. The phenomenon of suicide bombings came onto the scene with all its hideous consequences. Not less atrocious or apocalyptic were the events of Sept 11 and its consequences - the wars unleashed onto Afghanistan and Iraq.

Alas as he wrote these lines, the illegal imperialist occupation of Iraq by US and Great Britain was taking place, with its terrible consequences:

"All this is supposed to be part of the clash of civilisations - interminable, implacable and irreversible. I say this idea is false. I would have loved to affirm that the Americans' understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam has progressed a little. But it is unfortunately not the case.

For a number of reasons, the situation seems better in Europe. In the US, the hardening of positions, the shocking condescending generalisations and triumphant clichs, the domination of a brutal power allied to a simplistic distrust for dissidents and the other are reflected in the pillage and destruction of the libraries and museums of Iraq.

Our leaders and intellectuals seem incapable of understanding that history can not be effaced like a black board, in order for us to write our own future and impose our way of life on the inferior peoples", he wrote.

Research for domination, not understanding

When discussing domination, Said would regularly return to the theme of the academic discipline of Orientalism as a tool for European imperialism, where the history of a people is erased and rewritten, and their cultural representations distorted and deformed to better control and subjugate them.

In other words, the serious study of other cultures is not with the objective of peaceful co-existence and widening one's horizons, but rather to dominate them. That academic researchers sold themselves to power for this purpose is disgraceful.

For Said, the latest imperialist war against Iraq - concocted by a small unelected elite against an already weakened third world dictator, for the ideological reasons of world domination and control of precious resources is certainly one of the intellectual catastrophes of history.

Particularly so, as it is justified and precipitated by Orientalists who have betrayed their vocation, citing Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami as having exerted a major influence on the Pentagon and the National Security Council of the Bush administration.

Without the carefully constructed impressions that those faraway people are not like us and do not accept our values, clichs that constitute the Orientalist dogma, the war could not have been unleashed.

All colonial powers were surrounded by such researchers, he asserted - the Dutch in Indonesia, the British in India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and West Africa, the French in North Africa and Indochina.

Every new imperialist always pretends that they are different from the predecessors, affirming that the circumstances are exceptional, that their mission is to civilise, establish order and democracy, and that they will only use force as a last measure.

The saddest thing is that they always have at their bidding intellectuals to find the soothing words and speak of the benevolent empire.

Against this will to dominate, that is embedded in Orientalism, Said, employing the humanist critique, attempted to construct a reasoned resistance and replace the bursts of irrational anger that poison us with a more thoughtful and profound analysis.

He named this resistance and alternative to cultural domination by the powerful, 'humanism', a term that he continued to use despite the cynicism of sophisticated post-modernist critiques.

Humanism for him is rather a project towards creating understanding between peoples, cultures and civilisations, cultivating the spirit of community among mankind as opposed to domination of the other that leads to injustice and suffering.

This has to be based on a reasoned and historical reflection - the struggle against injustice must be inscribed within the context of history, culture and socio-economic reality.

Citing his own position, he observes that in his passionate defense of the rights of the Palestinian people for self-determination, he has always taken into account the sufferings and persecution of the Jewish people.

For him, what is most important in the struggle for equality between Palestine and Israel is to not lose sight of the humane objective, the need for coexistence, and not the pursuit of elimination of one by the other.

He demonstrated that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism share common roots, and it is vital that we elaborate models of cultural and intellectual exchange to replace the narrow and simplistic dogmas founded on mutual hostility that have been prevailing in the Middle East for too long.

World literature and standardisation

Being a scholar in comparative literature, it is natural for Said to invoke this academic field as a fertile ground for the humanist project - through the study and interpretation of literature as a cultural output for an emphatic understanding of the other.

In this respect, in a number of his writings he paid homage to Goethe for his interest in Islamic literature, especially the poet Hafiz, as a most admirable example.

The poet-philosopher cultivated his interest after a German soldier who had been fighting in one of the Spanish campaigns in the early part of the 19th century brought back a page of the Koran for him.

This devouring passion led Goethe to write a collection of poems about the 'other', the West-eastern Diwan and influenced his ideas on weltliteratur, the study of literatures of the world as one total symphony where one can understand and appreciate the individuality of each work, without losing view of the whole ensemble.

In a bold experiment, Said, also an accomplished pianist, together with the Israeli conductor and pianist, Daniel Barenboim, gathered young musicians from Israel and the Arab world to form the West Eastern Diwan Orchestra to play in Weimar (the city of Goethe).

Sadly our globalised world advances relentlessly towards standardisation, the homogeneity that Goethe through his ideas tried to steer clear of.

In the study of literature as a world that opens up the possibility of moving towards the objective of humanism, another great scholar that Said often cites in his many writings is Erich Auerbach, a German Jew who took refuge in Istanbul during the second world war. In Istanbul, Auerbach taught the romance languages and gathered ideas for his great saving work on western humanism, 'Mimesis' - a book that serves as a testament to the diversity and reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Wolf.

At one level, Said could fault Auerbach's ethnocentrism and his pessimism about 'new' languages and cultures from the non-European world, that might signal a new level of cultural activity.

But he greatly admired the latter's attention to texts, his modes of examination, and penetrating in a subjective and emphatic manner the living material of the text, taking into account its socio-historical context. Said remarked that this sort of scrupulosity and care, when applied to the study of world literature with generosity and hospitality, reflects a profoundly humanist spirit.

This opening up to the other, that would otherwise remain distant and foreign, is an important dimension in the mission of the scholar-researcher.

After the war, Auerbach remarked with sadness that the standardisation of ideas and increasing specialisation of knowledge progressively shrinks the possibilities of this type of investigation and tireless quest for which he was an embodiment.

More depressing, lamented Said, since Auerbach's death in 1957, the idea and practice of humanistic research has lost its centrality. Instead of reading, in the true sense of the term, our students are constantly distracted by the fragmentary knowledge available on the internet and churned out by the mass media.

Towards the end of the essay, Said jumped rather abruptly from literature to today's dangerous global politics, where the menace of imperialist ambitions of an unimaginably powerful and technologically advanced America, led by a handful of elite with a simplistic vision of the world is very real.

He insisted that this is closely linked to the absence of the humanist spirit. In periods of crisis and insecurity, as after the Sept 11 attacks, a people with no emphatic understanding of the other are easily manipulated into hating an unknown enemy demonised by the media by being labelled as terrorists.

Without this humanist spirit, we lose the sense of the density of interdependence of larger humanity. But this sad state of affairs is reciprocated in the Muslim world. The region has slipped into an anti-Americanism, which demonstrates little understanding of what constitutes American society.

Incapable of shaping the attitude of their people into their own mould, Arab-Muslim governments expend all their energies in repressing and controlling their populations. The failures and frustrations lead to anger and rising passions, sometimes fuelled by an understanding of Islam that is resentful of whatever that comes from the west and modernity.

This may be seen as lacking in nuance by Muslims, but Said considered that the progressive disappearance of the Islamic tradition of ijtihad (learned interpretation) is one of the major cultural disasters of our era, which has led to the disappearance of critical thought on questions posed by the contemporary world.

But there is still a glimmer of hope. It is not that the world of culture has completely regressed, ravaged on one side by an aggressive neo-Orientalism and on the other by absolute intolerance.

The conflicts evoked above, which force the populations under the falsely unifying banners of America, the west or Islam, must not be allowed to continue to ravage humanity. Against them, we have at our disposal our capacity for rational interpretation as the legacy of our humanist education, and we need to return to traditional and classical values infused with a secular and rational discourse.

For Said, his parting message as he lay dying is that humanism defined as emphatic understanding of the other is our last barrier against the inhumane practices and injustice that disfigure humanity's history.