That the New York Times would be critical of Edward Said and ungracious till the last was not unexpected; Said had been a thorn in the side of all Zionists and most of the Jewish and rightist establishments of America for years now. Commentary, a periodical published by right-wing Jews, had once run an article calling him "professor of terror" for his outspoken advocacy of the Palestinian cause; someone had at one point left a bomb in his garbage bin; he had received so many death threats that the New York police department once considered installing a "panic' button in his apartment. I remember reading an article by a leading American critic in The New York Review of Books accusing him of being a poor scholar and of writing incorrect English, though more objective critics have noted his mastery over a variety of prose styles and eulogized him for his scholarship. Over the years, conservative New York/Israeli thinkers had tried to do dirt on him in all kinds of ways. For example, when Said's autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir, was published a few years ago, a Jewish writer tried to show that Said had falsely claimed that he was born in Jerusalem; the "scoop" was widely reported and gleefully circulated until it was found out that this was just another attempt to discredit the leading Palestinian-American scholar of the age by a supporter of the Israeli cause.

That The Daily Star carried a brief report on him the day after his death and only another account of Yasir Arafat's condolence statement and nothing else for the next few days is not surprising either; most people in our country seemed to have taken little or no notice of the life and death one of the leading intellectuals of our time. I remember, for instance, reading a paper some months ago on Edward Said and his influential concept of travelling theory at the University of Dhaka's Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. The Chair of the session, supposedly one of the leading scholars of our university, told me when I finished that while he found the paper interesting, he had never heard of the man before. I remember another occasion when I read another paper on Said to a similar audience where what seemed to fascinate a few of the people was not the ideas Said espoused but his name: was he a Muslim? Why Edward Said? Why would someone who was not a Muslim be doing so much to defend Islam as I had claimed?

But even if the New York or Jewish establishments found no cause to grieve the death of Edward Said and even if his passing away has had little impact in our country, he has had a major impression on people all over the world in the last three decades. His death has put many of us in mourning. He will be remembered, primarily, for two reasons: as one of the founding fathers of postcolonial studies (many would say, the father of this interdisciplinary area of advanced studies), and as the leading spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the West, for he has been an outspoken critic of Zionism and the Western media's attempts to "blame the victims" created by the Israeli state and to "cover Islam", to use phrases that he used as titles of two of his books. He has, also, several other claims to fame. He has been an outstanding intellectual who has articulated with great clarity and rigor the role of public intellectuals in time; a leading literary critic and literary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century; an outstanding scholar and teacher of English and comparative literature; and a widely read columnist whose columns were syndicated in English and Arabic for almost a decade. He was also an accomplished pianist and a passionate but astute writer on classical music and opera. He wrote over twenty books that have been translated into more than thirty languages; he was one of the eight university professors of Columbia University and held that position for over thirty years; he had lectured in excess of two hundred universities all around the world; and had been awarded honorary degrees by quite leading universities in all corners of the globe.

Said is widely credited with pioneering postcolonial studies because of his seminal book Orientalism (1978). In it, Said argued with great polemical force that for centuries Western scholarship has served the cause of imperialism and that there is a close connection between the will to knowledge and domination of other races. Said further argues that the West has misrepresented the East and has made the Orient its "Other", the better to repress it. Relentlessly pursuing Orientalist scholarship over the ages, he not only unmasks the nexus between knowledge and power in history but also demonstrates how so-called "think tanks" in the West specializing in Middle Eastern/Oriental scholarship even now are being funded by petro-dollars and grants from Mobil, Exxon, etc. and are formulating policy for persistent control over oilfields. In 1993, Said published Culture and Imperialism, another major work where he showed the close links between cultural work and colonization. The book has succeeded in rewriting literary history to some extent and has implicated many of the leading writers of English literature in the drive towards the annexation of the rest of the world. While this book amplified some of the themes of the earlier book, it represents an advance over the earlier one in the sense that it has Said underscoring resistance to Western hegemony in the Orient and emphasizing the counter-discourse of post-colonial intellectuals as a fact of history.

M.B. Naqvi's fine tribute, "Homage to Edward Said," the one extended tribute reprinted on this great Palestinian- American in The Daily Star till now, focuses on the other major reason why Said will never be forgotten: he has been one of the most passionate, articulate, and committed activists the Palestinian cause has ever had. He championed his people tirelessly for decades, both in theory and practice. Orientalism, in fact, was part of a trilogy, and was the prelude to The Question of Palestine (1980) and Covering Islam (1981) two important books on the way Palestine was usurped, Palestinians dispersed and victimized, and Palestinians in general misrepresented and Islam in particular distorted by the Zionist-dominated media in the West. My favorite Said book, however, is After the Last Sky (1986), where Said and the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr collaborated to give us compelling images of Palestinians trying to pursue normal lives under the shadow cast by Israel occupation. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Dispossession 1969-1994, is one of the many collections of Said's essays on the plight of the Palestinians, their indomitable spirit, and endless quest for self-determination. But Said also furthered the Palestinian struggle for their rights by counseling Arafat till the Oslo Accord and by taking part in the deliberations of the Palestinian National Council, which acted as the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for a long time. He parted ways with Arafat because he felt that the Oslo Accord had compromised Palestinian sovereignty and had ceded to the Israelis the gains made by the intafadah movement of the later eighties for little or nothing. Never shy of courting controversy for the cause of his people, and quite combative in public in championing them, Said was widely criticized in the west for throwing a stone at Jewish settlements in Jerusalem to demonstrate his support of the intafadah. It was his belief that Israelis should be made to give the Palestinians what they deserved and not a pittance. In Peace and its Discontents, written mainly with an Arab audience in mind, Said records his anger and anguish at the betrayal the Oslo Accord represented to him and urges for genuine negotiations for a lasting solution for Palestine. But Said also wrote for the Israelis too, urging them to reconsider and revalue their relationships with Palestine and urging them to be just. He and his friend Noam Chomsky, the great Jewish-American dissident intellectual, were among the leaders of the opposition against American expansionism in the United States during the two Iraq wars. Till the end of his life, he continued to write regularly and energetically for the Palestinian cause, taking on the American government frontally for its Arab wars, while also expressing his regret at aberrant events such as the one the world witnessed on September 11, despite the leukamia that was slowly sapping him of life.

I have no doubt that one of Said's major works is Representation of Intellectuals (1993), a book based on the 1993 BBC Reith lectures. In it Said theorized what the role of the intellectual should be in our time. He saw the intellectual as oppositional and secular, and as working against nationalism or state power, and for the production of non-coercive knowledge. His/her intellect is never co-opted by the establishment and is forever dedicated to upholding the cause of the oppressed, and of proclaiming "truth to power'. Among Said's heroes in this book and elsewhere are Fanon, C. L.R. James, and Rabindranath Tagore, and he was always fond of citing the Bengali poet's strictures against nationalism. Beginnings (1975) positioned Said in the avant-garde of theory in the English-speaking world, while The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) consolidated his unique position in contemporary literary criticism. Said was someone who combined theoretical rigor with humanism, and was a comparativist who used his training in philology and his mastery over many languages to comment with great erudition on a variety of subjects. Because of space constraints, I can only ask readers to read Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (2001) to acquaint themselves with the breadth and depth of Said's scholarship, the catholicity of his taste, and the elegance and erudition with which he could discuss any number of subjects.

I want to end this memorial tribute on a personal note. For a long time now I have been working on Imperial Entanglements and Literature in English, a collection of essays on the colonial encounter and what it has meant for English studies and on reading postcolonially. I want to dedicate this book to Edward Said because he shaped it and my literary interests in all sorts of ways. From the moment I came across Orientalism in 1980, his ideas have molded me and directed the path I would pursue in my research and writing. I have corresponded with him a number of times and it is my great regret that I have lost one of the three letters (the handwritten one!) that he sent me. I have written at least six full-length essays/reviews of his works.

One of these essays was an attempt to counter a critique of Said published by an American scholar in The South Carolina Review.The editor of the journal had invited me to respond to the critique and I sent Said the critique, my response, and the writer's reply to my response, to Said. The letter reproduced in today's Star was Said's comment on my piece.

Hopefully, I will be eventually able to publish almost all the essays I have written on Edward Said in Imperial Entanglements and Literature in English. I had intended not only to dedicate the book to him but also have him preface it for me. I had invited him to come to Dhaka to inaugurate over the "Colonial/Postcolonial Encounter Conference" our department organized in 1996. But he had declined the invitation because of failing health. Now leukamia has finally claimed him and we will never get him in our midst anymore, but his works will continue to inspire all of us who have been witness to the force he was in contemporary theory and cultural politics for over a generation now.

Fakrul Alam teaches English at Dhaka University.