Edward Said did not fit into any single category. He was the very essence of human nature because he understood its contradictions. He was both a fighter and a compassionate defender. A man of logic and passion. An artist and a critic. A visionary of the future with an understanding of tradition. He fought for Palestinian rights while understanding Jewish suffering, and did not see this position as a paradox.
Edward was not only at home in music, literature, philosophy, and the understanding of politics, but he was also one of those rare people who saw the connections and the parallels between different disciplines, because he had an unusual understanding of the human spirit, and of the human being.
He had the ability to see not only the different aspects of any thought or process, but their inevitable consequences as well—and also the combination of human, psychological, and historical, as the case may be, “pre-history” of such thoughts and processes. He was one of those rare people who was permanently aware of the fact that information is only the very first step toward understanding. And he always looked for the “beyond” in the idea, the “unseen” by the eye, the “unheard” by the ear.
This very curious mind, of course, allowed him privileged glimpses into the subconscious of people, of creators. He also had a very unrestrained courage of utterance, and this is what earned him the admiration, the jealousy, and the enmity of so many people.
Edward saw in music not just a combination of sounds, but he understood the fact that every musical masterpiece is, as it were, a conception of the world. And the difficulty lies in the fact that this conception of the world cannot be described in words—because were it possible to describe it in words, the music would be unnecessary. But he recognized that the fact that it is indescribable doesn’t mean it has no meaning.
It was a combination of all these qualities that led us to found the West-Eastern Divan, which provides a forum for young Israeli and Arab musicians to study music and all its ramifications together.
I shall never forget his making a room full of young Arabs, Israelis, and Germans understand that the devil exists in all of us, that Weimar, where that first Divan took place, represented both the best and the worst of German history. It was the city of Goethe, yet it was only a few kilometers away from the Buchenwald concentration camp. He impressed on all the youngsters not only the importance of reading Goethe’s Faust, but also the necessity of witnessing with their own eyes the remains of the brutality of the concentration camp. He did so in a way that did not offend the Israelis, did not distribute collective guilt to the Germans, and made the Arabs see the necessity of understanding that period in Jewish history.
Let us not forget that until May 15, 1948, we were all Palestinians—Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians, and Christian Palestinians. Some of us got a new identity with the independence of the state of Israel, but others did not. A lot has happened since then, and there has been a great deal of suffering—unnecessary and avoidable. But the time has come to move forward, and this is what Edward and I were working on together. The time has come, first of all, to accept all that has happened, and secondly, not to distribute guilt, even if it is only the guilt of having made mistakes, either to the Palestinian side in 1948 or to the Israeli government after that. The time has come to realize that we have a problem of human and social justice that we must solve, and the national aspect of this conflict is only one of its many dimensions. For me, this is the very essence of Edward, because in order to achieve all of these things and to have the courage to say and fight for them openly; it takes the erudition, the intelligence, the humor, and the humanity of Edward.
I was in constant touch with him. I think I spoke with him nearly every day, sometimes to the consternation of our wives, because I would phone at times that were inconvenient for the household on Riverside Drive in New York, or because it was so late at night in Europe. I had promised him that I would go and visit him on Sunday, the 28th of September, because I had three free days and we had many, many things to discuss. We were in the process of planning our new book, and we were especially concerned about the development of the West-Eastern Divan Workshop which had become the most important thing in his life—as he said not only to me—and which has become the most important thing in my life as well. And we were concerned about how our work was going to proceed, and how we were going to make an active contribution to move things along and emerge from all these half lies, complete lies, and colored truths that we hear about the Middle East.
And then he said to me, “But when you come on Sunday”— a day he would not live to see—“you must promise that you will play for me something out of The Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach,” which I had played for him the last time I was in New York in June. “You must promise me,” he said, “that you will play the E-flat minor prelude from the first book.” And in fact, when I went to New York just before he died, the music on the piano was still open to the last page that I had played for him.
Fukuoka, Japan
October 29, 2003