Edward Said
Edward Said
Life
Said was born in Jerusalem[2] (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father was an American citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins who had moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward Said's birth. His father was a businessman and served under General Pershing in World War I, while his mother was born in Nazareth, also of Protestant[3] Christian Palestinian descent.[4] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.
Said referred to himself as a "Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture". He experienced a crisis of identity growing up and was quoted as saying that:
With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.[5]
According to Said's autobiographical memoir, Out of Place,[5] Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12. He has stated that he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem, although records are conflicting on whether or not this was the case, and indicate Said and his family may have been most closely connected to an affluent area of Cairo.[6] As the Arab League states declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. Said has given a number of histories for his early years[7], including:
I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schools designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to...
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