Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin eds. The Edward Said reader

By CHRIS RITCHIE

Our daily diet from the Middle East consists largely of "facts" - the latest body counts, for instance - as well as a bewildering array of claims and half-developed analysis.

What is missing is context, and this selection of writings by the famous contrarian - a Jerusalem-born Palestinian turned American academic - provides some of that.

The book reflects Said's lifelong attempt to come to terms with what has happened and is happening to the Palestinians in the wake of their dispersement just before and after Israel's creation; and to look beyond the immediate betrayal and destruction of family and nation in favour of more enduring insights into the nature of power, its misuse, and the consequences of this for innocent bystanders.

His affinity is always with the outsider and his story makes that no surprise.

Said was 13 when Israel was born in 1948 and, like many in Jerusalem, Nazareth or Haifa at that time, Israel's birth was the start of his wanderings.

Unlike most Palestinians who ended up in camps in Jordan or Lebanon and eventually became participants in the internal political disputes of those territories, Said by 16 was in the United States. He says he was in the process of settling quietly into an academic life, an American of Levantian origin, until the 1967 war - or rather its portrayal in America - dragged him into the public debate on the side of the losers, the Palestinians.

Quarter of a century after his arrival in the US, he was making a name for himself as a contrarian, challenging the accepted political and moral truths of his new home.

But his challenge is as much to the Arab states and societies as it is to the United States or Israel. And his enemies, numerous, speak many languages.

Granta

$44.95