A year after massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations roiled the campus of Columbia University, one protester’s placard sticks in my head:

“Columbia, why require me to read Professor Edward Said if you don’t want me to use it?”

This protester is onto something, because this question gets to the very heart of the wave of anti-Israel enmity that has consumed elite colleges for the last 18 months—and has continued into the Trump administration. Last month, the president gave an ultimatum to Columbia: Reform or lose your funding. And how did the students respond? They protested, once again.

Professor Edward Said would have approved of these students’ actions. One of the most famous and influential people to ever teach at Columbia, Said was an activist scholar, and the author of the renowned 1978 volume, Orientalism, which challenged the way the West’s thinkers and writers had defined and taught the history of the Middle East for hundreds of years. A hand grenade tossed into the academy, the effects of this totemic book are still felt to this day.

It’s in Orientalism that you’ll find the roots of the anti-Israel protests that have spread throughout the elite universities since 2024.

Said was born into a Christian family in Western Jerusalem in 1935, while it was still part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, Wadie Said, had become an American citizen after fighting for the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and Edward immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager. As a student, he excelled, attending Princeton and then later Harvard, where he earned a PhD in English literature. In 1963, he landed a teaching position at Columbia.

It was a few years later, in 1967, when his outlook on the world changed forever.

Students everywhere were protesting the war in Vietnam, but Said’s attention was elsewhere. From the U.S., he watched the Six-Day War in June 1967, in which Israel won decisive victories against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—taking control of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and other territories. In the West, the war was seen as a miraculous story of survival. Egypt’s strongman president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had said just a month before that “our basic objective” in any war with the Jewish state would be “to destroy Israel.” Israel had fended off three Arab armies. It was this failure to extinguish the Jewish state that curiously awakened Said’s commitment to Palestine.

Years later, reflecting on his career at the age of 63, Said described the effect that the war had on him, in his 1999 memoir, Out of Place:

I was no longer the same person after 1967; the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. I subsequently entered the newly transformed Middle Eastern landscape as a part of the Palestinian movement.

Said was no longer satisfied with a safe career as a quiet academic, a life of interpreting texts and giving lectures. He wanted to be part of a wider cause, and that cause would be the liberation of Palestine.

And so, in the 1970s, he became a trusted advisor to Yasser Arafat, then-chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But he also used his talents as an academic to advance his cause.

Said believed that the people of the Middle East should build their own image, write their own histories, tell their own stories, and refuse to accept the roles assigned to them by the West. This was the central philosophy of his groundbreaking book.

Orientalism was written not long after Israel again fended off Arab armies in the Yom Kippur War—a dark period for the professor, when he felt that the world had largely abandoned the Palestinian cause. In the book, he argues that the stories told in the West about the East are intertwined with imperialism and power. The East is painted in an exotic light, he says, and depicted as primitive and scary. Western authors reduce ancient, complex civilizations to dehumanizing caricatures that help justify the colonial theft and exploitation of their lands.

This Orientalist tradition includes imperialists like Napoleon Bonaparte, writers like Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, and painters like Eugène Delacroix. It doesn’t take much effort to find examples of Said’s concepts in more modern popular culture either: Indiana Jones is a whip-cracking Orientalist of the highest order.

As Said himself said, it is “virtually impossible for an American to. . . read books, to see films about the Middle East that are not colored politically.”

“The Arabs almost always play the role of terrorists and violent people.”

Said’s main target, though, was the academics who preceded him: the white, often British, French, or American historians who had written the canonical histories of the Middle East. These historians had spent hundreds of years categorizing peoples and cultures that their nation-states were in the process of conquering. The histories they wrote, according to Orientalism, were an extension of this conquest, inherently racist and repressive. Said argued that the only real thing you could learn from studying the work of Western historians on the Middle East was how the West chose to see the Middle East.

This may sound all very intellectual to you, very dry and highbrow. But Orientalism made Said a star. Based in the world capital of media, New York, he regularly appeared on chat shows. Back then, as now, the Middle East was in eternal turmoil, an endless font of breaking news that needed to be explained to an American audience—and Said became one of the key voices who was called on. Plus, this was the era of intellectual celebrities: William F. Buckley, Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky. Said, who dressed in the uniform of a British aristocrat—tailored sports coats, silk ties, and custom French shirts—fit into this constellation naturally.

His work quickly became canonical, and it utterly transformed American scholarship on the Middle East.

“One of the main arguments of Orientalism is that all Westerners approach the East with prejudice,” the historian Martin Kramer told The Free Press. And the book basically made the argument against universities hiring Western experts on the Middle East, full stop. Kramer explains this argument: “If you wanted to appoint someone to the faculty who you were sure was not tainted by this prejudice, the way to do it was to appoint someone who was either an Arab or a Muslim. Then you knew you weren’t getting an Orientalist.”

Edward Said was shattering the old consensus and discrediting the thinkers who preceded him. He was bound to make enemies. And one enemy stands out.

In the penultimate chapter of Orientalism, Said found and labeled a villain: a contemporary of his, Bernard Lewis. For years, Lewis had rightly enjoyed his reputation as the best and most respected of the Middle East scholars. He was at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein once hung his hat, and he had written groundbreaking histories on the Ottoman Empire and the expansion of the first Caliphates into Europe.

He and Said hated each other.

Said was a postmodernist. He saw it as his duty to reinterpret the past according to the new frameworks of the progressive present. But Lewis, who spoke 15 languages, was a traditional historian with little time for trendy intellectuals. He grappled with interpreting and understanding the past on its own terms. And when Orientalism first came out, he dismissed it, assuming the hype would blow over. But by 1982, Lewis was sufficiently concerned to publish a review of it in The New York Review of Books. In it, he picks apart Said’s book, pointing out inaccuracies, poor translations, and a tendency to cherry-pick sources:

A historian of science is not expected to be a scientist, but he is expected to have some basic knowledge of the scientific alphabet. Similarly, a historian of Orientalism—that is to say, the work of historians and philologists—should have at least some acquaintance with the history and philology with which they were concerned. Mr. Said shows astonishing blind spots.

Said responded to Lewis two months later in his own review of the review. It would be an understatement to describe it as scathing. “Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong,” Said wrote.

Again, Lewis responded publicly, in a letter to The New York Review of Books that began: “It is difficult to argue with a scream of rage.”

These two men represented the past and the future of Middle Eastern history. And they were on a collision course. Tufts University invited the pair to debate, and both accepted. On November 22, 1986, the American academy assembled to watch the two men duke it out. In one corner, looking to bury Orientalist traditions, were Edward Said and, by his side, the great intellectual journalist, Christopher Hitchens. Their opponents that morning were the literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier—and Bernard Lewis.

What happened in that room that day was, in a way, a changing of the guard. Said’s perspective was the fashionable one, while Bernard Lewis looked like yesterday’s man. And what Lewis said only reinforced the audience’s progressive idea that a white English Jew had no place explaining Arab history to anyone.

“It wasn’t his best performance,” admits Kramer, who was with him that day. Lewis approached his limited time on the podium as an academic lecturer, rather than a debater. His opening remarks were rambling: He began listing clichés about the Middle East, talking about “arbitrary despotism” and “unbridled sexual power.” To be fair, he was acknowledging some of the stereotypes about Arabia and Islam in an effort to knock them down. But he ran out of time before he could finish his argument.

Even Lewis’s debate partner on the day, Wieseltier, thought the great man had flubbed it. “Bernard, I have to say, let down the side,” Wieseltier told me. “He said something, this is not an exact quote, but he mentioned something about, I don’t know, nefarious Arab men and salacious Arab women or something. And I looked at him and I thought, whose side are you on? I mean, really, you don’t have to come here as one of Edward’s nineteenth-century Orientalists.”

Lewis was there to argue that Middle Eastern identity was safe in the hands of Western historians, but he looked exactly like the kind of condescending Orientalist who, Said argued, had distorted the field.

By comparison, Said was cogent and forceful. He ultimately prevailed, and in doing so, he would bury the right of certain historians to cover certain histories. At least inside the ivory towers of education, any Western view of Arab and Muslim cultures would now be perpetually embattled. And so, Said was building the academic space we live in today. On the stage that day, he articulated the talking points of students who would be protesting 40 years later. For instance, he blamed the Orientalist view of the Middle East on “the active collaboration of a whole cadre of scholars, experts, and abettors, drawn from the ranks of the Orientalist and special interest lobbies, among whom one—the Zionist lobby—has garnered a vastly disproportionate strength.”

But this is only half the story. Because while Said won the debate inside the faculty lounge, the real world had not complied with his elaborate theories.

And if it had been less taboo to do so, readers of Lewis might have pointed out that his ideas had been vindicated in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Less than a year after Said released Orientalism, Shia fanatics had taken over Iran. Their leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, claimed power, and his supporters took over the American embassy. He replaced a Western-backed despot with an Islamic tyranny so vicious that recently even dog-walking was banned.

Now, Lewis’s readers at the time would have known that political Islam was on the rise. (In January 1976, for instance, he had written an essay called “The Return of Islam,” which made this case.) But Said was unprepared to draw a connection between the Iranian Revolution and Islamic fundamentalism. He argued that the regime change was the result of anti-imperialism, rather than the triumph of violent theocracy.

In reality, it was both. But Said was so busy arguing that American media coverage of the revolution was Orientalist, he ironically misconstrued what was actually happening in Iran. Yes, the Western media made the revolutionaries seem like a bunch of violent fanatics—but, as history has since shown, a lot of them were violent fanatics. Said’s obsession with the discourse of the West blinded him to the reality of the East.

And Said’s failure to explain the role of political Islam in the Islamic revolution in Iran is a failure that has been emulated over and over again by his many protégés. After 9/11, for example, the academy was largely caught out, unable to explain the atrocity in the context of Islamic fundamentalism. It was Lewis, and intellectual journalists outside the academy, who provided the public with a framework to understand the history of political Islam.

However, as much as the Middle East has changed since the publication of Orientalism, the ivory towers of America remain frozen in time. Over the last 18 months, American students have insisted on viewing Islamic fundamentalists as an anti-imperialist force for good—and, in doing so, have ignored important realities of the Middle East.

Since October 7, 2023, the building occupiers and slogan shouters on American campuses have claimed to oppose oppression, even as they have walked in lockstep solidarity with Hamas. But just last week, we began to see popular resistance to Hamas’s rule in Gaza—which raises an uncomfortable question for the students and their professors. What about the many Gazans who consider themselves oppressed by Hamas?

It’s a question that will likely be ignored. Because on American campuses, the opinion of the regular Palestinians who oppose the regime that foisted a disastrous war upon them is unimportant. They are mere props in a larger drama about Western imperialism, objects in a narrative rather than subjects in their own right. Edward Said had a word for this kind of thing.