Accompanying Said on a journey back to his beginnings

Edward Said needs no introduction. Palestinian, American, humanist and thinker of acknowledged international stature, his scholarly achievement in literary and cultural criticism, his accomplished musicianship and his deep humanity have earned the respect and admiration of many all over the world.

Out of Place stands out from his prolific output as a very special work. It is an autobiographical journey started shortly after he was diagnosed with leukaemia. To quote one of his publisher's leaflets: "As ill-health set him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings" - and with such a revealing, penetrating and sometimes shattering result!

Comfortable stereotypical assumptions about self, family, school, nation, Middle Eastern history and North-South dynamics are challenged without mercy. But the fascination of this book is that it does not challenge assumptions as a goal in itself, rather it achieves this creative feat indirectly through Said's uncompromising honesty and unbridled analysis. Sometimes this ruthless honesty seems unkind, but uncannily the cumulative effect is of understanding and compassion for all the characters, even for those who seem to have wreaked so much damage. People like Said are of inestimable value in helping all of us on all sides to understand the cobwebs of reaction and counter-reaction that have bedevilled the Middle East, North-South relations, the relations between the West and the Islamic world, the internal mechanisms of power and decision making. His mastery of two apparently disparate cultures, languages and histories makes him one of those rare thinkers who can help find the win-win third-way resolutions out of circuits of chronic locked confrontation.

At a direct level, this book brings the reader hours of riveting reading, as layer after layer of the intricate process of the growing up of an extraordinarily perceptive Arab boy in Palestine, Egypt and the US is peeled away. Everyone will find his own level of interest. It is compelling as a story of growing up. It is sometimes a marvellous study of how to teach and how not to teach - more often how not to - and so should be of interest to parents and educators at all levels. It also sheds a penetrating light on aspects of Arab culture and society in transition and will therefore interest historians and students of Arab culture and the Middle East in general. Finally, it stands alone as a literary work of absorbing interest and merit. In its eventual humanity, this book reminds one of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

As the privileged son of a successful Palestinian businessman, who had fought with the US army in the first world war, the young Edward was subjected to an amazing array of forces all purportedly shaping him for his own good. His parents, having lost their first male child, held on to their only son with an intensity that frequently verged on suffocation. It is as if, sensing the tragedy and cataclysms that were in store for the Middle East, Said's father developed an unflinching determination eventually to send his only son to complete his schooling and education in the US. At various sad and decisive points he must have seen his son's future not in the Middle East but in the US.

One senses his mother as loving, sensitive and talented. Yet all had to be subservient to duty. Duty towards her husband's grand plan for their son, and the duty of denying all for the sake of manipulating the endangered son into a proper upbringing and growth. Not surprisingly, his upbringing in such a privileged, western-influenced family in the Middle East included complete denial of physicality and sexuality.

The amazing social and power dynamics he was subjected to were of course not solely generated by his parents, but included education in supposedly the best English and American schools in Cairo and then at Princeton and Harvard. Describing his schooling, he leads us into telling sequences that reveal the operation of subtle and not-so-subtle racism and deliberate cultural dispossession: "Our lessons and books were mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved. Their world made little sense to me, except that I admired the creation of the language they used, which I, as a little Arab boy, was learning something about."

Said leaves us with a lot of terrible and unanswered questions about Egypt after the coup that overthrew the elected Wafd government in 1952. This is exemplified by the mention of the incomprehensible arrest and death in custody of the saintly family friend Doctor Farid Haddad. There are no answers yet. How much of the nakba - catastrophe - that befell the Arab world came from without and how much from within? We know a lot about the hair-raising external dynamics, but what about the internal dynamics? This is a hitherto incompletely answered question.

A most exhilarating and illuminating part of Said's struggle to save the real Edward is his description of the gradually emerging role of music and art in his life and in the process of his salvation. There was the Cairo opera house, with its incredibly rich opera and ballet seasons; the unforgettable performances in Cairo of Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; the piano, in spite of the tedium of practising; Hamlet read and reread by Said and his mother - through all these, a decisive channel to salvation was opened.

Out of Place is a chronicle of the real Edward Said, perpetually trying to emerge out of the many Edwards that a bizarre and many-sided environment in confusion, transition and cataclysm tries frequently to create for him, rather than helping him to create and recreate himself. Magically, the eventual effect of the book is deeper. It is yet another testimony of the eternal dramatic striving "to be or not to be and what to be". The choices consciously and unconsciously keep repeating themselves in the process of growing up and growing out: succumb, join the herd and be safe and happy, or strive for the realisation of the inner call and become "out of place".

As human consciousness grows and as we embark on a new millennium with the cumulative knowledge of man's age-old search for meaning, for identity and for salvation, I would like to give Out of Place a new name: "In Place: The Triumph of Edward Said". The road to a dynamic, non-violent, pluralistic world of infinite creative potential is opened by such men.

Tarek Ali Hassan is professor of medicine, Al Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt, and was founding chairman of the new Egyptian Opera.