Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad Anti-Imperialist Struggles in a Post-Colonial World

In a series of interviews with David Barsamian when Eqbal Ahmad was asked to comment on Edward Said's intellectual contributions, he summed it up as follows: 'I think the singular achievement of Said, as a literary critic, beginning with Orientalism, has been to put imperialism at the center of Western civilization... He put therefore the whole issue of Western expansion, domination and imperialism as central forces in defining the nature of civilization itself.' Reflecting, in turn, on why he dedicated his book Culture and Imperialism to Eqbal Ahmad, Edward Said wrote that 'it was because in his activity, life and thinking Eqbal embodied not just the politics of empire but that whole fabric of experience expressed in human life itself, rather than in economic rules and reductive formulas