ABSTRACT
In June 1999, in keeping with its twice-yearly tradition, the American University in Cairo (AUC) awarded Edward Said an honorary doctorate. On that occasion, Said delivered a commencement address that focused on the idea of a university to the very last class of the twentieth century.1 He dispelled the notion that liberal education is a European or western mode of study and reminded his audience that the principle of ijtihad, i.e. the central role of individual effort in study and interpretation, constituted the core of the Arab-Islamic culture and that in the past the madrasa (school) attached to the mosque, whose students practised ijtihad, was the locus of liberal thinking and education. He proceeded to note the special status that every society assigns to the academy “whether it exempts it from intercourse with the everyday world or whether it involves it directly in that world”.2 Said argued that it is this special status accorded to the university that produces “a sense of violated sanctity experienced by us when the university or school is subjected to crude political pressures”.3 Said proceeded to advance his own model for academic freedom one that is in perfect harmony with his own personal and professional histories: the model of the migrant or the traveller:
If in the real world outside the academy, we must needs be ourselves and only ourselves, inside the academy . . . we should be able to discover and travel among other selves, other identities, other varieties of the human adventure. But most essentially, in this joint discovery of self and other, it is the role of the academy to transform what might be conflict, or consent, or assertion into reconciliation, mutuality, recognition, creative interaction.4
