...Back to Edward Said. It is true that I seemed to be one of his obsessions. He found ample reason to target me in his books. There is a similarity between Said and Dabashi, between mentor and mentee. The stuff they wrote for the respectable press were kept within some bounds, flimsy bounds, to be sure, of civil discourse. It is true that Said once wrote about Bobby Griffin, a Yale PhD in English, a friend of mine who had played basketball for Tel Aviv Maccabi and went on to teach English literature at Tel Aviv University. It was in response to a response of Griffin to a Said article in Critical Inquiry, a portentous journal. Said succeeded in keeping Griffin's letter out of print for, as I recall, more than two years. Then when it was finally published, Said answered, and through the body of the response called Griffin "this creature." Said once wrote an article mostly about me. It was in The Muslim, a Karachi English-language newspaper, that presumably not many in the States read. In that publication, his continuing allusion to me was as "the New York Jew." I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody had ever really read this article, or nobody of any consequence. Except those to whom I showed it.

So it is with Dabashi. He keeps his hands relatively clean in the books he publishes with Routledge. He puts out his contracts, or at least this one contract on Nafisi, in the well-thumbed Al-Ahram English weekly. To use the sexual metaphors so pleasing to Dabashi (and to Said, too), the professor of Iranian Literature and senior member of the Middle East Institute at Columbia had gotten their rocks off in private. That's OK, too. But soon everyone will know. The stain is now there for all to see. This is also Said's legacy. Bollinger will have much trouble tending to it...