Edward W Said, a lifelong champion of the Palestinian cause, died here late Wednesday after a decade-long battle with leukaemia. He was 67.

"Edward Said's loss will be felt by millions of people throughout the world. And for Palestinians, whose tragedy and whose stories he so eloquently helped explain to the public, a tree has fallen. The magnitude of this loss is profound,'' said Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem.

''But Edward Said's extensive writings and passionate spirit will live on as a powerful legacy and call to action for generations to come."

A man of many dimensions, Said was a celebrated literary critic, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, the author of 15 books, a music critic, a scholar of opera, a pianist, a father of two grown children and arguably the most eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the West.

Prizes and honours

A recipient of many prizes and honours, including the Sultan Owais Prize for general cultural achievement and the first Spinoza Prize given in the Netherlands, Said was also a visiting professor at such leading institutions as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

He was consistently critical of Israel for what he regarded as the mistreatment of the Palestinians.

"The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim," Said said in an interview with New York magazine in 1989. "They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and terrorism is understandable," he said.

"But what the Israelis do, in killing Palestinians on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the horrific and unjust dispossession of the Palestinian people."

He added: ''I totally repudiate terrorism in all its forms. Not just Palestinian terrorism - I'm also against Israeli terrorism, the bombing of refugee camps."

In the year 2000, Said prompted a controversy when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.

He wrote two years ago, after visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Israel's efforts "toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs" had actually strengthened Palestinian determination.

"Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel's concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective," Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly , published in Cairo.

Emotions on both sides

In the years after the 1993 Oslo peace accords, he came to the conclusion that separate Palestinian and Jewish states would always be unworkable and, while he recognised that emotions on both sides were against it, he advocated a single binational state as the best ultimate solution.

"I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New York Times.

"There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such."

Said was a prominent member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years before stepping down 1991.

Besides being one of the clearest voices for justice for the Palestinian people, he was also an accomplished pianist.

Born in 1935 in Jerusalem - then part of British-ruled Palestine - and educated at schools there and in Cairo, Said came to the United States in the early 1950s. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1957 and a master's and PhD from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964 respectively.

At Columbia University, Said wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause but also on a variety of other subjects - from English literature, his academic specialty, to music and culture.

A prolific author, his books include Orientalism, A Question of Palestine and The End of the Peace Process.

After receiving the diagnosis of leukaemia and beginning a long and ultimately unsuccessful course of chemotherapy and other treatments, Said threw himself into writing a memoir.

Asked about this encounter with mortality, he said in an interview: "I've decided that it's possible to live with a Sword of Damocles hanging over you ... You can, by an act of will, not think about it. That was, I think, the major victory that I won. I don't think about death."

Said's memoir, which appeared in 1999, is called Out of Place , and published by Viking Press. - IPS