Gods That Always Fail
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 1993
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith lecturer is the Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic Edward Said. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 where he is now Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Regarded as one of the founders of post-colonial theory, his 1978 book Orientalism is one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century.
In his sixth and final lecture, Edward Said considers how far an intellectual should participate in the public sphere. He examines the dilemma of loyalty to a cause, the nature of belief, and the problems faced by those who publicly recant. The hardest aspect of being an intellectual, he says, is to represent what you profess through your work and interventions, without turning into an institution or acting at the behest of a system or method.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series |
| 0:05.9 | Representation of the Intellectual, given by Edward Said, was originally broadcast in 1993. |
| 0:12.9 | He was a brilliantly eloquent and charismatic Iranian intellectual whom I had first met in |
| 0:17.5 | the West sometime in the middle of 1978. A writer and teacher of considerable accomplishment and learning, |
| 0:23.6 | he played a significant role in spreading knowledge of the Shah's unpopular rule |
| 0:27.6 | and later that year of the new figures who were soon to come to power in Tehran. |
| 0:32.6 | He spoke respectfully of Imam Khomeini at the time |
| 0:36.6 | and was soon to become visibly associated with the relatively young men Imam Khomeini at the time, and was soon to become visibly |
| 0:38.3 | associated with the relatively young men around Khomeini, who were of course Muslim, but |
| 0:43.3 | assuredly not militant Islamists, men like Abu Hassan Benny Sutter, who became president, |
| 0:49.2 | and Sadiq, Ruttab Sadi, who became foreign minister. |
| 0:54.0 | Within a few weeks after the Islamic Revolution of Iran had consolidated who became foreign minister. |
| 0:57.4 | Within a few weeks after the Islamic Revolution of Iran had consolidated power inside the country, |
| 1:00.6 | my acquaintance who had gone back to Iran for the new government's installation, |
| 1:04.8 | returned to the West as an ambassador to an important metropolitan center. |
| 1:09.1 | I recall attending and once or twice participating with him |
| 1:11.9 | in panels on the Middle East after the Shah's fall. I saw him during the time of the very long |
| 1:17.8 | hostage crisis, as it was called in America, and he regularly expressed anguish and even anger |
| 1:23.1 | at the ruffians who had engineered the embassy takeover and the subsequent holding of 50 or so civilian |
| 1:28.9 | hostages. The unmistakable impression I had of him was of a very decent man who had committed |
| 1:36.0 | himself to the new order and had gone as far as defending and even serving it as a loyal |
| 1:41.2 | emissary abroad. I knew him as an observant Muslim, but by no means a fanatic. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.