Edward Said saved my life. And I don’t mean that the work of the late American intellectual and Palestinian activist rescued me when I needed intellectual or emotional or moral sustenance. Sure, at one point in my political odyssey, Said’s work was important to me. Even now, though my ideas about the Middle East have changed a great deal since my graduate school days when I met Said, I believe that Orientalism, his most famous book, offers valuable, if skewed, insights into that volatile region. When I say Said saved my life, I mean it literally. You see, one snowy afternoon in the late ’90s, Susan Sontag was going to kill me.