Born in Talbiyah, Jerusalem on 1 Nov. 1935 to a Christian family; spent his early childhood in Jerusalem before the family moved to Cairo in 1947 in the wake of the UN Partition Plan; educated in the American School in Cairo and the British-run Victoria College in Alexandria; emigrated to the US, where he studied from 1951 at the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. Graduated from Princeton University (BA) and later from Harvard University (MA and PhD in English Literature in 1964); became an assistant instructor in the English Department of Columbia University in 1963, full professor in 1970; Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature in 1977, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in 1989, and, in 1992, university professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. Served as Visiting Professor at Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities and has lectured at over 100 others, most extensively in the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Received numerous awards and literary prizes as well as honorary doctorates from the universities of Birzeit, Chicago, Michigan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jami'a Malleyeh, Toronto, Guelph, Edinburgh, Haverford, Warwick, Exeter, National University of Ireland and American University in Cairo.

From 1977 to 1991, he was an unaffiliated member of the PNC; key member of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East in the early 1980s; consultant to the UN for the International Conference on the Question of Palestine in 1983; one of two PNC members (with Prof. Ibrahim Abu Lughod), who met US Sec. of State Shultz in March 1988 to discuss his peace proposals; helped in 1988 to draft the Palestinian constitution; long an ardent supporter of Arafat, he became a bitter critic after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which he rejected as PLO capitulation – “a Palestinian Versailles.” Harsh critic of the negotiations and the performance of the PA ever since.

Member and president (1999) of the Modern Language Association; fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member of the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, of King's College, Cambridge, the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Honorary Fellow of the Middle East Studies Association. Author of numerous philosophical, literary and political articles and books, translated into dozens of languages, incl. Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983); After the Last Sky (1986), Blaming the Victims (1988); Culture and Imperialism (1993); The Politics of Dispossession (1994); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995); Out of Place: A Memoir (1999):End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000); Reflections on Exile (2000); and, most recently, Power, Politics, and Culture (2001).
Died on 25 September 2003 New York City of leukemia at the age of 67.