It was during his Columbia years, Obama would later claim in Dreams of My Father, that he rediscovered his own African (and Muslim) roots, and this rediscovery is there seen very much through Said's postcolonial prism. However much Obama later doctored, omitted or invented incidents to fit his narrative — and Maraniss, though politically sympathetic to the president, reveals that he did all three — his new political identity owed much to his indignation at the incarceration and torture of his Kenyan Muslim grandfather in a British concentration camp during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s. The fact that the patriarch of the Obamas seems to have been not a rebel, but an obedient servant of the British imperial regime, makes it all the more revealing that his grandson Barack Hussein Obama Jr chose to rewrite his family history. 

He could not have known it at the time, but according to the Israeli scholar Justus Reid Weiner, Edward Said had done much the same thing: downplaying his privileged upbringing in Egypt and America to depict himself as a Palestinian refugee who had been exiled by the creation of Israel. The thesis of Orientalism is thus its author's invented personal narrative writ large: a story of vicarious victimhood, in which Western civilisation is not only held responsible for Oriental despotism but is seen as having created the latter in a prodigious feat of false consciousness. 

Ignoring the damning judgment of the Orientalists themselves — Bernard Lewis, their doyen, declared that "Edward Said's thesis is just plain wrong" — the rest of the academy adopted Said's ideas. The consequences for American policy in the Middle East under the Obama administration, have been profound. The President's guilt-inspired attitude towards Islam was set out in his Cairo speech of 2009. It was noted at the time that the Egyptian leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were seated in the front rows at Al-Azhar University to hear Obama quoting the Koran, praising Islam's record on "religious tolerance and racial equality", apologising for colonialism and ending with the Muslim blessing: "God's peace be upon you." Islamists everywhere drew the obvious conclusion that they had nothing to fear from America. Three years later, the Brotherhood rules Egypt; its allies are in the ascendant across the Muslim world; the US ambassador to Libya and his staff are murdered by jihadists. Said's Palestinian compatriots feel so emboldened by Obama's coolness towards Israel that they have refused to negotiate with the Jewish state. The Iranian theocracy has defiantly pursued nuclear weapons, thus far with impunity. Edward Said has enjoyed a posthumous influence far beyond his dreams; but Barack Obama's intellectual journey from Columbia to Cairo has led the Middle East to the brink of war.