Edward Wadie Said died at a hospital in New York City, on 25 September 2003, of complications attendant on the chronic form of lymphatic leukaemia with which he had struggled since 1991. He was sixty-seven years old. University Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at New York's prestigious Columbia University, it can be reasonably speculated that he was at that time the most widely known intellectual in the world.

In the ensuing days, tributes to Said filled the media. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared: ‘Both the Middle East and the United States will be the poorer without his distinctive voice.’ Alan Brinkley, the Provost of Columbia University where Said had spent most of his professional career, said in Columbia News that ‘Edward Said was a great scholar, a great teacher, and a beloved member of the Columbia community for 40 years.’ Furthermore, Brinkley said, ‘We will greatly miss this kind, gentle, and generous colleague and friend. It is hard to imagine Columbia without him.’ Meanwhile, Columbia's President, Lee C. Bollinger, opined that Said's ‘death is an irreplaceable loss to the realm of ideas and for those who believe in the redemptive power of the life of the mind’.

Others remembered Said differently. ‘A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to beat’, Alexander Cockburn, the radical Anglo-Irish journalist and leading figure of the New Left, wrote on his Counterpunch website.