This book gathers Edward Said’s late lectures and essays on humanism as a critical practice of reading and as a democratic stance in public life. Said argues for a secular criticism open to texts and to the world at once, seeing humanism as a way of resisting academic enclosure, political dogma, and rigid identity. Fawwaz Traboulsi’s Arabic translation makes available a decisive late statement on the role of the intellectual, the work of reading, and the ethics of freedom.