Calling the Orient different is uninformative without specifying how and why

Evidence

Said’s argument that in the European imagination the Orient was different is not, on its own, informative, simply because the adjective is, by its very nature, both ambiguous and relative. To bear meaningful sense, it requires not only clarification but also differentiation and specificity. A potential witness’s testimony that the bank thief looked different than he himself does, or even different from the police detective questioning him, would be for the policeman an utterly useless identification of the thief. It so happens that Said does articulate some aspects of the difference, an articulation that spans much of his book. The Orient is inferior, primitive, effeminate, superstitious, and the like, all of which are, for the Orientalist, negative attributes, or at least intended to be negative. But then Said expands his definition of “different” and includes positive qualities, such as the spirituality of the Orient, this time clearly intended by a few Orientalists to be a positive attribute with which they are stating their preference for the Orient over their Europe. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 277

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies why the predicate ‘different’ is vacuous without specificity and differentiation — a methodological critique of Said’s key term.