Said’s Orientalism lacked criteria to distinguish good from bad Orientalists

Evidence

For Said, this constituted misrepresentation all the same. But for the legatees of this sweeping approach who still thrive today, misrepresentation and consequently “Orientalism” are what they disapprove in other scholars’ work. The politicization in all of this stems from the fact that neither Said nor his followers set the necessary criteria that allow for grounded judgment, valuation, discriminating distinction, and assessment of what makes one Orientalist different from another, and what makes an Orientalist stand within a paradigmatic domain and another outside it. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 275

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how critique movements ossify into policing tools when the original theory omits evaluative criteria — applicable to many postcolonial and critical-theory descendants.
• DEEPTHINKING: Hallaq locates the politicization of Orientalism-debate not in ideology but in a missing evaluative framework, a structural argument with wide resonance.