Tahar Ben Jelloun Quotes
What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.
10 centuries ago was a time when the Arabs were far more advanced and modern than other cultures including the Christian West that was in the Dark Ages. However, in the 12th century there was a “closing”—a narrowing of allowable Islamic thinking, and since then, Islamic people have had great difficulty with change or modernity. Not all Muslim nations are equally rigid but the Arabs are at the extreme among Islamic counties.
This quotation is an amazing prediction that was 100 years in the future. China had a mercantile culture and tradition that was suppressed and controlled by the Emperors, the Europeans, the Nationalist Chinese, the Japanese, and finally the Communists who finally found a way to provide commercial freedom if not political, religious, and cultural liberty. But the talent for commerce was clear even 100 years ago to those who were broadminded enough to see it behind the antl-Asian prejudice of the 19th and early 20th century.
Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan writer. The entirety of his work is written in French, although his first language is Darija. He became known for his 1985 novel L’Enfant de Sable (The Sand Child). Today he lives in Paris, France, and continues to write. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
