Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

The line lands like a quiet rebuke to any nationalism that thinks respect can be demanded abroad while being denied at home. Ben Jelloun, a poet who has spent decades writing across the fault lines of Moroccan and French identity, frames tolerance not as a moral accessory but as a geopolitical instrument. The structure is deliberately causal: acceptance inside the nation becomes the precondition for dignity outside it. In a single sentence, he turns “neighbours” into both literal bordering states and the metaphorical strangers next door, collapsing foreign policy and everyday ethics into the same test.

The subtext is pointed: a country’s international posture is only as credible as its internal social contract. You don’t get to perform cosmopolitan virtue on the world stage while scapegoating immigrants, minorities, or dissenters in the streets. “In our own countries” is doing heavy work here, calling out the habit of outsourcing responsibility - as if intolerance were a problem that begins at the border rather than at the dinner table, the school, the bureaucracy.

There’s also a strategic humility in “be respected in our turn.” Respect is reciprocal, not automatic; it’s earned through practiced pluralism, not asserted through flags and speeches. Coming from Ben Jelloun - whose work often interrogates racism, exile, and the policing of belonging in Europe - the quote reads as both diagnosis and warning: when a nation hardens against its “others,” it doesn’t just fracture internally; it shrinks its moral authority, and neighbors notice.