Justice & Law Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

A “passionate desire for justice” is a risky engine for fiction: it can tilt into sermonizing. Ben Jelloun sidesteps that trap by pairing justice with temperament. His characters aren’t simply righteous; they’re “rebellious and incorruptible,” words that smuggle in plot. Rebellion implies friction with institutions, family, religion, state power. Incorruptibility implies a world where corruption is the default currency, where survival often means compromise. Put together, the line reads less like a moral badge and more like a warning: these are people built to collide with their surroundings.

The intent is also quietly political. Ben Jelloun, writing out of the Maghreb and a French literary sphere that often exoticizes North African lives, signals an ethics of representation. He refuses the convenient caricatures: the submissive victim, the pliable opportunist, the “good immigrant” who earns acceptance by erasing anger. Justice here isn’t abstract philosophy; it’s a pressure exerted by history - colonial aftermaths, censorship, policing, patriarchal control, the daily humiliations of racism and bureaucracy.

There’s subtext in “my characters,” too: a poet claiming sovereignty over narrative space. In a climate where power routinely rewrites people into stereotypes, to create rebellious, incorruptible figures is to insist that dignity can be dramatic, not just virtuous. It’s a literary stance against resignation - and a bet that the most compelling protagonists are the ones who won’t negotiate their conscience for comfort.