Politics & Power Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

A poet’s line that reads like a policy memo is rarely just about policy. Ben Jelloun’s insistence that religion “stay in the heart” tries to rescue faith from its most cynical career move: becoming a party platform. The phrasing is surgical. “Heart” is intimate, messy, lived; “politics” is public, strategic, and hungry for symbols. He’s drawing a border not between belief and society, but between belief and coercion.

The subtext is less anti-religion than anti-instrumentalization. When religion enters politics, it stops being a language for conscience and becomes a technology of power: a way to sort insiders from outsiders, to launder authority as divine, to turn disagreement into heresy. Calling it “private” doesn’t deny religion’s social importance; it challenges the assumption that piety should grant legislative privilege.

Context matters: Ben Jelloun writes out of the Francophone Maghreb’s long argument with modernity, postcolonial statecraft, and the aftershocks of Islamism and authoritarian “guardianship” alike. In such settings, the state can weaponize religion to police citizens, and oppositions can weaponize religion to claim inevitability. His line rejects both maneuvers. It also speaks to Europe’s own anxieties, where “religion in politics” is often code for “Muslims in public,” and secularism can become its own moral cudgel.

What makes it work is its quiet reframing: religion isn’t banished; it’s re-housed, from courtroom to conscience. That’s not neutrality. It’s a demand for civic life where legitimacy is earned in daylight, not inherited from heaven.