Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

A single sentence, and Ben Jelloun is already refusing the comfortable fiction of a unified "Arab world". The word "gulf" is doing the heavy lifting: not a gap you can bridge with better messaging, but a structural separation with depth, danger, and distance. Coming from a poet who has spent decades writing about power, exile, language, and the afterlives of colonialism, the line reads less like elitist scolding and more like a diagnosis of broken circuits: ideas are produced in one register and lived in another, and the translation keeps failing.

The intent is pointed. "Arab peoples" suggests plural publics shaped by bread-and-butter urgencies, local loyalties, and state pressure; "Arab intellectuals" implies a class trained to speak in abstract vocabularies, often in French or in rarefied Modern Standard Arabic, often in institutions that reward distance from the street. The subtext is that both sides are trapped. Intellectuals can become professional dissenters whose critiques circulate internationally but land faintly at home; publics can be reduced to a romanticized mass, invoked as authenticity while being denied real political agency.

Context matters: post-independence regimes that alternated between nationalism and repression; a media ecosystem where the state, the mosque, and the market compete to define "the people"; and an intellectual tradition haunted by the question of for whom, and in what language, one writes. Ben Jelloun is also smuggling in an ethical challenge: if there is a gulf, who benefits from keeping it open? And what would it cost to close it without turning either "people" into a prop or "intellectual" into a brand?