Tahar Ben Jelloun, in his latest article, didn’t unveil a hidden truth or hand us a philosophical gem. He merely rubbed salt into our daily wound: the slow, humiliating death of manners and civic sense. Nothing groundbreaking here, except that while many of us keep burying our heads in the sand, Ben Jelloun stood up and shouted: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are a nation addicted to chaos much like toddlers clinging to their toys!”
Yes, today we are hargawis of behavior—refugees from civility itself. We elbow and jostle in lines as if survival depended on it. We curse and insult at the drop of a hat, in full stereo, in front of children and grandparents alike. We feed stray cats and dogs on neighbors’ doorsteps as though sidewalks came with title deeds. We cross the road with the elegance of stampeding buffalo and then swear at whoever dares to honk. In cafés, buses, and other public places conversations are pitched at rock-concert levels, phone calls become public theater, and the rest of us are forced to applaud nonsense we never asked to hear. And when night falls, it is treated not as a time for rest, but as a sacred hour for collective harassment: music blaring, voices rising, laughter piercing as if we are not a community but lone Robinson Crusoes on a shared island.
And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve thrown in a few more “special effects”: skipping queues in bakeries and government offices as though we were God’s chosen; driving with the philosophy of “the road is mine and to hell with you”; blocking intersections to swap jokes and family gossip; honking horns like battle drums. Weddings become noise factories, complete with deafening music and ululations that could wake the dead, while the sick neighbor or weary worker be damned. Even funerals aren’t spared: we close streets, torment the living, and call it paying respect to the dead. And to put the cherry on the cake, we sprinkle in habits like letting our dogs run off-leash in public, leaving toilets unflushed so the stench can linger as a “souvenir,” blocking hallways as if they were personal living rooms, and seasoning it all with a generous dose of foul language in public spaces.
We tag public walls with vulgar graffiti that screams less “artistic expression” than “civilizational meltdown.” Garbage bins sit steps away, yet our trash prefers the street. Vigilantism, vandalism, hooliganism — we’ve turned every shade of antisocial behavior into a national folk dance. Children play football in alleys as though they were in the Champions League, while residents and drivers dodge balls instead of traffic. Smoking in public spaces is practically a civic duty now; object and you’ll quickly regret it—verbal abuse if you’re lucky, a fist or a spit in the face if you’re not. Apologies? Out of stock. Empathy? A relic. Giving a seat to an old man or priority to a pregnant woman? That’s for fairy tales.
The real punchline? We baptize this chaos with sugar-coated excuses: “It’s nothing,” “God forgive,” “hshooma,” “never mind him/her.” Voilà: breaking the law becomes charity, and disorder is paraded as a national virtue.
A few days ago, I remarked on a friend’s Facebook post that cafés had become breeding grounds for deliberate rudeness, where disturbing others is sport and confrontation is dessert. Within hours, two hundred people had clicked “like.” Proof, if any was needed, that this isn’t just my irritation—it’s a collective migraine.
And let me add a little scene of my own. I was busy drafting this article when a series of odd clicking sounds snapped my concentration. I turned around, only to find a well-dressed gentleman — shiny suit, neatly tied necktie, the whole “respectable” package — casually clipping his nails right in the middle of a supposedly “upscale” café. Imagine that: a VIP outfit paired with a public-bathhouse habit! What refinement, what taste! A surreal moment that perfectly sums up our paradox — a society plastered with cosmetic polish on the outside, yet betrayed by its fingernails on the inside.
Ben Jelloun, then, wasn’t slandering his country. He just said, in elegant French, what the rest of us shout in vulgar Arabic: enough is enough.
His cry wasn’t an attack on the homeland, but an attempt to jolt it awake. He longs for Moroccans to be known again as polite and composed, not as a nation of people who excuse every misdeed under the tattered banner of “freedom.”
But if we keep dozing, mark my words: one day we’ll gather to pray the funeral prayer of the absent over our nation’s morals—a funeral with no corpse, for a country murdered by many of its own children’s bad manners and strangled by its rulers’ greed.
And the cure? Not rocket science. As Tahar Ben Jelloun himself suggested, enforce the law, punish the offenders, and—just maybe—teach citizens that society is not their private backyard. Until then, all the window dressing in the world won’t hide the rot.
