[In the following review, Hibbard lauds the moral “shaping impulses” of Corruption, asserting that Ben Jelloun's text reveals the “endemic” social corruption in certain Arab countries.]

Readers of Tahar Ben Jelloun's earlier novels, especially The Sand Child (L'Enfant de sable) and With Downcast Eyes (Les Yeux baissés), will already be acquainted with the magical, lyric style of this Moroccan writer. No Arab male writer presents issues pertaining to gender, exile, and traditional Arab society with so much grace, precision, and wit. His talents have been widely recognized. In 1987 he won the Prix de Goncourt for The Sacred Night (La Nuit sacrée); in 1994 he won the Prix Maghreb.

Corruption (L'Homme rompu in the original French) is more solidly grounded in realism than previous work. Ben Jelloun tackles head-on one of the Arab Third World's greatest plagues—that endemic corruption so firmly lodged in the social and political order that it has become accepted practice. Through his main character Mourad, a French-educated engineer working as Deputy Director of Planning, Prospects and Progress, Tahar Ben Jelloun constructs a thorough etiology of corruption, showing a complex set of causes and tragic effects. At the outset Mourad is wholly honest and seemingly incorruptible. The reader, with full access to the workings of the protagonist's mind, agonizes alongside Mourad as he battles the social forces conspiring to make him “adapt,” or become “flexible.” Every day he watches his assistant Haj Hamid, who praises Saddam Hussein, getting rich from bribes. The prospect of poverty and doom finally drives Mourad to abandon his principles.

This is a novel whose shaping impulses are profoundly moral. Mourad's fateful choice to accept an unmarked envelope full of cash leads not to the free and easy life he had imagined. Rather, his life becomes more complicated and anxiety-ridden. He develops white blotches on his skin; his marriage deteriorates. His cousin, for whom he has held romantic expectations, rebuffs him because his integrity had been a key factor in her attraction to him. Finally he is targeted in an investigation, charged and then arrested for stealing government equipment—an obsolete Olivetti typewriter he had innocently taken home for his children's use. Mourad suspects he has been framed by his co-workers who “could have gotten richer if I hadn't been in their way.”

A story of one man's temptation and fall, Corruption follows the archetypal pattern of Faust. Its particularity is what makes the novel so fresh and compelling. After offering this haunting portrait of a Moroccan petty bureaucrat, the writer offers no solution. So pervasive are these practices that it would take nothing short of a massive and forcible routing of corruption, a complete social revolution. Ben Jelloun's novel helps us better understand present conditions in Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, and other Arab countries. At one point in the story, as Mourad climbs into a cab driven by an Islamic fundamentalist, he recalls the words of his former philosophy teacher: “They are sons of corruption … which means the more corrupt ordinary people are, the more the Islamists will find a reason to exist and fight.”