jordan pulse -

Dr Ali Al-Nahla Hiyasat
Intellectuals or newspaper columnists are never neutral. In Jordanian context, however, neutrality for many becomes profession, delay turns virtue, linguistic evasion a cultural lifestyle. From this soil emerges dominant model today: performative intellectual. Figure treats reality as writing material, knowledge as chance to appear, not responsibility or commitment.
I write from position of someone engaged in public and political life since youth, in Jordan broadly and Salt in particular. There, one learns early that politics not article, awareness not built after career losses or personal gains, nor summoned from books in emergencies. Awareness built early through daily contact with people, sensing hardship, confronting poverty, marginalisation, accumulated disappointment. Those who do not live this experience early later lack right to preach culturally, intellectually or politically, regardless of eloquence.
Organic intellectual, tested practically not theoretically by Antonio Gramsci, does not appear suddenly or born in seminar hall or opinion column. Product of early accumulation, clear alignment, patient work within society, not above it. No need for knowledge display or parading philosophers to prove depth. Legitimacy comes from unity of word and deed, not automated linguistic flair marketed as intellectual awareness.
Jordan and wider Arab world now see rise of superficial intellectuals and late writers. They discover politics once relatively safe, people’s issues once publishable, critique after losing real impact. They build digital ivory towers, using artificial intelligence not merely as tool but mask hiding lack of experience and absence of personal history in public and political work.
Resulting text may seem bold but cost-free. It may look critical yet threatens nothing, disturbs no one. Elegant linguistic hybrid, hollow in substance, mixing Nietzsche with Hegel, Socrates with Ibn Khaldun, into article or fleeting post, without context, commitment or scientific understanding or lived experience. Writing knows how to be said, not why or for whom.
In Jordan, where public and political work once carried risks, cannot equate those who chose silence then spoke when speech carries no price with those who paid early cost for positions. Core difference not intelligence or elegance of text but legitimacy of voice, measured by clarity of alignment, taking clear position, readiness to bear consequences.
Ultimately, speech delivered after losing its cost ceases to be stance, however smart it appears, becoming elegant mask for cultural and intellectual emptiness.
Rum