Immediately after our arrival at the Hotel Golden Tulip Farah in Casablanca on the evening of November 13, I fell sick. It was the usual type of dysentery that comes from being far from home in an environment with different strains of gut bacteria. Nothing life-threatening, but very distressing and uncomfortable. I called Karim, our Moroccan guide, and he contacted a Moroccan doctor who came immediately. The doctor spoke no English, but he did speak French, so I had to communicate with him using my extremely rusty and very inadequate French – although I can read it well enough, I’m pretty much deaf to spoken French – but I did understand enough to know how to take the meds he provided. Those were quite effective and I was back on my feet in short order, although I had to miss dinner at Rick’s Café that evening. I consoled myself with the knowledge that it wasn’t the real Rick’s Café – actually there was no such establishment in Casablanca during World War II – and that Rick wouldn’t have been there anyway, since after the shooting of Major Strasser he had left with Captain Louis Renault to join the Free French in Brazzaville.🙃
By the next morning I was feeling well enough to go on that day’s outing to the King Hassan II Mosque. I’m glad I didn’t have to miss that because it was an amazing experience. In contrast to most mosques in Morocco, non-Muslims are permitted and indeed encouraged to visit. Both inside and outside, it is a stunning architectural achievement. According to Wikipedia, it is the second largest functioning mosque in Africa and the 14th largest in the world. The minaret, 210 metres (689 ft) high (60 stories) is also the world’s second tallest. Designed by the French architect Michel Pinseau, it was built by Moroccan artisans to King Hassan II’s specifications and completed in 1993. It stands on a promontory overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and is situated half on land and half over the sea, and visitors can see the ocean through windows in the floor.
The mosque is built on a 22-acre complex which also contains a madrasah, a museum, conference halls, hammams (bathhouses), and a very large multimedia library, the Mediathèque. Despite the number of establishments, the complex was not crowded, and the esplanade on which it stands seemed mostly empty, a feature which maximized the towering majesty of the mosque itself.
The mosque took seven years to build, with 35,000 workers laboring on it day and night, and cost somewhere between $400 and $700 million. The Moroccan government could not afford the cost out of its normal revenues (the King paid for a third of it) and had to appeal to the public for donations, which were abundantly forthcoming, but still not enough; it was necessary also to take out loans from business sources and other governments, which were eventually repaid. The completed mosque is 200 metres (660 ft) in length and 100 metres (330 ft) in width. The architecture is a blend of Moroccan and non-Moroccan Islamic elements as well as some modernistic features. The mosque is built of reinforced concrete, but the exterior, overlaid with marble, limestone and tile, is abundantly decorated using various materials such as titanium and bronze, pale blue marble and zellij tiles, all in traditional Moroccan motifs. For example, the minaret, faced with marble, is decorated with green and turquoise blue tiles. Seashell-shaped basins at the corner towers of the square arcade surrounding the minaret have a stunning backplane consisting of beautiful blue-green mosaic tilework, and are set into a horseshoe arch flanked by pillars with crosshatch façades matching those on the sides of the minaret.
Entering the mosque, we found ourselves in the great prayer hall, which is designed to accommodate 25,000 people (the plaza outside is designed to accommodate another 80,000, but I’m very glad that neither was filled to capacity the day we were there). The hall is said to be big enough to fit either St. Peter’s basilica in Rome or Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral inside, although I’m a bit skeptical about that, and I’d hate to see anyone try to do so. It would be like putting a Volkswagen Beetle into a dorm room (this has actually been done) only on a grander scale, with the difficulty of undoing the deed exponentially multiplied.
The design of the prayer hall to me looked suspiciously similar to that of a Christian cathedral. Indeed, it is built on a basilica plan, with three naves perpendicular to the qibla (direction of prayer, facing toward Mecca) wall, where the apse and altar would be found in a Christian church; instead of an altar you find a mihrab, or prayer niche. (It should be noted that both mosque and cathedral have a common origin in the Roman basilica, which was originally a public building, containing courts or other government agencies, rather than a religious temple; the Muslims were not copying Christian churches.) However, the soaring arches with their elaborate muqarnas, the stucco carvings with their elegant Quranic epigraphy, and the profusion of zellij tiles with their lovely floral and geometric figures, all ensure that there was no way the mosque could ever be mistaken for a Christian church. Another quintessentially Islamic feature was provided by the two mezzanine floors on either side of the prayer hall, which appear to be suspended in the air between the columns lining the naves. Their square bases are faced with elaborately carved stone and tile, with elegant fences of dark carved wood lining the borders to keep people from falling off. The mezzanine floors are reserved for women, with entry restricted by electrically operated doors.
The ceiling panels too are made of intricately carved dark wood. 56 elaborate chandeliers made of Murano glass imported from Italy hang from the ceiling, making it especially hard to imagine how the roof could be retracted; but we were informed that it is indeed retractable, and that even though it weighs 1,100 tons, it can be retracted in five minutes. It was not opened during our visit, but we were told that it is often opened during services so that worshippers can pray in the sunshine or under the stars on clear days and nights.
Other than the Murano-glass chandeliers and the white-granite columns, also imported from Italy, all the materials used in the Mosque were sourced domestically in Morocco: cedar for the carved wooden furnishings from the Atlas Mountains, marble from Agadir and granite from Tafraoute. The six thousand or so highly skilled artisans who labored for five years to transform these materials into a mosque were drawn exclusively from Morocco and produced structures and decorations of traditional Moroccan design. It was all quite impressive and drove home to me that over the many centuries of its existence Morocco developed a truly unique and sophisticated civilization, the peer of any in the world, and today blends a distinguished heritage of Berber, Arab and Andalusian elements with modern technology.
One respect in which the designers of the mosque appear to have overreached themselves is in locating it partly over the ocean. After the first ten years of the mosque’s existence, the concrete foundations began to exhibit serious deterioration from the salt water soaking into it, rusting the steel rebar and eventually causing the concrete to crack. An elaborate and expensive restoration project, eventually costing 50 million euros, had to be undertaken to arrest the deterioration and repair the damage. It took three years of research to devise a plan for the restoration, which involved the development of new grades of seawater-resistant concrete and molybdenum-alloy stainless steel. But the results were impressive, and the work is supposed to have extended the life of the mosque by a century.
The section of the mosque built over the ocean replaced a huge municipal swimming pool, the Orthlieb Pool, which was built in 1934, during the French protectorate era. It was demolished in 1986 to make way for the mosque. Today one can look down at the water from large windows built into the floor of the mosque.
Muslims are obliged to perform a ritual washing (wudu) before prayer, and the King Hassan Mosque provides facilities for doing so in the basement. These include an ablution hall, where one can complete the basic wudu of face, arms, hands and feet, and a hammam (bathhouse), which accommodates 1,400 people. We were not invited to enter the hammam, but we did visit the ablution hall, which was accessed via a corridor from the outside of the mosque. The hall itself contains 41 mushroom-shaped marble fountains and 600 taps and is very elegantly decked out, with marble floors, granite columns, tiled walls, sculpted ceilings and strikingly original light fixtures. Both prayer and ablution halls were spotlessly clean and looked brand-new, as if they had been completed the day before.
Leaving the mosque, our tour group boarded the bus to go to lunch. On the way we dropped by the Royal Palace of Casablanca. As I think I’ve mentioned already, the King maintains palaces not only in the capital but in the largest cities, and since Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco, of course he would have a palace there. As I recall it is not an especially pretentious one, as palaces go, but we were unable to see what it was like inside, although Chuck Mattox respectfully knocked at the door to request admission. The cat who normally guards the door was absent this time, so there was nobody to let him in; and we were hungry, so we went on to lunch without further ado.
From the King Hassan II Mosque, there is a Maritime Promenade which extends westward between the seashore and the Boulevard de la Corniche, ending at El Hank Point, where the tallest lighthouse in Morocco proudly stands. The El Hank Lighthouse, 51 meters (167 feet) tall, can be mistaken for a minaret, but it is a working lighthouse, equipped with a Fresnel lens putting out 2.1 million candelas of illumination, visible for 30 nautical miles or 55 kilometers. Our lunch stop was somewhere to the west of the lighthouse – I forget the name of the café – and gave us a great view of the promenade, the seashore and the city itself. By this time my GI distress of the previous evening was a distant memory and I was able to enjoy a good meal without any discomfort.
After lunch we reboarded our faithful tour bus for the long (243-kilometers, about 3 hours) ride to our final destination in Morocco, the fabled city of Marrakesh.