Mosque Hassan II - Slight Return

I mentioned earlier that Mosque Hassan II was built on land taken, possibly without fare compensation, from Casablanca's poor. Here are some more thoughts on this:

Casablanca is a contradiction and may well provide a case study in the inevitable outcome of extreme income inequality.

Almost as quickly as the local government demolishes them, vast shantytowns constructed of building scraps, rubbish and whatever else the resourceful inhabitants can recycle, spring up all over the city. 

The official population is a tick over 5 million and a significant percentage live in these vast shantytowns.

And yet, along the Atlantic coastline of the city, multi-storey luxury apartment blocks are beginning to crowd the waterfront pushing aside the city's poor who had made their homes along the shoreline.

Enormous billboards at the edge of the surviving shantys seem to guarantee that this 'progress' will continue.

Mosque Hassan II, built for religious reasons at the water's edge, is an iconic backdrop to this social experiment but its impact runs deeper than this: 

Constructed over 6 years by 10,000 workers toiling day and night and at an estimated cost of $800 million (but arguably up to 3 times that amount) sourced 1/3 from a grant by the King and a fully 2/3rds from "gifts from the people".

There is something about see figures that troubles me.

10,000 workers required to work, in shifts admittedly, around the clock, 7 days a week for 6 years leads me to wonder about working conditions and remuneration. Our guide for the day on our 45 minute tour of this spectacular mosque - the 3rd largest in the world - was not forthcoming on this issue.

$US800 million (or $1,600m or $2,400m), in a country where average incomes are between $US400 & $500 per month and the unemployment rate is unofficially close to 30%, seems extravagant when adequate housing, sanitation and an acceptable standard of living is unatainable for a hugely significant proportion of the population.

And I'd be curious to unpack the "gifts from the people" story. I'm not sure there was a Mosque Hassan II lottery and would hazard a guess that the money came from tithes, taxation or garnisheed wages. (I suspect General Hossain would be troubled by my irreligious cynicism.)  (I have subsequently discovered that each and every family in the country was required to purchase a 'souvenir' commemorating the building of the Mosque and, if they wished, richer families were able to contribute more.)

Of course the same argument can and should be made against St Peters Basillica in Rome, St Paul's Cathederal in London or Hagia Sophia in Turkey and I do not seek to defend these monuments over Mosque Hassan II.

Mosque Hassan II is spectacular and is a key attraction in an otherwise rather spartan offering for tourists in Casblanca. On the upside for Morrocans it is constructed almost entirely from materials sourced in-country including unimaginably large amounts of marble, granite and cedar, so at least some Morrocan industries will have derived a benefit.  The Italians provided 57 elaborate chandeliers and 2 white marble slabs but the rest seems to have been sourced locally. Somewhat incredulously given Moroccan history, the designer was French...

20,000 men can worship on the heated marble floor beneath an elaborately carved roof which is able to be opened in around 3 minutes. 5,000 women can worship on raised balconies and there is an exquisitely engineered ablutions crypt below the main hall where the faithful can perform the necessary cleansing before prayers.

Enormous titanium doors provide ceremonial access to the Mosque and it is in use all the time: if not for prayer then as a tourist attraction.

It is unclear to me what the local shanty dwellers think about the Mosque and its self-evident opulence but recent history has seen a spate of violent extremism in Casablanca including 13 suicide bombings claiming 32 lives purported to have been carried out by a radical Islamist group whose founding members trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan - Salafia Jihadia. Conflating these may be unfair but it needs contemplating.

Regardless of any apparent Islamist affiliations, one of the widely accepted motivations for violence against the state is inequality. On this basis alone Casablanca risks sliding into the abyss and becoming a powder keg in an ever widening poverty and opportunity-poor social milieu. 

As a footnote to the above, and to be expanded in a later contribution, we visited the Moroccan capital Rabat later in the day and our visit coincided with a not insubstantial student protest. Apparently the students had just completed their university education and had found that there were no jobs to go to and little or no prospect of employment in the near future.

A concerning confluence of issues for the King and his parliament.