2015-12-8 Casablanca, Morocco

We watched Donald Trump vilify Muslims on the news this morning at the exact time that we were getting ready to visit Casablanca, a Muslim city. It was surreal. It was our first time to Africa. The ship stopped at Tangier on Nov 14 but we didn’t go on a tour because they required too much walking. This time we decided to go anyway. I hear that Tangier was a more picturesque city. Casablanca is a busy industrial port.

Bill stayed on the bus but I got off and did the best I could to keep with the guide. He made a big point of how well the different religions and sectors get along with each other. Our first stop was at a Catholic church. He also pointed out the Jewish area and the American area, among others that I don’t remember. The areas also have their own primary and high schools. Universities are more heterogeneous. Also, the colleges were once separated into men’s and women’s but are now mixed.

He showed us the daily newspaper Le Matin which is published in French. The date is shown in five different ways. One way is the Gregorian calendar (our way). Another is the Jewish calendar. The Muslim calendar is figured from the time that Mohammed started the Muslim religion. I don’t remember the other two ways.

When we stopped at this government building, the guide told us this is his summer place.

It had a beautifully detailed door. Someone said the outside of a mosque must have some green on it. 

There are more women than men in Morocco and many things have changed in regard to women. The guide asked this rhetorical question: “What do Moroccan women wear?” His answer, “They wear whatever they want.”  We saw women in every stage of western and traditional Muslim clothes, except that all of them were covered up. There was no cleavage or shorts. It’s winter, though, so who knows what they wear in the summer.

We saw a woman dressed completely in white. The guide said that she is a widow. White is a sign of mourning and wearing total white means that the husband has died. She is supposed to wear this outfit for four months and ten days. That seems odd but it gives enough time for a pregnancy to become apparent. If she is not pregnant, she can remarry. If she is pregnant, she needs to continue wearing widow’s weeds until she delivers.

I asked the guide about polygamy and he explained it as a way to solve some common problems in a marriage without being divorced from the first wife. One of the reasons was that if a man was required to travel, he needs a wife in each location. He said less than one percent of Moroccan men are married to more than one woman. That is partly because of economics but also because women don’t like it. He joked a lot about polygamy. He said the four woman limit is related to the four seasons of the year. That got a laugh. Then he said it is because of the four colors of the human race. That didn’t go over as well. He said he only has one wife because two mothers in law is one too many.

We drove out by the coast to see some touristy places and stop for a snack and a drink of soda pop.

Then we saw a Muslim mosque called the Hassan II mosque. It is huge. He said that thousands of people are there every night after the Ramadan fast is completed. We talked about Ramadan and he explained that it occurs two weeks earlier every year. We reviewed the Five Pillars of Islam: Allah is the only God, prayer five times a day, fast on Ramadan, give alms to the poor, and visit Mecca once in your life if you can. He said a visit to Mecca from Morocco now costs 6,000 to 7,000 Euros and is out of reach for most people.

Here is a close up of some of the detail on the mosque.

There were lots of soldiers and local police guarding every place we went. They stood outside the cruise ship with machine guns when we drove out. We were cautioned not to take any pictures of them. When we visited a place that was guarded, he told the guards how many people of each nationality were in our group. The largest portion was Americans, then Canadians and I didn’t hear what the others were.