Far from being the sleepy outpost depicted in the famous film, Casablanca today is Morocco’s biggest city and main port. It’s a bustling commercial metropolis with little to attract tourists. The one exception is an amazing modern building, the Hassan II Mosque. Commissioned by Morocco’s previous king, it was one of the largest mosques in the world when it opened in 1993.
The Hassan II Mosque is the only mosque in Morocco that is open to non-Muslims. We took a day trip from Rabat to see it and were blown away by the huge scale of the building, the towering minaret (more than 60 stories tall), and the artistry of its craftsmanship. The mosque was built half on land and half over the ocean, in keeping with a verse from the Koran that says God’s “throne was upon the waters.”
King Hassan II planned the mosque to be a monument “of which [Casablanca] can be proud until the end of time.” More than 3,000 master craftspeople and their assistants from all over Morocco worked for seven years to complete the building. The funding for its construction came mainly from public donations. Twelve million people contibuted money for the mosque, some as little as a dollar, and every donor received a certificate. It’s easy to imagine that in some homes, those certificates are proudly displayed as evidence that those families helped build one of the modern wonders of their country.
