Man of Balances

[See Cover)

As the last flat light tipped the orange trees and spacious rose gardens, a car swung off the main road from Rabat and up the long drive to the big, Norman-style royal villa. His Majesty Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, Sultan of Morocco, stepped out just as two cannon shots sounded through the still twilight air, signaling sunset and the end of Ramadan's day-long fast.

For the world's 400 million Moslems, Ramadan is the crudest month. From the moment in the predawn light when a white thread can be distinguished from a black, through each long day until sunset, they must not smoke, drink, eat, or indulge any other carnal appetite. Across the world of Islam from Casablanca to Djakarta, tempers are scratchy and emotions combustible. But Sultan Mohammed V moved with the kind of inner calm that is his special quality. He retired to a small room to pray, then sat down to break his fast.

After the sunset meal (eggs, steak), Mohammed V last week summoned his French chauffeur, his French cook, his French court photographer, and an old friend who is a French garage owner in Rabat, and repaired to the garden for a characteristically French game of boules (lawn bowling), throwing his hands in the air, wailing "Ayayaya" when he missed. For the rest of the long Ramadan night, Mohammed V alternated Moslem prayers with U.S. movies (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Desert Caravan), retired at dawn to sleep until midafternoon.

Slow-Won Wisdom. This combination of Islam and West, of Moroccan nationalist with French boules companions, is characteristic of this thin-voiced, soft-eyed man who sits hunched on the edge of his throne almost as if overwhelmed by its high-arching brocaded back. In the turbulent world of emergent Moslem nationalism, Mohammed. 47, is an all but unique example of instinctive moderation surrounded by intemperate ambition. His is a skillful balancing act between tradition, which can become stagnation, and progress, which can become confusion.

For him, as for his country, the wisdom has been slowly won. The man the French picked as a puppet has become the unchallenged leader of the forces that liberated his year-old country. An autocratic king, he has become the strongest advocate of democratic rule for his people. A descendant of the Prophet and official champion of the faith, he is the most powerful influence for bringing Western education to his largely illiterate land.

Most important of all, he is an Arab nationalist who understands that young nations can cooperate with the West without jeopardizing either pride or independence. He scorns the xenophobic raving against the Western "imperialists'' that inflames Middle East relationships. Liberal Frenchmen have called him "our final card in North Africa"--though the fact of the matter is that if the French do not make an end to the bloody war in adjoining Algeria, none of their cards will be worth much. The U.S.'s interest is direct: it has a naval air station and four SAC air bases in Morocco from which, in case of war, bombers could command the Mediterranean and reach Russia itself.

Far bigger than Tunisia, potentially much richer than Algeria. Morocco (pop. 9,000,000) is the most variegated of the three countries that once constituted French North Africa. In Morocco's north there are sweeping coastal plains and fertile valleys; in the south, the snow-capped Atlas Mountains soar 14,000 ft. above arid desert. Its cities range from modern Casablanca (pop. 700,000) with its bustling port and gleaming white apartment buildings, to the walled Arab city of Fez (pop. 180,000) with its ancient university buildings and its twisting casbah streets too narrow for automobiles, to the sprawling desert town of Marrakech (pop. 215,000) where ragged Berbers bring their camels to market, and snake charmers pitch their brown tents in the city square.

Morocco has been French only since 1912. Before that, for eleven centuries, it had been a free and sovereign state since the time when a dissident leader of the all-conquering Arabs declared his independence of faraway Baghdad in the 8th century. For centuries, rulers alternated between Arab dynasties and the indigenous Berbers. The empire waxed and waned but was never conquered. While medieval Europe fought and languished, the university of Fez gathered scholars from all over the known world. The Moorish empire reached into Spain, building aqueducts, huge irrigation systems, and the great Alhambra at Granada. The present Sultan is of a dynasty founded in 1660, claims direct descent from the Prophet's only daughter, Fatima. This gives him baraka, the spiritual quality that makes it lucky just to kiss his garments and gives him special title to spiritual (as well as temporal) leadership of his people.

The French Presence. France grabbed Morocco from the weak Sultan Moulay Habid in that grand African divvy on the eve of World War I in which Britain got a free hand in Egypt, Spain a piece of northwest Morocco, and Germany a slice of Africa south of the Sahara.

As first governor of its new protectorate, the French sent the revered Marshal Louis Hubert Lyautey to Morocco. Lyautey's policy: "Do not offend a single tradition or change a single habit." He ordered French towns built alongside but separate from the Moroccan towns, put all mosques off limits to unbelievers, and met the Moroccans as friendly equals. When he sent the Foreign Legion to subdue rebellious chiefs, he warned his commanders: "Always show your force in order to avoid using it. Never enter a village without thinking that the market must be opened the next day."

Paris was not for long content with such enlightened methods. Frenchmen poured into Morocco, grabbed up the best farmland with the help of laws dedicated to "extending the French presence," and allowing French farmers to pay 20% less tax than a Moroccan. They displaced the Moroccan administrators. They dug mines, made Morocco the world's second in production of phosphate, fifth in manganese, seventh in lead. They built roads and railroads, power plants and dams, constructed ports (Casablanca handles more tonnage than Marseille). They built 133 hospitals, at one time boasted they were opening a school a day. But the roads mostly went to French farms or French factories, the schools were chiefly for French children. Even now, only one in five Moroccan children goes to school; and in the 44 years of the protectorate, only an average of eleven Moroccans a year completed a pre-university education.

As a result, 875 Moroccan physicians are French, only 19 Moslem; there are 350 French lawyers, only 27 Moslem. The French lived in Morocco as in a good hotel, and luxurious apartment houses overlooked squalid bidonvilles where Arab laborers crowded into shacks roofed over with flattened gasoline tins.

The Third Son. Mohammed never expected to be Sultan of Morocco. But when his father Moulay Youssef died in 1927, the French passed over the two elder brothers and settled on shy, retiring 18-year-old Mohammed, had him duly "selected" by the council of Ulemas. Deeply religious, pensive Mohammed said little, always dressed in a flowing djella-bah, spent most of his time in pious ritual. He had been married off at 16 to a girl a year younger. The French mistook his shyness for timidity, his silence for ignorance. Mohammed was neither an intellectual nor a scholar, but he was intelligent and observant. "He loses nothing of what he's told, even less of what he sees," said an aide. "He stores up everything inside him."

The year after his enthronement, young Mohammed made his first trip abroad, came back resolved that he must liberate himself from the prison of Koranic tradition, adopt those European ways that would not conflict with what was essential in the Moslem code. When his wife first became pregnant, he went to Paris to bring back a crib, diapers, sterilized bottles, baby scales and a French midwife, explaining: "I want my son's umbilical cord cut in the 20th century manner."

Mohammed began collecting guns, race horses, and fast cars which he drove himself (he once drove a Bugatti 55 miles from Rabat to Casablanca in 32 minutes). He kept a reported 40 concubines, frequently adding fresh ones and sending faded beauties off to a convent. The French encouraged such distractions from more serious affairs of state (though later, to discredit him, they spread the word that he dealt savagely with servants who seduced some of his concubines, had one whipped to death). He exercised fully the Sultan's traditional right to exact gifts from his subjects, and the saying was that for the Moroccans, there were three possible catastrophes : drought, locusts, and a visit from the Sultan. Once he called on a minor caid and remarked pointedly on the caid's china, saying: "This is a tea set fit for a king." The cups were in the king's luggage when he departed.

Say Something. A stern but proud father, Mohammed zealously oversaw his children's education. As his daughters grew older, he concluded that there was nothing in the Koran that required veils for women, encouraged them to go barefaced. But mostly he concentrated on his eldest son, Moulay Hassan. When only three, Moulay Hassan remembers, his father took him to a diplomatic reception and told him: "You must speak, say something, anything."; The little boy sat through the evening sucking his thumb. When the guests had gone, his father angrily thrust him into a corner. Says Moulay Hassan: "I'm not timid now."

When the young prince decided he wanted to study history in the university, his father argued that he should study law, finally fell silent. Hours later he turned to his son and said: "When you walk downstairs, you're careful not to fall. When you light a match, you're careful not to burn yourself. Why? Because you love yourself. You don't want to hurt yourself. But the love you have for yourself is nothing compared to the love I have for you." Moulay Hassan studied law. Now the heir apparent, intelligent and self-confident, Moulay Hassan collects fast cars, says, "I've never felt inferior to anyone except my father."

Mohammed was slower in educating himself in his responsibilities to his country. Closely watched by the French, he had little part in Morocco's first stirrings towards independence. Not until a delegation of Fez educators came to him in 1940 to complain that the French would not allow them to organize a school for girls did he realize that nonroyal Moslem girls did not go to school, promptly promised, "I will make my daughter Aisha the missionary of feminine emancipation." During the wartime Casablanca Conference, President Franklin Roosevelt invited him to dine. It was the first time Morocco's Sultan had been allowed to meet any foreign head of state, and though he would not agree to declare war against Germany, he got from the meeting an increased sense of his own policical importance.

"Morocco Must Realize." After the war, France sent tough Marshal Alphonse Juin to put the now restless Moroccans in their place. Juin began by arresting scores of Istiqlal (Independence) leaders, announced: "Morocco must realize that at the end of its evolution it will remain tied to France." The Sultan retaliated by always meeting Juin unshaven and by committing himself wholeheartedly to the Istiqlal, smuggling leaders into the palace, sometimes in trucks delivering groceries. In the classic divide-and-conquer style. Juin assiduously cultivated the antagonism of the mountain Berbers for the urban Arabs. He made a special ally of rich old El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, who claimed to command some 300,000 fighting Berbers.

Whenever the Sultan showed signs of obduracy. El Glaoui would summon Berber horsemen down from the hills to surround the Arab towns in ragged but menacing array. In 1951, Juin forced a showdown, demanding that the Sultan condemn the Istiqlal and fire all nationalists from the government. Berber horsemen headed for Rabat, and Juin had a plane waiting at the airport to carry Mohammed V to exile if he balked. Glumly, Mohammed V capitulated; he denounced "violence," but he refused to condemn the Istiqlal. To Juin, it was clear that Mohammed would have to go.

One day in the spring of 1953, old El Glaoui got into his Cadillac, began rounding up signatures demanding the Sultan's abdication. The Glaoui was armed with a photograph of the Sultan's lissome daughter Aisha in a one-piece bathing suit. How could Mohammed be Imam to his people when he allowed his daughter to expose herself in public, offending every right-thinking Moslem? Urged on by the French, back-country chiefs signed up, until El Glaoui had the signatures of 311 of Morocco's 323 caids. In a matter of days a crestfallen Sidi Mohammed was bundled onto a plane with his two wives, five children, and assorted veiled ladies of the court for exile in Corsica. El Glaoui briskly produced his replacement as Sultan--goateed Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, a timid cousin of Sidi Mohammed's.

The Terror. Exile consolidated Mohammed's place in the hearts of his people as his presence never had (a process which the British seem doomed to repeat in Cyprus with Archbishop Makarios). Moroccan women began to see Mohammed's face in the full moon. Imams refused to say prayers in Cousin Moulay Arafa's name. The French did their best to discredit Mohammed, releasing a flood of stories of alleged collaboration with the Nazis, and hustled him even farther away, to Madagascar. Back in Morocco, anger swelled, and terrorism began. Trains were derailed, warehouses fired, boycotts of French goods organized. It became virtually a death sentence for an Arab to be caught smoking a French cigarette.

The French reacted with brutal ratissages, in which thousands of Moroccans were savagely beaten with clubs in the search for a handful of terrorists. Moroccans were thrown in jail simply for shouting the Sultan's name. French colons launched counterterror, shooting down Frenchmen suspected of sympathy with Moroccan aspirations.

The end came in a welter of blood in Morocco and political chaos in Paris. The Berbers rebelled against El Glaoui and his stooge Sultan, went on a major uprising in the Atlas Mountains. The last straw for the French came when El Glaoui himself drove into Rabat in his black Bentley and blandly declared: "I identify myself with the wish of the Moroccan nation for a prompt restoration of Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef."

Mohammed V was brought back from Madagascar to France. The throne council which was supposed to replace him flew to Paris to pledge their allegiance. So did scores of Moroccan chiefs and notables. Sycophant El Glaoui humbly prostrated himself before Mohammed, kissed his monarch's feet and begged forgiveness. Suddenly anxious to please. Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay agreed not only that Mohammed should return to the throne, but that France would help Morocco to "achieve the status of an independent state, united to France by the permanent ties of an interdependence freely accepted and defined." Pinay even agreed that the terms of "interdependence" could be negotiated later (they are still unsettled). Grumbled one unreconstructed colon: "The Sultan asked for a cup of water and Pinay gave him the ocean."

The Triumph. Mohammed returned to Morocco in triumph. All Morocco went on a week-long celebration. Berbers staged feasts in crenelated mud-walled casbahs. In the cities Arabs paraded with flags and portraits of the Sultan. In factories and mines, work stopped. In the hills, guerrillas calling themselves the National Liberation Army looted French plantations, murdered rich Moroccan farmers who had sided with the French. In the subsequent panic, thousands of Frenchmen packed up and fled to France, taking with them capital roughly equivalent to Morocco's whole annual budget.

Well aware that Morocco needs French capital, Mohammed V reacted with typically shrewd sense. He appointed 27-year-old Prince Moulay Hassan commander of the Royal Moroccan Army (trained and equipped by the French), and sent him out to disband the Liberation Army by swearing its men into the Sultan's own force. Steely-nerved Moulay Hassan had soon sworn in some 5,000 irregulars, sent the rest home except for some holdouts mostly in the deep south. The Sultan himself toured all Morocco, traveling in a huge caravan and camping in tents on the plains. Talking to crowds of 100,000 at a time, Mohammed V drummed home his message that independence was not an end in itself, that the new nation must go back to work if it wanted new schools, roads, houses. Morocco needed the French, and Mohammed V indulged in no rabble-rousing rhetoric about "expelling the oppressors." He called for the "creation of democratic institutions resulting from free elections . . . within the framework of a constitutional monarchy."

Until democracy can be established (municipal elections are scheduled this fall, provincial elections the following year for an assembly which will write a constitution), Mohammed is still conducting an autocratic reign, with the help of a Cabinet which he appoints and a 76-man consultative assembly which he selects. Out of a palace budget of $4,000,000, the Sultan maintains a yoman "Black Guard" and their 300 horses, keeps 35 cars ranging from a Rolls Royce to a jeep, and big villas and staffs for his two sons and the three elder daughters. Apple of her father's eye is three-year-old Lalla Amina, daughter of the Sultan's second wife, who can break up any council of state by dashing in and flinging herself into her father's arms.

Although one wing of the rambling Rabat palace is still called "the harem," its inhabitants are mostly poor relatives or aging concubines left over from his father's regime. Court attendants are now referred to as "ladies in waiting." Explains one Moroccan: "The word concubine is outmoded."

In a normal day, Mohammed V rises at 6, dresses himself in slacks and sports jacket, climbs into one of his sports cars, and drives into Rabat to look around. He is a confirmed sidewalk superintendent, often stops to watch workmen putting up a new building. Audiences take up most of the rest of the morning. In the afternoon, the Sultan confers with Premier Si M'Barek ben Mustapha el Bekkai, a onetime lieutenant colonel in the French cavalry who lost a leg in the Ardennes. After dinner, the Sultan usually works until midnight, often dealing with the affairs of his personal fortune, which is estimated to run into several millions.

Nearly all of Morocco's problems stem from its relations with France, and Morocco's man of balances has the delicate task of steering between the intemperate demands of Arab nationalists and the soberer counsel of those who recognize that France still has a considerable hold on Morocco's purse strings. The dominant Moroccan political force, stoutly behind Mohammed V, is still the Istiqlal, a party whose leadership is largely intellectual, membership mostly trade unionist. But one of Mohammed's problems is how to balance its laicist modernists against the conservative religionists of the medinas and the rural areas. Chief of the Istiqlal, and probably the most popular man in Morocco after the Sultan himself, is Allal el Fassi, a fire-breathing orator who spent nine years in exile, mostly in Cairo.

Waiting for Money. After Morocco got its independence, the economy staggered under the flight of French capital. Industries have slowed down, the tourist trade has fallen off. By unhappy coincidence, drought has parched the fields, and a slim harvest means hunger, discontent, and a flight from the starving countryside into the already bursting bidonvilles. Morocco is also confronted with the need of developing its own administrators, technicians and civil servants (the government's daily business is still conducted by some 11,000 Frenchmen). A crash educational program has been devised: private houses converted into schools, teachers drafted, and any Moroccan with a good education is asked to teach 20 others what he has learned. The Ministry of Education has blueprinted a plan to put every Moroccan child into school within five years, at a cost of $160 million. When does the program start? "When we get the money," shrugs an education official. The money can come only from France.

Infecting all Moroccan-French relations is the festering problem of Algeria. France is not disposed to contribute its usual aid until the Moroccans stop their support for the Algerian rebels. Mohammed, like Tunisia's moderate Premier Habib Bourguiba, is emotionally committed to "our Algerian brothers." The African war has provided a reason for the French to keep an 80,000-man army in Morocco, and its soldiers have on occasion knocked down villages and roughed up Moroccans while trying to track down Algerian fugitives. In addition, Morocco is sheltering an estimated 100,000 Algerian refugees. Lately, Moroccans have become almost as wary of the Algerian extremists as of the French, suspecting that the Algerians would like to see both Moroccans and Tunisians embroiled in their fight.

The French made things worse when last autumn they kidnaped five Algerian rebel leaders on an airplane flight from Rabat to Tunis. The Sultan was deeply shaken; under Moslem rules of hospitality the Algerians were his guests and therefore he was responsible. Mohammed V was so outraged that he withdrew his younger son from a Paris school, refused to fly home from Tunis in a French plane or land at a French base. But the Sultan ordered strict precautions to prevent bloody uprisings in sympathy. Typically, less than two weeks later, the Sultan was recognizing that bitterness would serve no one's purpose, made a speech urging the French to remain in Morocco and promising them protection. But the French broke off negotiations for $57 million in development aid and have not resumed them.

Fortnight ago, treading carefully to avoid the charge that it is trying to supplant France, the U.S. granted Morocco a carefully tailored $20 million in aid--as much as Morocco can handle at the moment but not so much that France could become alarmed. Last week the Moroccans reciprocated by opening negotiations on a new status for the air bases which France granted the U.S. (without bothering to ask Moroccan approval) back in 1950. The issue is one of pride rather than price, for the Moroccans want and welcome the bases--a fact confirmed last week when the Moroccans confidently ignored the Russian warning that Morocco was exposing itself to nuclear horror if it continued to allow U.S. bases on its soil.

The Beachhead. As a political leader, Sultan Mohammed is keenly conscious that his country fronts on the Atlantic as well as the Mediterranean, often talks of Morocco's "Atlantic vocation." An Arab, and no friend of colonialism, the Sultan has kept his distance from Egypt's Nasser, whose adherents proclaim him "leader of all the Arabs from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf." He has refused to join the Arab League on the ground that Morocco is not a Middle Eastern country, has notably failed to back the "holy war" on Israel.

Though he is too politic to say so in public, Mohammed V also considers Egypt's Nasser an irresponsible and dangerous demagogue and, since he is not of royal rank, somewhat of an inferior. The Sultan himself is convinced that Nasser could have negotiated a new status for the Suez Canal far less provocatively; he demonstrated his own method by negotiating Spain out of Spanish Morocco, more recently by obtaining a peaceful agreement to incorporate the once-international city of Tangier within his new kingdom.

If France could somehow make its peace with Algeria, as some day it must, France might be grateful to have a man so dedicated to Western cooperation as the Sultan of Morocco at the head of the Arabs in North Africa. So might the U.S. Says one U.S. diplomat: "Peoples all over Africa are looking at Morocco to see whether a country can achieve independence in stability and progress. We are certainly not going to let the Sultan down." Says Mohammed V: "During the last war we were the beachhead for liberation. Now we want to be the beachhead for peace, for freedom and for friendship."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.