Lavish memorial to King's sacred mission: Charles Richards, Middle East Editor, reports from Casablanca on the mosque critics describe as a monument to vanity

A PUTRID air hangs over the soaring square minaret of the mosque which King Hassan II of Morocco is having built on the Casablanca waterfront. It is not the smell of the donations levied on his subjects and compulsorily deducted from their wage packets. It is simply that the mosque, the most lavish in the country, is being built near where city's main sewer disgorges effluent into the Atlantic.

Critics of the project, due to open on 30 July, decry what they see as a costly monument to a man's vanity. It is being built as his mausoleum, comparable to that of his father, Muhammad V, in the capital, Rabat. Estimates of the cost vary but all exceed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Supporters point out that Casablanca, the largest city in a country of 25 million and Morocco's economic centre, lacks any single striking building of merit.

What the building expresses is the curious position that King Hassan enjoys. He is at once temporal ruler and spiritual leader, scion of the Sherifian dynasty and Emir-al-Muminin (Commander of the Faithful). Few leaders these days combine the religious with the secular.

This, above all, is why the Islamist movement - those seeking political change under the banner of Islam - is so much weaker in Morocco than in other countries in North Africa.

There are other reasons as well. Morocco's large Berber population helps to make it a more tolerant society. But it is above all the King's position that ensures there is less need for a militant Islamist movement. The constitution stipulates that Morocco is an Islamic state, and that Islam is the state religion. And if many Moroccans take a relaxed view of the social obligations that Islam imposes, other traditionalists observe its strictures fully.

King Hassan never misses an opportunity to underline his Islamic credentials. His speeches are peppered with Islamic references. On the eve of last week's elections, in a speech marking the Islamic new year, he called on his subjects to perform their sacred duty to vote. It was part of a jihad (Islamic struggle), he said.

But he has warned against the excesses of Islamic zeal consuming Morocco's neighbour, Algeria. Islamic militancy, he said in a newspaper interview earlier this year, was 'a blasphemy; it is a new duality, an encroachment against the concept of the unity of God . . . We should resort to what the Christians say: render unto God the things that are God's and unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Political manipulation of Islam has wreaked havoc.'

No doubts trouble King Hassan about his religious mission. 'In France the king became king by divine right,' he said in his ghosted autobiography. 'With us, the Commander of the Faithful has a divine mission, because divine rights do not exist. He is considered by all his subjects as God's representative on earth.'

In a move against the first seeds of an Islamist movement, the King's security forces have penetrated many groups which seek a more militant form of Islam. Abdessalaam Yassin, a school inspector who is head of the small militant movement al-Adl wal- Ihsan (Justice and Beneficence), is under house arrest. Dozens of sympathisers have been detained.

Militants say they are now regrouping their forces. Certainly their rhetoric is far less strident, less militant than that of Islamist movements elsewhere in the region. Its members stress that they are against violence, contact with outside powers and conducting their affairs clandestinely - although they are constrained to do just that.

Their main act of lese-majeste, however, is to deny that the King fulfils the qualifications for a Commander of the Faithful, a post they say he may enjoy only if he has the allegiance, or baya, of the entire community. 'We challenge the King to apply Islam,' one of the movement's militants declared.

For now, the Islamists are a small voice. But as unemployment rises and social and economic strains are felt, then as in other countries the Islamist movements are bound to find fertile ground.