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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.