Morocco: And Baby Makes Two

Though an heir would have been even more welcome, the birth of a daughter—his first child—to Morocco's dashing King Hassan II stirred the nation to stentorian rapture last week. Twenty-one gun salutes echoed through Rabat and Casablanca.

All Moroccan radio stations joyously broadcast the official palace communique: "His Majesty the King, may God glorify him, has just become the father of a girl, born in Rome." What raised eyebrows as well as hurrahs was that, until after the birth announcement, nobody had really been sure that Hassan, 33, was married.

Besieged by inquisitive foreign reporters, Moroccan diplomats explained blandly that the confusion resulted from European ignorance of Islamic conventions.

Tradition demands that the King of Morocco have at least one wife—he is entitled to four—before he accedes to the throne. Thus loyal Moroccans took it for granted at the time that sportive Bachelor Hassan had quietly been married in the five days between the death of his father, Mohammed V, and his own religious coronation in March 1961. Since it is also customary for royal wives to remain in the background, the marriage was never announced or acknowledged. "If the King has a child," purred a Moroccan diplomat last week, "that is his personal affair." In Rome, where he posed proudly with the baby and even bustled off to town hall to register her birth himself, Hassan said that the new princess would be called Mariam (Arabic for Mary), "a name that is sacred in the Koran and in the Scriptures, that of the mother of Jesus Christ."* One of the few young husbands able to name a new daughter and a new wife all in the same breath, Hassan let it be known that the "royal spouse"—she will not be addressed as Queen—is a 15-year-old member of a prominent Berber family and is called Latifa.