CASABLANCA, 4 June 2003 — His family, at a loss, show visitors the narrow bed covered with a sheepskin where Mokhtar Baoud slept until his arrest on May 21. Beside it is a dilapidated radio and a couple of cassettes.

The 25-year-old they describe is not quite the stereotypical radical Islamist portrayed in the Moroccan media after the suicide bombings which killed 31 members of the public and 12 bombers in Casablanca five days before his arrest.

Now charged with having helped organize those bombings, Baoud was not a shantytown dweller nor was he unemployed. He was a sheet-metal worker in a small workshop, who came straight home every evening to pray and eat, according to his family.

But he does fit the stereotype in one respect — he dropped out of primary school with minimal reading skills. He was under little pressure to go back to school from parents who were themselves illiterate, rural migrants to Casablanca.

His lack of education was a handicap he had been attempting to remedy. His brother Mohammed scrabbled around in some clutter on a coffee table and produced a paperback government textbook called “Basic Literacy for Adults”. On the flyleaf is the name “Mokhtar Baoud”.

Mokhtar Baoud’s was name also on the list of wanted men issued by the authorities the day he was arrested. The charges he now faces include premeditated murder and forming a criminal band.

The attacks are believed to have been the work of a small Islamist group, Al-Assirat Al-Moustaquim (The Righteous Path) based on the outskirts of Casablanca. Public feeling is running high. The news media was flooded with graphic images of the carnage.

The bombings shocked a country which thought itself insulated from the political violence estimated to have killed more than 100,000 people in neighboring Algeria, after elections there which an Islamist party was set to win were interrupted in 1992.

In the soul-searching following the Casablanca attacks, the Moroccan press rediscovered the shantytowns that ring the major cities. Last week King Mohammed visited Casablanca to be seen reviewing plans for new housing for slum-dwellers. And the government launched a fresh literacy drive dubbed ‘March toward the Light’.

Planned some time ago, the literacy campaign had been due to be launched in the first week of May until ministers’ scheduling problems caused yet another postponement, said L’Opinion newspaper.

Then came the Casablanca bombings, and the literacy campaign’s launch by Prime Minister Driss Jettou took on extra urgency.

Along with slum housing and youth unemployment, illiteracy is the topic of the moment as Moroccans attempt to understand what drove young men to go so far as to kill.

Morocco’s political and religious authorities have re-emphasized that the country’s tradition of Islamic observance is more sophisticated, and more tolerant, than the unflinching puritanism preached by groups such as Al-Assirat Al-Moustaquim.

But to get this message across, it helps to have an educated population. Illiteracy is seen as leaving young men open to ideological manipulation by extremists in addition to limiting their ability to progress in the country’s daunting job market.

At Moroccan independence in 1956, adult literacy was a cause dear to the nationalists. But in following decades, left-wingers seeking changes to the political system were active in poor neighborhoods.

Repression followed and grassroots literacy campaigns were not in vogue. Morocco fell far behind Algeria in percentage of the population that could read.

The new campaign aims at cutting illiteracy to 20 percent of the population by 2010, from 48 percent at present. There will be more, better-trained instructors, and television slots. The first shows a woman in her fifties whose face lights up with new knowledge.

Baoud’s own illiterate mother says her son was an easy-going boy, who grew a beard and became more religious after his father died three years ago.

After Baoud’s arrest, the family did not think of hiring a lawyer, which anyway would have been prohibitively expensive. His older brother Mohammed says he hopes the investigation will be “transparent”.

If his brother is found to have been involved, “then let the law be applied,” he said. “No religion permits killing.”