Casablanca, Morocco - Last Friday’s election here was watched closely around the world as an electoral bellwether for moderate Islam, but the moderate Islamists were not the only candidates to draw attention for their religious views.

No fewer than five Moroccan Jews, three of them women, ran in the elections. None of them ended up winning a seat in Parliament, but they represented a record number of Jewish candidates and they made their presence felt during the campaign.

Over the past month, they took to the streets of Morocco’s largest city and to the airwaves of Al Jazeera to win support, often making their case to veiled women and bearded men. And to hear the candidates tell it, the citizens of this conservative Muslim Arab country gave them a fair hearing.

“I campaigned in the slums where the Islamists are present, and I was very well received and it touched me deeply,” Susan Abittan, a fiery 53-year-old social worker, said two days after the election in an interview at her modest apartment in Casablanca. “They know that I am involved in social issues, and this is what they want.”

Abittan announced her candidacy in late July, when King Mohammed VI publicly called on his countrymen to become involved in the legislative elections. The king’s appeal, according to most observers, was intended to dilute the electoral power of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, which was expected to win the most seats in parliament...

...The effects of this campaign have apparently reached far and wide. In a speech that Al Qaeda released last week, Osama bin Laden said that “the Jewish community in Morocco today is one of the largest communities in the world. They are alive with us, and we have not incinerated them.”

Bin Laden had some of his facts wrong: Morocco’s Jewish community is hardly one of the largest — and even the campaign-trail picture of tolerance painted by Abittan differs sharply from the accounts of two Moroccan reporters who followed the race and spoke to the Forward on condition of anonymity. Locals to whom the reporters talked about the candidates consistently asked why foreign candidates had entered Morocco’s elections, or stated that voting for a Jew was against Islam.

Abittan disputes this claim, stating that her 25 years of social work had earned the respect of local Jews and Muslims alike. She noted that an Islamist baker in her neighborhood had offered his support, and that one of the other Jewish candidates, banker Solange Cohen, ran in a well-known Islamist stronghold in Casablanca’s suburbs.

“We didn’t get the votes, because we started too late,” she said, “People, when they heard ‘Cohen,’ did not run away; they were curious.”