Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The midnight fog rolls off the Atlantic on cue, wrapping around Casablanca's Enfa Airfield, where Rick's goodbye to Ilsa in 1942 launched the cinematic magic of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Today, the folks at the Casablanca Stock Exchange say the classic film about romance and redemption on a stage of global strife plays a cameo role in wooing Western capital to Morocco's financial hub at a time when the fear of terrorism has left much of the Muslim world grappling with ways to entice foreign investment.

``There's no doubt `Casablanca' attracts investors,'' says Touda Loutfi, the exchange's corporate-planning director. ``After Morocco, our biggest subscribers come from Great Britain, the U.S., France and Japan, places where the film has a cult following.''

Claxons of merchant ships in the Atlantic harbor penetrate the high-rise blue glass and white stone exchange. A lifetime seat on the 14-member electronic-trading floor costs brokers $670,000, compared with $50,000 a year for a New York Stock Exchange license.

With a market capitalization of $47.2 billion representing 69 companies, the 77-year-old bourse is hardly visible when compared with the $13.4 trillion market value of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Still, Casablanca's and Kuwait's exchanges are the two best-performing of the 10 in the Arab world.

Great Potential

``It's a burgeoning market with a great deal of potential,'' says Henry Azzam, 56, Deutsche Bank AG's chief executive officer for the Middle East and North Africa. ``Casablanca is the business center of the Maghreb.''

Azzam says he isn't worried that Bogart gave the bum's rush to the last Deutsche Bank executive who tried to gamble in ``Casablanca.''

``Casablanca is a place with a lot of characters,'' says the Dubai-based Azzam, who visits the city a minimum of four times each year. ``Of course I own a trench coat.''

Badr Alioua, fixed-income and equity manager at the local Attijariwafa Bank, says King Mohammed VI, 43, has made the city the ``hottest'' place for business in the Arab world. Morocco's gross domestic product grew 8.1 percent in 2006 from 1.7 percent in 2005. Moody's Investors Service rates the country ``stable,'' with credit strengths that include a young population, as well as structural and democratic progress.

Tolerant Interpretation

Alioua says the king's embrace of capitalism and free speech, as well as a tolerant interpretation of the Koran, ensures educated young Moroccans won't flee the country.

``The youth factor of this market is critically important to our continued success,'' the 27-year-old Alioua explains. ``Casablanca is like the movie: a place where young people are willing to take risk. `Casablanca' is the main reason why Americans know about us, and we must take advantage of that.''

Along many of the noisy streets outside the waterfront exchange, a brokerage community that exploits life imitating art is out of sync with radical Islamists who view Hollywood movies, liquor and interest-bearing financial instruments as taboo.

In May 2003, five separate bomb attacks engineered in Casablanca by al-Qaeda militants left 45 people dead, including 12 suicide bombers. Another blast in March of this year injured three people in a cafe and left the assailant dead.

Global Clash

A different global clash of ideals -- fascism versus freedom -- was in the news on Nov. 26, 1942, the day ``Casablanca'' premiered at the Hollywood Theatre in New York and the silkworm-breeding company Ancients Etablishment Buissou was the most actively traded of the exchange's 34 stocks.

Wrinkling her nose over a tumbler of mint tea in a humid conference room at the exchange, the 33-year-old Loutfi says, ``no imams'' when the subject turns to how the bourse copes with 21st-century tensions and whether it intends to create a Shariah-law-compliance committee with the power to veto investments.

``We don't want them here,'' Loutfi snaps.

``The strict prohibition on charging interest still prevails in the Muslim world and has largely prevented it from robustly developing the foundations of capitalism,'' says Feisal Abdul Rauf, imam of the Masjid al-Farah mosque in lower Manhattan.

``Not being able to accept these ideas is one of the primary reasons the Muslim world lagged behind the West,'' says Rauf, who is known as ``the Wall Street Imam'' because his mosque is located blocks from the New York Stock Exchange.

Suspicious Character

Nowadays, one of the most suspicious characters in Casablanca is Kathy Kriger, proprietor of Rick's Cafe and president of The Usual Suspects SA, its owner.

``Call me Madame Rick,'' says Kriger, who in 2004 resigned as a U.S. diplomat in Morocco to open the cafe in the city's Moorish quarter, a sweltering mile's walk from the exchange through the bazaars.

Kriger spent almost a year raising $1 million to recreate a symbol for a time when she says ``the world looked to America for its goodness and greatness.'' She found 43 investors, 32 of them U.S. citizens.

``And, of course, the U.S. Treasury Department tracked down the Americans because they transferred funds into a Moroccan company,'' Kriger says. ``They were all investigated. The government thought Rick's Cafe was a terrorist front.''

To contact the reporter on this story: A. Craig Copetas in Casablanca, Morocco, at ccopetas@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 6, 2007 21:35 EDT