Allal al-Fassi
Muhammad Allal al-Fassi, was a Moroccan politician, writer, poet and Islamic scholar.Politics
He was born in Fes, Morocco. He studied at the University of Al-Qarawiyyin. For many years, his professor and mentor was Abdeslam Serghini. He founded the nationalist Istiqlal party which was a driving force after the Moroccan Army of Liberation, with many Berbers, in the Moroccan struggle for independence from French colonial rule. He broke with the party in the mid-1950s, siding with armed revolutionaries and urban guerrillas who waged a violent campaign against French rule, whereas most the nationalist mainstream preferred a diplomatic solution. In 1956, as Morocco gained independence, he reentered the party, and famously presented his case for reclaiming territories that have once been Moroccan in the newspaper al-Alam. In 1959, after the left-wing UNFP split off from Istiqlal, he became head of the party.
In 1962, he briefly served as Morocco's Minister of Islamic Affairs. He was elected to the Parliament of Morocco in 1963, and served there as an Istiqlal deputy. He then went on to become a main leader within the opposition during the 1960s and the start of the 1970s. He died on 13 May 1974, on a visit to Romania where he was scheduled to meet with Nicolae Ceauşescu.Literature
In 1925 Al-Fassi published his first book of poems. In 1954 his The Independence Movements in Arab North Africa was published, a translation of a book he wrote in Arabic in 1948.
