Messali Hadj

Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj (1898–1974) was an Algerian nationalist politician, often called the father of Algerian nationalism, who founded the first modern movements for Algerian independence.¹

He was born in Tlemcen on 16 May 1898 into a Kouloughli family of modest means; his father was a shoemaker of Turkish origin and his mother came from a family whose father was a qadi and a member of the Darqawiyya brotherhood.¹² The French article records that as a boy he was a pupil at the madrasa of the Derkaoua zaouïa of Cheikh Benyelles and kept frequenting the zaouïa as a young man; the English article says he received a religious education influenced by the Darqawiyya order, while the Arabic article states of him personally that he was of the Darqawiyya order — a difference between the sources that the record's faith note preserves rather than resolves.²¹³ He served in the French army from 1918 to 1921.¹

Messali went to Paris in October 1923 — the Arabic article says October 1925 — and was recruited by Abdelkader Hadj Ali to the colonial commission of the French Communist Party in 1925.¹³ In 1926 he founded the Étoile nord-africaine, and at Brussels in 1927 he set out its demands, including abolition of the Indigénat, trade-union rights and education for all.¹

After exile in Geneva, where he met Shakib Arslan and reoriented from Marxism towards pan-Arabism, he founded the Parti du peuple algérien in March 1937.¹ A Vichy court sentenced him in 1941 to sixteen years of hard labour, and he was confined in southern Algeria and then Brazzaville; his arrest and deportation formed part of the background to the Sétif uprising of May 1945.¹ He went on to lead the MTLD, dissociated himself from the armed struggle in 1954, and founded the Mouvement national algérien to rival the FLN.¹²

He died on 3 June 1974 — in Paris according to the English and Arabic articles, at Gouvieux in the Oise according to the French — and was buried at Tlemcen, in the cemetery of Shaykh al-Sanusi according to the Arabic article.¹²³

• English Wikipedia, "Messali Hadj".¹
• French Wikipedia, "Messali Hadj".²
• Arabic Wikipedia, "مصالي الحاج".³
• Wikidata, Q942087.⁴