Hajj Abdeslam Bennouna

Hajj Abdeslam Bennouna was the founding intellectual and political architect of the Moroccan national movement in the northern Spanish Protectorate zone. In 1916, he founded the Charitable Society of Tetouan and established the first modern Arabic printing press in northern Morocco, publishing patriotic educational books.

He championed youth education, creating the Committee of Moroccan Students in Cairo and Madrid. A skilled diplomat, he traveled to Geneva and Paris to lobby European leaders for Moroccan constitutional rights and educational autonomy before his untimely passing in 1935, sparking the largest patriotic funeral in Tetouan's modern history.