Ali Benhadj

Born in 1956 in Tunis to parents of Mauritanian origin from the wilaya of Adrar in Algeria , Belhadj became a teacher of Arabic and an Islamist activist in the 1970s. He was imprisoned from 1983 to 1987. In 1989, after the Algerian Constitution was changed to allow multiparty democracy , he helped found the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamic party which won the only ever free elections in Algeria since its independence. During this period, he was a preacher at the famous Al-Sunna mosque in Bab el-Oued , a popular district in Algiers . In 1991, soon after FIS had finished a strike and massive demonstrations in Algiers, he, along with FIS president Abassi Madani , was arrested and jailed on charges of threatening state security. In late 1991, FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections , which were then called off by the military, who banned FIS; Belhadj remained in jail throughout most of the Algerian Civil War that followed, and was released only after serving a 12-year sentence in 2003 under the condition of abstaining from all political activity. He did not remain free for long; in July 2005, he was arrested for making a statement on Al-Jazeera which praised Iraqi insurgents and condemned Algeria for sending diplomats to Iraq shortly after two Algerian diplomats ( Ali Belaroussi and Azzedine Belkadi ) had been kidnapped [1] . He was released [2] just under a year later in March 2006, under the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation . Representing a Salafist wing of FIS, and seen as the spiritual leader of the most hardline factions of the party, he was against women working and condemned democracy as a Western innovation, while emphasizing the importance of Islamic education. He described his favorite authors as Ibn Taymiyya , and Ibn al-Qayyim , as well as the more recent Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb . However, his ideology is distinct from his favorite authors. He once debated with late great cheikh Alabani that Belhadj called a hypocrite. He was often arrested by Algerian police for giving talk in Mosques about different subjects of actuality.¹