The Muslim Mediterranean is considered as a relevant framework to analyse interrelated connections on its shores. Here, I follow Julia Clancy-Smith's conceptualisation of ‘the idea of a “central Mediterranean corridor”, which can be imagined as a series of linked, intersecting borderland regions’. This chapter on press propaganda and subaltern agents of Pan-Islamic networks in the Muslim Mediterranean, dealing with movements and circulations around the Mediterranean, will be particularly concerned with the interface of these two Mediterranean spaces: Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco). It is devoted to the study of the external component of resistance movements in North Africa, dealing especially with press propaganda, contributing to the emerging field of the Mediterranean history. Morocco is viewed as a case study of the extent to which movements of resistance sought external allies as a way of compensating for their weaknesses.

The approach developed in this chapter has two sources of inspiration, the micro-historians and the Subaltern school of Asian historians. Following the micro-historical approach, the attention is focused on individuals, with an actor-centred perspective. Subaltern historians focused on non-elite subalterns as agents of political and social change in the context of the British Empire. More recently, the subaltern in the Middle East has become a source of interest. Subaltern history is very useful to shed light on events or people not well known, belonging to non-elite circles. Both approaches promote a new historical object, history from below, which is much more concerned with the base levels of society than the elite. In this respect, I try to reconstruct micro-histories, or at least part of individuals’ lives and trajectories. Agents of press propaganda, and especially Aref Taher Bey, were not known. Taher Bey conducted subversive activities and travelled widely all around the Mediterranean and had contacts with large networks, such as Pan-Islamic networks. As a modern military officer, he had difficulties finding a place between core and periphery and his position could be viewed as belonging to marginality. In fact, if he could be considered as a member of the elite in his native homeland, he had to migrate and lost his social status, then belonging to the marginal, or subaltern. His activities as a journalist and press propaganda agitator were unexpected.