Ali Benhadj (also Belhadj; Arabic: علي بلحاج or علي بن الحاج, romanized: ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥajj; born 16 December 1956[1]) is an Algerian Islamist activist and preacher and cofounder of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) political party, the winner of the June 1990 local elections and the 1991 Algerian legislative election.
Born in 1956 in Tunis to parents of Algerian origin from the wilaya (province) of Adrar in Algeria, Benhadj became a teacher of Arabic and an Islamist activist in the 1970s.
He had close ties to Mustafa Bouyali's Islamic Armed Movement (MIA), and was arrested in 1983 and sentence in 1985 by a state security court.
[2] In 1989, after the Algerian Constitution was changed to allow multiparty democracy, he helped found the FIS, an Islamic party which won the first free elections in Algeria since its independence.
[8] In January 2015 he called for early presidential election as "a first step towards solving the country's political crisis" (Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika suffered a stroke in April 2014).
[9] Seen as the spiritual leader of the most hardline factions of the FIS, he was against women working and condemned democracy as a Western innovation, while emphasizing the importance of Islamic education.