[1][2] Mrabet, mostly known in the West through his association with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams, is an artist of intricate felt tip and ink drawings in the style of Paul Masson or Joan Miró, which have been shown at various galleries in Europe[3] and America.
Mrabet is recognized as an important member of a small group of Moroccan master painters who emerged in the immediate post-colonial period[5] and his works have become highly sought after, mostly by European collectors.
His father enrolled him in a Koranic school at the age of four, then in 1943 at L'ecole public de Boukhachkhach.
Upon his return to Tangier in 1960, he resumed his life as a fisherman and began to paint (his earliest drawing known to originate in 1959) and met and became friends with Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, the latter, who, being impressed by his storytelling skills, became the translator of his many prodigious oral tales, which were orated from a distinctive "kiffed" and utterly non-anglicized perspective[8] and published in fourteen different books.
Throughout the 1960s until 1992 Mrabet dictated his oral stories (which Bowles translated into English) and continued work with his paintings.