This paper explores how a colonial war in north-west Africa was re-imagined at the other end of the Mediterranean, thereby providing a novel insight into the worldview of Mashriqi nationalism in the 1920s. The Rif War, fought in the Rif region of Morocco between 1921 and 1926, was one of the most celebrated conflicts between the world wars, and received extensive press coverage in the Mashriq. In part, this owed to the cult of reportage and celebrity generated by the expansion of print media in the Middle East during the inter-war period. But, more than this, the paper will argue that Mashriqi intellectuals and activists saw in the Rif a moral argument in favour of national independence and, ultimately, the rebalancing of the global order in the aftermath of the First World War. The paper will use contemporary Arabic-language newspapers and publications to argue that, for Mashriqi thinkers, the fledgling Rifian polity was recast as a model Islamic nation-state with a written constitution and an elected presidency. Likewise, the Rifian leader, Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi (1882-1963), became a paragon of Islamic virtù, a mujahid celebrated in nationalist poetry and literature. Of course, it is possible to overstate the affective strength of such transnational imaginaries. This moral vision bore little relation to the actual Rif: an impoverished Amazigh (Berber) society split by tribal divisions. Moreover, the Rif War perhaps garnered less enthusiasm among Mashriqi intellectuals than the revolt in Syria in 1925-26 or the upheavals in Palestine during the 1930s; geographic, as well as imagined, proximity still mattered. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that the moral vision of the Rif War was an important component in a wider trend in Mashriqi political thought that called for the unity of ‘the Islamic world’ (al-‘alam al-islami). For Salafi thinkers, the war was one episode in an eternal struggle of East against West; but, more commonly, Mashriqi intellectuals saw in the Rif the future possibility of an alliance of self-confident nation-states bonded by Islam and Arabism and stretching from the Maghrib to the Mashriq. This paper will therefore conclude that the Mashriqi discourse on the Rif War was not only a moral argument in favour of the nation-state; it was also part of an appeal for a more just, more balanced global nomos in which the nations of the Islamic umma would regain their rightful place in the order of the world.