This paper will consider two inter-connected threads, both of which demonstrate the extent to which notions of anti-colonial struggle moved across the Maghrib and the Mashriq in the early twentieth century. The first thread will explore the political imaginary of the first Algerian party to demand independence: the North African Star. The party was formed in Paris in 1926 and over the next decade developed in France amongst Algerian workers. This paper will analyse how the North African Star’s ideas, symbols and slogans situated Algeria within a broader international imaginary. Partly this language linked nationalism to international communism and the wider anti-imperialist movement. But it also stressed connections with Moroccan and Tunisian nationalism and with the wider Arab and Muslim World. This thread, therefore, will analyse how the North African Star conceived of this political, cultural and religious link with the Maghrib and the Mashriq. It will explore the transnational networks that stretched across Egypt, Syria and Palestine, analysing the exchange of ideas and how these moulded the North African Star’s international perspectives. In this way the paper (drawing upon surveillance records of nationalists in the Paris Police Archive and the Colonial Archive in Aix-en-Provence, as well as the nationalist press) will address a gap in our historical knowledge: a micro-history of these links and how they contributed to the making of Algerian nationalism. In 1936 Messali Hadj, the North African Star leader, looked towards the newly elected French Popular Front. He also returned to Algeria after a thirteen year absence. In 1937 the North African Star was banned as a threat to French sovereignty, but then quickly reformed. With the North African Star now transplanted to the Algerian context, the second thread will explore how the message of Islam and Pan-Arab nationalism was understood by Algerians in Algeria. It will explore how popular enthusiasm for Messali Hadj reflected a flowering of sporting, cultural and religious associations which, in reacting against the triumphalism of the 1930 colonial centenary but also linking up with other political and religious movements in the Middle East and North Africa, now stressed the political, religious and linguistic connections with the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. Here the link with Egyptian culture, expressed through the importance of Egyptian cinema, was crucial. This bottom up process is still largely under-explored and is a further lacuna that I will be addressing within the paper.