When the Palestinian journalist Muhammad Ali al-Tahir passed away in Beirut in August 1974, the PLO organized a military funeral that was attended by countless Arab dignitaries, including representatives of Moroccan king Hassan II and Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba. Ahmed Ben Souda, director of the royal Moroccan cabinet, expressed “great sadness and much pain” about the passing of “the Great Arab Moujahid” in a telegram to his family. But who was the man whose death brought together countless freedom fighters and politicians like few other events in recent history? And why has he been written out of the historiography of the modern Middle East? My paper argues that the life of Muhammad Ali al-Tahir both shaped and mirrored the decolonization of the Arab world. Beginning in the 1920s, his Dar al-Shura publishing house in Cairo became an institutionalized meeting point for anticolonial activists from across the entire region. His influential newspaper al-Shura, although mainly focused on Palestine, was the first to regularly bring news from the colonial Maghrib to a readership in the Mashriq. He introduced two generations of North African nationalists—including Habib Bourguiba and Allal al-Fassi—to their counterparts from across the world; even Pakistanis and Indonesians frequented his office. In 1956, he toured the newly independent Maghribi nations and was showered with highest honors. The political elites of Morocco and Tunisia—most of whom had been actively engaged in the liberation struggles—never ceased treating him like a hero. Yet after the revolution of 23 July 1952, the new Egyptian regime no longer appreciated the perceived moderation of his journalistic and diplomatic anticolonialism, instead embracing truly revolutionary action embodied by the PLO and others. Forced into exile once again, and stripped of his Egyptian citizenship, he spent the rest of his life in Damascus and Beirut. As Nasser and his sympathizers shaped the regional political discourse, the journalist quickly descended into oblivion. The life and death of al-Tahir allows us to excavate multiple forgotten strands of Arab political history: the close cooperation among Maghribi and Mashriqi activists in Cairo; the ways that the Middle Eastern press shaped nationalist activism in North Africa; and how the rise of a second, more revolutionary wave of anticolonialism during the 1950s marginalized the activities of its predecessors. Al-Tahir’s absence from the historical record thus inadvertently tells the story of the Arab world during the 20th century.