Madih nabawi one of the principal religious genres of Arabic music, is a song form devoted to eulogizing or rather praising the Prophet Muhammad and his family. The genre dates from 632 CE, immediately after the death of Muhammad, but the performers address Muhammad as if he were still alive. It is also Sufi genre of belletristic Arab literature (Touma 1996, p. 161).

A typical musical performance features a skilled solo maqam singer assisted by a chorus of eight to sixteen men. The chorus sings in unison and a new verse of poetry and prayers or blessings for the audience are added at certain places during the chorus. In North Africa, it resembles ma'luf or andalusi nubah, in Egypt the dur, in Syria the muwashshah, and in Iraq the maqam al-iraqi (ibid, p. 159).

Musical genres or subgenres in the madih repertoire include tanzilah ("revelation"), ibtihal ("supplication"), tawassul ("beseechment"), tawshih, and muwashshah. A typical performance includes a solo singer accompanied by a chorus of men with frame drums, the chorus singing a refrain which the soloist improvisationally answers through variation, paraphrasing, or transformation of the refrain, emphasising the characteristics of the respective maqam row or scale (ibid, p. 162).

Muhammad Allal al-Fassi (January 10, 1910 – May 19, 1974), was a Moroccan politician, writer, poet and Islamic scholar.

He was born in Fes, Morocco. He studied at the University of Al-Qarawiyyin. For many years, his professor and mentor was Abdeslam Serghini. He founded the nationalist Istiqlal party which was a driving force in the Moroccan struggle for independence from French colonial rule. He broke with the party in the mid-1950s, siding with armed revolutionaries and urban guerrillas who waged a violent campaign against French rule, whereas most the nationalist mainstream preferred a diplomatic solution. In 1956, as Morocco gained independence, he reentered the party, and famously presented his case for reclaiming territories that have once been Moroccan in the newspaper al-Alam. In 1959, after the left-wing UNFP split off from Istiqlal, he became head of the party.

In 1962, he briefly served as Morocco's Minister of Islamic Affairs. He was elected to the Parliament of Morocco in 1963, and served there as an Istiqlal deputy. He then went on to become a main leader within the opposition during the 1960s and the start of the 1970s. He died in 1974, on a visit to Romania where he was scheduled to meet with Nicolae Ceauşescu.