Scholar, visionary and mujahid. Salamat was amir of Bangsamoro Mujahideen and chairman of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and spent all his life fighting one of the most brutal and devious colonial regime in Asia. Salamat proceeded on Hajj where he attended study circles and the following year, in 1959, he enrolled on a degree course at al-Azhar in Cairo where he did his master's in 1969. His love for learning so much that even in his native jungle base, he maintained a library. Salamat returned home in 1970 where freedom struggle was beckoning him. The MNLF remained engaged in a controlled low key and long-term resistance and its pledge for an independent Islamic state in Mindanao. Salamat Hashim was born into a peasant but former Cotabatu royal family in Pagalungan in Cotabatu province now known as Maguindanao. He had been ailing from a heart condition and intestinal ulcer and died in a jungle camp and he was buried in the town of Butig.