Great Mosque of Kairouan

The Great Mosque of Kairouan, also known as the Mosque of Uqba, stands at the heart of one of the oldest cities of Islamic North Africa. Kairouan was founded in 670 by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi as a garrison town on the dry plain of central Tunisia, and a mosque was laid out at the same time. Nothing visible survives of that first building: it was destroyed and rebuilt several times, and the structure seen today is essentially the work of the Aghlabid emirs, above all Ziyadat Allah I, who rebuilt it in 836, and his successors, who embellished it in the 860s and 870s. The city around it grew into a centre of learning and pilgrimage, and its walled medina is protected with the mosque as a World Heritage Site since 1988.

From outside the mosque looks like a fortress: a long, slightly irregular enclosure of honey-coloured stone, about 127 metres on its longer sides, braced by heavy buttresses. Inside opens a vast marble-paved courtyard, gently sloped so that rainwater drains to a central collector and on into cisterns below. At the north end rises the minaret, a massive square tower of three tapering storeys about 31.5 metres high, often described as the oldest minaret still standing in the Islamic world. Its plain, almost military bulk has become the image of the city.

The prayer hall is a forest of columns: more than four hundred of marble, granite and porphyry, many of them taken from Roman and Byzantine ruins at Carthage, Sbeitla and Hadrumetum, so that capitals of different styles stand side by side. Local lore says that anyone who tries to count them will go blind. The axis leads to the mihrab, crowned by a ribbed dome from the ninth century and faced with 139 lustre-painted ceramic tiles, either brought from Baghdad or made in Kairouan by an Iraqi craftsman, among the earliest surviving examples of this technique. Beside it stands the minbar of about 862, built of Indian teak from more than three hundred carved pieces and considered the oldest pulpit of its kind still preserved, and a carved cedar screen added in the eleventh century by the Zirid ruler al-Mu'izz ibn Badis.

Getting there

The mosque stands within Kairouan's medina, under a kilometre from the city centre. The nearest airport is Enfidha-Hammamet International Airport (NBE), about 53 kilometres away; Kairouan is linked by road to the coastal cities of Sousse and Tunis.