The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia is the oldest major mosque in North Africa and the model from which much of the religious architecture of the western Islamic world descends.
Founding and rebuilding
Kairouan was founded as a garrison city by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi around 670 CE during the Muslim conquest of North Africa, and the mosque was founded with it. The building was reconstructed into essentially its present form under the Aghlabid emir Ziyadat Allah I from 836. Kairouan became the first great centre of Islam in the Maghrib and a seat of Maliki legal scholarship, and it acquired such prestige that it was sometimes counted among the holy cities, with a tradition holding repeated pilgrimage to it as of great merit.
The building
The mosque is a vast hypostyle hall opening onto an arcaded courtyard, its prayer hall carried on columns quarried from the Roman and Byzantine ruins of the province, so that the building is literally assembled from the civilisation it succeeded. Its massive square, tiered minaret is generally held to be the oldest minaret still standing anywhere and the prototype of the minaret form across North Africa and Muslim Spain. The mihrab, with its ninth-century lustre tiles and carved marble, is among the oldest and most celebrated in the Islamic world.
Living monument
The Great Mosque remains an active place of worship at the centre of the old city of Kairouan, and the city and its monuments are a World Heritage site. Its influence radiates well beyond Tunisia: the plan, the minaret and the decorative vocabulary set here were carried across the Maghrib and into Iberia, shaping mosque architecture over a wide region for centuries.