Kairouan

Kairouan was founded in 670 as a garrison inland from the coast, chosen so that it could not be raided from the sea, and it became the base from which Muslim armies moved across North Africa and eventually into Iberia. The name simply means camp. Tradition surrounds the founding with a story of water miraculously discovered when a golden cup lost years earlier in Mecca surfaced in a spring at the site, which is the kind of account a new city acquires when it needs a charter.

The Great Mosque as it stands is essentially the rebuilding of 836. Its prayer hall is carried on columns taken from Roman and Byzantine buildings, its square minaret is the oldest still standing anywhere, and its interior holds a carved wooden pulpit of the ninth century made from imported teak, the oldest minbar surviving in place, together with a screened enclosure for the ruler. The forms worked out here, the square minaret and the wide hypostyle hall, set the pattern for mosque building across the Maghreb and al-Andalus.

The Aghlabid rulers also built the enormous open reservoirs outside the walls that made a city of that size possible in that landscape, which is a reminder that religious capitals are engineering problems before they are anything else.

Kairouan's lasting contribution is legal. Scholars of the city travelled to Medina to study with the students of Malik ibn Anas and brought his teaching home, and in the ninth century Sahnun compiled the Mudawwana, a vast record of questions and answers that became the basic reference of the Maliki school. A century later Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani wrote a short manual of belief and practice which has been the first book of law memorised by students from Morocco to Senegal ever since, and is still in print and in use.

Because Maliki law travelled south with the trade across the Sahara, the legal tradition of West African Islam, including the scholars of Timbuktu, descends from this city.

Kairouan's political fortunes were less steady. The Fatimids took it early in the tenth century and moved their capital to the coast, and their Ismaili doctrine sat badly with a Maliki population; when the local dynasty later returned to Sunni allegiance, the response from Egypt was to send nomadic tribes westward, and the city was sacked in the middle of the eleventh century and never regained its position.

A popular tradition ranks Kairouan among the holiest cities of Islam and holds that several visits there may substitute for the pilgrimage to Mecca. The city itself repeats the claim; many scholars reject it outright. The atlas records it as a claim rather than a status.