Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Tunisia gathers two cities tracing North African religion from a Phoenician colony that became a center of Latin Christianity to an Arab garrison city that carried Islam across the Maghreb.

Carthage was founded by Phoenician settlers from Tyre on the North African coast, by tradition in 814 BCE, and grew into the religious and commercial capital of the Punic world, worshipping the goddess Tanit alongside her consort Baal Hammon at open air sanctuaries including the debated tophet burial ground. Rome destroyed the Punic city in 146 BCE after the Third Punic War and refounded it a century later as a Roman colony, which grew into North Africa's leading Christian center: home to the writer Tertullian, the martyred bishop Cyprian, the young Augustine of Hippo's studies, and a series of church councils that helped settle both the Donatist controversy and the canon of the New Testament.

Kairouan was founded in 670 as the first Arab garrison city in North Africa and became the base from which Islam spread across the Maghreb and into Iberia. Its Great Mosque, rebuilt in the ninth century, is among the oldest surviving mosques in the world, and its scholars made the city the centre of the Maliki school in North Africa. Some traditions rank it among the holiest cities of Islam, a status the city claims and which is not universally granted.