Great Mosque of Kairouan

Overview

The Great Mosque of Kairouan is a mosque located in the city of Kairouan in central Tunisia. Founded in 670 CE, when Islam first arrived in North Africa, it is one of the oldest places of Muslim worship in the world and served as the model for later mosques across the region. It is an active congregational mosque and a pilgrimage destination, and it forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Kairouan.

Present

The Great Mosque of Kairouan is the main congregational mosque of the city, where the five daily prayers and the weekly Friday prayer take place. Kairouan is a national center for the celebration of the Mawlid, the commemoration of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and the mosque draws large gatherings during this annual festival and during the fasting month of Ramadan. The mosque is administered by Tunisia's religious authorities, and its conservation is overseen by the country's national heritage institution.

Religious Significance

The Great Mosque of Kairouan is one of the founding sites of Islam in North Africa. It was established by Uqba ibn Nafi, the Arab general who led the Muslim conquest of the region, when he founded the city of Kairouan in 670 CE as a base from which Islam spread westward across North Africa. From the 9th century, scholars teaching in the mosque made Kairouan one of the leading centers of Islamic law and theology in the Muslim world. Muslims in North Africa traditionally regard Kairouan as the fourth holiest city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. A tradition among North African Muslims holds that seven pilgrimages to Kairouan equal one Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim who is able is expected to make once in a lifetime. The mosque is a destination for pilgrims from across North Africa.

History & Structure

The Great Mosque of Kairouan was founded in 670 CE by Uqba ibn Nafi at the center of his newly established city. The first building was destroyed during fighting around 690 and rebuilt in 703. After enlargements in the 8th century, the mosque was almost entirely rebuilt in 836 under Ziyadat Allah I, a ruler of the Aghlabid dynasty that then governed the region, and the present building dates largely from this 9th-century reconstruction. The complex covers about 9,000 square meters. Its plain buttressed outer walls give it the appearance of a fortress. Inside, a large marble-paved courtyard leads to the prayer hall, whose roof rests on more than 400 columns of marble, granite, and porphyry taken from Roman and Byzantine buildings in the region. A square minaret, the tower from which the call to prayer is made, rises in three tiers to about 32 meters. The prayer hall contains a 9th-century mihrab, the niche marking the direction of prayer toward Mecca, decorated with tiles imported from Baghdad, and a carved teak pulpit of the same period. The old city of Kairouan, including the mosque, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.

Additional Resources

• UNESCO: Kairouan
• Book: Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800 by Jonathan M. Bloom (2020)