The Great Mosque of Kairouan, as the archetype of religious architecture and ornamental decoration in Tunisia and the Maghreb

di Roberta Marin [*]

Tunisia is a land of contrast, but it is also a place that still today has many stories to tell thanks to the different peoples who lived and prospered there along the centuries. In early antiquity, indigenous Berbers or Amazigh, divided into several ethnic groups, established themselves in the Maghreb and in Tunisia. The Phoenicians, an ancient Semitic group, who settled in the eastern Mediterranean area and nurtured great ambitions of conquering new territories and expanding their commercial activities, managed to conquer the region. In the 7th century BC, they founded Carthage, which became one of the most famous, wealthy and culturally advanced cities of the Classical World.

Carthage maintained its role also after the arrival to the scene of the Romans, who defeated the Phoenicians in 146 BC and kept control of the area for about 800 years. Romans were the ones who also introduced Christianity in the region. The Islamization and Arabization of North Africa took place during and after the Muslim conquest, which began in 647 and was completed about 709. Few Muslim dynasties ruled the area up to 1546, when the powerful Ottomans from their capital in Istanbul planned and eventually achieved the conquest of North Africa. They kept the region under their control till 1881, when Tunisia became a French protectorate. Of this complex and articulated history, many architectural remains are still in place and some are still in use, such as, for instance, the famous Great Mosque of Kairouan, which is one of the largest and oldest Islamic monuments in North Africa and one of the most renown architectural achievements not only in Tunisia and the Middle East but more broadly in the Islamic world.

The Great Mosque of Kairouan is also known as the Mosque of Uqba, after the name of the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi (622-83), who was the founder of both the original nucleus of what was to become the city of Kairouan and its original mosque. Uqba led the conquest of the Maghreb initially serving under the Rashidun caliphs (632-661) and then under the Umayyads (661-750). Kairouan was founded in 670 and originally functioned as a base for military operations. It did not take long for the military base to be transformed into a full-fledged urban settlement, enriched with the Great Mosque and the governmental palace of Dar al-Imara. Along with the whole region, the city was attacked by Berbers in several occasions, up to the end of the 8th century, when the governor of the Zab (today in modern Algeria) Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab (756-812) managed to sedate the revolt. In return for his courage and bravery, the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (763 or 766-809) recognized him as emir of Ifriqiya, giving him an almost complete independence in ruling much of North Africa, but expecting an annual monetary tribute and complete submission to the central government. In short, the Aghlabids, as well as the Tulunids and other minor dynasties, who settled in the Mediterranean area as well as in Central Asia, were vassals of the powerful Abbasids. Thanks to this, Ibrahim was allowed to establish the hereditary dynasty of the Aghlabids (800-909) and made Kairouan the capital of the emirate. The city was protected by strong walls and fortresses and enriched with libraries and new palaces, adorned with luxurious gardens and orchards. The inhabitants experienced a period of prosperity and peace. Along the years, Kairouan became one of the most important centres for Islamic and Quranic studies, particularly for the Maliki school of Sunni Islam, attracting theologians, literates and scientists from all over the Muslim world. It also developed into a place of pilgrimage, being the fourth holiest city in Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

With the increasing number of people living in the capital, however, the mosque was no longer able to accommodate them, and as a result it was enlarged and renovated in 703 and then again in 722-8 and 772. The current Great Mosque dates back to 836, when the Aghlabid emir Ziyadat Allah I (r. 817-38) ordered the building to be completely rebuilt, abandoning the mudbrick and replacing it with a more durable material, like stone (Mohamed Béji Ben Mami 2025). As always happens with historical monuments of a certain importance, even in the case of the Kairouan mosque, many restoration and alteration campaigns have followed one another throughout its history. An example of this is the addition of imposing load-bearing buttresses in the thirteenth century.

In 863, during the peaceful and prosperous rule of emir Abu Ibrahim Ahmad (r. 856-63), who was also an important patron of the arts, the prayer hall was enlarged. The fortress-like building, reinforced by thick walls, thus reached an area of 9,000 square metres, divided between a vast courtyard and a hypostyle prayer hall. Even today, the courtyard is surrounded on all sides by a portico with arches supported by columns in marble, granite and porphyry, which have been recovered in Carthage from Roman, early Christian and Byzantine monuments no longer in use. There are eight gates along the walls and a minaret, which is the oldest surviving religious tower in the Muslim world. It is located roughly opposite the prayer hall and is formed by three superimposed levels, the last of which is topped by a ribbed dome.

The prayer hall, which is seventeen aisles wide and eight bays deep, is topped by two large domes. The one above the 7-metre-high portal is a ribbed dome resting on a square base and a dodecagonal drum, while the dome of the mihrab is raised on a square base and an octagonal drum. Both domes play a significant role in emphasizing respectively the entrance to the prayer hall and the mihrab. Besides, the mihrab dome was probably built around 836 and is one of the oldest and most handsome domes ever erected in the western Islamic world.

Most of the 414 columns and capitals which enriched the prayer hall are marble and porphyry spolia from Roman and Byzantine buildings in Carthage and Sousse. In the centre of the qibla wall, which points in the direction of Mecca, is the beautifully decorated horseshoe-shaped mihrab. In an eleventh century account, the Andalusian geographer and historian al-Bakri reported an anecdote according to which the original mihrab from the time of the mosque’s foundation is held somewhere in between two walls, perhaps right behind the present mihrab, produced and installed in the 9th century. There is no evidence to support this story, but it is interesting to emphasize the great consideration of how the original building has been kept over the centuries (Mazot 2007:133).

The arch of the mihrab is supported on both side by red marble columns with yellow veins. The Byzantine style capitals, carved with vegetal motifs and enriched on the corners by protruding pinecones, carry two crossbeams with a stylised floral pattern and inscriptions in Kufic script. The wooden half dome is painted with an ornamental tendril of stylised vine leaves, flowers and small bunches of grapes in golden pigment on a dark blue background.  On the inside, the semicircular mihrab niche is covered with twenty-eight carved and openwork white marble panels, arranged in four horizontal rows, decorated with a series of elegant floral and geometric patterns, and separated by bands of Kufic inscriptions (Ventrone Vassallo 1993:161).

The front and the intrados of the arch as well as the alfiz (a moulding that encloses the external side of an arch) are still today richly embellished with more than 150 lustre tiles; some are in good conditions, others are fragmentary. This complex technique, which requires a high level of craftsmanship from the potters involved in the production, gives them a metallic shimmer and makes them shine like gold when struck by a light source. All the tiles have a square shape, measure about 21 x 21 cm and are richly decorated by a variety of geometrical and vegetal motifs (Khalili 2008: 91). Considering the ones with geometric patterns, it is easy to identify complex figures of squares, triangles, circles, stars, checkerboards and grids, in opposition to those painted with imaginary flowers and leaves, pine cones and stylised fruits. Geometric and naturalistic patterns are most often used separately, but on some tiles, they are combined, resulting in an even more articulated pattern.

At times a pair of double wings and some Kufic-like inscriptions are added to the tiles as well. The large set of tiles can be further divided into two main groups, according to the palette of colours. The first group includes polychrome tiles, predominantly in shades ranging from green to ochre-yellow and from brown to red, while the second group consists of monochrome tiles in shades of gold. The resulting space between the tiles is filled with a basic floral pattern in blue, which can be attributed to a much later period, most likely from the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century.

The lustre tiles were probably added during the restoration campaign commissioned by Abu Ibrahim Ahmed, but there is still no unequivocal answer regarding the provenance. For long time, scholars and researchers believed that the polychrome tiles were produced in Iraq, either in Baghdad or Samarra – two cities founded by the Abbasid caliphs in 762 and 836 respectively and destined to become the capitals of the empire – and later exported to Kairouan, whereas the monochrome tiles were partly made by Iraqi potters who lived and worked in the Aghlabid capital and partly by local potters. Only in recent time and after a more scientific approach to the study of the tiles, new conclusions have been made.

Eight samples of glazed tiles in the mosque of Kairouan and four sample of lustre pottery made in Mesopotamia have been compared and led the researchers to conclude that ‘the lustre tiles in the great Mosque of Kairouan came from Mesopotamia, most probably from a major production centre such as Baghdad, Samarra or Basra’ (Bobin, Schvoerer, Ney, Rammah, Daoulatli, Pannequin, and Gavraud, 2023). In order to support this theory, it can be helpful to make a further comparison between the patterns chosen to decorate the mihrab tiles, and those that enhance stucco panels in religious and secular buildings and pottery vessels produced in Samarra. Another interesting comparison can be made with the patterns on the contemporary wooden panels made under the short-lived Emirate of the Tulunids (868-905), who were vassals of the Abbasids, as much as the Aghlabids, and their capitals were Fustat and al-Qatai in Egypt.

The Great Mosque of Kairouan can be considered as a treasure chest. It is the perfect container for all kind of beautiful decorative elements, most of which are made of the finest materials, such as the ‘forest’ of marble and porphyry columns in the prayer hall and the courtyard portico, and the mihrab, masterfully dressed with lustre tiles and marble panels. The almost 150 lustre tiles represent a unique collection in the Islamic world as much as the Roman and Byzantine capitals of the columns in the prayer hall and the portico, which have no parallel in any other Muslim building or museum in the world. The Great Mosque is not only a key monument of the early Islamic period, but it occupies a particularly relevant place in the development of Islamic architecture, as it has become a model for later religious complexes erected in both the Maghreb and Andalusia. Although the mosque has been extensively studied over the years and many of its secrets have been revealed, there is no doubt that there is still much to be unveiled. 

Dialoghi Mediterranei, n. 73, maggio 2025

[*] Abstract

La Grande Moschea di Kairouan è indiscutibilmente uno dei monumenti più iconici dell’architettura islamica e uno dei luoghi di culto più importanti della Tunisia e dell’intero Maghreb. Fondata nel 670 dal generale musulmano Uqba ibn Nafi (622-83) nel corso dell’espansione territoriale dell’Islam, la moschea ha attraversato nella sua storia una serie di ampliamenti e ricostruzioni. Il complesso monumentale nella sua forma attuale risale al nono secolo e al suo interno si possono apprezzare la cosiddetta ‘foresta’ di colonne e lo splendido mihrab (la nicchia per la preghiera), decorato da pannelli di marmo intagliato, recanti anche delle iscrizioni coraniche in cufico, e da un ampio numero di piastrelle dipinte a lustro. È proprio sull’origine di queste piastrelle che la comunità scientifica si è divisa per decenni, anche se la teoria secondo la quale le piastrelle furono prodotte nell’Iraq abbaside, probabilmente nella città di Samarra, è stata ormai quasi unanimemente accettata. 

Riferimenti bibliografici 

O. Bobin, M. Schvoerer, C. Ney, M. Rammah, A. Daoulatli, B. Pannequin and R. P. Gayraud,  ‘Where did the lustre tiles of the Sidi Oqba Mosque (ad 836-63) in Kairouan come from?’, Archaeometry, 2023, 45(4):569-577.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1475-4754.2003.00117.x?saml_referrer

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L. Golvin, ‘Le Miḥrāb de Kairouan’, Kunst des Orients, 1968, 5(2):.1-38.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752365 (accessed April 11, 2025) 

A.R. Guest, ‘Les Faïences a reflets Métalliques de la Grande mosquée de Kairouan. Par Georges Marçais’, Geuthner, Paris, 1928 in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1930, 62(4):913-15. 

N.D. Khalili, Visions of splendour in Islamic art and culture, Worth Press, Bassingbourn, 2008. 

Mohamed Béji Ben Mami, Great Mosque of Kairouan, in Discover Islamic Art, Museum with no Frontiers, 2025.
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(accessed April 6, 2025) 

S. Mazot, ‘The architecture of the Aghlabids’, in Islam. Art and architecture, edited by M. Hattstein and P. Delius, Tandem Verlag GmbH, Königswinter, 2007:132-34.  

G. Ventrone Vassallo, ‘L’Africa del Nord dal III/IX al VII/XIII secolo’, in Eredità dell’Islam. Arte Islamica in Italia, a cura di G. Curatola, Silvana Editoriale, Milano, 1993:160-81.  

Sitografia

https://web.archive.org/web/20150924083658/http://www.qantara-med.org/qantara4/public/show_document.php?do_id=399&lang=en (accessed April 10, 2025) 

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(accessed April 11, 2025)

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Roberta Marin, ha conseguito la laurea in Lettere Moderne con indirizzo storico-artistico all’Università di Trieste ed ha completato il suo corso di studi con un Master in Arte Islamica e Archeologia presso la School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) dell’Università di Londra. Ha viaggiato a lungo nell’area mediterranea e il suo campo di interesse comprende l’arte e l’architettura mamelucca, la storia dei tappeti orientali e l’arte moderna e contemporanea del mondo arabo, iraniano e turco. Collabora con la Khalili Collection of Islamic Art e insegna arte e architettura islamica in istituzioni pubbliche e private nel Regno Unito e in Italia.

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