page_title: Kairouan
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: Kairouan / Religion
caption_attribution_description: View of the huge marble courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan formerly used to collect rain water in underground tanks (three wells in the centre)
context_page_description: Kairouan, also spelled Āl Qayrawān or Kairwan, is the capital of the Kairouan Governorate in Tunisia. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The city was founded by the Umayyads around 670. In the period of Caliph Mu'awiya, it became an important centre for Sunni Islamic scholarship and Quranic learning, and thus attracting many Muslims from various parts of the world, next only to Mecca and Medina. The holy Mosque of Uqba is situated in the city.
  In 2014, the city had about 187,000 inhabitants.
context_section_description: The most important mosque in the city is the Great Mosque of Sidi-Uqba (Uqba ibn nafée) also known as the Great Mosque of Kairouan. It has been said that seven pilgrimages to this mosque is considered the equivalent of one pilgrimage to Mecca. After its establishment, Kairouan became an Islamic and Qur'anic learning centre in North Africa. An article by Professor Kwesi Prah describes how during the medieval period, Kairouan was considered the fourth holiest city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem; this tradition is said to continue into the present day.
  In memory of Sufi saints, Sufi festivals are held in the city.
  At the time of its greatest splendor, between the ninth and eleventh centuries AD, Kairouan was one of the greatest centers of Islamic civilization and its reputation as a hotbed of scholarship covered the entire Maghreb. During this period, the Great Mosque of Kairouan was both a place of prayer and a center for teaching Islamic sciences under the Maliki current. One may conceivably compare its role to that of the University of Paris during the Middle Ages.
  In addition to studies on the deepening of religious thought and Maliki jurisprudence, the mosque also hosted various courses in secular subjects such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine and botany. The transmission of knowledge was assured by prominent scholars and theologians which included Sahnun ibn Sa'id and Asad ibn al-Furat, eminent jurists who contributed greatly to the dissemination of the Maliki thought, Ishaq ibn Imran and Ibn al-Jazzar in medicine, Abu Sahl al-Kairouani and Abd al-Monim al-Kindi in mathematics. Thus the mosque, headquarters of a prestigious university with a large library containing many scientific and theological works, was the most remarkable intellectual and cultural center in North Africa during the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries.
  A unique religious tradition in Kairouan was the use of Islamic law to enforce monogamy by stipulating it in the marriage contract, a practice common among both elites and commoners. This stipulation gave a woman legal recourse in the case that her husband sought to take a second wife. Although the introduction of the 1956 Code of Personal Status rendered the tradition obsolete by outlawing polygamy nationwide, some scholars have identified it as a "positive tradition for women within the large framework of Islamic law."
caption: The Great Mosque of Kairouan also known as the Mosque of Uqba (Great Mosque of Sidi-Uqba)
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON", "Image Model": "D90", "Image Software": "Picasa 3.0", "Image ExifOffset": "80", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "450", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4319", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/320", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF FNumber": "16", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2009:08:11 10:40:17", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "18", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2868", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4310", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "320", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "27", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "e72730a2747cfcd2d55206332687040d"}