Samir Atallah – Cities of Islam: The Survival of Kairouan

In the thirteenth century, the Banu Hafs gave the mosque a more fortified appearance, adding buttresses to support the external fall-out walls, a practice that continued into the later centuries. the West. Additional gates were also built in later centuries.
The Great Mosque, in its literal and figurative sense, was at the center of Kairouan’s activity, growth and prestige. Although the mosque is now located near the northwestern city walls that were built in the eleventh century, when Sidi Uqba al-Qayrawan founded, it was probably closer to the city center, near the governor’s residence and the main road. By the middle of the tenth century, Kairouan flourished with markets, agriculture imported from neighboring cities, the famous water cistern, and textile and ceramic manufacturing areas. It was a political capital, a destination of pilgrimage, and an intellectual center, especially for the Maliki school of Islam and the sciences.
The founding of the city of Kairouan formed the basis for the Islamic conquest of the Arab Maghreb, which became an “African” state. In 654, after several attempts, Muawiyah ibn Hadayj, after three military campaigns, was able to establish the first fortified camp. He gave the name “Kairouan” to his camp, and later to the city. After him, the Arab leader, Uqba ibn Nafi, was entrusted with the continuation of the conquest of Africa. In 682, he moved the original site of the camp to a more strategic location that was an important meeting point for caravans, far from the coasts guarded by the Byzantine navy, and not too close to the mountains.
The camp served as the military base for the conquest of Africa, where for thirty years the Arab forces faced both the Byzantines and the Berbers. Kairouan found itself the regional capital of an expanding Islamic empire. Like Amr ibn al-Aas, who conquered Egypt and set out from the Fustat camp, which later became Cairo, Uqba ibn Nafie intended to establish a new city, so he began building a large mosque that still bears his name today. Around the mosque, permanent homes were built to house the first soldiers, divided into districts according to their origins. The mosque was a place where everyone went to perform Friday prayers.
The first Arab city in North Africa, Kairouan was incorporated into the lands of the Umayyad Caliphate, and then the Abbasid dynasty that succeeded it. But in 800, the Aghlabid Emir freed himself from the authority of the Caliph in Baghdad to establish his own dynasty, the Aghlabid dynasty, which was the first local Arab dynasty. The emir controlled an area extending as far as eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli. Despite formal independence, his successors continued to swear allegiance to the Abbasid caliph. The Aghlabid period (800 – 909) corresponds to the heyday of Kairouan, which was a major center of Africa and the Maghreb, and the center of the Arab conquest in Andalusia1. The economic awakening of the region explains its geographical location at the crossroads of caravan routes, and the prosperity of agriculture and handicrafts in it.
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