Kutubiyya Mosque

The Kutubiyya is the largest mosque of Marrakesh, standing in the southwestern medina near the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. Its name, the Booksellers' Mosque, comes from the book vendors who once crowded the souk at its walls.

It was founded in 1147 by the Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min after he took Marrakesh from the Almoravids, whose mosques he condemned as wrongly oriented and demolished. He rebuilt it around 1158, and its seventy-seven-metre minaret was probably finished under Ya'qub al-Mansur around 1195. Abd al-Mu'min also moved here the Almoravid minbar commissioned in 1137 by Ali ibn Yusuf from a Cordoba workshop, fitted with a mechanism that made it glide forward for prayers.

The Kutubiyya supplied the model for the Giralda of Seville and the Hassan Tower of Rabat. After neglect in the seventeenth century, it was restored in the eighteenth.