Masjid 'Uqba

The Mosque of Uqba, the Great Mosque of Kairouan in central Tunisia, was founded in 670 by the Arab conqueror Uqba ibn Nafi when he laid out the city. It became a model for later Maghrebi mosques.

The first building was destroyed around 690 when Berbers under Kusaila took Kairouan, and the general Hasan ibn al-Nu'man rebuilt it in 703. The Umayyad governor Bishr ibn Safwan enlarged it between 724 and 728 and began the square minaret.

Its present form dates to the Aghlabid emirs: Ziyadat Allah I rebuilt the mosque in 836, giving it a hypostyle prayer hall, marble courtyard and early horseshoe arches; Ibrahim II enlarged it in 875. Scholars teaching in its halls made Kairouan a centre of learning until the city's decline from the mid-eleventh century, when intellectual life shifted to the Zaytuna mosque in Tunis.