Great Mosque of Kairouan

In the year 670 CE a brave commander named Uqbah ibn Nafi' stopped in the middle of the North African plains and said: this is where we will build a city. He called it Kairouan, and the first thing he built was a mosque.

The mosque looks like a sandy fortress with thick walls and a square tower called a minaret. That minaret is one of the oldest in the whole Muslim world, and builders copied its shape all over Africa and Spain.

Inside there is a huge open courtyard with a clever slanted floor. When rain falls — and it does not fall often in the desert — the floor guides every drop into underground tanks so the people always have water.

For hundreds of years Kairouan was a school city. Students walked here from Egypt, Morocco and Andalusia to study Qur'an, hadith and Arabic under famous teachers.

Today you can still see its forest of old marble columns holding up the prayer hall — each one rescued from an even older ruin, given a second life inside a house of Allah.