Kairouan

The Great Mosque of Sidi Uqba, founded in 670 CE and rebuilt into its present form in the ninth century, is the oldest place of Muslim worship in North Africa and one of the most significant early Islamic buildings anywhere. Its vast prayer hall is supported by several hundred columns, many reused from Roman and Byzantine sites across the region — a practice common to early Islamic construction that here produces a genuinely eclectic forest of marble and granite, no two columns quite alike. The mosque's fortress-like exterior walls and its minaret, among the oldest standing minarets in the Islamic world, reflect its dual role as both religious centre and frontier stronghold in the earliest years of the Arab conquest of North Africa.

The Aghlabid Basins, built in the ninth century under the Aghlabid dynasty, are among the oldest surviving hydraulic engineering works anywhere in the Islamic world — a large collection basin feeding a smaller settling basin through a still-functioning system, designed to supply Kairouan's population with water in a region with no permanent river. The basins still hold water today, over a thousand years after construction, a rare case of medieval Islamic engineering still performing close to its original function rather than surviving only as ruins.

Kairouan's medina carries its carpet-weaving tradition openly, with workshops and showrooms throughout the old town selling the distinctive knotted-wool carpets that have given the city its reputation as the carpet capital of North Africa — a craft passed down through specific families and neighbourhoods rather than a generic tourist trade. The Mausoleum of Sidi Sahbi, known locally as the Mosque of the Barber after the companion of the Prophet said to be buried there with three hairs from his beard, draws its own steady pilgrimage traffic distinct from the Great Mosque, and its tiled courtyards and painted woodwork are worth the detour on their own merits.