the Great mosque, Zitouna |
This is the main mosque of Tunis, and so it has been
almost all the time Tunis has been a Muslim city. The city has even been
modelled with it as the centre. Its name means
"olive tree", and comes from the mosque's founder who taught
the Koran under an olive tree. It was first erected in the 9th century
by the Aghlabid rulers. But its most famous part, the minaret (on the
left photo), is a 19th century addition.While the mosque
today serves mainly as a house of worship, its was also a house of
higher learning from times before the first European universities, and
until the 1950's when Tunis' universities started to take over.It is said that each
teacher had his own column. The teacher sat next to it, with his
students around him. Considering that there are no more than just a few
metres between each, all cannot have been teaching at the same time. |
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