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.
