The Zaytuna of Tunis

The Zaytuna, the Mosque of the Olive, is the great congregational mosque of Tunis and one of the oldest and most venerable centres of learning in the Muslim world. Founded in the early centuries of Islam and enlarged under the Aghlabids and later dynasties, with a broad hypostyle prayer-hall carried on rows of columns, a square minaret and a marble-paved court, it became, like the Qarawiyyin of Fez and al-Azhar of Cairo, not only a place of prayer but a university, where generation upon generation of students sat in circles about their teachers in the shade of its columns to learn the Qur'an and its recitation, the law and its sources, hadith, theology, the Arabic language and the sciences. Its standing rose especially under the Hafsids, the dynasty that ruled Ifriqiya from Tunis from the thirteenth century, who made the city their capital and a flourishing centre of trade, art and scholarship; in their age the Zaytuna was a magnet for scholars from across the Maghrib and al-Andalus, its libraries rich in manuscripts, its teaching circles famous. For more than a thousand years the Zaytuna trained the religious scholars and judges of Ifriqiya and the wider Maghrib, and it remains a working mosque and seat of learning today. This scene depicts the Zaytuna of Tunis in the Hafsid age, with its prayer-hall, its court and its circles of students. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.