Kairouan

Kairouan was founded about 670 by the Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi as a garrison town on the plain, far enough from the sea to be safe from Byzantine fleets and from the mountains to be safe from Berber revolt. The name comes from a word for a military camp. It became the capital of Ifriqiya, the base from which Islam spread across the Maghreb, and the seat of a school of law and learning whose scholars, among them Sahnun, gave the Maliki tradition much of its shape in North Africa.

Its greatest period came under the Aghlabid emirs of the ninth century, who governed for the Abbasid caliphs from Kairouan and their nearby palace towns of Abbasiya and Raqqada. They rebuilt the Great Mosque in the form it still has, dug the open reservoirs that stored water carried from the hills, and launched the conquest of Sicily in 827. The Fatimids took the city in the early tenth century but built their own capital at Mahdia on the coast, and later moved to Egypt, leaving a governor behind.

Decline came in the eleventh century, when the Zirid rulers broke with Cairo and the Banu Hilal nomads were sent west; they sacked Kairouan in 1057. The city never recovered its political importance, and power settled permanently at Tunis. What survived was its religious standing: a place of pilgrimage where several visits were popularly said to equal one to Mecca, and a market town for carpets, leather and grain. The French protectorate brought a modern quarter outside the walls, and in 1988 the medina and its monuments were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Kairouan is widely regarded as the holiest city in Tunisia and one of the principal cities of Islam in Africa, and that identity runs through daily life. The Mouled, the Prophet's birthday, is celebrated here on a scale seen nowhere else in the country, drawing families from across Tunisia to the Sidi Sahib shrine and filling the medina with stalls of sweets. Dress is more covered than in Sousse or Tunis, mosques are full at prayer times, and visitors are expected to observe the conventions of the shrines.

The city's other great tradition is the carpet. Kairouan's knotted rugs are made by women at looms in workshops and houses throughout the medina, and the trade dominates the main street, where buying is a long, tea-drinking negotiation rather than a transaction. Leatherwork, copperwork and the embroidery of ceremonial cloth are made here too, and the city's calligraphic tradition, carried by the manuscripts long kept in the Great Mosque's library, among them pages of the Blue Quran, remains a source of pride.

Manners are provincial and formal by Tunisian standards: greetings are extended, hospitality is pressed, and a stranger asking directions will often be walked to the door. Because so many outsiders come as pilgrims or as shoppers, Kairouanis are used to visitors without depending on them in the way the coastal resorts do, and the tone in the streets is businesslike rather than touristic.

About 190,000 people live in the city, the centre of a governorate of farms on one of Tunisia's drier plains. The economy rests on that agriculture — cereals, olives, almonds, chillies for harissa, and sheep — on handicrafts, on trade and administration, and on a stream of domestic pilgrims and day visitors from the coast. Kairouan also has a university and a large student population, and light industry has grown on the edges of town, but wages are lower and unemployment higher than in Sousse or Monastir an hour away, and many young people leave for the coast or abroad for work.

Most residents live outside the walls, in the wide low-rise quarters that have spread north and west since the 1960s; the medina holds shops, workshops and an ageing population. The rhythm of the day is early: markets and workshops open soon after dawn, the heat empties the streets in the early afternoon, and life resumes towards evening, when the cafés along the modern avenues fill with men over coffee and cards.

Water has always shaped the city, from the Aghlabid basins to today's supply problems, and shortages and dry years are a recurring local concern. So is the gap between the coast and the interior, a grievance that has driven Tunisian politics for more than a decade.

Kairouan's best-known product is makroudh: a diamond of semolina dough filled with date paste, fried or baked and steeped in honey or syrup. Shops on the medina's main street sell it by weight, stacked in trays, and Tunisians passing through often buy a box to take home. Around the Mouled the city eats assidat zgougou, a dark pudding made from the seeds of the Aleppo pine, layered with cream and scattered with nuts, and pastry shops compete over it.

Everyday food is the cooking of the interior rather than the coast. Couscous appears with lamb or vegetables, often with chickpeas and a thin stew reddened with tomato and harissa, the chilli-and-garlic paste that comes with almost everything in Tunisia and is made from peppers grown on this plain. Lablabi, a bowl of chickpeas in garlicky broth poured over torn bread, is a cheap breakfast; ojja sets eggs in spiced tomato and pepper; and brik, a thin fried pastry parcel of egg and tuna, is eaten as a starter everywhere.

Lamb is the meat of choice, grilled over charcoal or slow-cooked, and mutton merguez sausages are common. Olive oil from the surrounding groves goes into everything, including mechouia salad of charred peppers and tomatoes. To drink, the cafés serve strong coffee and mint tea with pine nuts; alcohol is rare in a city of this religious standing.