Islamic banking and finance
Islamic banking or Islamic finance or sharia-compliant finance is banking or financing activity that complies with sharia and its practical application through the development of Islamic economics. Some of the modes of Islamic banking/finance include Mudarabah, Musharaka and Ijara. Sharia prohibits usury, defined as interest paid on all loans of money. Investment in businesses that provide goods or services considered contrary to Islamic principles is haraam; these prohibitions have been applied in varying degrees in Muslim countries/communities to prevent un-Islamic practices. In the late 20th century, as part of the revival of Islamic identity, a number of Islamic banks formed to apply these principles to private or semi-private commercial institutions within the Muslim community, their number and size has grown, so that by 2009, there were over 300 banks and 250 mutual funds around the world complying with Islamic principles, around $2 trillion was sharia-compliant by 2014. Sharia-compliant financial institutions represented 1% of total world assets, concentrated in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Malaysia.
Although Islamic banking still makes up only a fraction of the banking assets of Muslims, since its inception it has been growing faster than banking assets as a whole, is projected to continue to do so. The industry has been lauded for returning to the path of "divine guidance" in rejecting the "political and economic dominance" of the West, noted as the "most visible mark" of Islamic revivalism, its most enthusiastic advocates promise "no inflation, no unemployment, no exploitation and no poverty" once it is implemented. However, it has been criticized for failing to develop profit and loss sharing or more ethical modes of investment promised by early promoters, instead selling banking products that "comply with the formal requirements of Islamic law", but use "ruses and subterfuges to conceal interest", entail "higher costs, bigger risks" than conventional banks. Although Islamic finance contains many prohibitions—such as on consumption of alcohol, uncertainty, etc. -- the belief that "all forms of interest are riba and hence prohibited" is the idea upon which it is based.
The word "riba" means “excess or addition”, has been translated as "interest", "usury", "excess", "increase" or "addition". According to Islamic economists Choudhury and Malik, the elimination of interest followed a "gradual process" in early Islam, "culminating" with a "fully fledged Islamic economic system" under Caliph Umar. Other sources, do not agree, state that the giving and taking of interest continued in Muslim society "at times through the use of legal ruses more or less openly," including during the Ottoman Empire. In the late 19th century Islamic Modernists reacted to the rise of European power and influence and its colonization of Muslim countries by reconsidering the prohibition on interest and whether interest rates and insurance were not among the "preconditions for productive investment" in a functioning modern economy. Syed Ahmad Khan, argued for a differentiation between sinful riba "usury", which they saw as restricted to charges on lending for consumption, legitimate non-riba "interest", for lending for commercial investment.
However, in the 20th century, Islamic revivalists/Islamists/activists worked to define all interest as riba, to enjoin Muslims to lend and borrow at "Islamic Banks" that avoided fixed rates. By the 21st century this Islamic Banking movement had created "institutions of interest-free financial enterprises across the world”; the movement started with activists and scholars such as Anwar Qureshi,Naeem Siddiqui, Abul A'la Maududi, Muhammad Hamidullah, in the late 1940 and early 1950s. They believed commercial banks were a "necessary evil," and proposed a banking system based on the concept of Mudarabah, where shared profit on investment would replace interest. Further works devoted to the subject of interest-free banking were authored by Muhammad Uzair, Abdullah al-Araby, Mohammad Najatuallah Siddiqui, al-Najjar and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr; the involvement of institutions and various conferences and studies on Islamic banking were instrumental in applying the application of theory to practice for the first interest-free banks.
At the First International Conference on Islamic Economics, "several hundred Muslim intellectuals, Shari'ah scholars and economists unequivocally declared... that all forms of interest" were riba. By 2004, the strength of this belief was demonstrated in the world's second largest Muslim country—Pakistan—when a minority member of the Pakistani parliament questioned it
History of Islam
The history of Islam concerns the political, social and developments of the Islamic civilization. Despite concerns about the reliability of early sources, most historians believe that Islam originated in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century 600 years after the founding of Christianity. Muslims, believe that it did not start with Muhammad, but that it was the original faith of others whom they regard as prophets, such as Jesus, Moses, Abraham and Adam. In 610 CE, Muhammad began receiving. Muhammad's message won over a handful of followers and was met with increasing opposition from Meccan notables. In 618, after he lost protection with the death of his influential uncle Abu Talib, Muhammad migrated to the city of Yathrib. With Muhammad's death in 632, disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community. By the 8th century, the Islamic empire extended from Iberia in the west to the Indus River in the east. Polities such as those ruled by the Umayyads, Abbasids and Mamluks were among the most influential powers in the world.
The Islamic Golden Age gave rise to many centers of culture and science and produced notable astronomers, mathematicians and philosophers during the Middle Ages. In the early 13th century, the Delhi Sultanate took over the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. In the 13th and 14th centuries, destructive Mongol invasions and those of Tamerlane from the East, along with the loss of population in the Black Death weakened the traditional centers of the Islamic world, stretching from Persia to Egypt. Islamic Iberia was conquered by Christian forces during the Reconquista. Nonetheless, in the Early Modern period, the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals were able to create new world powers again. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most parts of the Muslim world fell under the influence or direct control of European "Great Powers." Their efforts to win independence and build modern nation states over the course of the last two centuries continue to reverberate to the present day. The following timeline can serve as a rough visual guide to the most important polities in the Islamic world prior to the First World War.
It covers major historical centers of power and culture, including Arabia, Persia, Egypt, Maghreb, al-Andalus, Transoxania and Anatolia. It is an approximation, since rule over some regions was sometimes divided among different centers of power, authority in larger polities was distributed among several dynasties. For example, during the stages of the Abbasid Caliphate the capital city of Baghdad was ruled by other dynasties such as the Buyyids and the Seljuks, while the Ottomans delegated executive authority over outlying provinces to local potentates, such as the Deys of Algiers, the Beys of Tunis, the Mamluks of Iraq. Dates are approximate, consult particular articles for details; the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources. For example, the most important historiographical source for the origins of Islam is the work of al-Tabari. While al-Tabari was an excellent historian by the standards of his time and place, use of his work as a source is problematic for two reasons.
For one, his style of historical writing permitted liberal use of mythical, stereotyped and polemical presentations of its subject matter. Second, al-Tabari's descriptions of the beginning of Islam post-date the events by a large amount of time, al-Tabari having died in 923. Differing views about how to deal with the available sources has led to the development of four different approaches to the history of early Islam. All four methods have some level of support today; the descriptive method uses the outlines of Islamic traditions, while being adjusted for the stories of miracles and faith-centred claims within those sources. Edward Gibbon and Gustav Weil represent some of the first historians following the descriptive method. On the source critical method, a comparison of all the sources is sought in order to identify which informants to the sources are weak and thereby distinguish spurious material; the work of William Montgomery Watt and that of Wilferd Madelung are two source critical examples.
On the tradition critical method, the sources are believed to be based on oral traditions with unclear origins and transmission history, so are treated cautiously. Ignaz Goldziher was the pioneer of the tradition critical method, Uri Rubin gives a contemporary example; the skeptical method doubts nearly all of the material in the traditional sources, regarding any possible historical core as too difficult to decipher from distorted and fabricated material. An early example of the skeptical method was the work of John Wansbrough. Nowadays, the popularity of the different methods employed varies on the scope of the works under consideration. For overview treatments of the history of early Islam, the descriptive approach is more popular. For scholars who look at the beginnings of Islam in depth, the source critical and tradition critical methods are more followed. After the 8th century, the quality of sources improves; those sources which treated earlier times with a large temporal and cultural gap now begin to give accounts which are more contemporaneous, the quality of genre of available historical accounts improves, new documentary sources—such as official documents and poetry—
Islamic calendar
The Islamic, Muslim, or Hijri calendar is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days. It is used to determine the proper days of Islamic holidays and rituals, such as the annual period of fasting and the proper time for the pilgrimage to Mecca; the civil calendar of all countries where the religion is predominantly Muslim is the Gregorian calendar. Notable exceptions to this rule are Afghanistan, which use the Solar Hijri calendar. Rents and similar regular commitments are paid by the civil calendar; the Islamic calendar employs the Hijri era whose epoch was established as the Islamic New Year of 622 AD/CE. During that year and his followers migrated from Mecca to Yathrib and established the first Muslim community, an event commemorated as the Hijra. In the West, dates in this era are denoted AH in parallel with the Christian and Jewish eras. In Muslim countries, it is sometimes denoted as H from its Arabic form. In English, years prior to the Hijra are reckoned as BH.
The current Islamic year is 1440 AH. In the Gregorian calendar, 1440 AH runs from 11 September 2018 to 30 August 2019. For central Arabia Mecca, there is a lack of epigraphical evidence but details are found in the writings of Muslim authors of the Abbasid era. Inscriptions of the ancient South Arabian calendars reveal the use of a number of local calendars. At least some of these South Arabian calendars followed the lunisolar system. Both al-Biruni and al-Mas'udi suggest that the ancient Arabs used the same month names as the Muslims, though they record other month names used by the pre-Islamic Arabs; the Islamic tradition is unanimous in stating that Arabs of Tihamah and Najd distinguished between two types of months and forbidden months. The forbidden months were four months during which fighting is forbidden, listed as Rajab and the three months around the pilgrimage season, Dhu al-Qa‘dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, Muharram. Information about the forbidden months is found in the writings of Procopius, where he describes an armistice with the Eastern Arabs of the Lakhmid al-Mundhir which happened in the summer of 541 AD/CE.
However, Muslim historians do not link these months to a particular season. The Qur'an links the four forbidden months with Nasī’, a word that means "postponement". According to Muslim tradition, the decision of postponement was administered by the tribe of Kinanah, by a man known as the al-Qalammas of Kinanah and his descendants. Different interpretations of the concept of Nasī’ have been proposed; some scholars, both Muslim and Western, maintain that the pre-Islamic calendar used in central Arabia was a purely lunar calendar similar to the modern Islamic calendar. According to this view, Nasī’ is related to the pre-Islamic practices of the Meccan Arabs, where they would alter the distribution of the forbidden months within a given year without implying a calendar manipulation; this interpretation is supported by Arab historians and lexicographers, like Ibn Hisham, Ibn Manzur, the corpus of Qur'anic exegesis. This is corroborated by an early Sabaic inscription, where a religious ritual was "postponed" due to war.
According to the context of this inscription, the verb ns'’ has nothing to do with intercalation, but only with moving religious events within the calendar itself. The similarity between the religious concept of this ancient inscription and the Qur'an suggests that non-calendaring postponement is the Qur'anic meaning of Nasī’; the Encyclopaedia of Islam concludes "The Arabic system of can only have been intended to move the Hajj and the fairs associated with it in the vicinity of Mecca to a suitable season of the year. It was not intended to establish a fixed calendar to be observed." The term "fixed calendar" is understood to refer to the non-intercalated calendar. Others concur that it was a lunar calendar, but suggest that about 200 years before the Hijra it was transformed into a lunisolar calendar containing an intercalary month added from time to time to keep the pilgrimage within the season of the year when merchandise was most abundant; this interpretation was first proposed by the medieval Muslim astrologer and astronomer Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, by al-Biruni, al-Mas'udi, some western scholars.
This interpretation considers Nasī’ to be a synonym to the Arabic word for "intercalation". The Arabs, according to one explanation mentioned by Abu Ma'shar, learned of this type of intercalation from the Jews; the Jewish Nasi was the official. Some sources say that the Arabs followed the Jewish practice and intercalated seven months over nineteen years, or else that they intercalated nine months over 24 years. Postponement of one ritual in a particular circumstance does not imply alteration of the sequence of months, scholars agree that this did not happen. Al-Biruni says this did not happen, the festivals were kept within their season by intercalation every second or third year of a month between Dhu al-Hijjah and Muharram, he says that, in terms of the fixed calendar, not introduced until 10 AH, the first intercalation was, for example, of a month between Dhu al-Hijjah and Muharram, the second of a month between Muharram and Safar, the third of a month between Safar and Rabi'I, so on. The intercalations were arranged.
The notice of interca
Sunnah
Sunnah sunna or sunnat, is the body of literature which discusses and prescribes the traditional customs and practices of the Islamic community, both social and legal, being based on the verbally transmitted record of the teachings and sayings, silent permissions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, as well as various reports about Muhammad's companions. The Quran and the sunnah make up the two primary sources of Islamic law; the sunnah is defined as "a path, a way, a manner of life". In the pre-Islamic period, the word sunnah was used with the meaning "manner of acting", whether good or bad. During the early Islamic period, the term came to refer to any good precedent set by people of the past, including Muhammad. Under the influence of Al-Shafi‘i, who argued for priority of Muhammad's example as recorded in hadith over precedents set by other authorities, the term al-sunnah came to be viewed as synonymous with the sunnah of Muhammad; the sunnah of Muhammad includes his specific words, habits and silent approvals.
According to Muslim belief, Muhammad was the best exemplar for Muslims, his practices are to be adhered to in fulfilling the divine injunctions, carrying out religious rites, moulding life in accord with the will of God. Instituting these practices was, as the Quran states, a part of Muhammad's responsibility as a messenger of God. Recording the sunnah was an Arabian tradition and, once people converted to Islam, they brought this custom to their religion; the word "sunnah" is used to refer to religious duties that are optional, such as Sunnah salat. Sunnah is an Arabic word that means "habit" or "usual practice". Sunni Muslims are referred to as Ahl as-Sunnah wa'l-Jamā'ah or Ahl as-Sunnah for short; some early Sunnî Muslim scholars used the term "the sunnah" narrowly to refer to Sunnî Doctrine as opposed to the creeds of Shia and other non-Sunni sects. According to scholars such as Joseph Schacht and Ignác Goldziher the pre-Islamic definition of sunnah was "precedent" or "way of life", it was first used with the meaning of "law" in the Syro-Roman law book before it became used in Islamic jurisprudence.
Early schools of Islamic jurisprudence had a more flexible definition of sunnah than was used that being "acceptable norms" or "custom", was not limited to “traditions traced back to the Prophet Muhammad himself”. It included examples of the Prophet's Companions, the rulings of the Caliphs, practices that “had gained general acceptance among the jurists of that school”. Evidence of the use of other “sunnas” at this time is found in the hadith comment made about a report on the difference in the number of lashes used to punish alcohol consumption — “All this is sunna”, it was Abū ʿAbdullāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, known as al-Shafi'i, who argued against this practice, emphasizing the final authority of a hadith of Muhammad, so that the Qur'an was "to be interpreted in the light of traditions, not vice versa." While the sunnah has been called "second to the Quran", Al-Shafi'i "forcefully argued" that the sunnah stands "on equal footing with the Quran", for “the command of the Prophet is the command of God.”His success was such that writers “hardly thought of sunna as comprising anything but that of the Prophet”.
"Living sunnah"In the 1960s, Fazlur Rahman Malik, an Islamic modernist and former head of Pakistan's Central Institute for Islamic Research, advanced another idea for how the sunnah should be understood: as the normative example of the Prophet, but not "filled with specific content". Rather it should be "a general umbrella concept" that could and should evolve as a "living and on-going process", he argued that Muhammad had come as a "moral reformer" and not a "pan-legit", that the community of his followers would agree on the specifics of the sunna. If Western and Muslim scholars found that the isnad and content of ahadith had been tampered by someone trying to prove the Muhammad had made a specific statement, this did not mean they were fraudulent. "Hadith verbally speaking does not go back to the Prophet, its spirit does". If hadith changed from the early schools to the time of al-Shafi'i, through tampering from al-Shafi'i to the collections of ahadith of al-Bukhari and al-Muslim's, they formed a kind of ijma.
According to Rahman they were "materially identical" to ijma. Non-hadith sunnahBasic features of the sunnah — such as worship rituals like salat, hajj, sawm — are known to Muslim from being passed down `from the many to the many`, rather than
Hajj
The Hajj is an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city for Muslims, a mandatory religious duty for Muslims that must be carried out at least once in their lifetime by all adult Muslims who are physically and financially capable of undertaking the journey, can support their family during their absence. Speaking, Hajj means heading to a place for the sake of visiting. In Islamic terminology, Hajj is a pilgrimage made to Kaaba, the ‘House of God’, in the sacred city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia; the rites of Hajj, which according to Islam go back to the time of Prophet Abraham who re-built Kaaba after it had been first built by Prophet Adam, are performed over five or six days, beginning on the eighth and ending on the thirteenth day of Dhu al-Hijjah, the last month of the Islamic calendar. It is one of the five pillars of Islam, alongside Shahadah, Salat and Sawm; the Hajj is the second largest annual gathering of Muslims in the world, after the Arba'een Pilgrimage in Karbala, Iraq.
The state of being physically and financially capable of performing the Hajj is called istita'ah, a Muslim who fulfils this condition is called a mustati. The Hajj is a demonstration of the solidarity of the Muslim people, their submission to God; the word Hajj means "to attend a journey", which connotes both the outward act of a journey and the inward act of intentions. The pilgrimage occurs from the last month of the Islamic calendar; because the Islamic calendar is lunar and the Islamic year is about eleven days shorter than the Gregorian year, the Gregorian date of Hajj changes from year to year. Ihram is the name given to the special spiritual state in which pilgrims wear two white sheets of seamless cloth and abstain from certain actions; the Hajj is associated with the life of Islamic prophet Muhammad from the 7th century, but the ritual of pilgrimage to Mecca is considered by Muslims to stretch back thousands of years to the time of Abraham. During Hajj, pilgrims join processions of hundreds of thousands of people, who converge on Mecca for the week of the Hajj, perform a series of rituals: each person walks counter-clockwise seven times around the Kaaba, runs back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah, drinks from the Zamzam Well, goes to the plains of Mount Arafat to stand in vigil, spends a night in the plain of Muzdalifa, performs symbolic stoning of the devil by throwing stones at three pillars.
After the sacrifice of their animal, the Pilgrims are required to shave their head. They celebrate the three-day global festival of Eid al-Adha. Pilgrims can go to Mecca to perform the rituals at other times of the year; this is sometimes called the "lesser pilgrimage", or ‘Umrah. However if they choose to perform the Umrah, they are still obligated to perform the Hajj at some other point in their lifetime if they have the means to do so, because Umrah is not a substitute for Hajj. In 2017, the number of pilgrims coming from outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to perform hajj was reported as 1,752,014 and 600,108 Saudi Arabian residents bringing the total number of pilgrims to 2,352,122; the word in Arabic: حج comes from the Hebrew: חג ḥag, which means "holiday", from the triliteral Semitic root ח-ג-ג. The meaning of the verb is "to circle, to go around". Judaism uses circumambulation in the Hakafot ritual during Hoshanah Rabbah at the end of the Festival of Sukkot and on Simchat Torah. From this custom, the root was borrowed for the familiar meaning of holiday and festivity.
In the Temple, every festival would bring a sacrificial feast. In Islam, the person who commits the Hajj to Mecca has to turn around the Kaaba and to offer sacrifices; the present pattern of Hajj was established by Muhammad. However, according to the Quran, elements of Hajj trace back to the time of Abraham. According to Islamic tradition, Abraham was ordered by God to leave his wife Hajara and his son Ishmael alone in the desert of ancient Mecca. In search of water, Hajara ran seven times between the two hills of Safa and Marwah but found none. Returning in despair to Ishmael, she saw the baby scratching the ground with his leg and a water fountain sprang forth underneath his foot. Abraham was commanded to build the Kaaba and to invite people to perform pilgrimage there; the Quran refers to these incidents in verses 2:124-127 and 22:27-30. It is said that the archangel Gabriel brought the Black Stone from Heaven to be attached to the Kaaba. In pre-Islamic Arabia, a time known as jahiliyyah, the Kaaba became surrounded by pagan idols.
In 630 CE, Muhammad led his followers from Medina to Mecca, cleansed the Kaaba by destroying all the pagan idols, reconsecrated the building to Allah. In 632 CE, Muhammad performed his only and last pilgrimage with a large number of followers, instructed them on the rites of Hajj, it was from this point. During the medieval times, pilgrims would gather in big cities of Syria and Iraq to go to Mecca in groups and caravans comprising tens of thousands of pilgrims under state patronage. Hajj caravans with the advent of the Mamluk Sultanate and its successor, the Ottoman Empire, were escorted by a military force accompanied by physicians under the command of an amir al-hajj; this was done in order to protect the caravan from Bedouin robbers or natural hazards, a
Mosque
A mosque is a place of worship for Muslims. Any act of worship that follows the Islamic rules of prayer can be said to create a mosque, whether or not it takes place in a special building. Informal and open-air places of worship are called musalla, while mosques used for communal prayer on Fridays are known as jāmiʿ. Mosque buildings contain an ornamental niche set into the wall that indicates the direction of Mecca, ablution facilities and minarets from which calls to prayer are issued; the pulpit, from which the Friday sermon is delivered, was in earlier times characteristic of the central city mosque, but has since become common in smaller mosques. Mosques have segregated spaces for men and women; this basic pattern of organization has assumed different forms depending on the region and denomination. Mosques serve as locations for prayer, Ramadan vigils, funeral services, Sufi ceremonies and business agreements, alms collection and distribution, as well as homeless shelters. Mosques were important centers of elementary education and advanced training in religious sciences.
In modern times, they have preserved their role as places of religious instruction and debate, but higher learning now takes place in specialized institutions. Special importance is accorded to the Great Mosque of Mecca, Prophet's Mosque in Medina and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. In the past, many mosques in the Muslim world were built over burial places of Sufi saints and other venerated figures, which has turned them into popular pilgrimage destinations; the first mosque was built by Muhammad in Medina. With the spread of Islam, mosques multiplied across the Islamic world. Sometimes churches and other temples were converted into mosques, which influenced Islamic architectural styles. While most pre-modern mosques were funded by charitable endowments, modern states in the Muslim world have attempted to bring mosques under government control. Increasing government regulation of large mosques has been countered by a rise of funded mosques of various affiliations and ideologies, many of which serve as bases for different Islamic revivalist currents and social activism.
Mosques have played a number of political roles. The rates of mosque attendance vary depending on the region; the word'mosque' entered the English language from the French word mosquée derived from Italian moschea, from either Middle Armenian մզկիթ, Medieval Greek: μασγίδιον, or Spanish mezquita, from Arabic: مَـسْـجِـد, translit. Masjid, either from Nabataean masgĕdhā́ or from Arabic Arabic: سَـجَـدَ, translit. Sajada ultimately from Aramaic sĕghēdh; the first mosque in the world is considered to be the area around the Ka‘bah in Mecca, now known as Al-Masjid Al-Ḥarâm. A Hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari states that the Kaaba was the First Mosque on Earth, the Second Mosque was the Temple in Jerusalem. Since as early as 638 AD, the Sacred Mosque has been expanded on several occasions to accommodate the increasing number of Muslims who either live in the area or make the annual pilgrimage known as Ḥajj to the city. Others regard the first mosque in history to be the Quba Mosque in present-day Medina since it was the first structure built by Muhammad upon his emigration from Mecca in 622, though the Mosque of the Companions in the Eritrean city of Massawa may have been constructed at around the same time.
The Islamic Prophet Muhammad went on to establish another mosque in Medina, now known as the Masjid an-Nabawi, or the Prophet's Mosque. Built on the site of his home, Muhammad participated in the construction of the mosque himself and helped pioneer the concept of the mosque as the focal point of the Islamic city; the Masjid al-Nabawi introduced some of the features still common in today's mosques, including the niche at the front of the prayer space known as the mihrab and the tiered pulpit called the minbar. The Masjid al-Nabawi was constructed with a large courtyard, a motif common among mosques built since then. Mosques had been built in Iraq and North Africa by the end of the 7th century, as Islam spread outside the Arabian Peninsula with early caliphates; the Imam Husayn Shrine in Karbala is one of the oldest mosques in Iraq, although its present form – typical of Persian architecture – only goes back to the 11th century. The shrine, while still operating as a mosque, remains one of the holiest sites for Shia Muslims, as it honors the death of the third Shia imam, Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Hussein ibn Ali.
The Mosque of Amr ibn al-As was the first mosque in Egypt, serving as a religious and social center for Fustat during its prime. Like the Imam Husayn Shrine, nothing of its original structure remains. With the Shia Fatimid Caliphate, mosques throughout Egypt evolved to include schools and tombs; the Great Mosque of Kairouan in present-day Tunisia was the first mosque built in northwest Africa, with its present form serving as a model for other Islamic places of worship in the Maghreb. It includes naves akin to a basilica; those features can be found in Andalusian mosques, including the Grand Mo
