Spirit of Place: The White Mosques of Jerba

The Tunisian island of Jerba harbors nearly 300 mosques. They are great works of Islamic art and architecture.

French visitors to Jerba, the largest island off the coast of Tunisia, call this oasis of date palms and olive trees “Jerba la Douce”—gentle Jerba. The secret is in the wind. From March to October the parched Sahara gasps in lungfuls of humid Mediterranean air, drawing sea breezes across the island from the east and northeast. These winds ripple through the flat white sands day and night, rendering the air over Jerba, in French writer Gustave Flaubert’s hyperbole, “so soft that it hinders death.”

In 1881, Tunisia became a French “protectorate,” and artists and writers came to Jerba to bask in the glow of ancient civilizations, or at least in the brilliance of an island sun. But when the country gained its independence in 1956, the island was free to fall back on its own customs.

Thus despite the flourishing of tourism and the building of dozens of resort hotels along its northeastern coastline, Jerba remains a sanctuary for the old ways, a bastion of tradition that continues to resist the rapid changes taking place in many North African cities.

These glimmering, whitewashed structures dominate the landscape, their colors shift with the changing light, and their flights of architectural fantasy seem to come in infinite variety.

Perhaps the most striking example is the preservation of Jerba’s nearly 300 mosques, an extraordinary number for an island that measures only 185 square miles and is home to some 160,000 people. These glimmering, whitewashed structures dominate the landscape, their colors shift with the changing light, and their flights of architectural fantasy seem to come in infinite variety.

In Houmt-Souk (“market square”), Jerba’s capital, the most famous are the Mosque of the Strangers, covered with cupolas, and the Mosque of the Turks, with its massive minaret. The village of El May boasts an imposing example of a fortress-mosque, with narrow gun slits and thick walls, and the tiny port of Adjim impresses with sheer numbers—16 mosques in all.

Despite this diversity, two basic forms can be discerned on the island, corresponding to the two principal schools of Islamic thought here—the Malakis and the Hanbalis. The minaret of the Malaki mosque is tall and slender, while its Hanbali counterpart is a lower, squared tower topped with a lantern-shaped skylight. Most of the mosques, however, have the same basic interior plan: a large prayer hall, one or more rooms for washing before prayers, and several rooms for housing pious visitors, all surrounding a central courtyard built over a cistern.

As for the names of the mosques, they are often derived from the teachers who are said to have founded them, or from the legends which surround their origins. A typical example is the Jamaa Ellile, as it is pronounced locally: The Mosque of the Night, just outside the village of Guellala. The story goes that when the workmen came to build it, they got everything ready—the bricks, sand, and lime—and then went to sleep, intending to start the next morning. But when they awoke, the found the mosque standing before them, already miraculously built.

Walking around Jerba in the soft dawn light, as the mosques turn from gray to shell pink to brilliant white, one can imagine that such miracles sometimes do occur.

Note: This story is based on outtakes from a piece I did about Jerba for Islands magazine back in the 1990s. An adaptation of that article will appear on “Words for the Wise” soon.