Kairouan -- Holier than thou?

Zied, the student who seems to have become my personal tour guide to Tunisia, told me I should see Kairouan, a beautiful place near the coast that, like Dougga, is on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites. It is, he told me, the third holiest city in Islam after Mecca and Medina.

Now, who decides these things?

I ask because the same day (8/25/07) I took off for Kairouan a friend working for the BBC in Ethiopia told me she was traveling to Harrar, which she had been told was the fourth holiest city in Islam.

Wierd, eh? Like there's a panel someplace ranking cities after, I guess, Mecca and Medina. Where does Jerusalem fit in? Can you lose your ranking if Christians move in?

It is a mystery to me in case anyone wants to enlighten me. But at any rate we drove about two hours from Tunis to Kairouan which has some 50 mosques, including The Great Mosque or Okba Mosque -- shown above. According to Zied's French guide books, the magical light of this city and the grandeur of the architecture inspired painter Paul Klee and writer Guy DeMauppasant. All the guidebooks gush over this building and its austere, stark beauty. It is probably something poetical or imaginative lacking in me, but I didn't get it. It looked much like other mosques including the Zitouna or Olive Tree Mosque in Tunis. The same mystery panel of clerics and travel agents that rates the cities apparently also ranks mosques and these are the two most important in the country. The searingly brilliant tropical desert sun that has been turning me brown through 50-plus sunscreen for a week may also have been helped blind me to the wonder of this artifice. They were not welcoming visitors even in the courtyard and no non-Muslims are allowed inside.

I tried unsuccessfully to discern what was different about this "Arab Andalusian" architecture or to be wowed by the grace of the 414 columns in the courtyard -- taken from Roman ruins around the country or by the structure of the minaret -- shown here -- reputed to be the oldest in North Africa. But I failed. Really, I was longing for time at the beach.

It is possible I have tourist-fatigue. The lovely clerk in my hotel told me this morning that she be lives I have now seen more of her country than she has.

Hah.

I read on the Internet that there are 55 million olive trees in Tunisia, the third-largest producer of olive oil in the world after Spain and Italy.

I have two thoughts about this. First, I may possibly have seen each of those trees in recent driving tours and second: Who decides this things?

Who was the person who counted those trees and how did he/she do it, driving around the country or looking at aerial photos? How often is the olive tree census updated to account for new plantings and lightening strikes? It seems this could be one of those numbers that my father was forever pulling out of the air to buttress some point he was making. "The Pentagon spends $5 million dollars an hour on jet fuel."
"Dad, how do you possibly know that number?"
"I read it."

And he didn't even have the Internet.

I am finding that sometimes it is more interesting to read about a place than to visit it. For example, Kairouan is famous for something else besides holiness -- Hollywood.

It stood in for Cairo in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now I have to review the film.