Houda Ben Younes

Architect (Tunisia)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

Mapping and documenting the Ibādī mosques in North Africa

2023–2024: Spring

I am a Tunisian Architect and I obtained my PhD from the National School of Architecture and Urban Design of Tunis; during the research for my dissertation (entitled La spatialité des mosquées Ibādītes dans l’île de Djerba et dans la pentapole du Mzab au temps des I`azzâben, étude spatio-syntaxique), I developed a catalogue of the Ibadite mosques, in which 43 mosques distributed throughout Tunisia and Algeria have been listed, analyzed, and visually represented. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Archaeological German Institute of Rome (DAI-Rom) and I have worked on publishing a collection of my own photographs of 94 Ibadite mosques of the island of Djerba (Tunisia) and the Mzab valley (Algeria), together with additional data, as part of the “North Africa Research Archive” (NARA). The next step of my project is to map the Ibadite mosques in Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria using GIS software. I am also a member of the scientific and technical committee in charge of preparing the file for the inscription of the island of Djerba on the World Heritage List; I have set out the justification for the serial property’s inscription and carried out a comparative analysis with 24 sites distributed throughout North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the rest of the world.

I have published on diverse topics such as Heritage conservation policies in the island of Djerba and the Mzab valley, Berber and Ibadite architecture in Djerba (Tunisia), the Mzab valley (Algeria), and the Nafusa mountains (Libya).