Tunisia has been the stage lately of a surge of intolerability towards creativity and especially towards anything to do with a spray can. As a result, the French-born Tunisian graffiti artist El-Seed took action.

The result is Tunisia’s largest mural but what matters above all is the the location; he painted on the country’s tallest minaret, at the Jara Mosque, located in the industrial city of Gabes. Pictures after the fold.

Here is what El-seed says about the project “I decided to do the mural because it was close to my heart. It had been a while I had wanted to paint a wall in Gabes,” the artist told Ahram Online.

“The primary purpose was, and is, to inspire people to get together and build community around positive action,” El-Seed told Ahram Online via email. “

The mural, which has been embraced with open arms by the mosque’s Imam, was painted on the 57-metre high minaret, and is meant as a message of tolerance and mutual respect.

El-Seed got interestd in the art of graffiti back in 1998 in Paris, where he spent his childhood. Later, when he moved to North America, he started combining graffiti with his passion for Arabic calligraphy (usually associated with the Quran and religious scripture). The artist likes to mix traditional script and contemporary pop-culture, giving birth to a distinctive urban graffiti.