Raqqāda (Arabic: رقّادة) is the site of the second capital of the 9th-century dynasty of Aghlabids, located about ten kilometers southwest of Kairouan, Tunisia.

In 876, the ninth Aghlabid emir Ibrahim II ibn Ahmad (875-902) felt the need to change residence from al-Abbasiyya to find a quiet place away from city noise.

[3] After 1960, a presidential palace was built on a site of twenty acres, some remains of which are still visible, it houses since 1986 the National Museum of Islamic Art Raqqada.

[4] Excavation campaigns initiated in the early 1960s on the site of ancient palaces have yielded abundant fragments of pottery to glaze, including shards and tiles with a metallic sheen with floral and plant ( vine leaf stylized) and carefully decorated cuts (cutting the bird dating from the second half of the 9th century).

[6]: 25  Remains have been found across a site of approximately 9 square kilometers, suggesting that the city grew fairly large at the time.

It was first constructed as a roughly square walled enclosure, measuring 55 by 55 meters, whose exterior was reinforced with round towers or buttresses.

[7] The building was entered from the south via a bent entrance (a passage turning 90 degrees twice), a feature which became common in the Abbasid period as both a defensive measure and as a means to preserve the privacy of the inhabitants inside.

[10]: 137 [9]: 10  Large bodies of water would have played an aesthetic role by reflecting the images of adjoining buildings and giving them a lighter appearance.

[9]: 9 The museum specializes in medieval Islamic art and includes works from Kairouan and Raqqada sites and Al-Mansuriya, a former princely city built in the Fatimid period.