Students from the Secondary Teacher Education Programme (STEP C-18) travelled to Andalusia, Spain, as part of the programme’s educational field trip. The cohort visited Córdoba, Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, and Granada. The purpose of the visit was to help students learn more about the rise, achievements, and fall of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.
The STEP programme prepares student teachers to teach secondary students at religious education centres within the Ismaili community in their respective home countries. The field trip extends knowledge gained in the classroom through direct encounter with places steeped in Islamic heritage. STEP student teachers read about Andalusia in texts and see it in images, but this trip gave them the opportunity to see its architecture in person and to reflect on what they had learnt.
These reflections mark a change in how they understand the history of Muslim rule in Spain and the role of monuments that were built. These historical sites became something to read, question, and interpret, rather than monuments to admire from a distance. Most students also returned with a lesson to take into the classroom.
Walking through History
The cohort had spent weeks in classrooms in London learning about the history of al-Andalus before departing for Spain. While a textbook may provide dates, knowledge of dynasties, and photographs of monuments taken from a fixed angle, no book could prepare them for standing in front of the buildings, walking through them, or encountering the culture and food of the region.
Mazhar Ali Shah, a student-teacher from Chitral in northern Pakistan, anticipated spending the trip analysing monuments.
I found Andalusia silent and frozen in time, yet very eloquent with stories. These stories are not meant to be read; rather, you walk through them, feel them, and imagine them.
The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba made that point most forcefully. Builders began the mosque in the eighth century, and successive rulers enlarged it over the next two hundred years. Its mihrab (a niche in a mosque wall indicating the direction of Mecca) carries some of the finest decoration in the building. Standing in front of it, Mazhar stopped analysing the room and began a journey of the imagination.
“Prior to the Spain trip, I was expecting it to be a tour where I would observe and analyse the achievements of Muslims. But once I walked before the mihrab in the Mosque-Cathedral, I was no longer just observing it, but imagining Ibn Arabi praying near it. As I walked beneath the columns, I was visualising students learning while leaning against those pillars.”
These illustrious thinkers were denizens of the city he was standing in. Ibn Rushd, the philosopher and jurist, was born in Córdoba in the twelfth century. Ibn Arabi, the mystic and writer, came to the city as a young man. Mazhar has a name for the act of placing them back in the building, and it becomes the method he wants to teach.
“This experience enabled me to engage in historical imagination, which would be very difficult simply by reading about al-Andalus.”
Reading the Walls of the Nasrid Palaces
Granada was the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula, and the Nasrid dynasty ruled it for more than two centuries. Their palaces at the Alhambra survive largely intact, unlike other sites the STEP student teachers visit. The walls of the Alhambra carry the dynasty’s motto, cut into stone and plaster and repeated from room to room.
For Javeria Khan, a student-teacher from Chitral, that repetition was heavy with aesthetic value and deep meaning.
Walking through al-Andalus felt like listening to history speak through places I had previously known only through texts. In the Nasrid Palaces, I kept returning to ‘wā la ghāliba illā Allāh’ (There is no victor but God), repeated across the walls with such deliberate symmetry.
A ruling dynasty that writes those words across its own palace makes a claim that can be read two ways. The motto can assert the legitimacy of the ruler or remind him where that legitimacy comes from. This ambiguity is what made the building interesting to her.
“I wondered about the people who built them: were they declaring their own grandeur and legitimacy, or reminding themselves that the authority they held was ultimately God’s to give and take away? Perhaps it was both. That tension between human ambition and humility made me see Islamic architecture not only as civilizational achievement, but as a reflection of how people understood their place in the world.”
Beauty and the Divine in the Alhambra
A first-time visitor with no prior knowledge may see the Alhambra as a set of separate decorative schemes: geometry here, calligraphy there, running water and filtered light and shade as pleasant additions. Students who had studied these elements in class, and the historical context that produced them, arrived with a different understanding and awareness of the historical role of these beautiful buildings. For Mazhar, the effect raised a question about what beauty of that order is for.
The Alhambra is majestic. Its beauty overwhelms the senses. It speaks to something deeper within us: the part that recognises beauty not merely as an aesthetic experience, but as a form of truth.
His answer alludes to both the evident craftsmanship on display and the historical context of the society that produced it, as well as a theological awareness of the very source of human creative capacity.
“Its architecture, calligraphy, geometry, and proportions point towards the divine gift of creativity given to human beings. This beauty also whispers an undeniable historical truth: the intellectual and artistic achievements of Muslims in al-Andalus.”
Reading the columns at the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba
The prayer hall in Córdoba rests on hundreds of columns, arranged in long receding rows. Many of them were never made for the mosque at all. The columns and capitals came from Roman and Visigothic structures already standing in the region. Builders cut them down, matched them to a new height, and set them to a new purpose. Historians call the practice spolia, and it was common across the medieval Mediterranean, suggesting that builders of prior centuries were attuned to re-using and recycling rather than allowing building materials to go to waste.
Roohi Bhura, a student-teacher from the United States, noticed the difference between them. She arrived at the building with a working definition of pluralism and left with a different one.
Before visiting Andalusia, I thought of pluralism mainly as different cultures and faiths living alongside one another. That changed when I visited the Great Mosque of Cordoba.
Roohi found an argument about how cultures meet in stone.
“I was especially struck by the columns. Many were spolia, columns and capitals from earlier Roman and Visigothic buildings that were reused and given a new purpose within the mosque. Seeing them in person made me realise that these different histories were not separate from one another. They had been carried forward and woven into something new. It made me see pluralism as more than coexistence; it is also about how cultures meet, influence one another, and leave traces that continue long after them.”
Reused columns also raise a question about labour. Someone quarried each one, moved it, trimmed it, and set it in place. Written sources record the rulers who ordered the work and rarely the people who carried it out. That absence is where Roohi’s attention went next.
“We often hear about rulers, dynasties and monumental buildings, but I found myself wondering about the craftspeople who worked with these materials, the people who prayed between these columns, and those who experienced the many changes this space went through. Their stories are not as easy to find, but they are still part of what makes the space meaningful.”
What Remains at Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ
The Alhambra survives almost intact, but Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ survives only as ruins. Abd al-Rahman III founded the palace city outside Córdoba in the tenth century as a seat of Umayyad power. It stood for a few decades before civil war destroyed it, and the site was then razed and abandoned. Excavation has uncovered only part of what lies there, so visitors walk through archaeology rather than architecture. Tabassum Sultan, a student teacher from Yasin Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, had read about the city’s destruction long before she saw it.
It is said that walls have ears, but after the Spain field trip, I came to believe that walls have voices too. I had read about the rise and destruction of Madinat al-Zahra, but when we walked among its ruins, I began to hear the history they carried.
Ruins invite visitors to ask what is missing, and why it is missing. At Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, the foundations still mark out the rooms, the water channels show how the city worked, and the carved stone shows what its patrons valued. Tabassum’s imagination sparked a sensory journey in time from those fragments back to the city that once stood.
“The columns, the house of Yaʿfar [often spelled Casa de Ya’far or House of Ja’far], advanced baths and planned architecture made me imagine the grandeur of the city that once stood there. I touched the stones, traced the walls, and walked through spaces once filled with people and [their] routines. It was no longer simply something I knew; it was something I could experience with my senses. The walls seemed to tell two stories at once,: one of the people who built them, and another of what happened after they were gone.”
The site also completes a pattern the cohort had already recognised in Córdoba. Roohi had seen older stone reused inside the mosque; at Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ the same practice runs in the other direction. Carved material was taken from the ruined city and set into buildings elsewhere. Javeria found that dispersal more telling than the destruction itself.
“A city built by Abd al-Rahman III to embody Umayyad splendour and legitimacy now survives in ruins, while fragments live on elsewhere as spolia. Yet we can still trace them back to where they belonged. Standing among those ruins, I was struck by how power fades while traces of it remain through material culture.”
For Tabassum, the ruins raised a question about home rather than about Spain. Northern Pakistan, including Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral, holds forts, settlements, and remains that receive nothing like the same attention. The difference is not the sites themselves but the habit of looking. Standing at Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ showed her what that habit makes possible.
“The experience also made me think about the ruins and remains in my home region of Northern Pakistan. We pass places without noticing their stories, perhaps because we have never read about them. Perhaps they have voices too, but we have not always been taught to listen. If we do not stop to listen, questions, memories, and possible histories may remain unheard.”
Learning that Shapes Future Teaching
STEP prepares its student teachers to teach religious education in their home countries, so a field trip is never only a visit. Each of them travelled to Andalusia as a student-teacher and returned thinking about their own students. Every reflection ends in a classroom, one way or another. What differs is the method each of them adopts and how it grew out of what they saw and experienced in Spain.
Roohi would start her students where her trip began, with a single observation. She does not begin with dynasties, dates, or the significance of the building. She begins with a difference a child can see, and a question that follows from it.
As a future STEP teacher, I would want my students to begin with something as simple as noticing that the columns are different and asking, ‘Why are these columns different, and what might that tell us about the people and cultures that shaped this space?
…I hope questions like these can encourage students to look beyond names and dates and become curious about the people behind the history.”
The purpose of that question reaches past the syllabus. Roohi treats historical empathy as a transferable skill. Understanding people in the past on their own terms is practice for understanding others in the present.
“For me, that is the real power of historical empathy: if we can teach young people to step outside their own perspective and recognise the humanity in lives very different from their own, perhaps they will carry that same empathy into the world; meeting difference not with fear or judgement, but with curiosity, compassion and a desire to understand.”
Javeria came to the trip with a lesson she had already taught. She had used a story from Ibn Khaldun to show students how existing knowledge shapes their reading of unfamiliar histories. Andalusia persuaded her that imagination alone does not go far enough. She now wants her students to work with objects they can hold, not only ideas they can picture.
When I taught the encounter of Muslims in Europe, I used Ibn Khaldun’s “fable of the rat” to show students how we understand the unfamiliar (histories) through the limits of our own knowledge.
…This journey made me want to go beyond asking students to approach history through imagination. I want them to encounter it.”
She would also place Andalusia next to sites her students can visit themselves. Her list runs from a settlement in the Indus Valley to Mughal era Lahore and the ancient forts of Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral in Pakistan. Set beside Córdoba, those sites stop being local curiosities and become part of the same enquiry.
“The puzzles and postcards I brought back from Cordoba and Madinat al-Zahra will become tactile entry points into the past, alongside comparisons with Lahore Fort, Shalimar Gardens, Kot Diji, Baltit, Altit, and the fortresses of Chitral. I want my students to feel that history is not somewhere far away; it is something they can enter, question, and recognise.”
Mazhar would teach the same method he found himself using in Córdoba, when he pictured Ibn Rushd and Ibn Arabi inside the Mosque-Cathedral. He calls it historical imagination, where the past reaches us in fragments, and imagination is how students work with what survives.
“I would encourage my students not only to observe places and objects, but also to imagine the people, ideas, and societies behind them. History is never complete; it comes down to us in parts. However, by using our imaginative power, accompanied by experience, we can broaden our understanding of the past.”
Tabassum would begin closer to home, with what her students already walk past in their city. Her method requires neither field trip nor budget. It asks students to treat a nearby fort, wall, or ruin as a source, and to ask who built it and what happened to it.
“I aim for my students to know that history can be learned not only through reading, but through the senses by seeing, touching and standing among what remains. I want them to look closely at the world around them and recognise that places, objects and architectures have voices worth listening to.”
A Continuing Encounter with the Past
The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, the Alhambra, and Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ each highlighted a different aspect of the rich Islamic heritage of Andalusia. The mosque was built with stone taken from older buildings. The Alhambra still stands much as its builders left it. Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ lies in ruins, and parts of it survive in other buildings elsewhere. Reading about these places gives students the facts, but visiting them and standing inside them opens a new world of experience: the scale, the light, the surfaces, and a sense of the people who once used and inhabited these spaces. That is what they will carry back to their own classrooms.
Mazhar closes his reflection with an invitation, one that applies as much to the reader as to the next cohort of STEP student teachers:
Andalusia as a whole has much to offer, provided you have a curious mind and a receptive heart.
If you are interested in the Secondary Teacher Education Programme (STEP), applications are still open.
The deadline is 12 noon (BST) on 21 October 2026.
