Students from the Graduate Programme in Islamic Studies and Humanities (GPISH) cohort of 2027 travelled to Andalusia, Spain, as part of the programme’s Year 2 educational field trip. Led by Dr Gregory Bilotto, the trip forms part of GPISH’s enrichment programme and focuses on Muslim architectural monuments of the Islamic West. It complements students’ in-house academic modules, especially Arts and Architecture in Muslim Societies, by bringing to life places they have studied through texts, images, lectures, and seminar discussions.
Over four days, the cohort visited Málaga, Córdoba, Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, and Granada, encountering some of the most significant architectural sites associated with the history of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.
The visit extended classroom learning into direct engagement with place. Students had already studied the forms, histories, and meanings of Islamic architecture. In Andalusia, they were able to move through these spaces, observe them closely, and reflect on how buildings continue to communicate ideas about power, faith, beauty, memory, and cultural inheritance.
Bringing architecture beyond the classroom
The Arts and Architecture in Muslim Societies module introduces students to the visual, material, and architectural traditions of Muslim societies across different periods and regions. It asks students to think critically about buildings not only as aesthetic objects, but as spaces shaped by historical context, patronage, belief, and social life.
The field trip to Andalusia gave students an opportunity to bring direct experience to their studies. Several students reflected on the difference between studying architecture from a distance and standing inside the buildings themselves.
For Haya Hussain, who comes from Canada, the visit addressed one of the central challenges of academic study: the distance that can sometimes exist between ideas and lived experience. “One of the most difficult things about academia is that it often feels intangible and removed from the real world.
Trips such as the one to Spain as part of the Art and Architecture module ensure that what we are learning, studying, and researching feel as though they are not only physically embodied but also that the work we are doing can have real world impacts and consequences.
This sense of embodied learning was shared across the cohort. Students had encountered the monuments of Andalusia through lectures and images, but physical presence went beyond this to reveal their scale, atmosphere, and complexities.
As Mohsin Baig from Chitral, Pakistan reflected:
After weeks of studying Islamic architecture in London, absorbing dates, names, architectural patterns and photographs, nothing quite prepared me for actually standing inside these spaces.
…As a cohort, our four-day trip through Málaga, Córdoba, and Granada, as part of our Arts and Architecture in Muslim Societies module, turned theoretical knowledge into something substantial and practical that I can feel now.”
The movement from theory to experience changed how students approached architecture as a form of knowledge.
Mohsin continued:
“Walking through the Grand Mosque of the Umayyads in Córdoba, tracing its forest of arches, or wandering the breathtaking gardens of the Alhambra in the poetic city of Granada, I understood things no lecture could fully teach. Experience, I believe, is one of the deepest forms of knowledge, and this trip gave me exactly that.”
For Nurain Lakhani, who is from Kolkata, India, the trip sharpened her attention to detail and changed her relationship with the module material.
I think I underestimated how much seeing these buildings in person would actually change the way I understand the module material.
The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba was among the first sites to challenge her expectations.
“The Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba was the first thing to genuinely surprise me. I had seen images of the arches countless times in lectures, but standing inside and realising how far they stretch in every direction was a completely different experience.”
What emerged from the trip was not only appreciation, but a more active form of looking. Students began to read buildings as sources: asking what they reveal, what they conceal, and how their meanings shift across time.
Reading buildings as historical texts
Across Córdoba, Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, and Granada, students encountered spaces shaped by different forms of patronage, political ambition, religious transformation, and cultural memory.
The trip invited them to consider architecture as a historical text: something that can be read, questioned, and interpreted. Buildings do not merely survive from the past. They are altered, reused, restored, contested, and reinterpreted by each generation that inherits them.
For Nurain, the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba raised questions that became more immediate because she was physically inside the space.
“What I kept thinking about was the decision to build the cathedral directly through the mosque rather than demolish it. It says something complicated about power and coexistence, and being physically inside that space made those tensions feel very immediate rather than abstract.”
This movement from abstraction to immediacy shaped several student reflections. The site was experienced as a layered space where histories of power and adaptation remain visible.
Shabnaz Wali, from Chitral, Pakistan, also reflected on this complexity through the relationship between architecture and authority.
“Architecture has rarely functioned as a politically neutral enterprise. Ruling powers have consistently deployed the built environment as an instrument of legitimation, constructing spaces that encode ideology, assert dynastic continuity, and project authority in ways that written proclamations seldom achieve.”
For Shabnaz, Andalusia offered a powerful setting in which to explore these ideas.
Our cohort’s visit to Andalusia as part of the Arts and Architecture module offered a rare opportunity to walk through these contested spaces and reckon with what they reveal about power, memory, and cultural continuity.
Visiting these monuments helped to place them within broader histories of rule, succession, and transformation. Rather than viewing architecture as a static inheritance, she approached it as a record of competing claims.
The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, in her view, remains a particularly significant example:
“The building’s present condition, in which Qur’anic inscriptions coexist with active Christian liturgical practice, resists singular narratives of supersession and operates instead as a living archive of contested legitimacy.”
This idea of the building as a “living archive” speaks to one of the central learning outcomes of the trip: how to interpret the visible traces of historical change. Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ extended these questions in a different direction. For Nurain, it was one of the most engaging parts of the trip because of the site’s ongoing excavation and the questions it raised about reconstruction.
“Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ was where I felt most engaged. There is something about a site still being uncovered that makes you more aware of what you are actually looking at. Getting access to the Royal Hall, which is not open to the public, was the part of the trip I keep coming back to.”
The experience encouraged her to think carefully about preservation and interpretation.
“The carved stone decoration that has survived is so refined and deliberate, and seeing it in an unrestored state made me think more carefully about how we interpret and reconstruct the past. It raised questions for me about what gets prioritised in restoration and why.”
Shabnaz also reflected on Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ as a space where architecture and political ambition meet.
“Moving through the site’s surviving pathways and entering that ceremonial hall, I was confronted simultaneously with the ambition of the civilisation that produced it and the totality of its collapse.”
For students, such encounters opened up questions that reached beyond architectural form. The sites invited reflection on the fragility of power, the survival of material culture, and the responsibilities involved in interpreting the past.
Beauty, meaning, and the built environment
The visit to Granada and the Alhambra prompted a different set of reflections. Students considered how the elements of spatial design work together within Islamic architectural traditions.
The Alhambra became a space through which students could think about the relationship between concept and execution, theory and experience, and the spiritual and the everyday.
Nurain reflected:
“The Alhambra felt almost overwhelming at first. The Nasrid Palaces in particular pushed me to think about how Islamic architectural theory actually works in practice, how geometry, light, water and surface decoration are not separate elements but part of a single, unified intention.”
This changed how she understood the material studied in class.
That connection between concept and execution is something I had read about but not really internalised until standing inside it.
Mubashir Artas, from Gilgit, Pakistan, also reflected on the limitations of written sources when studying architecture and history.
There is a profound difference between reading history in textbooks and encountering it in tangible form.
For him, the visit revealed architecture as a record of values and intellectual ambition.
“I came to appreciate a living archive that records the values, beliefs, and intellectual ambitions of a civilisation in ways that written sources alone cannot.”
His reflection also challenged the tendency to separate religious and worldly categories when discussing Islamic art and architecture.
“Standing before the Alhambra and walking through the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, I was struck by how seamlessly the spiritual and the everyday were woven together.”
He continued:
“A key learning for me was that much contemporary scholarship on Islamic art and architecture imposes a dichotomy between the religious and the worldly, yet the builders and patrons of these spaces likely did not perceive such a divide. For them, beauty, faith, knowledge, and daily life were a single, integrated whole, a perspective worth recovering.”
This insight connects closely with the aims of the GPISH curriculum, which encourages students to think across disciplines and to question inherited categories.
Learning to see differently
Taken together, the reflections show how the field trip changed students’ ways of seeing. For Mohsin, this shift was personal and lasting.
“What changed most was my confidence. I no longer just look at architecture and admire it from a distance. Now I study it, its patterns, its proportions, its meaning. That shift will stay with me for life.”
For Haya, the trip brought together different strands of GPISH learning.
“Because this module is different from a lot of the GPISH curriculum in that it is built on different ways of thinking and approaching texts and contexts, having the physical experience of being inside the architecture that we had been discussing for so many sessions was especially important.”
The experience of Córdoba, in particular, became a point where areas of study seemed to converge.
“While standing in the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, I couldn’t help but be in awe of how the city was a maze of palimpsests, and that came through in the experience itself. While the city was a mix of cultures, religions, and empires, all of our GPISH courses to date were culminating in our experience of it.”
This is where the significance of the field trip becomes clearest. It allowed students to bring together historical study, textual analysis, material culture and religious studies through lived observation. Such experiences are central to the wider educational purpose of GPISH. The programme prepares students to engage critically with Muslim histories, societies, and intellectual traditions. Field trips extend that learning by placing students in direct contact with the material and cultural environments through which those histories are preserved, contested, and remembered.
Nasr Zain, who comes from Salamiyah, Syria, approached Andalusia through music. Having grown up loving the guitar, he connected the trip to one of the first difficult pieces he learned, “Recuerdos de la Alhambra”.
“This now makes a whole lot of sense after visiting Andalucia, where every scene and every background look like a guitar piece.”
His reflection offers a different but equally powerful way of understanding place through rhythm and movement.
“Córdoba was a beautiful, lively tune that carries you alongside the Muslim architecture. Granada was the slow, entangled, and sometimes ascending music with each and every Calle.”
He added:
“And with all the hustle and travelling, time went slowly as I passed from one memorable place to another.”
This closing reflection captures something shared across the cohort. The trip was intellectually demanding, but it was also personal, with a sense of wonder.
A continuing encounter with the past
The GPISH 2027 cohort’s field trip to Córdoba, Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ, and Granada showed how direct engagement with place can deepen academic study. The visit allowed students to extend their understanding of architecture as a living archive of power, culture and faith. They also described a shift in themselves: from looking at buildings to reading them, and from studying the past to encountering its material presence.
