Reflection on my visit to Al-Andalus

I have spent the past weeks, as a student in the Duke in the Arab World program based in
Morocco, immersed in Islamic culture and history in a way I had never experienced before.
Near the end of the program, we took a three-day trip across the Strait into Spain —
specifically Andalusia, the region the Arabs once called Al-Andalus, visiting Seville,
Córdoba, and Granada. I went in expecting beautiful buildings. I didn't expect to come out
questioning how I think about history, craftsmanship, and coexistence itself. This is my
attempt to put that reflection into words.

Crossing by ferry from Tangier to Morocco was itself one of the most memorable parts of the
whole experience for me. Watching two continents narrow toward each other across open
water felt like we were entering a portal from one world to the next. Near the Strait of
Gibraltar, our tour guide Muhammad Scott pointed to the meeting place of the Mediterranean
Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. He connected this scene to the Quranic verses describing two
bodies of water separated by a barrier (barzakh), each retaining its own characteristics. This
made Gibraltar a fitting place to begin my visit to Al-Andalus, as it was also about two
worlds meeting without losing what made each of them unique.

Our first stop in Spain was Seville, and the first place we visited was La Giralda. What struck
me wasn't just the architecture, but its layered identity. It now functions as a Catholic site, but
the structure itself began as a minaret, and you can still feel that origin in its proportions and
form if you look closely. It was my first real introduction to a theme that would follow me
through the entire trip: buildings in Andalusia rarely have one clean identity. They carry
several, stacked on top of each other.

After that, we visited the Plaza de España, which was a different kind of impressive, as it was
less about religious history, more about sheer scale and ambition. I also got to see the
building used as the backdrop in The Dictator, which I had watched with my cohort a week
prior, which made the visit feel a little more personal. Walking the full length of the plaza, I
kept thinking about how much intention goes into spaces meant to make people feel
something specific, whether that's reverence, pride, or wonder.

The fourth and, to me, most significant experience of the entire program was visiting the
Mosque-Cathedral Monumental Site of Córdoba. I have a personal tendency to underestimate
the capabilities of people from earlier eras, as I stated earlier, almost assuming that
craftsmanship and architectural ambition have only improved with time. Standing inside this
building dismantled that assumption completely. But beyond its sheer beauty, what made this
site so significant to me was its history of religious transformation and coexistence. The
building began as a church, was converted into a mosque, and was later converted again into
a cathedral, and rather than erasing each previous layer, the site today preserves all of these
histories in the same physical space, side by side rather than in contradiction.

Nothing captured this for me more than standing where the qibla, the wall indicating the
direction of Mecca for Muslim prayer, was perfectly aligned in one part of the structure,
while the surrounding walls displayed Qur'anic verses, including passages from Surah
Mariam affirming that there is no God but Allah, in the very same room where Christian
iconography and craftsmanship were also on full display. The woodwork alone, which took
twenty-seven years to complete and depicted scenes from the Bible, represented an
extraordinary investment of human time, skill, and devotion, made even more impactful by
the creator being buried right nearby since he died shortly before the inauguration of the
display, which made me think about how people would dedicate their entire lives to their
crafts. As a whole, seeing both religious traditions physically coexist within the same walls,
rather than one simply replacing the other, was unlike anything I had encountered elsewhere
on this trip, and it reshaped how I think about the historical relationship between Islam and
Christianity. Rather than a narrative of pure conflict or pure separation, this site offered a
narrative of layered coexistence, even if that coexistence was often the product of conquest
rather than choice.

This experience also pushed me to think differently about modern architecture, governance,
and the value we place on permanence. A typical building today might be constructed in a
year or two, but it is rarely built to endure for centuries. The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba,
by contrast, took roughly two centuries to build and has survived far longer, in part because
of the extraordinary care and craftsmanship invested in it. In an age of mass production and
now artificial intelligence, this site made me think seriously about what is lost when speed
replaces patience. More than that, it made me reconsider the relationship between governance
and religious diversity. The fact that the Spanish state and church now allow both the Islamic
and Christian histories of this site to exist in conjunction, rather than erasing one in favor of
the other, reflects a governance choice: a decision that religious diversity, even when it stems
from a contested history, is worth preserving rather than flattening into a single narrative.
That choice offered me a system of how governments can manage religious coexistence not
by erasing competing histories but by allowing them to coexist in harmony.

The next day we went to Granada, and my favourite place there was the Alhambra. Two
things hit me almost simultaneously: how enormous the complex was, and how much of it
was full of people; it didn't feel like a hidden gem so much as something the whole world has
clearly caught onto. Even moving through just a fraction of the grounds took real time.
What stayed with me most, though, was the detail within the scale, especially the stained
glass and the intricate ornamentation throughout the palace. It's the kind of craftsmanship that
made you stop walking just to look up at every stop. But more than the visuals, the Alhambra
made me confront something uncomfortable about my own knowledge gaps: I genuinely had
not understood how deep and how long the Muslim presence in Spain had been, or how much
it had shaped the region's architecture, language, and identity. Al-Andalus was centuries of a
civilisation that left fingerprints everywhere I looked, and I'm a little embarrassed it took
standing inside the Alhambra for that to fully register.

Six weeks in Morocco gave me a foundation in Islamic culture I didn't have before. Three
days in Andalusia showed me what happens when that culture meets, clashes with, and
ultimately intertwines with another, sometimes by force, sometimes by choice, but rarely by
simple erasure. Córdoba, in particular, taught me that coexistence doesn't always look like
harmony in the way we imagine it; sometimes it looks like layered survival, each era leaving
its mark without fully overwriting the one before it. I came to Spain expecting tourism, but I
left with a different lens on history, patience and how cultures can coexist despite clashing
ideologies.