Mahdism

Talking about Andalusada can be hard. On good days, the problem is that nobody has any idea what the hell I'm going on about, because I can't just link them to the blog and say, "Read all of it." On bad days, though, it's because it involves Islam, and Islam makes people stop thinking.

Well-meaning but clueless people hear that North America is a Spanish-speaking Muslim country, and that's all they hear. Without a chance to get into how it evolves, or what politics can be like in a world with steampunk social science, they immediately conclude that the UCNA is a superpower Islamic Republic of Iran; it's only because I live in a decent part of the country that I haven't heard the word "Islamofascist" used yet.

Which is a shame, because there's a joke that I could make, and nobody who used "Islamofascist" would get it: This is Islamic Spain I'm talking about. They have Islamo-Carlism instead.

Mahdism 101 ("Onward to the twelfth century!")

Mahdism's goal can be summarized with a single four-digit number: "1200." That's 1200 AH for all you dhimmis out there - 1786, the last stable year in the history of Umayyad Seville. Logically or semi-logically, that goal entails the following things:

• Andalusi independence: Mahdism is nationalist, not regionalist. While most of them would be quite happy to give the Crown of All Spains a taste of its own medicine by taking over Castilla as well, the key goal isn't retribution; it's the restoration of Seville as a state in its own right.
• ...as a caliphate: Mahdism isn't exactly "Islamist" in our sense, but it's certainly Muslim; what was once a metropolis and cultural capital has been turned into an emigration society, and the emigrants are overwhelmingly Moors who are disadvantaged under the new state Catholicism that (incidentally) doesn't benefit the Mozarabs that much either.
• Because Seville's common law was abolished after the First Mahdist War, "restoring the caliphate" implicitly also means "restoring the prewar legal codes," which would restore a lot of the old Moorish khassa to prominence again. (It would also mean that a lot of poor Moors would suddenly own small amounts of Old World land.)
• ...ruled by the House of Umayya. Originally, this was the legitimist claim of al-Mahdi. In the wake of his death, that cult of personality has diffused into a cult of dynasty. Although any serious Mahdist pretender will have a cult of personality, Mahdism as a whole is devoted less to the individual than to the continuing succession of the first, greatest, and only true rulers of the Islamic world.
• Specifically, this means "under an Umayyad descended from al-Mahdi." There's a fair number of them at this point. Pretenders are always styled Mahdi, and their mothers "Umm Mahdi" as an honorific.

Or at least that's how it's supposed to work.

A brief history of Mahdism

A basic outline of Mahdism looks something like this:

• The First Mahdist War: al-Mahdi's first significant attempt to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and take Seville. [when?] It was abortive.
• The Second Mahdist War: The second and more substantial Mahdist War that al-Mahdi actually fought in, in the early 1820s - contemporary with the War of the French Succession. al-Mahdi actually crossed the Straits, seized Seville, and (after most of his forces had collapsed) died several months later, after a final flareup of the war in Almeria.

On his death, the movement's leadership collapsed, and the Crown of All Spains crushed it back across Gibraltar and beyond.

• The Third Mahdist War: In the 1860s, the Spanish Monarchy decided to try their hand at Mexico's program of Reclamation, incentivizing Moorish assimilation into Christian Spanish society. It blew up in their faces.

Outside of Iberia proper, some of Mahdism's notable conflicts have included:

• The 1895 Chergui, when the Mahdists first got their hands on double-base powders and shot up Spanish Morocco something fierce.
• The eight months of terror caused by Asad from Seville, who codified the serial killer in Andalusada.

Mahdism in the world today

Andalusada has a fair number of lost causes - the Miramoline's struggle for Five Families Seville; the two losing factions of the French Wars of Religion; most recently Tsarism in Russia. Mahdism is one of those lost causes. It can't possibly make a serious grab for its goals; the various Mahdis are scattered across the world, and most of them aren't serious material for the reestablishment of a government; the movement itself has drifted significantly from its origins.

• The UCNA: The UCNA isn't Mahdist. In fact, it rejected Mahdism before it was even born, when Yusuf I rejected the Mahdist baya during the First Mahdist War. (Maghrebi Mahdists still curse his name.)
• al-Aqsain: The greatest actual Mahdist state rules the Isthmus of Panama (and the northwestern half of what we'd call Colombia), financed by primary extraction economies and a plurality ownership of the Transcabralia Canal. "Rules" is the key word here; majority ownership of the Canal is held by the UCNA and England-Scotland (with a bit by the CRC), and the local Mahdi knows better than to piss them off.
• The G.P. of Cabralia is, however, backing a Mahdist pretender to the throne, in an effort to shake the Transcabralia Canal out of the CRC's orbit.
• Gran Peru: For no other reason than because I colored it that way in the beginning, Gran Peru has one Mahdist emirate in its orbit. (The relationship's something like that between Switzerland and Liechtenstein, if Liechtenstein were Islamo-Carlist.)
• The CRC: For its part, a fair number of Mahdist claimants wound up in the Southern Cone, for reasons that I'm not totally sure about. (Maybe a single Mahdi and his bastard kids?) Some of them have been overthrown, some invaded, and a few joined willingly because they knew what was good for them.

State impotence isn't political impotence, though:

• The global Moorish diaspora. Andalusia's become an emigration society on par with Ireland IRL, and they're really unhappy about that. Popular Mahdism is a fair bit more romantic (and democratic) than it was originally, but a cause is a cause. It's an open secret that a lot of Andalusi restaurants give a cut of their revenues to various Mahdist fronts in the Old World, pretty much the same way some bars in Boston backed the IRA.
• The Banu Sufyan. Sufyan had a lot of kids; a widowed Umm Mahdi here, a spare Sufyanid daughter there... at this point there's a few families of plausible Mahdist pretenders. None of them are claimants, but they have backgrounds in statesmanship and command; the Crown of Spain sweats them more than any of the others, because the Sufyanid successions are worryingly trained in grand strategy.
• G1200. The Grupo 1200 is Spain's worst terrorist problem, a network of bomb-happy Mahdists strewn across the Maghribi coastal cities. The G1200 doesn't support any Mahdist claimant in particular; its stated purpose is to support any legitimate claimant in a restoration attempt. As of 1930 it's been responsible for a fair number of bombings and at least two or three deaths in the royal family.