Moorish phratries

When Abu Talha Rais first sighted the northern coast of Cabralia in 1484, he had no illusions that he'd reached India. (He did, however, name Hispaniola al-Waqwaq, whence its current name "Guaquaquite.") Instead, he categorically named everything on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean the Bilad al-Aqsa: "the Farthest Land." Later maps would declare the continents to be "America" and "Cabralia," and the water between them and Florida Algeciras to be "Caribby," but in Arabic none of that mattered. For the Moorish world, the New World was always al-Aqsa.

For most of the Five Families era, the Arabs weren't terribly interested in colonizing it. It was simpler to let the Isidorans ease their demographic pressures by moving abroad, converting the New World to (Isidoran) Catholicism and making them administrators of the dhimma. Come 1700, though, Umayyad Seville changed that forever. And when in 1792 al-Mahdi was driven into Maghrebi exile, things changed forever again.

Andalusi vs. Aqsi

Not that the Moors themselves would see it that way. They see their kinship system as being essentially unchanged from the way things were in the Five Families period (or for that matter the Berber Fitna) - just complicated a bit by accidents of politics. (Their defense of this position would be a textbook example of steampunk social science, if I knew what exactly it was.) We have the luxury of looking at it from the outside, though; and from that outside, there's a simpler way to explain the dynamics of the whole thing: the Moorish world has developed phratries.

• In theory, the Andalusi and Aqsi branches of any individual clan are one and the same. They share common ancestry, common kinship, and common loyalties and relationships with other families.
• In practice, the Andalusi and Aqsi branches of each house are completely autonomous. While they'll pay lip service to politics and problems across the pond, in point of fact none of that matters. Old World family alliances carry nothing more than nominal weight, and even then the actual relationships involved may be totally different in the New World.
• Complicating matters further, some families (but not others) distinguish further subdivisions, usually for their Maghrebi branches.

The textbook example of what these power dynamics look like in practice is the Banu Umayya, because it's the most extreme case of imbalance between the branches of a single clan. In the New World, the House of Umayya rules the greatest state Islam has ever known, as well as Cuba, Transcabralia, and a bunch of islands in the Caribbean Sea. In the Old World, by comparison, the House of Umayya...

...well, in the Old World the House of Umayya is extinct, so let's look at the New World Old World Umayyad territories. Without exception they've been reduced to puppet states. One of them is the fifth suyu of Gran Peru; a few others have been all but annexed into the CRC, and march in lockstep with Balthasaria's orders if they know what's good for them. The most powerful one is sitting atop Transcabralia, with a forest of New Andalusian bayonets "safeholding" the canal for him. Where they've kept themselves alive, it's because the Sufyanids have married into them, turning them into collateral lines of collateral lines of the greatest state Islam has ever known.

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.