Zahra

Life: 1887-present.
Position: Calipha of the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia
Preceded by: [who?]

The electoral side of the UCNA's history is justifiably a sausage party: as of 1930, women's suffrage is still something that needs campaigning for. The monarchic side of the UCNA's political history is, at this point, a sausage party too, and it shouldn't be. Presumably the caliphs have no shortage of wives and daughters, but who are they? What are they doing?

As of tonight, I'm only really familiar with the current calipha of New Andalusia; I'm not even sure about her family name yet. What I know is that, in several spellings, her name is Zahra, devoted wife of Caliph Yusuf III. This is her story.

Life downstairs: Zahra's early years and adolescence

Zahra was from a Mudejar family [details?], which had collaborated with the Spanish Crown early on, only to fall from grace in the Second Mahdist War. Her Aqsi family arrived in Cuba with all its assets squeezed into two chests, and lived beyond their means; inside of a generation, they'd been reduced to aristocratic paupers. When she was born in 1887, she joined its third generation, the first to be born decidedly downstairs. Downstairs in the Alchazar isn't a bad place to be born, though.

• At age three, though, the caliph [who?] dies, and because she's paid for by the caliphal family rather than the Caliphal Household she follows her family, and their masters, out of the Alchazar to make room for Caliph Yusuf II.
• Zahra's generation was also the first of her family to speak Moorish instead of Arabic. (She did learn to speak Arabic, but it's very much a second language for her - and it shows; Zahra is infamously incapable of sticking to a single spelling of her name.)

Around age 12, Zahra was assigned a new role on top of her duties as a maid: she was now the official friend and caretaker of Yusuf, the family's problem child.

• Zahra was a pretty girl, and the men of the House took advantage of that. By the time she'd reached the age of maturity, she'd been slept with by most of the men upstairs. (She was a subordinate, they were authorities; these things happened, and there were consequences for saying no.) This would come back to haunt her later in life...

To her shock (but not her surprise), Yusuf proposed to her when she was 23. After getting the approval of her parents, and arranging for her mahr [details?], the couple announced their marriage to Umm and Abu Yusuf. It went almost as poorly as they had anticipated.

Life upstairs: Zahra's marriage (1910-1918)

As soon as they could, the happy couple left the house, and the unavoidable tensions their marriage had caused within it. For all that Zahra had moved upstairs, for all that her life was a Joseph Campbell-tier archetypal retelling of the Cinderella story, not much had actually changed. Lacking money to hire help of her own, her time was still spent cooking, cleaning and housekeeping as hard as any servant, or for that matter a plebeian housewife.

• Yusuf's infamous confrontation with his stepfather and brothers came over an iftar early in their marriage. [Most of Ramadan fell in September during the years 1910-12, so most likely then; but still, when?]
• Zahra was uncomfortable about her husband's involvement with the Believers, less because of their platform than because their role as the opposition party was making them too confrontational for her tastes. Her husband's rise made her a recognized figure in Believer circles, but never an involved one; she was happy to stand by her man and be the dutiful wife, but didn't let herself get too associated with the cause.

Caliph Basil II died in 1918, tragically and far too young. When the dust settled, Sa. Zahra would find herself back inside the Alchazar, for the first time in almost thirty years.

Calipha Zahra (1918-present)

Yusuf's acclamation was a trying time for Zahra. She's a pleaser, not a fighter, and the storm of politics surrounding her husband's acclamation forced her to be confrontational like never before.

• Zahra's sordid teenage years were too sordid to pass up; backbiters dragged them into the public eye early in the acclamation process, vicariously attacking Yusuf's character through hers. The smear campaign didn't stop until it backfired, once the entire world knew Zahra's unhappy past.
• This smear campaign also rallied the Believers around "our calipha."

Calipha Zahra on the world stage: Zahra didn't actually go abroad for some time.

• Calipha Zahra decidedly failed to impress the grands dames of the world. Caliph's wife or no, the Anglo-Scottish Empress [who?] saw in her a servant's comportment.

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