Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Reclamation

The Moorish New World was, first and foremost, Christian. During the Age of Exploration, the Five Families actively encouraged Isidoran missionary efforts, for entirely cynical reasons: it gave the Christians something to do besides revolt, and New World dhimmitude made it much easier to systematically exploit its staggering wealth. Islamization only came during the colonial era, when it was profitable to be above Christians.

Relations didn't significantly sour until the Liturgical War, which Umayyad Seville handled with an infamously heavy hand, but once they were soured they stayed soured. Come the Mexican Revolt, there was (of necessity) a staggering amount of anti-Muslim violence - and when the dust settled, the Moorish Empire was gone. And in its place, in the New World, was the G.P. of Mexico: a Christian government with a significant, and very diverse, Muslim minority.

Reclamation in theory and ideology

By the time Teresa Maria ascended to the throne, Mexico was suffering serious battle fatigue. Its economy was a mess, and an entire generation had never known peace. And (given that the First Mahdist War had only just died down in the Old World, and Cuba was still strong in the Caribbean), "peace" would be nothing but a chance to reload unless something serious was done to either placate the Muslims or permanently dispose of them.

That "something serious" turned out to be the policy now known as "Reclamation."

Saturday, June 2, 2012

The Manazil and Moorish popular Islam

Historically, the Arabic-language printing is complicated by the fact that it's a cursive-only script, which requires a larger range of letters because there needs to be initial, medial, final, and isolated versions of almost all. IRL, this was only made harder by the fact that in the Ottoman Empire the printing presses were run by Christians (and often Catholic foreigners rather than the domestic Greeks), who adopted as their standard typeface a script of Arabic that Muslims generally didn't use.

(This Catholic influence, incidentally, was also part of the crisis that gave rise to the Uniate church; the early Ottoman printing industry was Jesuit, and for a solid century after the fall of Constantinople the autonomous churches under it had basically no printed literature at a time when their Catholic neighbors had tons of it. The Russians responded, at least in part, by transferring the seat of the church from Kiev to Muscovy, and eventually pressuring the Ecumenical Patriarch to grant them autocephaly; the same events gave rise, in lands under the Polish-Lithuanian orbit, to the church transferring its loyalties from the Patriarch to the Pope in the interest of securing equal status with their Roman hegemons.)

The biggest issue was that the publication of the Qur'an was frowned on very, very hard. In Western Europe, the publication of the Bible (even outside the vernacular) was enormously financially successful in early modernity, which basically doomed the age of manuscript and the assumptions of manuscript culture.
But what's true of the Ottoman Empire (or whatever the Turks are in Andalusada, because the Ottomans are not foreordained) isn't necessarily true of the Moors, who after all develop their own civilization by the time they start establishing trans-Atlantic colonies.

So how does the printed Qur'an work? I have some tentative thoughts.

The Black Codices

After the discovery of the New World in 1484, there's every reason to think that Seville, in the name of having money to spend after such a long and marginal existence, does what Spain did IRL: spends so much New World gold that it collapses economies worldwide, causing a global shift toward the silver standard.

At the lowest point of the gold crash, somebody in the Five Families had an inspired idea: if gold is so cheap, why not make a show of it? Thus was born the Black Codices.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Khalwa in Umayyad Seville

In the Moorish world, "caliph" is essentially meaningless. It mattered under Abd al-Rahman III, sure, but the Qurtuba's caliphate didn't even last a century before it was abolished by its own khassa. The Almohads brought it back for a bit, sure, but they were messianic loonies anyways. And after they'd been crushed back across the Strait of Gibraltar, the only claimants to the title of caliph were barbaric national enemies who could be safely ignored. The absolute power of the caliphate didn't devolve to the ulama and Sufis as it did in the eastern Islamic world; it simply went dormant.

But all things must eventually return. After the Almohads, after the Abbadids, after the Five Families, after the Miramoline, caliphate came back in a big way: the Emirate of Seville was now the Caliphate of Seville, under a bunch of jumped-up pretenders calling themselves the House of Umayya and claiming absolute power for themselves.

Autocracy was historically accurate for a caliph, especially an Umayyad one, but it didn't butterfly away those meddling ulama and turuq either. The ulama were dealt with in all kinds of ways (not least simply making concessions to them), but the Sufis proved more troublesome.

One of the ways Umayyad Seville found to deal with them was khalwa.