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.
A lot of late Sevillan politics is wracked by the fact that different factions in the caliphal house are allied with different tariqas, including at least one that doesn't exist yet, and the caliph is constantly trying to subsume the traditional authority of the tariqas in his own rule as final arbiter of both faith and state. In this environment, khalwa became the polite word for "exile." (Interesting comparisons could certainly be drawn between Moorish khalwa and Takasagonese penitential pilgrimage to Assisi, but that's for another day.)

And it happens to quite a few people, and sometimes their families. With interesting consequences.

This is a stub. It will be expanded upon.