The Miramoline

The has the name Wendy, which went from being an American-only outlier (on par with inflicting your child with a variant spelling of a name) to an internationally recognized one because of some Scotsman writing some book. (The Slavic world has an equivalent in the form of Svetlana.)

Andalusada almost certainly doesn't have Wendy, and it probably doesn't have Svetlana either. But it does have a female name of its own. That name, in the original French spelling, is Miramoline. Within a century the interconsonantal /a/ had been lost, giving rise to Mirmeauline, and (in English) the same thing, with various renderings of the vowels and duplicate letters: Mermelline, Myrmeline, etc. The name caught on.

This entry is about person who made it stick. The first woman to ever sign her name as la Miramoline.

The Miramoline in a nutshell

After Seville reconsolidated the taifas of al-Andalus, after the Almohad Caliphate collapsed in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, after the Black Death, Seville spent three and a half centuries governed by the Five Families. At the end of those three and a half centuries, the weave of the Five Families came undone; and when the dust settled, the Emirate of Seville had become the Umayyad Caliphate of Seville.

It was a war for the ages, the Umayyad Restoration. It was a much harder fight than their historiography would care to admit. And in no small part the fighting was so hard because al-Mujadid (and his son, before the angel Gabriel got him sent to Granada) were pitted against the most formidable woman the Moorish world has ever known.

Her ism was Imtithal (in the Moorish orthography, Intiçal, it's still a common enough name); her kunya, her nasab, and her nisbah are as yet undetermined - and unimportant. Because what matters is her laqab, the name that she earned, the name that she insisted on: Amira al-Mu'minun.

There are too many Amiras in Moorish history, just as there are too many Jeannes in French; but just as there is only one Pucelle, there is only one Miramoline.

The Miramoline's legacy

The Umayyad Restoration is one of the Great Moments in the history of Moorish civilization, with the same kind of sentimental what-if speculation that the American Civil War does IRL (at least for a certain kind of American, anyways.) Along with al-Mujadid, the Miramoline is a key figure in that. And to a greater degree than almost anybody in the CSA, she embodies the Lost Cause. The CSA could conceivably win without Lee, or without Jefferson Davis, or without one or another of its big names; but the Miramoline's somebody who needs to win personally for the Five Families to survive.

And Five Families Seville raises an even bigger possibility: without the Umayyad Restoration, does the Great Realignment even happen? Umayyad Seville set a lot of things in motion that would simply never have been issues in a continuing Five Families system - the construction of the Winchester Alhambra and the politicized Sufism that enabled weaponized khalwa, for instance, wouldn't have happened at all. (And given that the latter shaped New World Islam in big ways, and laid lots of foundations for the Moorish empire's collapse within the century, the butterflies are enormous.)

• One thing that I haven't actually mentioned before, but which really matters, is that the Miramoline is one of the Great Women of History. Umayyad Seville officially anathematizes her (she's usually referred to as al-Nisa "the Woman"), but for a time during the Restoration she was the single most powerful woman in the Muslim world, perhaps in the entire world. It's why, despite al-Mujadid's anathema, her title goes on to become a relatively familiar name in the Western world.
• Her power seizure was also unprecedented in Moorish history; she was pushing all the limits of what Maliki fiqh said was possible, and simply breaking them when they couldn't be pushed far enough. Until both the Miramoline and al-Mujadid were dead, when there was serious support for putting her back in charge, her supporters had to take Moorish political thought in ways it had never gone before. Without the Amira, the dissident schools that influenced Yusuf I wouldn't have been possible.

This is a stub. It will be expanded upon.