Moorish scientific Hermeticism

One night, in the plausibly near future of the verse, an Andalusian observatory will discover the planet that we know by the name of Pluto.

A few nights later, a bunch of astronomers will gather in their jamia, bringing with them an enormous set of odd paraphernalia. They will bring with them bottles of wine, and bottles of cider, and bottles of other liquors, and plenty of water for tea and chocolate. They will bring whatever it is that they smoke, and whatever it is that they need to smoke it with. They will bring stacks of books - maps of the night sky, and biographies, mostly.

They will sit down and plot out, over glasses of drinks, important questions, like "What was Pluto doing when all these people were born? What college was it in? What was it occluding? Where was it relatively to all else?" And they will work this out, and account for this in the horoscopes of the great men of history. (And some great women too.)

And when they have established this, they will then ask the ensuing question: "What are the differences between what the original uncorrected horoscope would suggest, and what actually happened?" And they will observe this, and record it for the record.

And over the course of many such questions, they will ask a third question: "All of these horoscopes, across centuries and continents - what trends do we observe about the ways the horoscopes failed to account for the lives that fell under them? What is constant when Pluto is on the cusp of this, or occluding that?"

Bit by bit, scouring the archives of the world, they will theorize the astrological significance of Pluto to a very high standard of rigor. And if you tell them that what they're doing isn't science at all, they'll stare blankly.

And then put their cigars out in your eye.

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.