Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline

[holycookie]

Cuba wasn't non industrialied. So wasn't Yugoslavia.

Comunist Yugoslavia was formed in 1945 from what had been, before the war, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It was a nation created primarily by the soviet union. the difference was the special relationship between the Russians and the Servians. Basically the soviets let them do whatever they wanted as long as it didn't get in the way of the USSR
Cuba was one with a division of nobility and serfs. The nobility were the Americans and their allies and the serfs were the Cubans. It was a nation that "had" (at the most basic possible level) industry but had no middle class of its own. It was basically a place for Americans to spend the summer. That's why the idea of the bourgeoisie against the workers worked.

 

[Nivek]

don't know if Tirunah will be very happy about it nor the otomi. multiple colonies create various problems and benefits. One of the problems is to make the colonies work together or not kill each other for a territory they both want.

Otomi are vassals, Tirunah is a full fledge colony, those are different

 

[holycookie]

Otomi are vassals, Tirunah is a full fledge colony, those are different

In theory yes, in practice no. It's one thing to be a vassal in the old continent and a colony in the new world. It's quite another thing to have a vassal and a colony that have borders, interests and influence that clash. does the nation support the colony or the vassal?
supporting the vassal irritates the colony and slows its growth. The situation complicates even more when you consider other colonies that would not like to see the expressive growth of one colony to the detriment of others. Tirunah wants the focus, immigrants and money on her and not on another colony for example.It's a necessary balancing act.

 

[Emperor-of-New-Zealand]

Can someone point me to the most recent map?

 

[Denliner]

Can someone point me to the most recent map?

Moonlight in a Jar: An Al-Andalus Timeline

whats the status and info on the jews currenctly in Andalusia have they formed merchant families?

www.alternatehistory.com

 

[Nivek]

In theory yes, in practice no. It's one thing to be a vassal in the old continent and a colony in the new world. It's quite another thing to have a vassal and a colony that have borders, interests and influence that clash. does the nation support the colony or the vassal?
supporting the vassal irritates the colony and slows its growth. The situation complicates even more when you consider other colonies that would not like to see the expressive growth of one colony to the detriment of others. Tirunah wants the focus, immigrants and money on her and not on another colony for example.It's a necessary balancing act.

Otomi and tirunah are continents away I doubt that would matter

 

[holycookie]

Otomi and tirunah are continents away I doubt that would matter

yes, the tirunah colony chosen was simply an example but if you look at the map you will see that the emirates have a border with Quwaniyya not only that but the expansion of the emirates in the future comes into conflict with the timucucua colony. There will also be one between Quwaniyya and Tirunah across the Panama area.

 

[Ursogulos]

yes, the tirunah colony chosen was simply an example but if you look at the map you will see that the emirates have a border with Quwaniyya not only that but the expansion of the emirates in the future comes into conflict with the timucucua colony. There will also be one between Quwaniyya and Tirunah across the Panama area.

Can't wait to see the battle between Andalusian Viceroyalties.

 

[Crazymachines]

I'll be honest, I don't think I ever expected one of my maps to make it into an alternatehistoryhub video

 

[Denliner]

I'll be honest, I don't think I ever expected one of my maps to make it into an alternatehistoryhub video

This definitely means he read the timeline (to some extent), which is awesome.

 

[Mayukh]

This definitely means he read the timeline (to some extent), which is awesome

This Shows why his what if Al Andalus Survived Video is so Similar to MIAJ

 

[Yama951]

Now I wonder if MiaJ is in the video somewhere...

 

[WanderingProfessor]

Why do I have a feeling that Quwwuniah Republic
Has defeated People's Republic of China in ttl's Cold War and is the Sole Superpower in ttl's 2022.?

The thing is the sheer amount of changes brought on by a surviving Al-Andalus has butterflied communism and the PRC out of existence. Even if an ideology like communism did exist it would have a different name and take hold in another country.

 

[Denliner]

Now I wonder if MiaJ is in the video somewhere...

It was mentioned.

This Shows why his what if Al Andalus Survived Video is so Similar to MIAJ

Yeah that also raised my suspicions. At least the video confirmed it.

 

[Planet of Hats]

I am always genuinely surprised when big-name creators have read my stuff. I am even more surprised when they don't trash it.

 

[CountofDooku]

I am always genuinely surprised when big-name creators have read my stuff. I am even more surprised when they don't trash it.

Because you've made good, stellar work in this brilliant and fantastic AU/TL. I know to well we writers are our own worst critics, but others not always view our own work as harsh as we do ourself and like, or even love it. ;D

 

[Planet of Hats]

Because you've made good, stellar work in this brilliant and fantastic AU/TL. I know to well we writers are our own worst critics, but others not always view our own work as harsh as we do ourself and like, or even love it. ;D

Sometimes it's hard for me to accept the praise, I guess. But I appreciate that people still care despite my having fallen off the planet for the first, uh, quarter of the year. Between work commitments and the crushing cycle of doomscrolling that the war in Ukraine has caused me, my mind's liquefied into the consistency of chocolate pudding.

Thing is, I've got this jar on the shelf. And there's some stuff in it.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Excerpt: The People's Faith: A History of Modern Islam - Abu Najib ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Mufaji, AD 2007


Fresh off his deposition and furious at the terms of the Governing Fatwa, it would be reasonable to assume that the former Hajib Tariq would emerge as a strong parallel power in the High Atlas. Rifts between Usulids and Ghimarids were wider than ever in the Asmarid Empire, and the person of a deposed Hajib, supported by a powerful warlord in Izemrasen ibn Ghanim and his bloc of Masmudas, would seem to be a logical focal point for Usulid anger.

Events unfolded less rosily than Tariq would have hoped, by any metric. To be certain, Izemrasen promptly recognized Tariq as the rightful Hajib, the Governing Fatwa as invalid and the Asmarid Empire as held hostage by a usurper, and he ceased to remit taxes from within the Aghmat region back to Isbili. This move initially went unopposed: Facing unrest at home in the form of both sporadic Usulid riots and unease from the noble class at the formalization of the Majlis ash-Shura, newly-appointed Hajib Uthman was obliged to spend the first two years of his term both mollifying irritated aristrocrats with fiscal concessions and suppressing scattered Usulid violence with the help of the Black Guard and the junds.

Trouble signs emerged for Tariq in that most of these outbursts of Usulid sentiment emerged without his involvement - and without loyalty to him. While Tariq shared sentiments with the Usulids, the core of the movement was more ideological than personality-based, and his close ties to the Masmudas soured the opinions of high-ranking Andalusi Usulids. The cultural memory of the Al-Mutahirin uprisings and the Blue Army ran strong in Andalusi ideological thought, and while a handful of dissidents seem to have continued to acknowledge Tariq, a mass movement never materialized, with most protesters simply taking an ideological stand of their own volition. More soberingly, no other major landholders took the side of Tariq.

Holed up in Aghmat and operating de facto independent, Izemrasen and Tariq sought out allies in the Maghreb's political class, but found few, particularly with so much of the aristocracy long since invested in maritime trade. By 1543, disappointed by their lack of success with the elite class, they turned inland, to the group known as the Mulatthamin, today's Imuhagh people.[1]

Asmarid expansion into the northern edge of the old Manden Kurufaba had brought with it control over vast swathes of trackless desert, most of which they could never hope to control beyond a few scattered outposts. Real control of these lands lay with the nomadic Mulatthamin tribal confederations. They had contributed some manpower to the original Blue Army, but their impact had been particularly felt in the south, where the so-called Southern Blue Army had dominated Awdaghost and the surrounding area as late as the early 1400s. This loose confederation had fallen apart largely thanks to the activities of proxies of the Simalas, then later through the invasion of the Jeliba[2] bend. At a time when the economy of the Asmarid realm had shifted towards a maritime empire based on trading ports around the world and the culture had shifted to a more cosmopolitan one, the Mulatthamin remained more inclined towards traditional culture and a mix of fundamentalist and revolutionary strains of Islam, reliant on trade in salt, slaves and gold for their existence.

Pushed north from the river by the Zarmas, many of these Mulatthamin had begun to migrate north, back towards the Maghreb. The most important of these groups was led by a man known as Fakhreddin al-Mahdi.

Emerging from obscure origins, Fakhreddin was evidently born Ibrahim ag Baloua among a tribe once located around Awdaghost. Accounts of his life are so fragmentary that most efforts to reconstruct him rest on various rumours reported by enemies or curious onlookers. What is broadly consistent across these accounts is that Ibrahim undertook the hajj in the early 1530s and came back convinced he was the Mahdi, a claim he backed up with an impressive personal charisma and an ability to persuade. By 1543, now going by the name Fakhreddin - "Pride of the Religion" - he had built up a large base of followers on his way north, where his men had occupied the long-declined ruins of Sijilmasa and made nuisances of themselves on the sparsely-trafficked overland trade routes the city once straddled. Followers of Fakhreddin had begun to filter into towns and villages in the Maghreb, preaching the emergence of the Mahdi.

It's at this time that Tariq and Izemrasen seem to have made first contact with Fakhreddin. Tariq must have assumed that he could somehow work around Fakhreddin or otherwise harness his followers to his own ends. The version of Islam Fakhreddin preached was on the extreme edge of the Usulid spectrum, calling for a complete rejection of "innovation," naturalism and outside culture. Fakhreddin viewed Asmarid society as irrevocably corrupted by decadent innovations like printing presses, Chinese silk, honeyed mara[3] and haram things from overseas, and he viewed himself as the man who would roll back that innovation. His theology was highly Zahiri-influenced, entailing not only a rejection of innovation and of empirical deduction as a means of determining truth, but going even further and envisioning the existence of large dhimmi communities as unfit for a Caliphate. The emergence of the Majlis ash-Shura was also seen as an unacceptable innovation that perverted Islam.

Tariq seems to have hoped to bring Fakhreddin into his fold of supporters in the hopes of bolstering his army and making actions against Uthman possible. When Fakhreddin and his supporters made their way to Aghmat in 1544, it seemed that an alliance was nigh. Instead, Fakhreddin set up shop outside the city before staking out a place in the middle of town and preaching to the entire city, allegedly screaming at the top of his lungs for three hours straight. The speech was reported to be so motivating that a substantial portion of Izemrasen's army immediately swore fealty to the Mahdi and left for his camp outside the city.

Whatever actually happened, Fakhreddin seems to have harnessed anti-modernity sentiments among radical Usulids in the southwestern Maghreb and harnessed them into what has come to be known as the Mahdi Army. By the summer of 1544, Fakhreddin had driven Izemrasen and Tariq out of Aghmat and seized the city for himself, then swung west to launch a series of attacks on towns around the ports of Asfi and Anfa, prosperous communities flush with colonial wealth.

Tariq and Izemrasen withdrew higher up into the mountains and holed up at a small ribat in the village of Zerkten, keeping their heads down as Fakhreddin descended on the towns and cities that embodied everything he hated about the Asmarids. These raids could have been seen as a local matter until the Sack of Suwayrah in 1545.[4]

While not the largest trading port on the Maghrebi oceanic coast, Suwayrah had steadily grown through the Crossing Age, rounding into a prosperous seaside community built around one of the better anchorages in the region. The town was unprepared for more than two thousand Mahdi Army followers, mostly on horseback, to descend on it in the largest raid Fakhreddin had yet spearheaded. Contemporary accounts depict the Mahdi Army slaughtering the town's defenders, burning ships at anchor and destroying buildings at harbourside. The town had boasted a modest Golahi Jewish community; Fakhreddin's troops rounded them up and massacred them, accusing them of usury and various other trumped-up crimes against Islam. The few Christians in the community were similarly killed after Fakhreddin demanded they either convert to Islam or die.[5] Andalusi and Berber merchants were variously flogged or executed, and women were forced to don full face covers on pain of punishment.

Fakhreddin did not remain in Suwayrah - after destroying much of the city and leaving a quarter of its population dead, he withdrew inland with an enormous quantity of gold and treasure. Word quickly spread back to Isbili, carried by merchants who had managed to escape by sea in the nick of time. The message found Hajib Uthman fresh off dealing with an assassination attempt spearheaded by two disgruntled scribes, itself a follow-up to a series of smaller-scale riots he'd been obliged to put down or buy off.

Uthman moved quickly to gather a well-equipped force and send it across the Jabal al-Tariq to try and take care of Fakhreddin. This proved more difficult than anticipated. Landing in the spring of 1546, the Asmarid army found itself struggling to bring Fakhreddin to battle at all. While the Asmarids had the advantage of modern weapons, up-to-date equipment and manpower, Fakhreddin's army was heavily cavalry-based and enjoyed extreme mobility in the arid inland regions of the southern Asmarid Maghreb, where the Asmarid troops were challenged to operate for any length of time. Fakhreddin had more than enough horses and camels and more than enough experience operating in the Sahara to make campaigning there second nature. Any time the Asmarids would attempt to close in on him, Fakhreddin could simply melt into the desert and attack their supply lines until they had no choice but to either starve or withdraw.

The army did achieve successes in 1547. That year, a scouting force reached Zerkten and uncovered the whereabouts of Tariq. An ensuing raid resulted in Izemrasen's capture, though Tariq escaped and fled, heading east. Izemrasen would be shipped back to Isbili and imprisoned. The Asmarids would retake Aghmat later that year and replace Izemrasen and the Mahdist occupation government with a regional supporter. Despite these victories, however, Fakhreddin remained at large and as much of a menace as ever, waging less a traditional war and more a grinding war of hit-and-fades designed to run the Asmarid army ragged.

SUMMARY:
1544: Deposed Hajib Tariq attempts to forge an alliance with Fakhreddin al-Mahdi, a prominent Mulatthamin zealot migrating north from Subsahara. Instead Fakhreddin all but hijacks the Usulid movement in the southern Maghreb and goes on to kick Tariq out of Aghmat.
1544: The Mahdist War begins.
1545: The Sack of Suwayrah. The Mahdi Army invades the port of Suwayrah, slaughters religious minorities and elites and imposes an arch-rigorist version of Sharia before withdrawing to the outskirts. The Asmarids begin to mobilize a full response.
1547: The Asmarids chase a beaten Tariq out of Zerkten and go on to retake Aghmat from the Mahdi Army, but struggle to bring Fakhreddin and his forces to real battle.

[1] The Tuaregs.
[2] The Niger River.
[3] Coffee.
[4] The Arabic form of Essaouira, Morocco.
[5] This is a highly atypical approach, but has a parallel in the atrocities committed by the Almohads, who also rejected the idea of dhimmi as acceptable. If you doubted Fakhreddin was a heel, doubt no more.

 

[Denliner]

Very glad to see this timeline back after so long.

So far the Maghreb is in a bit of a mess with Tariq trying to usurp Uthman's position as Hajib in Ishbili, but I was definitely surprised that a third party not only subverted Tariq's expectations of them being an ally but also overthrew him as the major threat in the Maghreb (in a hilarious "Oh balls, I might be over my head moment").

I really appreciate how the events surrounding the fall of the Mali Empire, the rise of the Zarmas, and the activities of the Asmarids and their Simala allies have led to this movement to happen, but obviously no one in the urbanized regions of the Maghreb and Al-Andalus wants the return of "Al-Mutahirin", or worse. With the Maghreb being more valuable than ever as a breadbasket and a major trading hub (not to mention the homeland of the Asmarid dynasty), this is a part of the empire that Uthman can't afford to lose to Fakhreddin.

Can't wait to see how the Asmarids deal with this new threat in future posts.

Fakhreddin viewed Asmarid society as irrevocably corrupted by decadent innovations like printing presses, Chinese silk, honeyed mara[3] and haram things from overseas, and he viewed himself as the man who would roll back that innovation.

Why is coffee supposed to be an innovation? Kinda weird that he has a bone to pick with a drink that was consumed by Muslims for centuries, even with the addition of sugar.

I'd probably understand Fakhreddin's viewpoint a bit more if the Asmarids started to develop a decadent and complex ceremony around the consumption of drinks like chocolate, coffee, and tea (with milk, spices, sugar, etc.), since at that point, it's just the rich wasting their money for selfish needs.

The few Christians in the community were similarly killed after Fakhreddin demanded they either convert to Christianity or die.[5]

This is presumably a typo.

[5] This is a highly atypical approach, but has a parallel in the atrocities committed by the Almohads, who also rejected the idea of dhimmi as acceptable. If you doubted Fakhreddin was a heel, doubt no more.

Well that's going to ensure that the Jews and Christians are firmly on Uthman's side, since there's no other faction to turn to that will ensure their rights like the moderate/reformist Ghimarids.

Makes me think if whether the possible increase in population of Christians in the Maghreb ITTL (according to our previous speculations on the topic) will make a difference as Christians lend their support to Uthman and the Majlis.

 

[Planet of Hats]

Why is coffee supposed to be an innovation? Kinda weird that he has a bone to pick with a drink that was consumed by Muslims for centuries, even with the addition of sugar.

I'd probably understand Fakhreddin's viewpoint a bit more if the Asmarids started to develop a decadent and complex ceremony around the consumption of drinks like chocolate, coffee, and tea (with milk, spices, sugar, etc.), since at that point, it's just the rich wasting their money for selfish needs.

To be blunt, because Fakhreddin is outrageously extreme.

Fakhreddin doesn't like the current trend of mixing stuff from the Gharb al-Aqsa into the coffee. It does not matter to him that vanilla is not haram, for ex. He just sees it as scary foreign stuff and therefore bad. He also sees coffee as addictive. The real reason, however, is that he thinks tea is better and won't listen to anyone who thinks that coffee and tea are both based and halal.