Kahoqiya, Pashalik of Kahoqiya
Ramadan/Mares, 1109 (March, 1698 A.D.
)
To Soufiane, his eight year-old grandson, Seifeddine bin Ahmed, was the spitting image of his own elder brother Ahmed, martyred more than a half century prior in Tenoqtitlan by the Crusaders during the Conquest of Atlantis. After his son Ahmed’s placement as an administrator of trade at the Pasha’s court, Soufiane looked forward to traveling north to Kahoqiya to visit his son, and grandson Seiffedine. This year, the travel during Ramadan had been difficult, but the pious elder maintained his fast. The grandson of a refugee and later refugeed himself, like many of his generation, Soufiane was always settled, skeptical, and stoic in his world-view. Nevertheless, victory over the Spaniards in New Mexico and advances against the Jesuits in the forests north of Bayouk had softened him, if only a little.
Soufiane and his wife had been particularly stern parents as they raised their family in exile in Bayouk. Like most Atlanteans, they were keen to keep the stoicism and nobleness of their culture alive. However, as with most grandparents, their approach had softened with the arrival of a new generation in the family. The eldest son, Abu Seiffedine, had in fact married a Muladid woman, Nita Biscaino, of mixed Morisco and Adite origins, much to the chagrin of others in Atlantean high society. As such, Soufiane spoke Arabic with his grandson, who's knowledge of Berber was, understandably, limited due to his Arabic-speaking mother. Amongst other Atlantean families, however, most in fact, the Berber languages was zealously guarded in their homes and amongst their social circles.
“
Dada?” Seiffedine inquisitively asked his grandfather without any formalities.
“
Yes, azizi?”
“
The Navarrans, is it true they are Christians?”
To the elderly Atlantean, it seemed at first clear that the Europeans who lived throughout the north of Bayouk worshipped that most infamous of idols – the cross. But the more the octogenarian pondered the question, the more he realized not only its unclear answer, but also the repercussions it had on this younger generation, fully and thoroughly of New World stock.
Since the first Huguenots arrived in Bayouk over a century and a half ago, Bayouk had been either a destination or a point on a migration of Gallic and Iberian Protestants. Many of those more integrated in Moorish society were from Navarre, and had spoke Castilian alongside the Moriscos they had emigrated with, and like their counterparts, had adopted Arabic language and customs; their intellectuals maintaining Castilian as well. Their precedent had led to their French Huguenot kinsmen being likewise labeled “
Navarrans” by the Muslims of Bayouk. Yet, there existed many differences between the two groups.
While not all, many Huguenots married amongst themselves and lived in forts, and often traveled to the lands of the Haudenosaunee to trade and many would eventually stay to settle as later waves of migrants traveled to the Americas with the intention of joining the Haudenosaunee in their purge of the Catholic French in exchange for land and freedom. The Navarrans, however, lived amongst their Muslim neighbors, married amongst them, and over a century and half in a Muslim sea, had developed a more puritan and unitarian theology. While in the dialect of Bayouk they were often called
nabraween, or Navarrans; these Arabized Protestants, largely of Iberian stock but many of Adite and African lineage as well, preferred to refer to themselves as
muwahidoun al-massih- Messianic monotheists.
“
The Navarrans are Christians- they are People of the Book, ya weldi,” he responded to his grandson wisely. “
From where comes these words?”
“
Then why do they not seek to destroy Islam like the other Crusaders?”
And then Soufiane realized where this had come from. Since the first Resurrection[1], the Islamic wars of conquest against Catholic Spain in the New World, nearly two decades ago in New Mexico and
Jizan[2], popular sentiment against the Catholic Spaniards as “
Crusaders” had seen the denouncement of Spaniards reach new highs. Coupled with the incursions of French Jesuits and the Haudenosaunee Ascendancy in the
Paidenau[3] region north of Bayouk, certain scholars in Bayouk had spread treatises degrading Spaniards, Frenchmen and Catholics in general as so degenerate and derived from “True Christianity” that they were no longer followers of the Messiah in the monotheistic “
People of the Book” tradition, but rather infidel polytheists, lacking protection or rights under Islam.
The presence of Calvinists and Huguenots amongst Bayouk’s allies and populations had seen the popular conception of Christianity, in the Muslims eyes, transferred to the Protestants. To Soufiane’s generation, there was no question that the Spaniards and their blasphemous Catholicism were the enemy; but it would have seemed impossible to reject their Christianity. Yet over the past three decades in Bayouk, such a phenomenon had exactly taken place.
Near
Kahoqiya, Pashalik of Kahoqiya
Emirate of Bayouk
Rabia Althani/Yunyu, 1121 A.H. (June, 1709 A.D.
)
For three years now, Seifeddine had considered René as his brother. The only son of his father, the Huguenot boy from the fort would had first left his fort in the woods to study in the local
teboshkali[4] in Talah Baduqa[5], had excelled and been sent to the largest city in the north – Kahoqiya – to the
kamlekak[6] there, the highest and most prestigious center for the education of youth in all of the north. Like many Navarrese Protestants and the few Huguenots who integrated into Moorish society, the Atlantean tradition schools were preferred over the local madrassas under the control of the local
qadi, for their traditions of equality and humility.
It was at the
kamlekak at Kahoqiya that René Jean Calvin-Dubois, later known as Al Nabrawi, had first met the young Muslim named Seifeddine, the son of an Atlantean administrator at Kahoqiya. There were not many Atlanteans in Kahoqiya, and there were fewer Huguenots. The two young boys excelled in their studies, and came to be particularly close: the young Muslim having no brothers, and the young Huguenot living alone at the school by charity of the imams and professors; on one of René’s fathers first visits, he quickly approved to the proposal of Ahmed bin Soufiane, the father of Seifeddine, the house and provide for René.
At the
kamlekak, or in the fields and meadows with the other youth, the two were inseparable. They particularly enjoyed attending the
la’ab albaroud, or gunpowder game performances[7]. Consisting of a group of tens of horse riders, the chevaliers would race forward, in a synchronizing charge, in a straight path at the end, firing many rounds at the same time into the sky so that one single, loud shot is heard. Usually a part of wedding celebrations, they plays were popular as well for the
moussem (festivals celebrating the “gates” or beginnings of the seasons,) celebrations of the harvest, the festivals celebrating the collection of the maple sap[8], the Birth of the Prophet, and the two Eids as well. The Arabized Iberian Protestants, the Navarrans, also often performed their own plays during for Easter and during Christmastide; in Kahoqiya in particular, the local
serba, or regional group who performed the plays, contained many Navarrans.
Entertaining pastimes were not how the adolescents spent the majority of their time. Both issued from traditional pious and proud families, the two were well-read and in particular had taken interest in the Kahoqiya
council of correspondence, one of several councils in the five largest cities of Bayouk (Kahoqiya, Mahdia, Maqbara, Matagorda and Medora) to between the mercantile and agricultural communities and elites in opposition to edicts and rulings of Mahdia-appointed qadis.
These five cities represented the centers of Moorish New World society[9]:
Kahoqiya was, by far, the second largest city and had long-opposed domination imposed by the Moroccan-appointed emir in Mahdia;
Maqbara was the largest Muslim society outside of Bayouk, being the capital and chief settlement of the Kadwani Confederation and its main center of trade with Bayouk;
Matagorda was the largest city in the Jewish Marches and a primary Caribbean port and mercantile capital from where derived most inland trade with New Spain; while
Medora, originally an Adite settlement who’s cooperation allowed for Moorish settlement at Mahdia and into the New World, and was traditionally the “Second City” of lower Bayouk. While
Mahdia remained dominated by the judicial and ruling class as well as
Magharaba (Moroccan-born administrators, elites and merchants[10]), it was also home the Atlanteans, and the
Umayyad Madrassa[11] – both of which were bastions of opposition to the status quo in Bayouk since the assumption of direct control by Morocco and the monopolization of power by the Mudéjar.
Initially formed to address particular problems (the first, in Kahoqiya, to complain about the large tributes and rations demanded by the Emir from the northern harvests to supply the army against the Spaniards), by the early XVIII-century, the councils of correspondence had become permanent groupings of complaint and opposition to the rule of the
qadis, attracting intellectuals, merchants, land-owners as well as representatives of nomadic Muslim Adite tribes- most important among whom were councilors to the emir of the Kadwani Confederation.
“
What does your father make of the Sharifians’ ascent in Fez?” René asked his closest companion as the two reclined under a large oak tree on the edge of a pasture not far from the city’s gates. The two were through and through city boys, but, as most youth of the north, they felt most at ease outside of the walls.
“
Nothing can stop the raise of the Pentapolis,” Seiffedine responded. “
My father says centuries of corrupt dynastic rule is to blame not only for the instability in Fes, but throughout the Oummah…”
René was surprised. While he certainly harbored similar opinions, not only about Morocco, but had heard his relatives speak the same of the tyrannical rule of French monarchs as well – he was surprised Seiffedine so openly spoke about his father’s intolerability of the dynasty, despite being an administrator.
“
He does not feel hypocritical then, as a minor vizier for trade?”
“
My father feels it is best to be on the inside, to know thy enemy you know René. I think the truth is with his opinions.”
René nodded in agreement. Indeed many spoke of “the time” or “the near future:” not only for when the de facto Alaouite rulers would overthrow the Saadians properly; but also for when a rift would come between the colony’s diverse elites and merchants on one hand, and the co-opted qadis who enforced Alaouite rule on the other. The Alaouite dynasty had given little support to Bayouk during the war with Spain in New Mexico, and it was rumored Spanish merchants freely traded in Moroccan ports. While the Alaouites, like many opposition dynasties before them in Morocco, sought the backing and power of the Moors’ traditional Iberian enemy; old grudges died hard, and throughout Bayouk, even amongst the Mudéjar judicial elite, many decried the cooling of relations with Spain. Amongst Atlanteans, normalization would be a red line: any normalization with Spain and the Spanish New World would be considered intolerable.
“
But truly, could the Pentapolis govern Bayouk independent of the sultanate in Fes? With what legitimacy can a Muslim rule without the authority of the sultan?” René inquired. In the circles the boys frequented, (Zahirid zawayas, the Atlantean kamelekak in Kahoqiya, etc.) many spoke of “
the renaissance of the Pentapolis,” a name those who opposed the despotic and “immoral” rule of the Moroccan governors and their judicial allies gave to self-rule, referring to the Greco-Semitic Pentaopolis of Cyrenaica of pre-Islamic Barbary whom Atlantean philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition praised second only to Carthage for their governance. It had also become a codeword for the organized and mounting economic, political, and theological opposition.
Seifeddine did not know the answer, but he hard what his father and his father’s friends spoke of late into the early mornings in his home. They spoke of Muslim lands in far away countries- many, no, most Muslims outside of the temporal domains of the Caliph were ruled by their own rulers.
As-Sultanah, the authority, was not only legitimate if it derived from the sultanate in Fes. In Arabia, India and Songhai other sultans ruled. But this was not the most daring of presumptions and ideas discussed in secrecy and privacy late at night by candlelight amongst men from many walks of life in Bayouk united in opposition to the judicial class’s rule.
Seiffedine moved closer to the young man he was closest to in the whole world, for all intents and purposes, his brother. Reaching his arms around the young Huguenots shoulders, he spoke in a low voice, lest the deer, squirrels or trees be aligned to the status quo of the qadis:
“
My father says the legitimacy of the Pentapolis derives from the consensus of the Believers who are sound of mind, and furthermore that freeborn Muslims, as in the time of the pious ancestors, need not and should not submit to the authority of dynasties or kings. Rather, that freeborn Muslims outside of the realms of the Caliph can and ought to elect amongst themselves temporal authority for their own administration, common good, as well as guardianship and protection of the People of the Book therein residing…”
__________
[1] The Resurrection: Term used by Muslims historians ITTL to refer to the period of Muslim expansion at the expense of Catholics, primarily by the Moors of the New World against the Spaniards, i.e. kind of a "Reconquista" but not, exactly.
[2]
Jizan: Al-Barquq (*Albuquerque) and environs, Moorish New Mexico (see post
n°64)
[3]
Paidenau: From "Pays-d'en-haut," term used in Arabic and English to refer to the areas of the Great Lakes and further northwest; *Wisconsin, *the U.P., *Minnesota, etc.
[4]
teboshkali: Azteco-Berber schools for the populace (see
post n°50)
[5] See the introduction narrative of René Al Nabrawi, post
n°33
[6]
kamlekak: Azteco-Berber schools for elites (see [4])
[7] Known in Arabic as "
la'ab al-baroud", in Berber as "
tbourida" and in French and English as "
Fantasia" (Link to video)
[8]
Sugar Eid: See
post n°86
[9]
Map of the Cities and Settlements of Bayouk: This map is an older attempt before I addressed the issue of the French and the English in the *Southeastern USA, but it shows the cities mentioned. I hope to have a more detailed map and post on Bayouk soon.
[10] See
post n°50 on the Demographics of Bayouk
[11] See post on the
Umayyad Madrassa (n°50, point [10] as well.)
