The decade following the Treaty of Granada brought a profound tonal shift to the Emirate. The frantic, high-stakes panic of an impending crusade dissolved into a golden age of civic execution. For the first time since my arrival in 1479, the hammer blows of the military forges slowed, replaced by the quiet hum of an empire learning how to live in the future it had built.
Granada did not transform into the soot-choked, exploitative landscape of the Western Industrial Revolution. Guided by the warnings of the future I carried on my laptop, and rooted deeply in Islamic traditions of urban stewardship, we forged a clean, beautiful, electrified society, an Islamic Victorian era without the Victorian horrors.
When European industrialization eventually happened in my original timeline, it brought horrific urban squalor, London’s rivers became open sewers, and coal ash choked the lungs of the working class. The Emir’s early environmental veto completely spared Granada from this fate. Instead of centralized coal complexes, we leaned into our decentralized green grid, scaling up what Andalusians had already mastered for centuries: advanced water engineering.
Medieval Granada already possessed a sophisticated network of acequias (gravity-fed water channels) and public hammams (bathhouses). The House of Wisdom modernized this by deploying small, electric water pumps powered by our river turbines. We built closed-loop ceramic sewage systems that isolated human waste, treating it safely outside urban centers to prevent the disease epidemics common in contemporary Europe.
Street illumination expanded rapidly. The old city squares, once dark and dangerous at night, were softly lit by overhead incandescent bulbs. The architecture remained classic, intricate Moorish tilework, sweeping horseshoe arches, and lush courtyard gardens, but now, clean copper wiring ran seamlessly through plaster walls, providing light to homes, hospitals, and public libraries.
Because I respected local anxieties regarding the printing press, we never forced its implementation. Instead, we institutionalized the copyist profession. The House of Wisdom funded massive scribe academies where hundreds of trained writers systematically transcribed my knowledge into beautifully bound, standardized textbooks on medicine, electrical engineering, and agricultural chemistry, some even has its own version by the scribes, notes from engineers who discovered a way to improve the schematics, a massive breakthroughs in medicine too after we shifted our focus from warfare to other fields.
With the borders of the Emirate secured and Castile-Aragon diplomatically boxed in by the Treaty of 1492, the expansionist energy of the Iberian peninsula completely transformed. The historical Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the New World was effectively put on hold. Castile lacked the strategic freedom to finance massive imperial fleets, while we possessed a massive technological advantage that we chose to direct toward trade and exploration.
We developed the world’s first steam-powered fleet. This wasn't a reckless, overnight sprint; it was the quiet culmination of a covert naval research and development program we had secretly established in the shipyards of Almería and Málaga back in late 1492, right after the ink dried on our treaty.
The heavy engineering expertise acquired during the Al-Burraq armored wagon program made the transition to naval engineering remarkably smooth. The principle Tariq's students carried over was simple in theory, brutal in execution: heat water in a sealed iron boiler until it becomes high-pressure steam, then channel that expanding steam through valves into a piston cylinder. As the steam pushes the piston, the piston turns a crankshaft, converting the straight-line force of expanding gas into rotational power. The same rotational power that once turned the Leviathan's iron wheels now turned a ship's propeller shaft. The genius wasn't the concept; Granada's engineers already understood pressure and combustion from their gunpowder work. The genius was in the boiler welds, the valve timing, and the metallurgy needed to contain steam pressure that would tear apart lesser iron.
I explicitly stepped in to steer our naval architects away from the side-mounted paddle wheels that dominated early nineteenth-century maritime history. While paddle wheels were mechanically easier to construct, the marine engineering files on my laptop warned us of the Atlantic's brutal swells. A heavy oceanic roll would plunge one wheel deep into the waves while lifting the other completely into the air, causing uneven resistance that would violently wrench and snap our newly forged crankshafts.
Instead, we chose to leap straight to the Screw Propeller. The construction of these vessels required an unprecedented level of precision from the shipyards of Almería and Málaga; propeller casting, the stern gland seal, and closed-loop condenser.
Khalid al-Muhandis’s Khalid al-Muhandis’s metallurgical team utilized our bell-founding techniques to cast massive, three-bladed bronze propellers. Bronze was non-negotiable; iron would have pitted and corroded to ruin within weeks in the salty Atlantic. Each blade was meticulously ground and balanced by hand to ensure smooth rotation without vibrating the ship to pieces.
The true engineering bottleneck was structural: running a spinning iron shaft from the indoor engine room straight out through the rear hull, completely submerged beneath the waterline. To prevent the ocean from flooding the ship, Tariq’s team designed a brilliant stuffing box. They packed a bronze sleeve around the rotating shaft tightly with layers of hemp rope saturated in high-density tallow and beeswax. This created a watertight barrier that allowed the shaft to spin freely at high speeds while keeping the hull perfectly bone-dry.
By the end of 1496, our years of parallel shipyard work yielded four spectacular steam-powered frigates. These were engineered as iron-ribbed, hybrid caravels. They proudly maintained their majestic lateen sails to capture the Atlantic trade winds for long-distance fuel efficiency, but could engage the screw propellers to push through doldrums, navigate treacherous currents, or outmaneuver any obstacle. Meanwhile, local merchants utilized our research to build smaller, paddle-wheeled steamships optimized specifically for the calmer, shallower trade routes of the Mediterranean Sea.
Because our mission was driven by the House of Wisdom's thirst for mapping, diplomacy, and resource trading rather than the desperate, gold-hungry conquest of historical Christendom, our initial interactions with the civilizations of the Americas took a completely different path.
We weren’t expanding our realms within the Iberian Peninsula. Instead, we reached the Americas first, establishing strategic outposts and eventually a network of cooperative colonies that strictly respected native territory and sovereignty. One of the primary ongoing projects of The Scribe Academy was the compilation of a massive, living dictionary of Native American languages and tribal customs. In return, the steady flow of trade from these outposts provided Granada with vital new resources, botanical samples, and raw materials that triggered further industrial and medical breakthroughs at home.
The first Atlantic fleet landed in Brazil in 1498. The second fleet mapped North America in 1500, dropping anchor in what my original timeline called Newfoundland. The third fleet arrived in the Caribbean in 1501, establishing a peaceful trade hub in modern-day Puerto Rico.
The fourth frigate was deliberately kept at home. Heavily armored and fitted with our most advanced, long-range breech-loading artillery, it remained stationed off the southern coast, a silent, floating deterrent that ensured no foreign empire dared challenge Granada's waters.
By the turn of the century, I celebrated my 44th birthday, and it would still decades to go until my portal to go back to my original timeline opened. I would be 84 years old by the time that portal cracked open. I could no longer afford to be the single, indispensable pillar holding up Granada's future. The House of Wisdom had to be institutionalized so that it could survive without me.
We systematically restructured the Order into self-governing, meritocratic academic divisions. Khalid al-Muhandis took absolute charge of the mechanical and metallurgical faculties, embedding precision manufacturing protocols into standardized curricula. Tariq ibn Sami assumed leadership over the electrical and chemical engineering branches, managing the safety grids and battery manufacturing lines. There is also Zaki ibn Barir that is leading in medicinal research and hospital improvements. With the Order expanding, the Emir also formed a Ethical Development division primarily filled with philosophers and thinkers, the leading figure is Samir Al-Hakim, mainly a Moorish architect that spent his time mostly at Islamic geometry and responsible in the current beauty of the Emirate’s landscape, is now important person that would steer the Order’s direction into more enlightened one. While I keep myself just an advisor most of the time.
Most importantly, we secured the Oracle. The physical MacBook Pro, its battery cycles strictly rationed, was permanently retired to a custom-built, reinforced subterranean vault deep beneath the foundations of the Comares Tower. It was sealed under a dual-key security protocol held jointly by the Emir and the Grand Scholar of the House of Wisdom. It was no longer a daily tool, but a sacred archive, only to be powered up via our custom solar socket in moments of extreme societal crisis or conceptual dead-ends. The knowledge transfer had successfully transitioned from silicon back to paper. The books written by our scribes were now the true engine of the realm.
With the foundation of the House of Wisdom firmly secured and institutionalized, the final years of the century witnessed an extraordinary phenomenon: the domestic overflow of our technology. For the first time, innovation wasn't dictated by military necessity. The knowledge we had unlocked began to filter down into the suqs, homes, and daily lives of ordinary Granadan citizens.
Granada was transforming from the inside out. It wasn't just an empire with an advanced army; it was becoming a completely unique, highly advanced civilization.
Under the brilliant leadership of Zaki ibn Barir, our medical division completely bypassed centuries of lethal medical ignorance. Using the optical manuals copied from my digital library, Zaki’s teams worked with local glassblowers to construct the realm's first compound microscopes.
For the first time in human history, human eyes saw microbes. Zaki didn't just accept this as a curiosity; he weaponized it. We introduced early pasteurization, mandating the controlled heating of milk and public water supplies in urban sectors, which nearly eradicated infant mortality rates from waterborne pathogens.
Zaki’s hospitals implemented strict cleanliness protocols. Surgeons washed their hands and instruments in distilled alcohol and weak carbolic acid solutions before operations. More miraculously for the patients, the alchemists successfully distilled high-purity ether. The horrific screams that historically echoed through medieval medical tents were replaced by quiet, peaceful sleep as tumors were removed and bones were reset without pain.
In 1495, a brilliant young alchemist named Rashid ibn Wafi achieved a breakthrough that captured the imagination of the entire palace. While experimenting with light-sensitive silver salts in a darkroom, he accidentally noticed that a polished copper plate coated with silver nitrate retained the silhouette of the window frame when exposed to the sun. That was one of the moment we had to go back to the vault to look for the information in my MacBook to further help Rashid’s invention as the first camera is already invented in my timeline before.
Working together, Rashid and I refined this into a practical Daguerreotype-style photographic process. We enclosed these light-sensitive plates inside wooden boxes fitted with finely ground glass lenses. The scribes officially termed the invention Al-Rasm al-Shamsi, The Sun Painting. For a society that deeply respected visual art but maintained religious reservations regarding traditional portraiture, these perfect, chemically captured landscapes of the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada were viewed as the ultimate celebration of natural truth.
Khalid al-Muhandis’s mechanical workshops, no longer strained by the constant production of muskets, turned their high-precision metallurgy toward civilian manufacturing.
A sewing machine! We introduced a simple, foot-treadle-powered mechanical sewing machine using a double-stitch shuttle mechanism. The effect on ordinary people was immediate. The textile workers in the suqs, who previously spent days hand-stitching silk and wool garments, could now produce beautifully bound clothing in a fraction of the time. The domestic economy boomed, and clothing became affordable for even the poorest citizens.
To assist the Scribe Academy without violating their cultural preference for handwritten calligraphy, Khalid's team designed a mechanical script-indexer. It wasn't a rigid Western typewriter; it was a beautifully balanced, lever-based mechanical arm that allowed scribes to index and print standard geometric borders and common script headings rapidly, saving their wrists for the intricate textual work.
We built Edison’s original, The Phonograph, purely mechanical sound-recording cylinder. Using a large brass horn, a flexible parchment diaphragm, and a steel needle, we etched acoustic vibrations directly into rotating cylinders of hardened beeswax. The Sultan was brought to tears the first time he heard a perfect, mechanical playback of a master Quranic reciter’s voice echoing out of a brass horn without a human being in the room.
Tariq ibn Sami’s electrical grid was no longer just powering watchtowers and telegraphs; it was entering the domestic sphere, overseen by the aesthetic eye of Samir Al-Hakim to ensure our infrastructure never turned the city ugly.
While true compressor-based refrigeration was still locked behind advanced metallurgy, we utilized our lead-acid battery grids to power small, silent DC electric fans inside traditional Andalusian ice houses. By regulating airflow through underground channels, we created highly efficient evaporative cooling chambers, allowing fresh meat, dairy, and fruits from our American trade outposts to be preserved in the heat of summer.
The Local Telephone (Al-Hatif) is developed In 1499, Tariq (based on our effort to improve the communication system while still locked by Vacuum tube discovery) successfully built a functional, short-range carbon-microphone telephone system. By packing finely crushed charcoal granules behind a thin iron diaphragm connected to a copper wire circuit, we could transmit distinct human speech. Initially, the lines were limited to linking the Alhambra’s command bunker to the central House of Wisdom workshops and the port authority offices in Almería. Hearing a colleague's voice instantly from miles away fundamentally shifted how the leadership managed the daily affairs of the state.
Deep within the electrical labs, Tariq’s most advanced student, Zayd ibn Nour and his team were already experimenting with pulling high vacuums inside glass tubes using our refined mechanical pumps, catching early glimpses of thermionic emission. The seeds for true electronics were being planted decades ahead of schedule.
By 1502, the Emirate of Granada was a shining, anomalous beacon of light on the global stage. A citizen walking the cobblestone streets at night walked under electric illumination, wore clothes sewn on mechanical linkages, and could visit a hospital free of filth and cholera. We had created an era of unparalleled comfort and progress, proving that humanity could step into the industrial age with clean air, clean water, and deep ethical restraint.
By 1502, the frantic cadence of my early years felt like a half-remembered dream. For the first time since 1479, I actually had the luxury to sit in stillness.
I spent my evenings by the arched window of my tower room, looking out over the geometric beauty of the gardens. The room around me perfectly encapsulated the world I had built: a beautifully woven Persian rug on the floor, shelves lined with hand-inked textbooks on electronics and metallurgy, and a single, warm incandescent light bulb casting a steady glow from the carved stucco ceiling.
I’ve spent 23 years building this industrial ecosystem, for Granada, to avoid their certain doom that happened in my timeline.
A messenger arrived with concerning letter at the court about possible Papal State’s new crusade against us. All of this peaceful development only to be met with another war as if our effort was in vain. The Emir as he looks disappointed, ordered us to build more ironclad or even battleship to counter this as a way to discourage them. It’s possible that we had to unlock the vault one more time to gain more knowledge of possible weaponry improvement to be added to our arsenal. We might face another bloody war from simply existing.