ooking at the map of the Islamic world in the tenth century AD, multiple iterations of “kinship” present themselves, as three “cousins”— the Abbasids, the Fatimids and the Umayyads— divided the mulk into competing caliphates. In its ubiquity and fluidity, kinship, alerts us to how processes of legitimization in the three caliphates utilized shared claims, but also, to how each, separately and in competition with one another, advanced unique elements in their caliphal model. Of these, the paper focuses the Umayyads of al-Andalus, who almost two centuries after their rule in Damascus ended (in 750AD), announced a new caliphate in Córdoba (in 929AD). The Umayyads highlighted their Qurash?/Umayyad, and at times Marw?nid, lineage. They carefully reused the argument of first Umayyad caliph in Damascus, namely, their kinship to “the martyred” ruler ‘Uthman b. ‘Aff?n (d. 656AD), a Qurash? elite, and twice the son-in-law of the Prophet, for whom they renewed the initial pledge of deferred rescue (nusra) and revenge (thar?t) by building a maqs?r? in the Great Mosque of Córdoba, housing a copy of the Qur’?n, said to have four drops of his blood. Consulting four adab and historiographical works, the paper looks at the Umayyad venture as a product of the tenth century, and finds that kinship, as an argument for political legitimacy, was understood as a framework for constructing a model of rulership within which intimate adherence to Arabo-Islamic cultural norms was claimed. By doing so, I further show, kinship helped anchor novel features the Umayyads introduced to the caliphal model by conflating their Umayyad lineage with selective political and cultural genealogies.