Only the Wahhabi Sect Honours Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah

Muslims may remember that Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah’s army massacred the family of the Prophet.  But the story did not end there.  There were the rape and massacre of the people of Madina and the desecration of the Prophet’s mosque.

After the massacres of Karbala and Madina, the accursed army of Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah marched toward Makkah, where the people had also revolted against him.  They were outraged at the murder of the Ahl al-Bayt in Karbala and Madina.  Under the leadership of the swahabi, Sayyidina Abu Bakr ‘Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr, they had put up a competent defence.  Since Yazid’s army could not enter Makkah, they set up siege engines and shot fireballs of pitch into the city.  Many worshippers in the Haram were killed by these.  One of these fireballs hit the Ka’bah itself and set it on fire.  Due to the fighting, it remained on fire for a significant amount of time, causing a large part of it to be burnt.

The Battle of al-Harrah, which preceded this siege, remains one of the best documented atrocities in early Islamic history, cited across both classical tarikh and modern historiography as a turning point in how the ummah viewed Yazid’s legitimacy.  Sunni chroniclers writing centuries apart, from Imam Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir ath-Thabari onward, converge on the same core account: Madina’s own defenders, many of them children of the Prophet’s own Companions, were cut down by an army sent from Damascus, over a matter of political consolidation rather than any theological necessity.

Sayyidina Abu Bakr ‘Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr’s Defiant Rebuilding

Sayyidina ibn az-Zubayr eventually rebuilt the Ka’bah, but only after he left it for months in that condition so that people could witness what Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah and his soldiers had done.  They were an army of apostates.  Hundreds of swahabah were killed in this attack, the best of believers, and hundreds of their wives and daughters were raped.  Not even the Byzantines, the Mongols, and the Crusaders managed this level of outrage in the Haramayn.

The historical record clarifies one detail worth noting for accuracy: Yazid died in 683 CE, shortly after the first siege of Makkah, and it was under his successors, culminating in the reign of ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and his general al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, that Sayyidina ibn az-Zubayr was finally defeated and killed in 692 CE, his body crucified and later burnt.  The chain of command changed hands.  The Umayyad dynasty’s culpability, launched by Yazid’s own order to march on the Haramayn in the first place, did not.

The Ummah’s Verdict, and Its Consequences

The ummah never forgave the Umayyads for this.  Their dynasty lasted less than a hundred years.  The black banner of rebellion was raised in the east, and the Abbasids swept to power.  The bodies of the Umayyad rulers were dug up and desecrated, their tombs destroyed.  Their male members were killed to the point of extinction in Sham and the Hijaz, and they only managed to survive by fleeing to the far west and leading the opening of al-Andalus.

The Abbasid Revolution of 750 CE stands as the clearest historical data point available for how thoroughly the ummah rejected the Umayyad legacy.  A dynasty that had ruled the entirety of the Islamic world for nearly a century was dismantled so completely that its surviving members had to cross into Iberia to rebuild any political foothold at all, founding the Emirate of Córdoba under ‘Abd ar-Rahman ad-Dakhil in 756 CE.  A political collapse of that scale, sustained across generations, is not the fate of a dynasty remembered with ambivalence.  It is the fate of one the ummah actively worked to erase.

Sunni and Shi’ah Scholarship in Rare Agreement

In the books of our scholars, whether in Sunni or Shi’ah Islam, Yazid’s name is cursed.  He is declared a kafir, an apostate, and his sins are detailed, from his sleeping with young boys, to his constant drunkenness, to his debauchery and disrespect for the Prophet.  Imam Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Hanbal forbade any ahadits transmitted through Yazid from ever being recorded.  Imam Shihab ad-Din Abu al-Fadhl Ahmad ibn ‘Ali ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani wrote that loving and glorifying Yazid is not done except by a heretic of void belief.  This is not a sectarian talking point confined to one branch of the ummah.  It is a rare point of convergence between Sunni and Shia scholarship, separated by thirteen centuries of otherwise bitter disagreement, arriving at the identical verdict.

And yet, there is a faction that praises Yazid, that claims he was in the right, and has even named places in his honour.  That faction is the heretical Wahhabi sect.  Only a kafir would honour another kafir.  That a self-identified reformist movement, born in eighteenth-century Najd under Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, would find itself standing against Imam ibn Hanbal, against Imam ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani, against the entire weight of Sunni consensus on this single question, is not a minor theological footnote.  It is the clearest available proof of how far that movement has drifted from the very Hanbali tradition it claims descent from, defending a man the founder of that tradition would not permit into his own ahadits collection.