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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Battle of Harrah The Medina Uprising; a Right or Wrong Movement? The properness or improperness of a socio-political movement is examinable from various aspects, and as long as the direction and the viewpoint of judgment are not specified, any judgment will remain in ambiguity.

First, it is to be clarified that whether properness and improperness is meant to be legitimacy or the lack of it, or whether it is meant to be well-timed, efficacious, or ineffectual. The Degree of Legitimacy of the Medina Uprising The legitimacy of a social movement is dependent upon several factors including the motivations, goals, methods, prevailing circumstances, and conditions.

What is obtained from the existing historical sources - and we already mentioned some aspects of it in previous pages - is that the main and explicitly expressed motivation of the pioneers in Medina movement has been a religious, reformist, and human one, as 'Abd Allāh b.

Hanzala, the most distinguished figure among the leaders and commanders of the uprising of Medina, would frequently talk about religious values while encouraging the people to revolt and resist, and rejected Yazīd as deserving to rule over Muslims because of his vices, corruption, and incompetence.19 Medinans' efforts in preventing their properties from being taken to the Umayyid court in Syria could have been rated as a means to express their overall dissatisfaction with the Umayyid's rule, rather than an economic motivation to battle for.

As a matter of fact, whispers of dissatisfaction with the Yazīd's Caliphate had begun long before this event; and it was such expressions of discontent and turbulence that forced Yazīd to replace the governors of Medina one after another at very short intervals, so that in 61 A.H. (680 C.E.) first Walīd b. 'Utba was the governor, then 'Amr b. Sa'd took office, and after a very short while 'Uthmān b. Muhammad b. Abū Sufyān, Yazīd's cousin was appointed as Medina's ruler.

All these indicated the incompetence of the Medina's sucessively appointed governors and the unrest of the people of that city. However, fighting tactics of Medinan combatants were not accompanied with crime and betrayal, as they had the power to take hostage the governor of Medina, Marwān b.