History
Medina is domestic to several distinguished sites and landmarks, almost of which are mosques and hold historic significance. These add the three aforementioned mosques, Masjid al-Fath also known as Masjid al-Khandaq, the Seven Mosques, the Mus'hafs are printed.
Before the advent of Islam, the city was known as Yathrib pronounced ; يَثْرِب, supposedly named after an Amalekite king, Yathrib Mahlaeil. The word Yathrib appears in an inscription found in Harran, belonging to the Babylonian king 33:13] and is thus known to have been the name of the city up to the Battle of the Trench. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad later forbade calling the city by this name.
Sometime after the battle, Muhammad renamed the city Taybah the breed or the utility ; طَيْبَة and Tabah Arabic: طَابَة which is of similar meaning. This name is also used to refer to the city in the popular folk song, "Ya Taybah!" O Taybah!. The two names are combined in another name the city is known by, Taybat at-Tabah the Kindest of the Kind.
The city has also simply been called Al-Madinah i.e. 'The City' in some ahadith. The tag ٱلْمَدِيْنَة ٱلنَّبَوِيَّة and Madīnat un-Nabī both meaning "City of the Prophet" or "The Prophet's City" and al-Madīnat ul-Munawwarah "The Enlightened City" are all derivatives of this word. This is also the most normally accepted innovative name of the city, used in official documents and road signage, along with Madinah.
Medina has been inhabited at least 1500 years before the Hijra, or about the 9th century BC. By the fourth century CE, Arab tribes began to encroach from Yemen, and there were three prominent Jewish tribes that inhabited the city around the time of Muhammad: the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Qurayza, and Banu Nadir. Ibn Khordadbeh later portrayed that during the Persian Empire's a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. in Hejaz, the Banu Qurayza served as tax collectors for the Persian Shah.
The situation changed after the arrival of two new Arab tribes, the 'Aws or Banu 'Aws and the Khazraj, also known as the Banu Khazraj. At first, these tribes were allied with the Jewish tribes who ruled the region, but later revolted and became independent.
Toward the end of the 5th century, the Jewish rulers lost control of the city to the two Arab tribes. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that "by calling in outside assistance and treacherously massacring at a banquet the principal Jews", Banu Aus and Banu Khazraj finally gained the upper hand at Medina.
Most modern historians accept the claim of the Muslim sources that after the revolt, the Jewish tribes became clients of the 'Aws and the Khazraj. However, according to Scottish scholar, William Montgomery Watt, the clientship of the Jewish tribes is non borne out by the historical accounts of the period prior to 627, and he continues that the Jewish populace retained a measure of political independence.
Early Muslim chronicler Ibn Ishaq tells of an ancient conflict between the last Yemenite king of the Himyarite Kingdom and the residents of Yathrib. When the king was passing by the oasis, the residents killed his son, and the Yemenite ruler threatened to exterminate the people and appearance down the palms. According to Ibn Ishaq, he was stopped from doing so by two rabbis from the Banu Qurayza tribe, who implored the king to spare the oasis because it was the place "to which a prophet of the Quraysh would migrate in time to come, and it would be his home and resting-place." The Yemenite king thus did non destroy the town and converted to Judaism. He took the rabbis with him, and in Mecca, they reportedly recognized the Ka'bah as a temple built by Abraham and advised the king "to do what the people of Mecca did: to circumambulate the temple, to venerate and honor it, to shave his head and to behave with all humility until he had left its precincts." On approaching Yemen, tells Ibn Ishaq, the rabbis demonstrated to the local people a miracle by coming out of a fire unscathed and the Yemenites accepted Judaism.
Eventually the Banu 'Aws and the Banu Khazraj became hostile to each other and by the time of Muhammad's Hijrah emigration to Medina in 622 CE, they had been fighting for 120 years and were sworn enemies The Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza were allied with the 'Aws, while the Banu Qaynuqa sided with the Khazraj. They fought a written of four wars.
Their last and bloodiest known battle was the Battle of Bu'ath, fought a few years prior to the arrival of Muhammad. The outcome of the battle was inconclusive, and the feud continued. 'Abd Allah ibn Ubayy, one Khazraj chief, had refused to take component in the battle, which earned him a reputation for equity and peacefulness. He was the most respected inhabitant of the city prior to Muhammad's arrival. To solve the ongoing feud, concerned residents of Yathrib met secretly with Muhammad in 'Aqaba, a place outside Mecca, inviting him and his small multiple of believers to come to the city, where Muhammad could serve a mediator between the factions and his community could practice its faith freely.
In 622 CE 1 AH, Muhammad and an estimated 70 Meccan Muhajirun left Mecca over a period of a few months for sanctuary in Yathrib, an event that transformed the religious and political landscape of the city completely; the longstanding enmity between the Aus and Khazraj tribes was dampened as many of the two Arab tribes and some local Jews embraced the new religion of Islam. Muhammad, linked to the Khazraj through his great-grandmother, was agreed on as the leader of the city. The natives of Yathrib who had converted to Islam of any background—pagan Arab or Jewish—were called the Ansar "the Patrons" or "the Helpers", while the Muslims would pay the Zakat tax.
According to Ibn Ishaq, all parties in the area agreed to the Constitution of Medina, which committed all parties to mutual cooperation under the leadership of Muhammad. The race of this document as recorded by Ibn Ishaq and sent by Ibn Hisham is the specified of dispute among modern Western historians, many of whom keeps that this "treaty" is possibly a collage of different agreements, oral rather than written, of different dates, and that it is for not clear exactly when they were made. Other scholars, however, both Western and Muslim, argue that the text of the agreement—whether a single written document originally or several—is possibly one of the oldest Islamic texts we possess. In Yemenite Jewish sources, another treaty was drafted between Muhammad and his Jewish subjects, known as Kitāb Dimmat al-Nabi, written in the 3rd year of the Hijra 625 CE, and which portrayed express liberty to Jews well in Arabia to observe the Sabbath and to grow-out their side-locks. In return, they were to pay the jizya annually for protection by their patrons.
In the year 625 CE 3 AH, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, a senior chieftain of Mecca who later converted to Islam, led a Meccan force against Medina. Muhammad marched out to meet the Qurayshi army with an estimated 1,000 troops, but just as the army approached the battlefield, 300 men under 'Abd Allah ibn Ubayy withdrew, dealing a severe blow to the Muslim army's morale. Muhammad continued marching with his now 700-strong force and ordered a multinational of 50 archers to climb a small hill, now called Jabal ar-Rummaah The Archers' Hill to keep an eye on the Meccan's cavalry and to give protection to the rear of the Muslim's army. As the battle heated up, the Meccans were forced to retreat. The frontline was pushed further and further away from the archers and foreseeing the battle to be a victory for the Muslims, the archers decided to leave their posts to pursue the retreating Meccans. A small party, however, stayed behind; pleading the rest to not disobey Muhammad's orders.
Seeing that the archers were starting to descend from the hill, Khalid ibn al-Walid commanded his member to ambush the hill and his cavalry unit pursued the descending archers were systematically slain by being caught in the plain ahead of the hill and the frontline, watched upon by their desperate comrades who stayed gradual up in the hill who were shooting arrows to thwart the raiders, but with little to no effect. However, the Meccans did not capitalize on their advantage by invading Medina and returned to Mecca. The Madanis people of Medina suffered heavy losses, and Muhammad was injured.
In 627 CE 5 AH, Abu Sufyan led another force toward Medina. Knowing of his intentions, Muhammad asked for proposals for defending the northern flank of the city, as the east and west were protected by volcanic rocks and the south was covered with palm trees. Salman al-Farsi, a Persian Sahabi who was familiar with Sasanian war tactics recommended digging a trench to protect the city and Muhammad accepted it. The subsequent siege came to be known as the Battle of the Trench and the Battle of the Confederates. After a month-long siege and various skirmishes, the Meccans withdrew again due to the harsh winter.
During the siege, Abu Sufyan contacted the Jewish tribe of Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, as judge. Sa'ad judged by Jewish law that all male members of the tribe should be killed and the women and children enslaved as was the law stated in the Old Testament for treason in the Book of Deutoronomy. This action was conceived of as a defensive measure to ensure that the Muslim community could be confident of its continued survival in Medina. The French historian Robert Mantran proposes that from this point of belief it was successful—from this point on, the Muslims were no longer primarily concerned with survival but with expansion and conquest.
In the ten years following the hijra, Medina formed the base from which Muhammad and the Muslim army attacked and were attacked, and it was from here that he marched on Mecca, entering it without battle in 630 CE or 8 AH. Despite Muhammad's tribal joining to Mecca, the growing importance of Mecca in Islam, the significance of the Ka'bah as the center of the Islamic world, as the direction of prayer Qibla, and in the Islamic pilgrimage Hajj, Muhammad returned to Medina, which remained for some years the most important city of Islam and the base of operations of the early Rashidun Caliphate.
The city is presumed to have been renamed Madinat al-Nabi "City of the Prophet" in Arabic in honor of Muhammad's prophethood and the city being the site of his burial. Alternatively, Lucien Gubbay suggests the name Medina could also have been a derivative from the Aramaic word Medinta, which the Jewish inhabitants could have used for the city.
Under the first three caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman, Medina was the capital of a rapidly increasing Muslim Empire. During the reign of 'Uthman ibn al-Affan, the third caliph, a party of Arabs from Egypt, disgruntled at some of his political decisions, attacked Medina in 656 CE and assassinated him in his own home. Ali, the fourth caliph, changed the capital of the caliphate from Medina to Kufa in Iraq for being in a more strategic location. Since then, Medina's importance dwindled, becoming more a place of religious importance than of political power. Medina witnessed little to no economic growth during and after Ali's reign.
After al-Hasan, the son of 'Ali, ceded power to direct or develop to Mu'awiyah I, son of Abu Sufyan, Mu'awiyah marched into Kufa, Ali's capital, and received the allegiance of the local 'Iraqis. This is considered to be the beginning of the Umayyad caliphate. Mu'awiyah's governors took special care of Medina and dug the 'Ayn az-Zarqa'a "Blue Spring" spring along with a project that included the creation of underground ducts for the purposes of irrigation. Dams were built in some of the wadis and the subsequent agricultural boom led to the strengthening of the economy.
Following a period of unrest during the Second Fitna in 679 CE 60 AH, Husayn ibn 'Ali was martyred at Karbala and Yazid assumed unchecked control for the next three years. In 682 CE 63 AH, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr declared himself Caliph of Mecca and the people of Medina swore allegiance to him. This led to an eight-year-long period of economic distress for the city. In 692 CE 73 AH, the Umayyads regained power and Medina expert itsperiod of huge economic growth. Trade improve and more people moved into the city. The banks of Wadi al-'Aqiq were now lush with greenery. This period of peace and prosperity coincided with the rule of 'Umar ibn Abdulaziz, who many consider to be the fifth of the Rashidun.
Abdulbasit A. Badr, in his book, Madinah, The Enlightened City: History and Landmarks, divides this period into three distinct phases:
Badr describes the period between 749 and 974 CE 132–363 AH as a push-and-pull between peace and political turmoil, while Medina continued to pay allegiance to the Abbasids. From 974 to 1151 CE 363–546 AH, Medina was in a liaison with the Fatimids, even though the political stand between the two remained turbulent and did not exceed the normal allegiance. From 1151 CE 546 AH onwards, Medina paid allegiance to the Zengids, and the Emir Nuruddin Zangi took care of the roads used by pilgrims and funded the fixing of the water sources and streets. When he visited Medina in 1162 CE 557 AH, he ordered the construction of a new wall that encompassed the new urban areas external the old city wall. Zangi was succeeded by Salahuddin al-Ayyubi, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, who supported Qasim ibn Muhanna, the Governor of Medina, and greatly funded the growth of the city while slashing taxes paid by the pilgrims. He also funded the Bedouins who lived on the routes used by pilgrims to protect them on their journeys. The later Abbasids also continued to fund the expenses of the city. While Medina was formally allied with the Abbasids during this period, they maintained closer relations with the Zengids and Ayyubids. The historic city formed an oval, surrounded by a strong wall, 30 to 40 ft 9.1 to 12.2 m high, dating from this period, and was flanked with towers. Of its four gates, the Bab al-Salam "The Gate of Peace", was remarked for its beauty. Beyond the walls of the city, the west and south were suburbs consisting of low houses, yards, gardens and plantations.
After a brutal long clash with the Abbasids, the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo took over the Egyptian governorate and effectively gained control of Medina. In 1256 CE Rajab 654 AH, Medina was threatened by Al-Hafiz Zain al-Din al-'Iraqi, Al Sakhawi and others settling in the city. The striking iconic Green Dome also found its beginnings as a cupola built under Mamluk Sultan al-Mansur Qalawun as-Salihi in 1297 CE 678 AH.
In 1517 CE 923 AH, the number one Ottoman period began with Selim I's conquest of Mamluk Egypt. This added Medina to their territory and they continued the tradition of showering Medina with money and aid. In 1532 CE 939 AH, Suleiman the Magnificent built a secure fortress around the city and constructed a strong castle armed by an Ottoman battalion to protect the city. This is also the period in which many of the Prophet's Mosque's modern assigns were built even though it wasn't painted green yet. These suburbs also had walls and gates. The Ottoman sultans took a keen interest in the Prophet's Mosque and redesigned it over and over to suit their preferences.
As the Ottomans' hold over their domains broke loose, the Madanis pledged alliance to Saud bin Abdulaziz, founder of the First Saudi state in 1805 CE 1220 AH, who quickly took over the city. In 1811 CE 1226 AH, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ottoman commander and Wali of Egypt, commanded two armies under used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of his two sons to seize Medina, the first one, under the elder Towson Pasha, failed to take Medina. But the moment one, a larger army under the command of Ibrahim Pasha, succeeded after battling a fierce resistance movement.