Muhammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya raises the banner of…

762 CE

Muhammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya raises the banner of the Alid Revolt against the Abbasids at Medina, followed by his brother Ibrahim ibn Abdallah at Basra.

Initially, he had hoped to rebel against Umayyad rule, when the children of Hashim paid their allegiance to him at Abwa.

Among them were Ibrahim al-Imam, As-Saffah and Al-Mansur.

But it soon became clear that Abbasid rule was established, so those who had paid allegiance to him deserted him, and another group of Shiites flocked around him.

Muhammad is an inspirational figure to many throughout the caliphate who believe that he is destined for glory due to his ancestry.

For years, he had disguised himself and traveled stealthily, since his professed relationship to the Prophet meant that he posed a threat to the established political order.

He is eventually able to amass a sizable but ragtag army and on September 25, 762, Muhammad declares himself at Medina, catching the Abbasid governor, Riyah ibn Uthman, by surprise.

The rebellion is bloodless and Muhammad quickly gainsthe support of the old Muslim families of Medina and Mecca (the Ansar), but the movement has been doomed from the start: despite Medina's great symbolic value, it has little strategic importance, and the error of using it as the center of a rebellion becomes apparent when the Abbasids immediately cut off the grain supply from Egypt that fed the city.

Medina is an exceptionally poor place for any large-scale rebellion due to its dependency on other provinces for goods, and his motley army of devotees is no match for the Caliph's imperial soldiers, who arrive in December under Isa ibn Musa, the caliph’s nephew.

Despite the advantage held by the Abbasid troops, Muhammad refuses to step down in the hours before battle, blindly believing that utilizing the historic trenches dug by the Prophet to fortify the city decades earlier would result in victory.

His naiveté leads to a crushing defeat at the hands of the Abbasids, quelling for the time the possibility that the prophet's family would ascend to political power.

Muhammad's corpse is beheaded and his head dispatched to the Caliph.

Due to the unrealistically high expectation among his followers of success, a section of his followers are shocked and cannot bear the news of his defeat, and do not believe his murder, since they believe he was the Mahdi, whose appearance they had been awaiting for a very long time.

They believe he had not been not killed, but is alive and staying on the Mount of Ilmiyyah (between Makkah and Najd) until the time when he will reappear.

This section of his followers hold onto a hadith of Muhammad, which implies that the Mahdi’s name is like Muhammad’s name and the Mahdi’s father’s name is like Muhammad’s father’s name (Abdallah).