The Battle of Harrah and the brutal massacre of the people of Madinah

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On 28th of the Islamic month of Zil-Hijjah in 63 AH, the Battle of Harrah and the brutal massacre of the people of Medina took place in less than two years after the tragedy of Karbala, when the Godless Yazid dispatched a huge army led by the notoriously immoral Muslim bin Uqbah to sack the Prophet's city. It happened that after the heartrending martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, Imam Husain (AS), the people of Medina who had failed to support him, sent a delegation to Damascus to ascertain Yazid's character.
The delegation found him completely devoid of all Islamic values, and as a result the people of Medina expelled the Omayyad governor and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Yazid's un-Islamic rule. The ungodly tyrant sent a force of 10,000 Syrians who attacked the defenders at Harrah, northeast of Medina.
The well-equipped Omayyads after slaughtering a large number of Muslim defenders pursued them into the city and mercilessly butchered the people, including those that had sought refuge in the Prophet's Mosque and the Prophet's shrine. As many as 10,000 people, including 700 prominent persons comprising the Prophet's companions and scholars were massacred in cold-blood. Next, Muslim bin Uqbah, who has earned notoriety in Islamic history as the criminal transgressor who violated all bounds of sanctity, ordered his troops to plunder and desecrate the property and womenfolk of Medina for three days, before marching upon Mecca and blasphemously attacking the holy Ka'ba.
For generations the heinous crime of Harrah was remembered. Of the women of Medina gang-raped by Yazid's soldiers, over a thousand gave birth to illegitimate children with no clue about their fathers. These are known in history as the “Offspring of the Sedition of Harrah”, and it is said that the schismatic ideas known as Wahhabism today, especially the prohibition on visiting the graves and recitation of Fateha for the dead, could actually be traced to these children of unknown and illegitimate parentage.