He opened his rule with the murder of the martyr al-Ḥusayn, and he sealed it with the catastrophe of al-Ḥarra; as a result, the people despised him, and no blessing was granted to the years of his life.
More than one faction rebelled against him after al-Ḥusayn: the people of Medina, who rose up for Allah (1); Mirdās ibn ʿUdayya al-Ḥanẓalī of Basra (2); Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq (3); Ṭawwāf ibn Muʿallā al-Sadūsī (4); and Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca (5).
Ibn ʿAwn narrated from Ibn Sīrīn, from ʿUqbah ibn Aws, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr:
He mentioned Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq and said, “You have named him correctly.” Then he said, “ʿUmar al-Fārūq is a horn of iron; you have named him correctly. Ibn ʿAffān, the possessor of the two lights, was killed unjustly. Muʿāwiyah and his son shall rule the Holy Land. Al-Saffāḥ, Salām, Manṣūr, Jābir, al-Mahdī, al-Amīn, and Amīr al-ʿUṣab (6)—all of them descend from Banū Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy; each of them is righteous, and the like of them will not be found.”
Hishām ibn Ḥassān (7) corroborated this report.
Yaʿlā ibn ʿAṭāʾ transmitted from his uncle, who said: “I was with ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr when Yazid dispatched him to Ibn al-Zubayr, and I heard him say to him, ‘Indeed, I find in the books that you…’”