ajj), Muhammad returned to Medina, which remained for some years the most important city of Islam and the capital of the early Caliphate.
Pagan Yathrib was renamed Medina from "Madinat al-Nabi" ("city of the Prophet" in Arabic) in honor of Muhammad's prophethood and death there. (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, Omar, and Othman, Medina was the capital of a rapidly increasing Muslim Empire. During the period of Othman, the third caliph, a party of Arabs from Egypt, disgruntled at his political decisions, attacked Medina in 656 AD/35 AH and murdered him in his own home . Ali, the fourth caliph, changed the capital of the caliphate from Medina to Kufa in Iraq. After that, Medina's importance dwindled, becoming more a place of religious importance than of political power.
After the fragmentation of the Caliphate, the city became subject to various rulers, including the Mamluks of Cairo in the 13th century and finally, in 1517, the Ottoman Turks.
World War I to Saudi control
In the beginning of 20th century during World War I, Medina witnessed one of the longest sieges in history. Medina was a city of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Local rule was in the hands of the Hashemite clan as Sharifs or Emirs of Mecca. Fakhri Pasha was the Ottoman governor of Medina. Ali bin Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Hashemite clan, revolted against the caliph in Istanbul and sided with Great Britain. The city of Medina was besieged by the caliph's forces and Fakhri Pasha tenaciously held on during the Siege of Medina from 1916, but on 10 January 1919 he was forced to surrender.
After the First World War, the Hashemite Sayyid Hussein bin Ali was proclaimed King of an independent Hejaz, but soon after, in 1924, he was defeated by Ibn Saud, who
