1. Makkah and Madinah were still inhabited by a large number of those people who had seen the Prophet and had been able to spend some time with him.
2. People who were born after the passing away of the Prophet, were in their 20’s, 30’s, 40,’s and 50’s. That means two new generations of Muslims had grown up who had had no contact with the Prophet.
3. Islam had spread beyond the confines of Arabia. There was a large number of Muslims who did not speak Arabic and many new Muslims lived in places such as Iraq, Iran and Egypt, as well as other places.
4. The civil war which had begun as a protest against the high-handed policies of the third Khaleefa Uthman had taken its toll on the community. The community had split in groups – There were the main stream populace who were bewildered and forced to follow the party in power without much consideration to morals, ethics and the basic principles of Islam; they were more concerned with their daily bread. Then there were the special interest groups, the family of the Prophet of Islam who were basically ghettoized inside the city of Madinah. The family and the adherents of Banu Umayya, who were in power and they had concentrated on Damascus as their base. There were other groups, who were though unhappy with Banu Umayya, but lacked the wherewithal to do anything about it.  There were the Kharijees, who had, though, been subdued by Imam Ali during his rule, their remnants were still lurking in the wilderness and they would make raids here and there. The tribes of Bedouins, who had been defeated by Islam and Muslims and they had accepted Islam as a last resort – in the process of their defeat at the hands of the Muslims in the early years, a great number of their warriors had been killed in battlefields, mainly at the Battles of Uhud, Khandaq and Hunayn. Most of those fighters were killed by Imam Ali or by other Muslims led by Imam Ali.
5. Yazeed son of Mu’awiyya was born some 20 years after the passing away of the Prophet. He had now become the ruler of the kingdom on his father’s will. Yazeed’s mother was a Syrian Christian Bedouin woman. Yazeed had grown up reciting poetry, drinking, dancing, hunting, riding, and just playing around in the wilderness of the Syrian countryside.
6. Husayn son of Ali, was the youngest grandson of the Prophet of Islam, being the son of his daughter Fatima. He was 57 years old at this time. Husayn had seen Islam taking shape in his own house. He had seen how diligently and faithfully his own father Ali had served Islam and Muslims under the leadership of the Prophet. He had also seen how his father sat quietly and patiently waiting on the sidelines while other insignificant people took over power and ruled the community. Husayn had also seen how the community had betrayed his brother Hasan.
7. If anyone had visited Madinah in those days, he would not see any pomp and circumstance associated with the family of the Prophet. They were not poor but neither were they powerful people in the community by any stretch of the imagination. The seat of the government lay some thousand miles away in Damascus where major governmental decisions were made. Husayn was not in a position to have been able to exert any influence on the government of the time. 
8. Yazeed was the most powerful despot in the Muslim world.
9. The question is: Why did Yazeed bother to exert pressure on Husayn to acknowledge his B’ayat? Husayn was one man, and he was without much power of any kind or even tribal loyalties in the city of Madinah or around it. Ever since his elder brother Hasan had died of poisoning in the 49^th year of Hijra, he had been living in Madinah very quietly.
10. Usually, historians write that because of his father Ali, there were a lot of people in Koofa, Iraq, who looked up to Husayn as their leader (Imam). So, Yazeed’s asking for b’ayat was actually a pre-emptive action to subdue the people of Koofa.
11.  But the point is, the people of Koofa were already subdued to a great extent. During Muawiyya’s rule, Koofa was identified as a stronghold of pro-Ali sympathies. To counter that, Muawiyya had let a free reign of terror against the people of Koofa. He would send his spies and henchmen and they would hunt for any sympathies for Ali and the Prophet’s family. If such sympathies were found, those families would be tortured and killed. The killing of  Hujr bin Adee and his companions at a place called Azra[1] is a very clear evidence to that policy and those actions.
12.  Not only that, Mu’awiyyah had sent out one of his generals named Busr bin Abi Artah, on an expedition of the Arab lands to establish a reign of terror. The whole idea in that expedition was to subdue people generally and terrorize them for a long time to come[2].
13.  How can then, we explain Yazeed’s step?
14. To answer that question fully, we will have to go back a little in the early history of Islam. If we go back to the time when Uthman had been lynched by an angry mob, Imam Ali had been acclaimed as the fourth Khaleefa of the Muslims, and he had taken charge, we come to the point where he orders Muawiyya deposed from his position as the governor in Damascus, Mu’awiyyah in turn, refuses to give in to that Caliphal command and the Battle of Siffeen takes place.
15. Mua’wiyya and his people are thoroughly routed in the battle and they ask for arbitration. The battle is stopped. Mu’awiyya writes a letter to Imam Ali. In that letter Mu’waiyya makes some points as follows:

16. Imam Ali replied to that letter point by point as follows:

17. We can see from this exchange that while Mu’awiyya considered the worldly rule of the part of the Muslim kingdom as his right only because he claimed ancestry from the Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet of Islam, Imam Ali considered it as a divinely appointed office for which TAQWA and devotion to the Islamic principles were the sole required elements without any consideration to the ancestry. Moreover, in that pursuit, Imam Ali was willing to sacrifice the temporal power over the preservation of the basic principles of Islam.
18. If Imam Ali had conceded to relinquish control of the Syrian province to Mu’awiyya as he had desired from the very beginning, there would be no fighting and Imam Ali would be able to rule as the fourth Khaleefa not only in Hijaz and Iraq but also in Egypt and Iran. Mu’awiyya saw the whole Muslim kingdom as the property of the children of Abd Munaf (both Banu Umayya and Banu Hashim as well as some other small tribes). In his opinion it would have been a legitimate division of the kingdom between two cousins.
19. Imam Ali saw the Muslim kingdom as the Kingdom of Allah, to which he was the heir according to the holy Qur’an and the Prophet’s hadeeth as the Imam of the time. He considered it both, his duty as well as right to preserve and protect that kingdom and work for its solidarity to establish justice in the earth. Mu’awiyya’s claim to any part of that kingdom was frivolous, illegitimate and preposterous.
20. With that background, let us look at Yazeed’s state of mind in the 60^th year of Hijra.
21. The foremost driving force in creating Yazeed’s state of mind in this context, was his father Mu’awiyyah’s statement to him on his deathbed. We quote from Tabari:

22. In addition to this deathbed-statement, it was the whole life of Mu’awiyya for Yazeed to take lessons from. While Mu’awiyya had wished to divide the Muslim kingdom between Imam Ali and himself, Yazeed moved one step ahead and he claimed the entire kingdom for himself. He could not bear to see a single prominent person in the kingdom living without acknowledging him as the sole power. True to his father’s advice, he sent a messengers to Madinah commanding the governor Waleed to summon all those four people and ask them to acknowledge Yazeed as the legitimate Khaleefa. Were they to refuse that, they were all to be killed.  He could not get hold of Abdulalh bin Zubayr, who escaped to Makka in the middle fo the night and lasted until some twelve years after the death of Yazeed. There is a very clear trace of sarcasm in Mu’awiyya’s comment about Abdullah bin Umar. True to his prediction, he accepted Yazeed without any qualms and actually exhorted other people in Madina to do the same.
23. In Husayn’s refusal to do his B’ayat, Yazeed saw an intransigent rebel, even though Husayn was actively moving away from any violent confrontation with the government. Sure enough, the people of Koofa had been writing to him ever since the passing away of his own brother Hasan bin Ali. But Husayn himself never responded to those letters.
24. Even when he left Madina on the 28^th of Rajab, he proceeded to Makka and he lived there for six months.  During those six months, he did not approach a single person from the point-of-view of raising an army against the government. There was no open call for a political movement against Yazeed from him. He did not start a fund-raising campaign either.
25. When things really got very active from the Koofan side, the only thing he did was to send his cousin, Muslim bin Aqeel, to Koofa on a fact-finding mission. He was to meet people in Koofa and write back to Husayn. Once again, there was no design to show any preparation of an armed action against the government.
26.  In actual fact, Abdullah bin Zubayr was staying in Makka at the same time as Husayn. The two of them met several times during that period. In one meeting, Ibn Zubayr offers Husayn military and strategic help to take his stand. Here is how Husayn replied to that offer of help:

27. So, we can see that Husayn had foreseen his own murder at the hands of the Umayyad government. But he did not want to be killed inside the holy precincts.
28. Hardly any more evidence is needed to show that Karbala was an unequal duel. It was nowhere near in Husayn’s mind that he was going to rise against the government of the time militarily.
29. The question is, why did he then proceed to Koofa? Why did he not turn away from that journey when he heard of the news of Muslim bin Aqeel’s killing?
30. The only logical answer is that Husayn had never planned a military strike against the government. Husayn had a democratic streak in him, very much like his father, Ali, had in him and very much like his grandfather, the Prophet of Islam had. History has seen that the Prophet of Islam lived in Makka for twelve years – he took abuse, torture and even a death threat. But he moved to Madina only when he found public support in Madina. Within a period of ten years he was able to establish a full-fledged city state due to that overwhelming public support. Very similar to that, Imam Ali did not take any action for himself during the first three Khilafat periods. That was because he saw that there was no public support for his cause in the Muslim community. He accepted Khilafat only when he saw that the Muslims wanted him overwhelmingly. Very much like that, Imam Husayn lived in Madina for a period of eleven years without responding to the call from the Koofans. However, when he was pressured by Yazeed for B’ayat, he first left Madinah. When he continued to be hounded, he looked to those areas where there was likely to be some kind of public support for him. That is why he proceeded towards Koofa. His plan was that if there was sufficient public support found in Iraq against Yazeed, then, perhaps, under his leadership, a movement might take shape on democratic lines to influence other parts of the Muslim world thus Yazeed could be deposed on religious grounds without any military action. That is the only conclusion we can draw from the fact that Husayn had taken his women and children with him. No one takes along women and children while on a war path.