This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The most rigorously investigated Maitatsine episode, the December 1980 Kano rising, was examined by a federal government tribunal of inquiry, which found 4,177 civilian dead, a figure that itself excludes the roughly 100 policemen and 35 military personnel separately reported killed; other widely repeated tallies for the Kano rising alone run to about 5,000 including Marwa. No historian consulted has reconciled these two Kano figures with each other, or built a combined total covering the further 1982, 1984 and 1985 risings, each of which produced its own, less thoroughly documented, casualties.
The risings were organized around Marwa's own claimed religious authority and a theology that broke sharply with mainstream Sunni practice in northern Nigeria. Mainstream clerics and Islamic organizations denounced Marwa's teaching as heretical from the outset and took no part in the fighting, responding to him as a genuine theological threat rather than merely a public order problem, even as his recruitment tracked real economic and social marginalization among Kano's migrant poor. The movement never regained the scale of its Kano following after 1980, though scattered Yan Tatsine activity and further clashes with authorities continued into the later 1980s.